U.K. Sent Hypersonic Missile Data to Putin Ally After Email Typo—Report

The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense inadvertently sent emails containing classified information—including about hypersonic missile research—to an African nation which has close ties with Russia, according to a report in British newspaper The Times.

The issue was said to arise from a typographical error. British military officials who had been attempting to send information to counterparts in the Pentagon—which uses the domain name ".mil" for email addresses—missed out the middle letter, sending the emails to ".ml," the domain for the West African nation, Mali. The British Ministry of Defense confirmed to Newsweek it had launched an investigation into the matter.

It comes just over a week after another report said that potentially millions of military emails had been redirected to the Vladimir Putin-allied nation because of users in the U.S. trying to contact Pentagon officials making the same mistake.

The U.K. and America's military support for Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia is well-known, and questions have been raised of how much the Kremlin may be able to glean, were it to have received the communiqués.

Spokespeople for both the British Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon have publicly said they were aware of the issue and stressed that they do not believe any inadvertently disclosed information to be compromising.

The Times reported that many of the emails sent to the Malian domain had contained only trivial information such as diary entries for staff annual leave, but some were said to contain sensitive information.

The British newspaper wrote that one email inadvertently sent to the African state revealed the names of both U.K. and American employees researching new designs for hypersonic missiles—which can travel many times faster than the speed of sound and have both short- and long-range strike capabilities—at Porton Down, a secretive defense laboratory in Salisbury, England.

The U.K. does not currently have hypersonic missile capability, but the U.S. has multiple programs, according to the British parliament. In 2022, as part of the AUKUS pact, the U.K, U.S. and Australia announced cooperation on the development of hypersonic capabilities.

Hypersonic missiles are capable of delivering nuclear warheads and fly at lower altitudes than conventional missiles, making them harder to detect. But an understanding of their specifications could allow a belligerent power to evade them.

The Times reported that it had seen five emails originating from British government addresses sent to Mali. Newsweek has not seen the emails and could not verify their contents or origins.

Asked about the potentially misdirected emails, Andrew Murrison, junior defense minister, said on Tuesday that the British Ministry of Defense was "conducting an assessment" of what emails had been sent to the Mali domain.

"While all sensitive information is shared on systems which would prevent such misdirection, policies are put in place on all email systems to minimize the risk of such mistakes," he said. "Once the analysis of our email traffic is complete, we will consider what, if any, changes need to be made to MoD policies."

A Ministry of Defense spokesperson told Newsweek that it had opened an investigation into the "small number of emails that were mistakenly forwarded to an incorrect email domain."

"We are confident they did not contain any information that could compromise operational security or technical data," they added.

The British probe was launched after the Financial Times reported on July 17 that millions of U.S. military emails had been misdirected to Mali for almost a decade.

Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch contractor who manages Mali's country domain, said he had collected nearly 117,000 misdirected messages since January this year alone in a bid to flag the issue to the Pentagon, according to the FT. He reportedly told it in a letter earlier in July: "This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the U.S."

Mike Rogers, a retired four-star U.S. Navy admiral and former director of the National Security Agency, told the newspaper: "If you have this kind of sustained access, you can generate intelligence even just from unclassified information."

He added: "It's not out of the norm that people make mistakes but the question is the scale, the duration and the sensitivity of the information."

Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman, a Pentagon spokesperson, told the Financial Times it was "aware of this issue" but noted that emails sent directly from military email addresses to the Malian domain "are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients."

In a statement on Friday, he told Newsweek that the Defense Information Systems Agency began blocking domains that look like .mil "immediately."

As of the start of this year, it was blocking outbound emails to 135 Malian domains and subdomains, Gorman said, and as of July, it had begun blocking emails to all .ml domains aside from legitimate ones.

While he said emails that originated outside the Department of Defense network erroneously sent to Mali addresses could not be monitored or filtered, the spokesperson added it "is coordinating with the interagency, industry partners, and international allies and partners to alert them to the possibility of unauthorized disclosure of information resulting from this typographical error."

Mali has maintained a friendly stance towards Russia since the invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, either abstaining or voting against U.N. resolutions condemning the war.

Mali's military leader Colonel Assimi Goïta was among the heads of state from 17 African nations to attend a summit laid on by Putin in St. Petersburg this week, down from 43 in 2019 and has been reliant on Wagner Group troops to hold off paramilitary forces.

Update 07/28/23, 10:43 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from Tim Gorman, a Pentagon spokesperson.