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“Nations would be terrified if they knew by what small men they were governed” – Talleyrand
About fifteen years ago, in late Autumn 2010, I was contacted by a young high-ranking Russian diplomat in London, Sergey Nalobin. He was extremely interested that I was helping Conservative Party Treasurers to recruit future financial political donors, and stated that he could help with that. “I know Russian companies that would like to contribute to the Conservative Party”, he told me.
For me, this was a massive red flag and potentially a serious criminal offence. I warned the Security Services (MI5) but they refused my offer to collect proof of Nalobin’s proposed criminal activities and, instead, allowed him to remain en poste in London for a further few years. Eventually, this Russian diplomat was gently pushed out of the country by the Foreign Office, although not without causing yet another controversy, but that’s another story.
When Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) was finally allowed to publish its Russia Report in 2020, it unleashed fierce criticism at MI5 for “actively avoiding looking for evidence that Russia interfered in our democracy”. It then dawned upon me that my encounter with Nalobin could have been an important illustration of that, and I wrote to my old friend in the parliamentary Conservative Party, and Chairman of the ISC at the time, The Rt Hon Sir Julian Lewis MP for advice. I was told to go to the Police.
Donate to help Project Citizen cover their rising legal costs for this important follow-up to the Russia Report
Special Branch
Of course walking into a police station with a report about MI5, and expecting to be taken seriously is not as straightforward as it may sound. However, I got talking to SO15 (formerly the Special Branch) of the Metropolitan Police, who also deal with foreign espionage and eventually began to feel that I was being listened to. However, my optimism was short-lived.
On a cold January evening in 2022, just a few weeks before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, at a London railway station, a plain clothes police officer handed me a letter from a Detective Superintendent at SO15. The letter basically stated that MI5’s refusal to investigate possible activity of a foreign diplomat did not, in their view, amount to a criminal offence. I was advised that “the proper forum for [my] complaint would be the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT)”. The letter was dated 5 May 2021, about 8 months previously, and bore an incorrect postcode. I was left with a distinct feeling that the Police were stalling.
As I was planning to write and send my complaint to the IPT securely, the Russians attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022. My family, like so many other families caught up on different sides in any war, was broken. My mother, my father and my half-sister had become completely brainwashed by Russian propaganda. As Putin banned and expelled all independent media from the country, my mother believed what she was told by the Federal TV. Things got so bad that she refused to believe anything I was trying to explain to her, and eventually she refused to talk to me for more than a year. 2022 was a terrible year and spending my time making yet another complaint about Nalobin did not seem to be a priority.
But eventually I got round to it in November that year, after receiving a call from Channel 4’s Dispatches, asking for an interview about Nalobin. My story seemed important again.
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Intelligence Tribunal
The response from the Tribunal arrived a mere three months later. The IPT refused to investigate my complaint about MI5’s refusal to investigate Mr Nalobin, with no right of appeal. It justified its decision by my complaint being, apparently, “out of time” as the IPT, under its current statute, does not have to consider events that took place over a year ago.
While the Tribunal had discretion to waive that requirement, apparently it was not satisfied with my explanation that I “was unaware of the significance of the event until the publication, in July 2020, of the Russia Report”.
Additionally, the Tribunal stated that it had turned down my complaint because “there [was] also no explanation as to why the complainant did not receive the letter dated 5 May 2021 until sometime in 2022. We note that it is addressed to the complainant at the same address given in the complaint form. The complainant has not explained who handed him the letter or when, other than it was “earlier this year””.
Clearly, if the IPT really wanted to know the answer to the last question then it could have obtained it from the Police. Their first point about the Russia Report sounded as an empty excuse. The whole thing stank to me of whitewash.
It also seemed, from the irritated tone of the IPT decision, which sounded like a cantankerous elderly aunt just woken from her afternoon nap by a noisy child, that the presiding Judge really did not want to be drawn on such controversies, even if both the Police and the ISC thought the Tribunal was the correct avenue for the resolution of my concerns.
