How spies and soldiers will face the blame over Afghan data breach

Times

3 days ago

On a dark winter's day in December 2023, John Healey was escorted into a secure briefing room at the Ministry of Defence and handed a brown envelope.
The shadow defence secretary had just received a superinjunction, prohibiting him from repeating a word of what he was about to be told by James Heappey, the armed forces minister.
The contents of their discussion would not become public for another 18 months, as the Conservative government used the courts to prevent The Times and other newspapers from revealing a catastrophic data leak involving thousands of Afghans seeking refuge in Britain from the Taliban.
Healey left the building shocked by the gravity of the situation, knowing he would almost certainly have to handle the fallout when the veil of secrecy was finally lifted.
That moment arrived on Tuesday. In parliament, Healey, now the defence secretary, told MPs how a defence official had inadvertently leaked a list containing the details of nearly 19,000 Afghans in February 2022.
It also contained the names of more than 100 British special forces troops, MI6 spies and military officers who had vouched for some of the Afghans. The previous government's response had been to spend hundreds of millions of pounds bringing several thousand impacted individuals and their families to the UK via a secret Afghan Response Route (ARR), without parliament or voters knowing.
Sir Keir Starmer and shadow senior cabinet ministers had been looped in shortly after entering government but Healey's wife only discovered what her husband had been dealing with when he delivered the statement.
After days of recriminations and Conservative buck-passing, many questions around the scandal remain unanswered this weekend.
In Westminster, the defence committee has vowed to investigate the cover-up, with Sir Ben Wallace and Sir Grant Shapps, the former defence secretaries, likely to be interrogated when MPs return from summer recess.
• Grant Shapps 'trying to rewrite history' on Afghan leak
While both have defended the superinjunction, Rishi Sunak, the prime minister who presided over it, has not said a word and is overseas.
The intelligence and security committee (ISC), a body made up of peers and MPs that scrutinises the UK's spy agencies, is furious it was kept in the dark and has demanded a host of government documents around the leak and the cover-up. It has statutory powers, and will launch its own inquiry in due course.
Lord Beamish, who chairs the committee, is equally incensed by MI6's failure to inform the committee of the potential disclosure of its agents' identities. Despite providing quarterly updates to the ISC on any major developments, the service failed to mention the issue at any point.
The ISC has demanded answers from MI6 and the committee is set to summon Sir Richard Moore, the outgoing chief of the intelligence service, or his successor, Blaise Metreweli, to explain the omission.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has also commissioned a review into how the government gagged senior parliamentary figures, himself and the Lord Speaker included, and the constitutional issues this raises. He hopes to update MPs either on Monday or Tuesday.
But the biggest unknown is the long-term impact on public perception of parliament, the two main political parties, and British democracy itself.
By the time Healey was ushered into the MoD's briefing room in 2023 he had already been made aware of a series of failings relating to the Afghan evacuation.
In September 2021, a month after Kabul fell to the Taliban, he had pressed Wallace, the defence secretary, over a human error that resulted in the personal information of 265 Afghans who had worked alongside British troops being shared with hundreds of others who were on the same email distribution list.
Wallace apologised and insisted action had been taken to prevent it from happening again; earlier this year, the Afghans affected were told they would be able to claim up to £4,000 in compensation.
• How top military chief's role in Afghan data leak was hidden
But by August 2023, Healey had identified a total of four data breaches associated with the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap), the main route for bringing over personnel who had served alongside the UK armed forces.
On August 13, he released them to the media in a 'Dossier of Failure'.
He would not know until later, but the following day the MoD discovered it had another leak — this time bigger than any before. It was decided three months later that he should be informed. Healey's allies believe this was only because he was continually grilling Tory ministers on problems with the Arap scheme.
Healey received one more briefing on the secret Afghan operation in opposition, early in the new year.
By the time he entered the MoD as defence secretary in July last year, the scheme had been running for months. But beyond a monthly trickle of Afghan relocations to the UK, little had changed.
Healey believed it needed to, and was alarmed not just at what his predecessors had left him to deal with, but the apparent secretive mindset that had set in among civil servants.
This complaint has been echoed by a number of senior aides who worked for Sunak in No 10. 'For the scale of catastrophe it was, I was very surprised at the lack of urgency from officials in getting people out [of Afghanistan],' said one. 'There was quite a churn of officials working on it.'
Healey began to push for a reassessment of the threat posed by the Taliban to the Afghans on the list — the reason for the superinjunction remaining in place — but even this took months of internal debate within Whitehall to get started.
• Who knew about the Afghan data breach — and who was in the dark?
At the beginning of this year, Paul Rimmer, a retired deputy chief of defence intelligence, was finally commissioned to lead a review.
By June, Rimmer had determined that the leaked document had not spread as widely as feared and that its value to the Taliban, as well as its risk to the Afghans named in it, had diminished sufficiently. Decisions were finally made: only a portion of the Afghans had a legitimate right to come to Britain, many of whom had already arrived.
The secret route would end and the MoD would no longer fight to keep the superinjunction in place.
