Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered movable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defense secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

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Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, canceled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the gray suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organized the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of  overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language center, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoestring. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavor.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defense to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change.  To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training center at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programs. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic program of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians  do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialog that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialized, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defense spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defense has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defense production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

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Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorized around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilizing Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak ruble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritizing its state-owned energy and defense monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.

Not so with many other targets. Sir Ken McCallum warned in 2023 that as many as 20,000 Britons have been approached on LinkedIn by profiles linked to Chinese state actors. The phenomenon hit the news last month when MI5 issued a formal parliamentary alert about two individuals accused of using LinkedIn to approach people in the parliamentary ecosystem on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).

The genius is in the banality of it all. The choreography of modern recruitment is designed to look normal: a polished message, a flattering invitation to write a short “policy” paper, an honorarium, a paid trip, a promise of future “opportunities”. These approaches are not crude entrapments, but the hooks for what become long-term grooming campaigns that escalate slowly and exploit everyday vulnerabilities. It’s a low-cost, high-impact option for Beijing’s operatives. LinkedIn does the reconnaissance. Tens of thousands of invitations can be sent. And a single lead can justify hundreds of dead ends.

On its own, a single approach may not pose much of a risk to national security. At scale, the threat is very real. This work is a part of a broader effort to shape UK institutions to be less resistant to the aims of the Communist Party, and to help Beijing assert its dominance by all and any means necessary, lawful or illicit.

And, yes, people fall for it. The CIA famously groups espionage motives under the acronym MICE: money, ideology, coercion, ego. It remains unerringly accurate, especially the ego factor. Flattery, exclusive invitations and the promise of being “the expert” are consistently reported as powerful accelerants. The MSS’s recruiters cultivate status and belonging. It works especially well with mid-career specialists who feel overlooked by their institutions. Of course, these motives rarely appear in isolation. The MSS’s success lies in shaping multiple pressures over time, turning a benign connection into routine cooperation. Even journalists have been shown to be susceptible.

But the threat ranges far beyond LinkedIn. Let’s widen the lens a little. The MSS is not just a spy agency in the narrow sense, but a key instrument in upholding the unchallengeable authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is itself foundational to the “new China”. The old China, by contrast, is the China of the “century of humiliation” which, in both Nationalist and Communist folklore, was bullied and suppressed by Japan and by European powers including Britain. The Party is the means of liberation — the architects of a People’s Republic that will achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, and restore China to its natural position at the center of the world order. This presupposes, of course, the end of what the CCP sees as a Western-imposed order. Any criticism, anywhere in the world, which challenges the legitimacy of the Party is therefore a threat to national security and to China’s destiny that must be managed, if not eliminated. To that end, the MSS is among the Party’s chief tools.

But the MSS is only one part of China’s intelligence apparatus. You may remember the Prince Andrew “spy” scandal, where the courts refused a visa to Chinese national Yang Tenbo on national security grounds. Yang had grown close to some of Prince Andrew’s charitable efforts, and dozens of photos of him looking chummy with the former prince surfaced. Those following closely may also remember that Xuelin Bates (neé Black), now married to a Tory peer, was found to have set up “talent acquisition centers” for Beijing. The FBI says that China’s talent schemes “incentivize members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals”. Both Yang and (now) Lady Bates were accused of being affiliated with the “United Front”, a loose and sprawling association of organisations and individuals using their positions to soften opposition to the CCP.

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Successive leaders have termed the United Front an “important magic weapon” to “defeat the enemy, govern, and rejuvenate the country”, and Xi currently sees it as a key component of advancing the Party policy. The United Front mobilizes non-Party forces, such as overseas Chinese, intellectuals, religious groups, minorities, businesspeople, to align them with CCP goals, strengthening national unity, broadening the Party’s social and influence base.

Its methods are almost impossible to detect, and rarely illegal: coded threats to dissidents; services offered to overseas Chinese which enable the party to exact control at a distance; preferential business offers with invisible strings attached; infiltration of institutions across the UK economy and civic institutions; calling in favors earned over long periods of careful grooming. This list barely scratches the surface. It’s not a homogeneous body. Jelly is more easily nailed to a wall than is the amorphous blob of the United Front, and that’s by design, of course.

The MSS and United Front projects are distinct, but two branches of the same tree. They can and do interact and reinforce one another as part of China’s broader strategy for political influence and security. Together, they form complementary pillars of the Party’s mechanism to maintain internal cohesion, project influence abroad, and secure its long-term political dominance.

Not only that, as Alex Joske’s painstaking research has pointed out, they are the apparatus at the center of a deliberate strategy to blur influence and intelligence collection, showing how united front networks of diaspora groups, academic ties, and business associations provide institutional cover and plausible deniability, enabling the co-option of civic and academic structures into state purposes. The line between “normal” outreach and state targeting is intentionally fuzzy.

Those downplaying the risk often argue: “It’s normal for nations to spy on each other”. Or: “We are just as bad”. But they spectacularly miss the point, revealing shocking ignorance of the scale and intent of China’s intelligence operations in the process.

For context, both organizations have gargantuan budgets. In the financial year 2022-23, we spent £3.6 billion on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 combined. While there are no reliable figures for the MSS cashflow (predictably), one publication put the figure at $20 billion. Turning to the United Front, the Jamestown Foundation found in 2020 that the spending on institutions core to the United Front well exceeded that of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ entire budget, with nearly $600 million set aside for offices designed to influence foreigners and overseas Chinese communities alone. These are regarded by analysts as “floor” figures — highly conservative, with the likely spending much higher.

In sum: China has the means, manpower, and intent to reshape our way of life. The UK neither has the desire nor ability to do this. In the Chinese model, human intelligence, technical collection, and influence operations fused into a single national effort. It’s a behemoth.

Now, China would not put it in such stark terms, but the logic is plain enough. Their mandate is to protect the unchallengeable authority of the CCP and its aims. This requires and demands narrative control abroad. This, in turn, necessitates the adaptation of life in the UK to the extent that it poses any risk to CCP authority and its stated aims. That means that our values and freedoms, and our open, pluralistic society and institutions, are under threat.