A thriller BY PROJECT CITIZEN, featuring Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Jukes and Sergei Cristo that exposes an alleged secret spy ring operating at the very heart of the British establishment
Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring
It was around this time that Carole Cadwalladr, the investigative journalist with the Guardian and Observer, involved me in the recoding of this chart-topping podcast. And it was during my trips to London to be interviewed for various episodes that I probably learnt more about the significance of my experience of the Russian interference, as I was being prompted by this brilliant podcast. I talked to my friends in the Conservative Party, Parliament, government, journalism and diplomacy. Most of the answers seemed to point back to the Russia Report.
The Russia Report
There were several intriguing discoveries. First, that Conservative members of the ISC knew the reason why Prime Minister Johnson came up with bogus excuses to prevent the publication of the Russia Report before the 2019 Election. He was afraid that the controversy around the Russian interference would derail his campaign to “get Brexit done”, and might have even ended up in the courts.
Second, that the Report was massively redacted. I was told that it goes to the other four of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies, who take out anything that they believe came from their sources. That meant that we would not have had the chance to see any American information, which was a pity because US agencies clearly keep a close eye on us. Once a credible source in the US told me that, when Cameron was PM, the CIA tipped the British several times over the so-called “suspicious” deaths of Russians in the UK, but London dismissed them.
Third, that Johnson wanted Grayling to take over the ISC not only to soft pedal the release of the Russia Report and how it was presented to the public, but also to destroy the Committee’s independence, remove part of its funding and fire key expert personnel. Other than that, Grayling had no interest in being on the Committee – he left soon after he lost the election as Chairman to Julian Lewis.
Fourth, I confirmed my suspicions that the relationship between the Committee and the intelligence and security services, which it is supposed to oversee, and the rest of the Executive, has been a constant struggle. In its annual reports, the ISC complained about the Services failing to answer their requests in time, if at all. The PM has not made himself available to the Committee, as it used to be the case, for several years. Apart from complaining about all this in their reports, the Committee, which represented us, the electorate, could not really do anything to force the executive to take their responsibilities before Parliament seriously. In the meantime, the Committee sits firmly within the Cabinet Office structure, with its every move carefully monitored by the Executive. Indeed the Committee can’t even publish a fully redacted report without asking the Prime Minister for permission.
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Smoke and Mirrors from Boris Johnson
The Report was published in July 2020, soon after that exhilarating feat of multi-party collaboration, so unlike the confrontational nature of British politics, as members of different political parties wrestled ISC’s independence back from Mr Johnson at No 10.
In its pages it hid a startling revelation: our excellent intelligence and security agencies did not see it as their national security objective to protect our democratic process from foreign interference. The powers that be were pretending to be blind, and they were leading the blind.
The Prime Minister Johnson wasted no time in rubbishing the report. He simply politicised this crucial national security issue. “It is about pressure from the Islingtonian Remainers who have seized on this report to try and give the impression that Russian interference was somehow responsible for Brexit” he said.
Like one of those Trumpian tweets, I found this blunt accusation puzzling. I spent most of my time at the grand Conservative Carlton Club in St James’s Street of Westminster, not in Islington. And while I, like many in my Party, happened to think that Britain’s place was at the biggest table in Europe, my efforts to educate people about the Russian threat well predated my “Remainism”.
It was also true for Luke Harding, who first helped to get my story out in 2012. He is currently The Guardian’s correspondent on the Ukrainian front, and the first Western journalist expelled from Russia since the fall of communism. And for the two key witnesses of the ISC, who provided our podcast with incredible insight into the Report. Edward Lucas has known Boris Johnson personally for 20 years or so and has watched Russia for about 40 years. Chris Steele spent over two decades at the SIS (MI6) watching and analysing Russia.
