Missing secrets

Red faces at Foggy Bottom

Get this: the intelligence branch of the U.S. State Department loses a safe full of top-secret documents and doesn't even know it. Eleven weeks later, the unlocked safe turns up in a prison, of all places; the warden returns it to State. Then a police informant confides that more documents are still inside the prison, but the Government doesn't believe him. Some of the documents later show up in the hands of a convict and a local TV news station.

Embarrassing? The Secretary of State certainly thought so. Filled in by phone last week while traveling to Japan...

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