So there’s a whistle-stop tour on what we are dealing with: an adversary with an intelligence apparatus that is “almost certainly the largest in the world,” composed of “hundreds of thousands” of officers and paired with a highly capable cyber-espionage arm. Don’t take my word for it. These are quotes from Parliament’s most senior committee.

Where does all of this leave the UK? My assessment would be that we are fighting a house fire with a syringe filled with lighter fluid. The syringe being the resources available to contain the threat, and the lighter fluid being the UK government’s seemingly irrepressible desire to make things worse.

Consider the National Security Act. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat designed a scheme to help police and intelligence deal with the problem of Chinese interference, called the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). The idea was that certain countries would be put in the “Enhanced Tier” and be subject to more stringent registration requirements. Then, the theory goes, those working on behalf of the CCP who fail to register properly would have committed an offense, and the police would have legislation to charge them (not currently the case). The scheme was launched this year, with Iran and Russia placed in the top tier. No prizes for guessing who’s still not in it: the country it was actually built for: China.

This isn’t a party-political point. The last government’s approach to China could be charitably characterized as schizophrenic, with different departments pursuing mutually contradictory approaches. We’ve had an intelligence community screaming from the rooftops about the threat, while ministers made concessions to Beijing in order to pave the way for begging bowl trips to China and Hong Kong.

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Indeed, across both Conservative and Labour administrations we have only ever seen movement in the direction of China realism when the backbenches have demanded it. Even then, it’s been tough going, with heavy campaigning to extract the smallest concessions. Huawei, Hikvision, the Genocide Amendment campaign. Every time it has been a slog, which became harder when latent divisions among China hawk MPs were worsened by someone who would be later accused of Chinese espionage.

I write as a long-standing member of the Conservative Party who had to spend the past five years criticizing the government’s obstinate unwillingness to address the problem. It is a dereliction of duty to leave the defense of the realm against our more acute security threat to a merry band of backbench MPs and activists. At the very least, it cannot be described as a meaningful China “policy”. More “path of least resistance” capitulation, whether to the backbenches or to Beijing.

That said, it is also true that the UK has begun adjusting its legal architecture, even if in a piecemeal way. I’ve mentioned that the National Security Act 2023 introduced offenses criminalizing the obtaining or disclosure of trade secrets for a foreign power and other espionage-related acts, addressing a prosecutorial gap that previously made economic espionage difficult to pursue. But legislation is only one pillar: MI5’s warnings, parliamentary briefings to MPs and peers, and the creation of protective institution signal that there is some desire for the state to shift from ad-hoc alerts to system-wide resilience.

Yet we remain miles away. According to MI5, one of the most targeted aspects of the UK economy is business, yet I am not aware of a single MI5 alert having been issued to the business community. We should not be surprised, therefore, when City of London institutions pop up to lobby the government in favor of, say, keeping China out of the top tier of FIRS.

Our response must be precise, grounded in clarity, not ignorance or xenophobia. Britain’s strength is in our openness: universities, collaborative research and cross-border professional networks are national assets. Overreach risks pushing communities away from cooperation and falsely equating ethnicity with threat. The landmark Intelligence and Security Committee report on China explicitly cautions against conflating the Chinese state’s activities with people of Chinese heritage. Effective policy therefore balances targeted intelligence and security measures with safeguards for civil liberties and community cohesion.

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But there can be no meaningful response which fails to recognize the strength of the adversary, or to signal willingness to address it. The power of China’s interference apparatus lies in its cinematic scale; the genius lies in the subtlety of its tools, and the danger lies in its intent. That subtlety is what makes the operation both potent and hard to see. We should be alert and robust in our countermeasures, honest about the scale and sophistication of the challenge, and disciplined.

The lines between sunlight and shadow, and between Party and people, have been blurred by design. Recognizing that fact is the prerequisite to defending an open society against a whole-of-state adversary that prefers the appearance of normality to the drama of the cloak-and-dagger.

But, right now, we are barely on the playing field, invincibly ignorant for fear of diplomatic detriment. We lack the China expertise and political courage to face reality. This is clearly unsustainable. We are already feeling the pain of naivety. Just recall the British Steel fiasco, bought by Chinese company Jingye and mismanaged so drastically that nationalization was the only option. As so often, the short-term allure of Chinese investment made us forget the risk, anyway costing us more in the long-run. And yet the Treasury remains convinced that a country which targets the majority of its foreign direct investment towards UK critical infrastructure, and with which the UK has a gaping trading deficit, is somehow going to help save our economy.

Just as the obstinacy of the Westminster bubble over migration policy led to the splintering of the political spectrum and yielding of the microphone to the political fringe, so refusal to address the intensifying threat from China will strengthen the CCP’s narratives, and hobble the UK. If we don’t get this right, it will be British-Chinese people who will pay the price as the UK lurches for a nationalist answer to the Beijing question.

The UK should exchange its lighter fluid-filled syringe for the biggest hosepipe we can find. Our security services are superb, but until we kill the governmental culture of anticipatory obedience, and stop denying the police and intelligence services the tools they need to address the problem, we will not succeed in constraining China’s interference behemoth. This really is urgent. Our universities and private sector have already been compromised, and  civic institutions, including even Parliament, are now also being targeted. Act now, or future generations will inherit a different Britain.

The ambivalent, paranoid John le Carré vibe is well suited to the present moment in a multipolar world — the feeling that previous certainties can’t be relied upon, and everything is slowly going to the dogs. The narrator in the Smiley books isn’t sure that the two sides fighting the Cold War are so very different: the West is capable of atrocities, betrayals, and fumbling cock-ups, just as its enemies are. These days, the logic works in reverse: maybe the West isn’t as bad as we thought; or maybe the alternative is worse. Either way, there is moral ambiguity and decay everywhere we look.

