We can take cold comfort in the fact that ‘losing’ key weapons documents does not just happen at home. It recently happened to a delegation led by Israel’s National Security Adviser, which lost classified documents related to weapons deals with India just before the delegation was scheduled to leave.
Luckily, the documents were retrieved thanks to a restaurant waiter’s presence of mind, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on Wednesday.
In January this year, Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat travelled with several members of the National Security Council to India when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval. The Israeli NSA had also discussed various weapons deals in those meetings, according to the Ha’aretz.
Prior to the trip, Shabbat’s aide had printed several documents related to possible weapon deals with India, which reportedly also included classified information. The delegation dined at a restaurant prior to boarding the plane but the aide who had printed the papers reportedly left them behind.
The documents were subsequently found by a waiter at the restaurant but the delegation had already left. A glance through the papers was sufficient to tip off the waiter that the papers related to India. Luckily, the waiter got in touch with a friend whose mother works for the Israeli Embassy in India. Then the waiter’s friend flew to India and gave her mother the documents, which she then passed on to the security officer of the embassy.
A probe by the NSC found that the loss of documents had not undermined Israel’s security, the report said. The NSC chair, Yoav Horowitz, issued directives to launch a probe into the incident, which concluded that the contents of the documents had not been exposed to any “dangerous entities”.
Shabbat’s aide was charged with losing the documents and was placed under warning, the report said. “The incident was taken care of immediately, a security investigation was carried out and lessons were learned,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office told the daily.