Article from: The Australian

LONDON: He's the spy who came in from the beach.

Holiday snapshots and family details about the newly appointed head of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency have been removed from a Facebook page after a British newspaper told the government about them.

Pictures from the social networking website published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper show John Sawers posing with his children, wearing a santa hat and playing frisbee on a beach.

The paper said the information was posted by Sawers's wife on her Facebook page. It included vacation photos, details about the couple's three children and the location of their London home.

Shelley Sawers's page has been removed from the site.

Some politicians called the details a security lapse but others said they revealed nothing but a few mildly embarrassing domestic details.

"It's not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks," Foreign Secretary David Miliband said. The Foreign Office would not comment further on the case. But Conservative politician Patrick Mercer, who heads parliament's counter-terrorism subcommittee, said the revelations left Sawers open "to criticism and blackmail".

Sawers, 53, was named last month as the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency. A former spy, diplomat and foreign policy adviser to prime minister Tony Blair, he is currently Britain's ambassador to the UN. He is due to take up his new post in November.

Until the 1990s, the identity of the MI6 chief, known as C, was kept secret. Until 1992, Britain's government refused even to confirm the organisation's existence.

Authorities have gradually become more open about MI6 and its domestic service MI5 in a bid to attract a wider range of staff.