Like me, it seems that le Carré’s youngest son likes to live in the downbeat world his father created, and now hewants more people to join him there. Last year, Nick Harkaway – already a successful science fiction writer – published what is known in the trade as a “continuation novel” called Karla’s Choice. This filled in some of what George Smiley and other members of the Circus were getting up to in the mid-Sixties, between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This week, it was reported that Harkaway is encouraging other writers to bring “new stories into this same world”; for, he says, “the world of Smiley is richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show”.

Harkaway’s invitation is to be found in a book accompanying a new exhibition about his father, which opened this week at the Bodleian library. Oxford is the obvious place for such an event: Smiley’s “spiritual home”, as le Carré put it; the city where he himself spied on far-Left groups as a student, and where his double agent, Bill Haydon, first turned towards communism. Former intelligence officer Connie Sachs still sits there in her shabby front room, offering reminiscences of Moscow in exchange for whiskey. Harkaway says he is trying to “open the gates” to such cloistered places, adding that since he has already “claimed the Smiley universe, the next person doesn’t have to be so afraid”.

In the original Smiley universe, barriers to entry — social, political, physical — loomed large. At the end of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, protagonist Alec Leamas dies trying to climb over the Berlin wall. A psychoanalyst would presumably have a field day with a son who jumps over the wall of the story-world belonging to his celebrated father, then opens the gates from inside to invaders — albeit that Harkaway says le Carré “implicitly” authorized him to do so before he died. Or maybe it’s just an extension of the passionate anti-Brexit stance Harkaway has taken elsewhere, again echoing concerns of his famous parent. No literary landscape is really an island; incomers can only do good; there is enough land here for all.

Karla’s Choice is certainly an entertaining ventriloquist act. There’s a familiar sort of plot, prioritizing individual loyalty to people rather than to nations. There are the trademark bits of compressed dialog, heavy with inhouse spy jargon, bluff schoolboy jokes, and English self-consciousness: what William Boyd has called the “Pall Mall clubman’s patois”. And there are also the weirdly emotional monologues, during which otherwise repressed characters suddenly unburden themselves inexplicably upon their embarrassed confessor, Smiley, who simply blinks a lot and purses his lips sepulchrally in return.

But there are also differences. I spotted a few anachronisms when I read Harkaway’s book: a reference to someone “feeling his religion”, and to the state exercising “coercive control”. More importantly, as others have noted, there is an absence of the biographical preoccupations that keep bubbling under in actual le Carré plotlines: real-life fury towards a feckless conman father, a mother who abandoned him at the age of five, humiliations wrought by the English public school system. In Harkaway’s telling, for instance, Smiley’s wife, Ann, is comprehensible and even sympathetic. She is not acting as she does in the original books, like a sadistic nymphomaniac cartoon. Smiley’s stuffed shirt colleagues are not slyly goading him about the state of his marriage on a daily basis. There isn’t the same feeling that the people around you could maliciously betray you at any time.

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In short: without his father’s simmering psychological intensity to justify the latent melodrama, Harkaway’s book at times gets perilously close to camp pastiche. The son may have his own Oedipal issues — and don’t we all — but they are different from the father’s. And they make for a different sort of imaginary landscape, even if Cambridge Circus and the Bodleian are still present in both.

You might say: so what? New Miss Marple or James Bond books come out all the time. Continuation novels are just a lucrative version of fan-fiction, and many readers enjoy the results. And anyway, hasn’t le Carré’s vision been reinterpreted by the performances of Alec Guiness and his fellow actors in the masterly TV series from the Seventies and Eighties? Indeed, isn’t the writing of a continuation novel just another kind of adaptation? According to Harkaway, le Carré himself found Guinness’s performance “so overwhelming that he could no longer hear the character, only the actor”. Why then worry about new versions of old characters on the page?

But it’s one thing to interpret a character made of words for a visual medium; or even just to imaginatively slot the presence of George Smiley into your afternoon walk on Hampstead Heath. In both cases, you are making the original creation more vivid, and paying proper tribute to its owner. In contrast, by treating literary characters as things to be passed around to other writers and placed in interesting new positions, effectively you are implying their creator’s achievement was pretty limited to start with: most of the aesthetic value concentrated in parts to be extracted, and not in the unique and irreplaceable whole.

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Naturally enough, Harkaway doesn’t see it this way. He gives us a vision of a fictional universe that is concrete and specific like the real one, containing “richer and wider” detail than his father could ever have conveyed on his own; as if both authors were like historians, giving their readers a partial glimpse of people and events already in existence. But in fact, a better analogy for what he is doing is with the forging of oral folk tales, each new teller adding to a collectively wrought world. The characters in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy now have personal histories that include the embellishments of Harkaway, albeit that le Carré wrote that book shortly after Harkaway was born. If additional authors take up the invitation and place Smiley, Guillam, and co in fresh predicaments, their versions too will retrospectively inflect the narrative whole. And in theory, the contribution of the very latest skillful tale-teller might conceivably be as great as that of the first one — assuming you can even remember his name.

In practice, of course, it is unlikely to go this way. Not feeling a baleful parental eye upon them, other writers are less likely to be as fastidious as Harkaway in trying to get the characters right — though of course, AI will always be there to help. But in any case, what is “getting the characters right” once you have downgraded the originator to a mere collaborator in a shared project? In opening wide the gates of his father’s creation, Harkaway has invited potential vandalism, by people who don’t properly understand the culture there. Poor Smiley — it seems he really can’t rely on anything staying the same.

The Manual spooked Western intelligence agencies. Did this mean that terrorists were being trained to operate like MI6 agents? And if so, how could they be defeated? It’s a paranoia that has only grown in the past two decades. From terrorist groups to semiconductor companies, non-state actors increasingly have access to highly sensitive information of national importance. Espionage is now anyone’s game; the need for security everywhere. Only this week, two men in the UK — including a former parliamentary aide — were charged under the Official Secrets Act with spying on behalf of China. And while this might seem a throwback to a Le Carré world of inter-state espionage, the reality is that any modern spy worth their salt would be as interested in Britain’s private sector as it is in our government.