All that might well have been double Dutch to Prime Minister Johnson, who, like a certain bird, seemed to be attracted to everything that shined. Be that lavish hospitality of KGB oligarchs in England and Italy, populist red campaign busses or political donations from various Russian sources, some obvious and some less obvious.
Political Funding: From Russia with Brexit
At a luxurious office at the presidential palace in one of our more friendly European states, the senior official looked at me very firmly and answered: “the thing about those Russian donations was that they were a part of a scheme”.
We were talking about donations to the Conservative Party made, over the years, by Russians with British passports. These donors lived mostly in the UK, but the source of their wealth tended to come from Putin’s Russia or what it regarded as its “satellites”.
Conservative governments of the post-Brexit period have always denied that Russia has “successfully” interfered in British politics. Would bankrolling a big part of the Brexit campaign count as successful interference? I would say yes, given that only £7 million (that we know about for sure) given by just two Russian donors in the last few years would have funded the whole Central Conservative Party operation for a year. I worked with Conservative Treasurers at the Conservative Party HQ and I know that the annual budget was normally about that at the time.
In Episode 8 of our podcast, Chris Steele confirms that, according to his intelligence, the Kremlin allocated a large secret budget to influence the Brexit campaign and says that “money changed hands”.
Another senior European security official, who we also talked to, said that the level of support that Russian intelligence gave to various British “independence” campaigns over a long period prior to the Brexit campaign, is widely underestimated.
He also stressed that while Russians have long supported and secretly funded nationalist and separatist movements across Europe, the UK has always been seen by the Kremlin as the most dangerous power in Europe, and therefore a priority.
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The Kremlin Razzle Dazzle
So, how did we get here and where are we heading? My personal instinct is that part of the long-term strategy for Putin might have been pushing the UK intelligence and security agencies and their allies away from counterintelligence by encouraging them to focus more on counterterrorism. And spend their resources there instead. As Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former Director General of MI5, liked to repeat, it is all about setting priorities. And Putin was there to help us set them.
He was the first Western leader who called President George W Bush after the terrorist attack on September 11th. He also encouraged intelligence cooperation over Afghanistan and Syria, as well as domestic terrorist threats.
The consequences of this shift in early 2000s soon became apparent. Many of the most experienced officers at Thames House, who worked though 1980s and 1990s and knew Russian active measures when they saw them, left or retired.
Most of the remaining experienced officers ended up mostly on the counterterrorism side, despite, according to one former Chief of the SIS, terrorism never being a systemic threat for the UK. Russian espionage had become a marginal area for MI5, staffed by young graduates, and Moscow used that weakness to build the largest hostile espionage presence in London since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
It is true that most Embassy-based Russian spies have been expelled. However, Russia is increasingly cooperating in their political interference and espionage operations with other autocracies, such as China, Iran and North Korea. The UK will need to revolutionalise its national security infrastructure if it is to address this growing threat effectively.
To me, foreign interference in our democratic processes ceased to be an issue of political debate as soon as it came firmly under the remit of MI5 in 2023 under the new National Security Act.
However, those of our unscrupulous politicians who enabled Putin’s geopolitics by taking political donations from his proxies and doing his bidding are still a growing threat to Britain. All this time, they kept us, the ordinary voters, in the dark, taken for granted, patronised and led by the nose.
It is time to have a proper public enquiry into the Russian interference. Possibly presided by three of the most senior judges in the land and authorised and cleared to look at all intelligence reports.
To the hesitating members of the new Labour Government I would remind the immortal words of the late Senator Diane Feinstein, chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee when she presented the CIA torture report:
“This clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world.
“Unfortunately, it is going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not.
“There are those who will cease upon the report “you see what the Americans did?” and they will try to use it to justify evil actions and incite more violence.
“We can’t prevent that. But history will judge us, our commitment to a just society governed by law, and our willingness to face an ugly truth and say “never again””.
Listen to ‘Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring’ – a podcast by Carole Carwalladr and Peter Jukes