MI6 employee arrested for trying to sell documents

Daniel Houghton

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities have detained a former MI6 employee after he was caught trying to sell classified documents to MI5 spooks posing as foreign agents. Daniel Houghton, 25, who was arrested on Monday at a central London hotel, worked for MI6 between September 2007 and May 2009. During the course of his employment, he apparently stole MI5 (and not MI6, as has been suggested) electronic documents, classified secret and top-secret, by copying them to CDs and DVDs. He then attempted to sell the material, which is said to relate to “techniques for intelligence collection”, for £2 million ($2.9 million), to MI5 agents posing as intelligence handlers of an unspecified foreign intelligence service. He was arrested during the secret meeting with the agents, reportedly after receiving a suitcase containing £900,000 in cash, in exchange for some of the stolen documents. Interestingly, it appears that Houghton, who holds dual British and Dutch nationality, and is fluent in both English and Dutch, had kept his stint at MI6 completely secret, even from his mother and brother, who had no idea he worked for British intelligence. His London flatmate, US citizen Kimberly Peterson, 27, was under the impression “he worked for Lloyds bank as a graduate trainee”.