The British state has begun to realise this. In 2022, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a joint address to business and academic leaders. When it came to the threat of Chinese espionage and cyberattacks, they said: “most of what is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours.” Nowadays, private companies developing products in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotech have access to such sensitive information that, if it got into the wrong hands, it would be a national security issue.

Far from the Cold War era of stealing nuclear secrets — think Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs — spies today are more likely to want to nick your PowerPoint. In January last year, a Chinese spy named Zheng Xiaoqing stole a data file from General Electric Power, which related to the design and manufacturing of gas and steam turbines. The IP was thought to be worth several million. He attempted to hide the file within the code of another file — a picture of a sunset — using a technique called steganography. The choice of target is instructive: it is increasingly the Nvidias and ASMLs of the world (both semiconductor companies), and not the CIA or MI5, which have access to secret information of national importance.

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By Thomas Fazi

This diffusion of knowledge and power away from the state and intelligence agencies, and towards private companies, marks a stark shift from the Cold War era. Back then, there was no confusion: the British and American intelligence communities had a monopoly over secrets. In fact, the Cold War was in many ways a war of intelligence, and its Manichean nature — an existential competition between the US and the Soviet Union — was far more stable than our current multipolar system. As Tom King, chair of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee in the Nineties, lamented in 1998: “Was not the Cold War, in its awful way, a form of rigid security system that has now collapsed?”

Ironically, globalisation was initially seen as the panacea for Cold War tension. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was President Truman’s attempt to induce Europe not to turn red with a large injection of cash. And four decades later, it was the desire for American blue jeans which helped bring down the Berlin Wall. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of terrorism, that the West figured out that globalisation and interdependency was a threat, not a cure. Today, in an interconnected world where we rely upon one Taiwanese company (TSMC) for all of our smartphones, economic and national security have become one and the same.

Well-aware that it cannot afford to turn a blind eye, the UK Government has overseen an influx of national security legislation in the past few years all designed to tighten scrutiny. The National Security & Investment Act, introduced in 2022, is designed to protect the UK’s critical infrastructure — from telecommunications to AI — against foreign acquisition. More recently the new National Security Bill, introduced in December 2023, is the most significant espionage law since the Official Secrets Act of 1911. And a new arm of MI5 — the National Protective Security Authority — was established in 2023 to advise private UK companies on how to combat cybersecurity. “Economic security” has also become a significant issue. In a speech last week Oliver Dowden laid out plans for export controls and tighter regulation of sensitive research projects in British academic institutions, arguing that “our economic and security interests are intertwined as never before”.

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By Aris Roussinos

What this wave of legislation suggests is that national security has become so all-encompassing and diverse that it can no longer be separated from the rest of government. Legislation, not secret agents, is being used to counter security threats. In a globalised world, the politician’s pen is replacing the agent’s pistol.

Some fear that the government’s increasing role in dealing with national security may lead to its politicisation. Just last month, the UK banned foreign state ownership of newspapers, responding to the attempted acquisition of the Telegraph by the UAE conglomerate RedBird. Prior to the ban itself, the acquisition was seen to “represent a very real potential national security threat” by a group of 18 Tory MPs. The problem is that, although the concerns over the Telegraph instance were well-founded, the broader notion of “national security” remains undefined and ambiguous — even in a major piece of legislation like the National Security & Investment Act. The risk is that, with the ever-widening scope of “national security”, it becomes a political issue, defined and redefined by politicians at any given moment.

Across the Atlantic, earlier this week Congress approved a bill to ban TikTok unless the the Chinese company ByteDance sells the US platform. The concerns stem from two issues. The first is the fact that for many people TikTok acts as a de facto source of news: its ownership by a Chinese company therefore essentially translates into a foreign-held media company. Second, there is the issue of TikTok’s vast pool of data — and fears that the CCP has access to it. The danger is that TikTok could be used for surveillance, Chinese-sanctioned propaganda, and ultimately to undermine American democracy. In the run-up to an already potentially toxic presidential election, those worries are not unfounded. Nonetheless, the forced sale of TikTok is yet another example of Western governments feeling compelled to use a blunt instrument (legislation) to tackle issues of national and economic security.

Pressure has mounted on the UK to follow suit. And the UK has in general very much followed (or been lent on by) the US to toughen its national security legislation in recent years. Just think back to Trump’s row with Johnson over Huawei in 2020, when Britain was on the cusp of allowing a Chinese company to dominate the UK’s 5G network. But we also have less weight to throw around in the global economy than America. The US can easily absorb the shock of any unintended consequences inflicted by heavy-handed legislation. The UK, on the other hand, has to walk a finer line between national security and staying open for business. There can be no such thing today, economically speaking, of an isolationist Britain.

This collaboration (and, in some cases, confrontation) between the state and private companies who hold IP and technology of national importance is not necessarily a bad thing. But as the lines between economic and national security blur, the trade-off may well be a politicisation (and bureaucratisation) of national security by those in Whitehall. And this does represent a fundamental break with the past. As the intelligence academics Antonio Díaz Fernández and Ruben Arcos put it, the days of the Cold War “secret state” are giving way to the 21st-century “protecting state”, in which national security seeps into everyday life.

Since the Cold War “national security” has expanded from the narrow realm of military power and deterrence to include terrorism, environmental security, migration, cybersecurity and now economic security. Of course, parliamentary bills will never replace the world of James Bond entirely. But, as Bond’s own Chief of Intelligence put it a little over a decade ago: “Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren’t nations… It’s in the shadows — that’s where we must do battle.”

Last week, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) released its long-awaited report from Operation Kenova, a seven-year criminal investigation costing £38 million, into the activities of a British Army agent known in the media as “Stakeknife”. Rumours about this agent first surfaced at around the time of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998. Stakeknife was said to be Freddie Scappaticci, a bricklayer from Belfast who was recruited by the army in the late Seventies. It was claimed that his intelligence had saved “countless” lives, even if it came at a terrible price.

