This Royal Navy whistleblower is absent without leave, but claims he will give himself up to the police soon.
My name is William McNeilly. I am an Engineering Technician
Submariner for the UK's Trident II D5 Strategic Weapons System.
I sent this report on the 05/05/15 to every major newspaper,
freelance journalists, and whistleblower I could find.
It is now the 12/05/15. Ive had one email reply
so he published it on scribd as a .pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/265119365/The-Sec-ret-Nuc-lea-r-Th-re-At
Creator : Microsoft® Word 2013
Modify Date : 2015:05:14 20:04:06+01:00
Author : William Mcneilly
Create Date : 2015:05:12 20:10:06+01:00
Clearly he was not thinking clearly or else nobody gave him any sensible whistleblowing advice:
Why did William McNeilly expect a reply from any UK newspapers etc. only 2 days before the General Election of the 7th of May ?
The Sunday Herald seems to be the first media outlet to publish the whistleblower allegations, early on Sunday 17th May2015:
Trident whistleblower says nuclear subs are insecure, unsafe and 'a disaster waiting to happen'
N.B. The story was mentioned on their Twitter feed on Saturday night
https://twitter.com/newsundayherald/status/599677536113729536
9:47 PM - 16 May 2015
WikiLeaks have jumped on the bandwagon by publishing their "exclusive" version of what he probably sent them on 5th May, some 20 hours after The Herald
https://www.wikileaks.org/trident-safety/
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/600046188851757056/photo/1
10:12 PM - 17 May 2015
and 10 hours after the Scottish National Party (which opposes Trident) had issued a press release.
"Safety blunders & security lapses" at Faslane
Sun, 17/05/2015 - 11:55
He has also updated his Facebook page, and published images of his UK passport and his Royal Navy ID Card.
This whistleblower has eschewed anonymity, but seems to be trying to keep his physical location secret for now.
The security and safety allegations need to investigated immediately by the Ministry of Defence, not just by the Navy on its own and a Minister needs to make a statement to Parliament and the public
McNeilly claims to have infiltrated the Trident program on purpose, to gather information on it, by working hard and passing the engineering courses with distinction.
I knew I had to get assigned to a boat and go on patrol as soon as possible in order to gather this information. Fast Track to a Leading Engineer was the answer. If I got fast tracked I would be on the first available boat after training. I worked hard day and night, and at the end of the 10 week course I had the achieved the highest test result on average out of a 20plus people on the SMQ course. At the end of SMQ dry training No-one received fast track. However the achievement went onto my JPA record. There was just one course left, one last shot.. TheTrident Training Facility (TTF). At the end the course I was told I had more SWS (Strategic Weapons System) knowledge than most of the supervisors onboard. It was a nice compliment but I doubt it. I was awarded Fast Track to Leading Engineering Technician and received an award for best student.
Just weeks after passing out of training I had a draft for HMS Victorious. My work mates started calling me a terrorist robot because I remembered everything and I have a Northern Ireland accent. This reputation would have undoubtedly made it difficult for me to gather information. I needed to create distance between them, and create a new persona; I aimed for mixture of dumbness and eagerness to learn for simple curios reasons. Within days of being on patrol I was no longer the terrorist robot, soaking up all the information for terrorist reasons. Playing dumb came easy for me, I've been doing it and been it most of life. It makes people open up and explain a lot more. If someone assumes you know something they might leave that part out of the conversation, meaning you've just lost information which might have been valuable. It also helps with getting out of certain situations. I watched a lot of Columbo when I was a kid.
Apart from the safety hazards he himself apparently witnessed, he seems to have collected reports and ancedotes from his ship mates about HMS Victorious on which he was posted, but also on the lucky / unlucky HMS Vanguard.
He warns about the lax checking of military ID cards, the lack of adherence to top secret security procedures and the lack of enforcement of the bans on prohibited items such as mobile phones with cameras, BlueTooth devices (in the Trident missile room) and e-cigarettes.
Clearly no effective crackdown on mobile phones (with cameras) has happened on Trident nuclear missile submarines since the 2012 spy case invovling Edward Devenney, a depressed, drunken HMS Vigilant Petty Officer, who like McNeilly, is also from also from Northern Ireland.
Devenney stupidly phoned the Russian embassy offering to sell secrets, which he was able to photograph and smuggle onshore with his mobile phone. Thankfully the "Russians" he thought he was talking to were MI5 agents, although there are still unanswered questions why he was not spotted as a security risk - passed over for promation, depressed, drinking heavily.
McNeilly alleges;
This contains references to CB8890: The instructions for the safety and security of the Trident II D5 strategic weapon system. I'm sure all the Strategic Weapon System (SWS) personnel are scratching their heads and wondering how I'm writing this on my personnel laptop and referencing a book, which is contained within a safe in the Missile Control Centre (MCC). The MCC is the compartment used to control the launch of the nuclear missiles. It can only be accessed by people on the access list, and no personnel electronics are allowed. I was on the access list but how could I have gotten a copy of every single chapter on to my phone? A hidden camera? No. Smuggled the book out then filmed it? No. What I did was walk into a room were no recording devices are allowed. I sat down; took my Samsung Galaxy SII (white) out of my pocket, and recorded the entire book word for word. I held the phone still, about a foot in front of my face and anyone who looked at the screen or used common sense, would've seen I was recording. There were other SWS personnel in the room; in the video you can see a SWS JR about 3 feet in front of me talking to another SWS JR sitting right beside me. You probably think that's impossible but I've got the evidence to prove it. The complete lack of concern for security worries me. The fact is it would've been even easier for me to cause a nuclear catastrophe than to gather that information, and gathering that information was actually quite simple, due to the amount of ignorance.
McNeilly also notes a couple of crew mates who seem to be aggressive and unstable, so perhaps the psychological monitoring of Trident nuclear missile submarine crews has not improved since the Devenney case either.
McNeilly's own mental state is, of course, being questioned by the anonymous Royal Navy press briefings, but they do seem to confirm that he is a genuine Trident submariner, who has not yet revealed anything which damages national security.
e.g. BBC:
Navy probes leaked Trident safety claims
As one would expect, the Royal Navy is trying to downplay any security or safety issues with the Trident nuclear missile system, but, given the involvement of SNP politics, it is doubtful if they will be believed, unless there is a fully transparent independent inquiry.
Hopefully the Government will not try to prosecute this whistleblower.