IT expert tried to sell MI6 secrets

Daniel Houghton. Photo / Supplied

A computing expert formerly employed by MI6 yesterday admitted he had attempted to disclose a welter of stolen secret information, including a list identifying 39 field agents, by setting up a "naive" £2 million ($4.2 million) deal to sell the data to the Dutch security services.

Daniel Houghton, 25, claimed he had been "directed by voices" to accumulate a vast bank of highly sensitive information, including files detailing advanced intelligence-gathering techniques, while he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service as a computer programming specialist between September 2007 and May 2009.

After his arrest in a sting operation by Scotland Yard at a London hotel in March this year, searches of Houghton's home in Hoxton, east London, recovered copies of classified paperwork and a memory card containing 7000 files that disclosed the names of hundreds of employees and dozens of agents of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service.

Houghton, who is half Dutch, thought he had set up a deal with the security service in the Netherlands to sell the information for £2 million but Dutch agents tipped off MI5.

He was wrestled to the ground holding a briefcase containing £900,000 which he had been given moments earlier for two memory cards and a hard-drive holding the files.

Despite a claim from Houghton, who was recruited to develop software used by MI6 to glean intelligence from electronic sources, that he had handed over "everything" to his Dutch contacts, British experts fear some files remain at large. A memory card containing information which he said he had hidden at his mother's home has never been recovered.

Judge David Bean, sitting at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, warned Houghton he almost certainly faces prison when he is sentenced in September after he pleaded guilty to two charges under the Official Secrets Act of unlawfully disclosing intelligence material. He denied a third charge of theft, on which prosecutors will now offer no evidence.

Houghton had been recruited to work in MI6's Thameside headquarters after graduating from Birmingham University with top marks in interactive computer systems.

Over the next 18 months, while developing the sophisticated software used by MI6 to trawl cyberspace for information, he exploited a breach in security safeguards by copying secret files on to CDs and DVDs from his office computer.

As well as gathering SIS data, he copied MI5 files detailing intelligence-gathering techniques used by agents.

Security service officials said Houghton went about the business of selling his damaging material with breathtaking naivety. Some three months after he left MI6, he contacted the Dutch domestic intelligence service, AIVD, on a published telephone number using his mobile phone.

The Briton held a series of calls with his contacts in the Netherlands during which he was asked to describe what he proposed to sell before a meeting was held in February this year to set up a deal. MI5 bugged and videoed the encounter as Houghton showed off his wares to the Dutch agents.

One source said the computer expert, who was raised in Devon, had limited social skills, adding: "He was not James Bond."

Houghton offered to boost the information available by adding two lists: one containing 300 names of MI6 employees and another detailing the home addresses and mobile phone numbers of 39 agents.

Piers Arnold, prosecuting, told the court that he would not accept the findings of a psychiatric report carried out for the defence which said that Houghton believed he was "directed by voices to do what he is said to have done in the charges".

A senior intelligence source said Houghton had quickly become bored while working at MI6 and his actions were motivated by greed, adding that he had been living a "champagne lifestyle on ginger-beer wages".

- INDEPENDENT