The chilling allegation against Freddie Scappaticci was that during his time as an army agent he became a senior figure in the IRA’s infamous “Nutting Squad” (to “nut”, in Northern Ireland, is to shoot someone in the head). Part of Scappaticci’s job had been to find spies in the IRA and interrogate them, in other words hunting down people like him. If the Nutting Squad extracted a confession from a suspected agent, a recording was sent to the IRA Army Council where the likes of Martin McGuinness would decide if the victim was to live or die. Usually, Scappaticci recalled, the order that came back was: “take him out and give him it”. Newspaper reports suggested that Scappaticci might have been involved in as many as 50 murders. In itself, this was shocking. Far more disturbing was the idea that his army handlers knew about this and may have been complicit.

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Operation Kenova was set up in 2016 to investigate the claims about Scappaticci and, if true, build a criminal case against him and his handlers. It was hoped that this would provide justice for the families of those who had been abducted and murdered by the Nutting Squad. Over the next seven years, a team of 72 detectives conducted 336 interviews, and went through more than 12,000 classified records from the archives of the local police, the army and MI5, in what will ultimately go down as the largest murder investigation in British history. But it led to no criminal prosecutions. That’s mainly because its principal target, Freddie Scappaticci, died before final charging decisions could be reached. The man leading Operation Kenova, Jon Boutcher, recently appointed Chief Constable of the PSNI, accepted that his investigation had failed to deliver justice. But he was adamant that it could still remedy the historical record, and provide lessons for future British governments.

The Operation Kenova report published last week was clear and uncompromising. On too many occasions, Boutcher wrote, Scappaticci’s handlers turned a blind eye to their agent’s horrific crimes. Some of these handlers, when questioned by Boutcher’s detectives, argued that Scappaticci’s intelligence had allowed them to save “hundreds” of lives. Boutcher strongly disagreed. After going through most of the written reports attributed to Stakeknife, he estimated that this intelligence saved no more than about 10 lives. Although his team did not find any direct evidence of Scappaticci taking someone’s life, they estimated that he was personally involved in as many as 14 killings. Based on this, Boutcher estimated that more lives were lost as a result of Stakeknife than were saved, a catastrophic inversion of the moral trolley problem that his handlers had been playing with real lives in Northern Ireland.

What’s interesting about this conclusion is that Boutcher did not criticise the initial decision to recruit Scappaticci. Nor did he state that this agent should have been dropped as soon as he joined the Nutting Squad. Instead, Boutcher argued this was a question of degree: that Scappaticci had been allowed to go too far and that his handlers had failed to provide rigorous oversight. And they did this because Stakeknife was a prize asset. The ultimate goal for anyone in the business of running spies is to recruit an enemy official as an agent. That’s been the case since the dawn of espionage, and it was true in Northern Ireland. Britain wanted agents deep inside the IRA, and would sacrifice at least some principles to get them there. But this wasn’t following some existing law, nor are there other well-known examples of agents from MI5 or MI6 being free to kill with impunity. And that’s why the Stakeknife story should make us fundamentally confront what it means for Britain’s operatives to pose as members of violent extremist organisations.

In Britain, we have historically maintained a respectful epistemological distance from our intelligence agencies. “Secrecy”, the historian Peter Hennessy wrote, “is as much a part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds.” As recently as the late Eighties, we indulged the idea that MI5 did not officially exist — during the Sixties, MI6’s headquarters still displayed a plaque saying it was the “Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company”. When it comes to the secret world, we have a history of looking the other way.

During the Troubles, this laissez-faire stance bled into the way that agents like Stakeknife were run. When a senior Special Branch officer went to Margaret Thatcher in 1986 and told her that a worrying number of police informants in Northern Ireland were taking part in serious crimes, the response from Downing Street was clear: “Please continue to do what you’re doing. But for goodness’ sake, try not to get caught.” This attitude percolated down from the top, until it reached the men and women looking after the likes of Scappaticci. It was in the background as they tried to figure out what to do with the intelligence he was supplying. Each time he told them about a forthcoming attack, or a murder that was being planned, they faced a dilemma: will we save more lives if we act on this intelligence, or if we don’t?

The same real-life game theory was applied during the Second World War by government officials in Bletchley Park. They knew that if they acted on everything, the Germans would work out that their encrypted Enigma messages were being read and change their codes. As a result, there were times when the British chose not to intervene in order to save more lives in the long run. In a very similar sense, Scappaticci’s handlers often chose not to act, hoping that protecting their source would ultimately allow them to save more lives. But according to Jon Boutcher, they frequently made the wrong call, and should have intervened many more times than they actually did. And part of the problem, Boutcher suggested, was that those in the intelligence community had “a tendency to view the Stakeknife case through rose-tinted spectacles”. They were beguiled, he felt, by the mythology surrounding this agent, and the “irony” and “poetic justice” of having a spy inside the IRA’s spy-hunting unit. Maybe they also believed that nobody was ever going to rake over the details of what they were doing, which would help to explain why they were willing to give Scappaticci what was, in all but name, a licence to kill.

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By Tom McTague

It’s rare for a police investigation to lead to new legislation, but the Stakeknife case was the driving force behind the government’s 2020 Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. Never before had Parliament debated whether government agents should be allowed to take part in murder. But Operation Kenova had shown that the law on agent-running was woefully inadequate. This new bill would clear up just how far government agents could go. Some politicians called for an upper limit on agent criminality, and hoped that this bill would make it impossible for spies to participate in serious crimes including sexual violence, murder and torture. No amount of intelligence, they argued, could ever justify murder.

But the government — or rather the intelligence agencies — disagreed. Their argument was that by allowing some crimes, and not others, it might be possible for a terrorist leader to identify any spies in their group by asking them to carry out a proscribed activity. Anyone who refused would come under suspicion. As a result, the final draft of this unprecedented legislation, described in The Guardian as “shameful”, had no upper limit on agent criminality. It became known as the “licence to kill bill” before it had even passed.

