FORT MEADE, Md. — The recent leak of National Security Agency hacking exploits appears to have been caused by Microsoft’s helpful office assistant, Clippy, according to current and former employees of the secretive organization.

“It all happened so fast,” Army Lt. Toby Reynolds reportedly told superiors. “I was about to log off for the day when Clippy popped up and said ‘It looks like you're trying to establish a backdoor to revisit later. Would you like to save your top secret work to the cloud?’”

“I fat-fingered the keys and hit ‘Enter’ instead of ‘Tab,’ and here we are.”

Reynolds’ supervisors didn’t notice the leak until the stolen tools were put up in an online auction.

“I tell my staff that a problem is serious if it makes you spit out your Wheaties when you find out about in the morning,” said Corin Stone, an NSA executive. “When this one hit me, I shit my pants.”

The insiders speculate that this leak may have been part of a 20-year effort to embarrass the United States.

“It appears that a foreign government may have compromised Clippy in Office as far back as 1997,” one former agency security specialist said. “It would explain why he was so useless.”

In light of the issue, sources say that NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers has issued emergency orders to upgrade all NSA systems to the Windows 2003 operating system, while also banning all uniformed military personnel from ever using computers again.

“We're issuing wax tablets, which were good enough for the Roman Legions,” Rogers wrote in an email sent with Microsoft Outlook 98.