Healey's team believe that Tory ministers were genuinely determined to protect the Afghans when they first sought the superinjunction. But as time wore on, they suspect a desire to protect reputations crept into the decision-making process. While Shapps has in recent days expressed 'surprise' that it lasted as long as it did, they point out that last summer he successfully appealed against a decision to lift the superinjunction, right in the middle of the general election campaign.
Healey is determined that the culture of cover-ups and the persistent issues with data security — stretching well beyond Afghanistan — are permanently resolved in the MoD.
A new chief information officer has been brought in and, in January, new software was introduced on MoD computers to more securely share data. Recently a review of the Afghan data leak was completed to ensure information was being held at the right security classification and in the right location.
That no one has been sacked for the scandal has also raised uncomfortable questions about accountability. To this end, Healey's long-term defence reforms will establish clearer chains of command. Under a new military strategic headquarters, the chiefs of the RAF, army and navy will formally report to the chief of defence staff for the first time, with Healey overseeing a department more clearly focused on policy development.
Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, is also joining Healey as his strategic director and will be responsible for challenging and reviewing all major decisions. Chalmers is hugely experienced in foreign, defence and security policy: he was previously a visiting professor in the war studies department at King's College London and served as an adviser to Jack Straw when he was foreign secretary. Healey has described him as a 'one-man intellectual powerhouse'.
An MoD source said: 'We're continuing to drive the biggest defence reforms in 50 years — that means proper accountability, better transparency for parliament and a stronger internal challenge to the MoD status quo.'
And yet, the mistakes keep happening. This weekend, The Sunday Times has revealed how a publication associated with a senior British Army regiment has been routinely disclosing the identities of special forces personnel in its ranks. The MoD was warned about the security breach two months ago, and yet the documents are still online after they initially appeared to have been taken down. Healey has demanded an investigation.
In No 10, Starmer's aides are also contemplating their next steps, amid growing calls for a public inquiry. This has not yet been ruled out, although Downing Street believes the defence committee and the ISC should be given space to conduct their own investigations.
However, the wider consequences of the Afghan debacle will persist.
According to government sources, approximately 24,000 impacted Afghans and their families will come to the UK via all available schemes. Of those, 4,500 Afghans have already arrived or are en route via the ARR and given indefinite leave to remain. This allows them to apply for British residency and, ultimately, citizenship. A further 2,400 have been earmarked for relocation over the coming months, with the total costs associated with the secret route expected to hit £850 million. On average, impacted Afghans have brought eight family members with them — the highest number is reported to have been 22 — placing added pressure on already tight housing stocks and stretched public services. Officials had originally hoped they would bring only their wife and two children.
They have each been offered 'transitional accommodation' lasting up to nine months. Many of the Afghans clandestinely flown to the UK were originally put up in disused army barracks, under an operation codenamed 'Lazurite'. In 2023, Weeton Barracks near Blackpool was used to house more than 50 families, although it is unclear whether they were individuals caught up in the leak. Many Afghans were then moved into service accommodation, which is usually set aside for military personnel and their families. At its peak, 12 per cent of military homes were being used, although that has fallen below 2 per cent. The MoD has now decided to end the scheme.
Others, however, have been dispersed to various local authorities around the country to be housed, including, in some cases, hotels. The secrecy around the Afghans has made locating them difficult, although Bracknell Forest council in Berkshire, which covers the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, said it had received about 320 new Afghan residents alone this year. The sudden influx appears to have created tension with locals. In May, the council was forced to issue an explanatory note saying: 'The council and its partners are aware of some misinformation circulating regarding our new Afghan families. While this misinformation is being circulated by a small number of individuals, we want to make sure all our residents have the facts. We would like to reiterate that our new families are not illegal immigrants, asylum seekers or refugees. They have indefinite leave to remain and so are now UK residents.'
A year on from a summer of rioting prompted by the Southport atrocity, there are growing concerns over the national impact on community cohesion — a point also raised in Rimmer's report.
No 10 argues the government's response has reduced the possibility of such violence reoccurring, noting that the strategy for announcing the Afghan leak drew heavily on Starmer's response to the Southport riots and the delayed charging of Axel Rudakubana with terror and biological weapons offences.
A senior source said: 'We know we are operating in a very low trust environment, which is why we are being as transparent as humanly possible.'
A YouGov poll published on Wednesday suggests this approach is working, with 49 per cent of respondents supporting the superinjunction and the need to protect the Afghans, compared with 20 per cent who disapproved.
However, the attacks on police officers during violent protests outside an asylum hotel in Epping, Essex, over an unrelated arrest of an asylum seeker on suspicion of alleged sexual assaults in the town, has highlighted how quickly things could escalate again.
Luke Tryl, director of the think tank More in Common, said: 'The leak is likely to deepen voters' frustrations about the competence of government and the civil service, confirming their suspicions that they are just not up to the job.'
For now, the greatest risk for Starmer is that the Afghan leak entrenches the belief that Britain's political system is broken, regardless of which party is in charge.