On the face of it, this new law is deeply troubling. MI5, MI6, the police, and a surprisingly long list of other government agencies now have the power to authorise their agents to commit serious crimes. But look at the detail of the legislation, and you can see that a situation like the one in which Freddie Scappaticci found himself, when he came to believe that he had a licence to kill and could freely take part in as many IRA killings as he saw fit, is unlikely ever to happen again. The new law is by no means perfect, though it has introduced a system of checks and balances that were not there during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But ultimately it only relitigates one of the central ethical dilemmas of liberal society: how much harm do we permit the security services to inflict in order to keep us safe?

Shocked by such raw aggression, the man being accused, public pianist Dr K, withdraws. It’s hard to tell if he did touch anyone, since his hand is just out of shot in the film of the incident. He appears to be reaching for the miniature People’s Republic of China flag the young woman was holding.

The outburst was the climax of a row that started when a group of flag-wavers accosted the station’s public pianist and tried to prevent him from broadcasting any footage showing their faces or voices.

The whole group, who were waiting to play after Dr K, had voluntarily interacted with Dr K in a friendly way just 10 minutes earlier. But as he sat up from the piano, inviting them for a jam, one of the party, Ms Liu asked him not to show their faces in his livestream. “We are filming for Chinese TV […] You’re not allowed [to film us at the piano] because we are for Chinese TV. This is non-disclosable.” At one point, the pianist responded: “We’re in a free country, mate. We’re not in Communist China now, you know.” In response, Mr Leng, another of the group, cried racism, claims since echoed online by Ms Liu.

After the clip went viral, an interview with Piers Morgan followed, as did tabloid headlines, memes and remixes. But why such excitement? Weren’t these merely normal British-Chinese people driven by a concern for their personal privacy? Or was something more sinister going on?

To answer this question, we must to turn to Ms Adelina Zhang (张宁), Dr K’s third interlocutor and supposed hand-touching victim. A decade ago, Zhang surfaced at the coalface of the American branch of China Daily, a regime mouthpiece, writing a range of generally anodyne English-language articles, her only sensitive piece being an investigation of a religious cult banned in China. By 2016, Zhang was in the UK. That year, she triumphed at the “First British Chinese Supermodel Contest”, winning with it the opportunity to work with a company that produces shows for Chinese TV. (By the way, all Chinese TV is controlled by the CCP’s propaganda system, including whatever station the St Pancras crew were working for.)

Zhang has since built a career as a presenter of events associated one way or another with the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and its friends. The UFWD has bestowed upon itself responsibility for what it terms “qiaowu” 侨务, or “Overseas Chinese affairs”, meaning for Zhang’s purposes engagement with the Chinese immigrant community in Britain, which includes the likes of Leng and Liu.

UFWD guidance that I’ve been studying states that “Overseas Chinese” are the “sons and daughters of China connected by blood” and that their goal is “national reunification and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. This is of course nonsense. It is the CCP that wants to “reunify China”. (For “reunify China”, read annex Taiwan, gain control of some Malaysian, Philippines, Vietnamese and Japanese waters, plus hopefully various bits of India and Bhutan too.) The claim that the “Overseas Chinese” share this goal is an attempt to conjure a “broad United Front” in support of the CCP. The CCP thus claims to be speaking on behalf of all “Overseas Chinese”, asserting the right to monitor and guide these people, enticing collaboration and intimidating sources of opposition — all in the service of “national reunification and the great rejuvenation”.

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Happy-clappy galas and functions of the kind overseen by reliable hosts such as Adelina Zhang serve various functions. They are a great setting for propaganda. Attracting hangers-on from British commerce, academia and politics also make them a staple source of information and connections for the UFWD and a cosy ecosystem for hard-core spies in the employ of China’s intelligence agencies.

Testimony to Zhang’s personal sociability is provided by a healthy crop of political selfies, including with former Prime Minister Theresa May, former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, former Asia minister Mark Field, and serving Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Here is an account of Zhang’s work offered last year by a magazine run by the UFWD:

“She has hosted numerous international events and interviewed various business leaders. She has thrice hosted a ‘Spring Festival Gala’ organized by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council [the Office is an alter ego for the UFWD under the characteristically Communist ‘two names, one organisation’ system], served as a bilingual host at the Chinese New Year dinner in the UK House of Lords twice, hosted the London Trafalgar Square Spring Festival gala four times, representing Asian women on the international stage, and hosted what BBC called the world’s largest Spring Festival event outside China, attracting up to 700,000 live viewers annually.”

What of Mr Leng and Ms Liu? Neither has enjoyed a career comparably close to the CCP. Leng’s LinkedIn initially identified him as a consultant for the Financial Times, but the paper has since clarified that it contracted him for just two days once. He used to work at a Confucius Institute and now runs gym classes. Liu, who has tried to capitalise on CCP jingoism online since the incident, runs a company placing Chinese grads in internships and jobs.

The three advanced upon Dr K in reverse order of seniority, first Liu, then Leng, then Zhang. The most intriguing aspect of the incident, though, is the presence in the background of another woman, perhaps in charge. In X posts published afterwards, Liu herself claimed that this was Christine Lee, who MI5 alleged to be a UFWD agent in 2022. Liu appeared to write:  “We were filming for Chinese TV, nothing to do with CCP, just a Chinese New Year Video to celebrate a Chinese new year from important figures in the Chinese community in the UK. […] Christine Lee was in the back with my boyfriend, but she was just accompanying.”

Liu then deleted the tweets and then her account was suspended. It is not known why. On top of that, the woman identified as Lee does not actually look like Lee.

It is not easy to see the full picture, but viral events like this act almost as a primer for those unfamiliar with the CCP’s influence efforts abroad: every aspect of the incident reflects some classic phenomenon. Perhaps more importantly, they are also an introduction to the resistance against CCP influence efforts among an emerging coalition of emigres: Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hongkongers, Christians, democratic activists, persecuted artists and lawyers. It is sometimes called a “united front against the united front”. This resistance is carried on above all by those that the CCP desperately wishes were loyal “Overseas Chinese” who support “reunification and rejuvenation”.

The aftermath of “Pianogate” abounds with examples. Take that of British Hong Konger, Jazzua Leung, who went to play his home city’s anthem (banned by the CCP) on the by-then infamous piano. After uploading a video of his performance, Leung’s YouTube account was suspended because of spam complaints by CCP trolls.

