Correspondence from the Chairman of the
Committee to the Permanent Secretary, Home Office, 25 February
2009
Thank you for your letter of 20 February. However,
my Committee would still like clarification of part of your oral
evidence to us regarding the genesis of the investigation by the
Metropolitan Police.
You told us that by the summer of 2008 you were
concerned that the large number of leaks from the Home Office
pointed to some kind of systematic leaking (Q 16), that your concerns
in relation to national security were that the 20 leaks that you
knew of appeared to have come from an official close to the Home
Secretary's Private Office and that the Cabinet Office was concerned
"about the leaks over a number of years of national security
information, some of which there was a possibility had come from
the Home Office" (Q 5).
In response to Mr Winnick's questions about
Mr Galley, you responded: "I have to be careful. There are
two answers to that. He had security clearance only up to the
level of `secret'. He was working in places, therefore, where
he would have access to some sensitive material. I have never
gone on to claim that he leaked national security information;
indeed I must not make that assumption. A lot of the material
that was leaked to the press was not national security information."
(Q 19)
However, when I asked "Are we saying that
some of the leaks relating to the information that Mr Galley had
in his possession, in answer to what Mr Winnick has said, were
national security issues? Were any of them to do with national
security?" (Q 29) you replied that, of those leaks of which
you were aware from the newspapers, "Over the two years at
least one of those leaks has (been an issue of national security)."
(Q 34)
Was that single leak that related to issues
of national security one of the 20 which the Home Office had investigated
and which had led you to seek the Cabinet Secretary's advice in
the late summer of 2008?
| 
