(CBS)  The judge presiding over the trial of the only man charged so far in this country in the Sept. 11 attacks reports a serious U.S. government blunder.

The Justice Department is still unclear on how it happened, but somehow as many as 48 documents that officials now say should have been classified, were inadvertently turned over to terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui as part of the discovery process in his upcoming trial. According to court records released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who is presiding over the case, called the 'mistake' a grave security breach.

Moussaoui has been acting as his own attorney in a potential death sentence case in which he is charged with being a part of the September 11 plot. He's been reviewing paperwork in his Alexandria, Va. cell.

The classified documents were given to Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States for the hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, by mistake over the past few months as part of the evidence turned over to him by federal government prosecutors.

The classified documents, which were FBI summaries of interviews, then had to be retrieved during several days of searches of Moussaoui's jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia, where he is being held in solitary confinement awaiting trial.

"Despite their hard work and valiant effort, the Marshal's Service could not find two of the seven documents. Unfortunately, one of the remaining two documents is the most critical of the seven," prosecutor Robert Spencer wrote. It was not clear whether those documents eventually were recovered.

It's not clear if Moussaoui even saw them in the mass of material he's been presented. A Justice Department official said the government was "quite confident" that Moussaoui never read the documents.

As CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports, the papers have since been retrieved, but the government says it's now begun a damage assessment study to not only find out if national secrets have been compromised, but how something like this could have happened in the first place.

Brinkema issued an order Thursday that made public the correspondence on the matter. She said she agreed with Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers that the government's letters to the judge had been kept secret solely to avoid embarrassment to prosecutors.

Further, she said, the government disclosed the classified nature of the materials in a pleading sent to Moussaoui, who is not supposed to see secret material in his case. The court-appointed lawyers, who assist Moussaoui while he represents himself, are cleared to see the material.

The documents, FBI interview reports called "302s," "are the property of the United States and the court has authority to order that the property be returned to the United States," Spencer wrote the judge Sept. 5.

In a separate letter the same day Spencer wrote, "The defendant now has access to national security information...The access to this material by the defendant is a situation that, even if of our own making, is improper and unacceptable. Simply put, it is illegal and dangerous for the defendant to possess the material, and there must be some way that we can correct the situation."

The judge on Aug. 23 questioned why the government sought to tip off Moussaoui that the documents were classified since there was no indication on the records themselves of their secret nature.

"You may find in the final analysis that less harm will be done by not drawing the defendant's attention to these documents," the judge wrote.

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