Or take the example of any member of the crowd of ethnically Chinese Dr K supporters who flocked to see the pianist on his return to St Pancras. One was my friend Lyndon Lee, a Christian refugee, journalist and human rights lawyer. Or there is Namewee, the Taiwanese musician known for satirising Xi’s CCP, who is now plotting a musical collaboration with Dr K, as well as the army of “Overseas Chinese” amateur sleuths from around the world who endeavoured to dissect every aspect of “Pianogate”.

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Look around the world and you will see countless examples of a twilight conflict pitting this resistance against the CCP’s United Front and its pets. Last year, Canada endured an astonishing CCP infiltration scandal that saw the resignation of a serving MP accused of covertly working with the CCP, an attack directed by Prime Minister Trudeau at Canadian intelligence agents leaking info to the media, and revelations of a $1 million plot to influence Trudeau himself. Then and since — a foreign interference inquiry has only just begun in the country — grassroots campaigners such as Natalie Hui and Mehmet Tohti, but also leading politicians such as Michael Chong, have been instrumental in de-stigmatising the conversation around CCP interference and demanding answers about the phenomenon from Trudeau’s government.

The UFWD is not particularly secretive about its intent to interfere in democratic processes: documents I have seen note the growing number of ethnic Chinese running for election in Canada and elsewhere and states a desire to mould them into “a new force in the reunification of the motherland and the rejuvenation of China”.

Ethnonationalist rhetoric such as this has led to radicalisation. This was evident in California last November, when Xi Jinping’s visit prompted both the United Front and its pets and the anti-CCP resistance to take to the streets. This led to brawls between Tibetan-American teenagers, refugees from Hong Kong and dissidents living in the US on the one hand, and middle-aged, red-armbanded Chinese men on the other. The previous year, the state witnessed a mass shooting of Taiwanese-American Christians by a radical opponent of Taiwan independence.

The CCP has long spoken of “Five Poisons”: those in favour of Taiwanese independence, those in favour of Uyghur independence, those in favour of Tibetan independence, practitioners of Falun Gong, and Chinese democrats. Hong Kong independence advocates have been informally added to the list and cast as “parasites” and “roaches” to be “eradicated”. Xi himself, in 2019, warned that anyone who tries to undermine China’s unification will end up with “bodies pulverised and bones crushed.”

This may be Xi’s dream, but the ragtag anti-CCP resistance is his nightmare — and, as Pianogate revealed, it’s not going anywhere.  What’s needed, however, is more awareness of their struggle. It is too significant to be relegated to social-media discourse. Far from being solely a threat to Chinese emigres, the CCP’s “war by other means” is an attack on democracy itself.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

That China’s agents would dare to infiltrate the heart of the British government has been widely portrayed as an unprecedented development. “This is a major escalation by China,” one anonymous senior Whitehall source told The Times, which broke the news, adding that: “We have never seen anything like this before.” It is hard to know whether such sentiments are genuine or exaggerated for effect. Either way, they seem rather overwrought.

China has been engaged in extensive espionage operations in Britain, and around the world, for decades. As a 2021 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee stated accurately: “China almost certainly maintains the largest state intelligence apparatus in the world.” Moreover, as the report also noted, China employs a “whole-of-state” approach to espionage, co-opting a range of state and non-state actors, as well as ordinary citizens at home and abroad, to help carry out this work. Chinese students studying abroad, for example, may sometimes be pressured by the government into reporting information back to Beijing — though far more often about the activities of their fellow ethnic Chinese students than state secrets.

It is true that, in recent years, a rising China has escalated its overseas intelligence operations. Since he came to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made what he calls “comprehensive national security” the central priority for China’s party-state. He has handed China’s premier foreign intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), along with its military equivalents in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), greater authority and more resources both old and new (such as cyber) to more assertively collect intelligence, protect Chinese interests and project Chinese influence worldwide. The result has been the uncovering of a litany of hacks, thefts and scandals. Of these, the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States in February may have been the most high-profile, but was among the least successful and consequential (as compared with, say, MSS’s massive 2015 breach of US government security clearance records).

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But this is simply what nation-states, and especially the world’s major powers, do. Though perhaps distasteful, it should hardly be a shock. In fact, Britain should be particularly familiar with the business, given its history as an epicentre of the Cold War spy game. Those who walk the corridors of power in Westminster and think the present situation is unprecedented had best read up on the Cambridge Five.

Of course, Britain and its allies in the Western world are also spying on China — as we taxpaying citizens might reasonably hope they would be, if China really is the security “challenge” our governments say it is. In July, CIA Director Bill Burns did not shy away from saying publicly that the agency had “made progress” in rebuilding and expanding its spy network in China, years after Chinese counter-intelligence managed to identify and kill nearly all of the CIA’s agents operating in the country, following a 2010 intelligence breach (potentially the work of either a mole or cracked encryption).

There is some evidence that our spies have been wildly successful of late — at living rent-free in Xi’s head, anyway. Because whatever the furore in London, it pales in comparison with the escalating level of paranoia about hidden hands and foreign forces that has emerged in Beijing in recent years. Not only is China in the middle of a sweeping ongoing counter-espionage campaign — with the MSS currently calling on the public to engage in a “whole of society mobilisation” to hunt down spies and traitors, and triumphantly highlighting arrests on its new social media account — but more serious, if mysterious, goings-on higher up hint that Xi’s concerns about the loyalty of his people could be playing havoc within the Chinese system.

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The breaking news on Thursday night was that China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, had been arrested and placed under investigation. The source for this information was, of course, US intelligence. But the fact had already been rumoured in China, as he had not been seen in public in weeks. Li’s fate seems linked to that of two top generals of the PLA Rocket Force (which oversees China’s nuclear weapons) who were hauled away a few months ago. The Force’s deputy commander, meanwhile, allegedly committed suicide. China’s short-lived foreign minister, Qin Gang, also suddenly disappeared and was replaced without explanation this summer.

There is no evidence, to be clear, that any of these officials were engaged in or suspected of espionage. The more likely explanation is old-fashioned corruption. The persistent rumour in China is that the PLA Rocket Force generals had taken money Xi handed them to expand China’s nuclear arsenal and pilfered it instead. Li, who previously ran the PLA’s equipment procurement department, may have been involved. But it seems plausible that the current atmosphere of extreme suspicion regarding foreign infiltration and subversion contributed to these officials’ exposure and removal, with Xi now no longer trusting the reliability of anyone, especially in his national security apparatus. Corruption itself can, after all, open the door to foreign intelligence services willing to wield blackmail or simply offer additional cash.

This distrust is particularly clear in Qin’s case. The ex-foreign minister disappeared after a Phoenix TV reporter strongly hinted that he’d had an extramarital affair (and fathered a secret child) with her while they were both previously stationed in Washington, DC. Since many Chinese officials have mistresses without facing any repercussions, and because Qin was previously considered personally favoured by Xi, some suspect that it was the fact that he’d engaged in his covert indiscretions only a few miles from Langley that was of greater concern. Naturally, the online rumour in China is that the TV reporter, Fu Xiaotian (who has also disappeared), was in fact herself an MSS agent deployed to Washington undercover.

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Whatever the truth of these specific salacious cases, it is absolutely clear that Xi is quite convinced that the West and its agents are hell-bent on infiltrating China and subverting Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. Because Western countries “have always regarded China’s development and growth as a threat to Western values and institutions”, he thundered at an assembly of top party leaders in 2016, these countries “have not for a moment ceased their ideological infiltration of China”.

In this, he was merely echoing a long series of similar declarations, as in 2013, when he warned that said “hostile forces” were “doing their utmost to propagate so-called ‘universal values’” with an aim to “vie with us [on] the battlefields of people’s hearts”, split up China “overtly and covertly”, and ultimately “overthrow our socialist system”. For Xi, China is engaged in an “extraordinarily fierce” global ideological struggle with Western liberalism that, “although invisible, [is] a matter of life and death”.

Western leaders don’t necessarily disagree. President Joe Biden regularly describes the United States as engaged in a global “battle between democracy and autocracy”. Former President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, went so far as to insist while in office that the United States must “engage and empower the Chinese people” to enact regime change, because, he asserted, “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us”. British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, for his part, this week vowed not only to improve security but to “defend our democracy” — implying that undermining it must be Beijing’s actual target, rather than mundane intelligence gathering.

Both China and the West, therefore, not only suspect infiltration by the agents of their foreign competitors, but demonstrably view this as part of a much wider, more threatening, and more enduring struggle between rival systems. The hard truth, then, is that, in a very real sense, we’ve all been thrust back into an era much akin to the Cold War, when constant spying and attempted subversion were simply geopolitical facts of life. It may be best for leaders in Westminster, and indeed in capitals around the world, to come to terms with this not-so-unprecedented reality, and to move forward with open eyes: prepared, serious, and without naivety about what’s happening — but also without any undue shock and outrage. Surely the nation of James Bond, at least, can manage to carry on with good cheer.

On one occasion, I was part of a picket line and was kicked on the shin by a police officer, who I suppose was only doing his job. A few days later, being a firm believer in preaching to the unconverted, I gave a talk on socialism to the sixth form at Eton, and entered the classroom limping. I told the boys that I had been kicked on a picket line by a copper and they laughed politely, assuming that I was joking. Presumably they believed neither that the police could be violent nor that Oxford dons could be picketers. By this point, the clickings had begun to sound like a pair of mad castanets.

I took to chatting to the silent listener at the other end of the line, asking whether it was true that spies were trained to kill with a matchbox and why they had allowed MI5 to be run for some years by a Soviet agent. Was this really the way to protect us from socialist slavery?

These one-sided conversations were rather like prayer. They were addressed to an immensely powerful, almost omniscient being who had the power to inflict torture on you, but also who may or may not have existed and whose reality one had to take on faith. It is said that one such professional eavesdropper resigned from the service in protest at being required to spend his days listening to the phone conversations between a well-known British Leftist and his seven-year-old daughter. The Leftist in question also had regular political discussions over the phone with a friend throughout the Seventies; a few years later, since neither of them could remember what they had said, they considered asking M15 for transcripts.

Finally, I got to meet a couple of spooks face to face, though probably not those who were bugging my phone. Two men claiming to be journalists turned up at my door and began to quiz me about a Left-wing group of which I was then a member. When I made to shut the door on the pair, one of them dangled before my eyes a highly confidential document I had written for the group and foolishly entrusted to the post.

One of these men might well have been a journalist, but the other almost certainly wasn’t. Burly and slow of speech, he looked more like a detective, and seemed remarkably well-informed about the history of Marxism. He was particularly interested in discovering the exact doctrinal differences between my group and a rival outfit on a highly technical issue in Marxist economics, and before long the two of us had launched into a deep scholarly discussion of these matters, full of erudite allusions and elaborate digressions, while the “real journalist” stared miserably at his notebook and waited for it to stop.

When I congratulated the disguised cop, a touch sarcastically, on his impressive knowledge of these issues, he muttered that he had been studying them for 20 years. It was poignant to imagine him joining the police as a young man eager to chase criminals through docklands and council estates and instead being given a pile of volumes by Lenin and Trotsky and told to work his way through them. Maybe that’s what took him 20 years. But he had clearly developed some zest for the subject, and after a while I began to wonder whether he might not make a suitable recruit to our group. Should I ask him to call back by himself sometime later? There would be dangers of course in recruiting a police officer, but not because he would act as an infiltrator and report everything back to his masters. After all, we had an infiltrator already, who was faithfully reporting everything the group said or did to the authorities.

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It was proving impossible, however, to establish who this fifth columnist was. There would be private conversations between three or four senior members of the organisation, all of whom would probably have sacrificed their lives to the cause, and who were already in the process of sacrificing their partners, children, finances, leisure time and sanity to it. Yet whatever had been said among them still managed to reach the ears of the police. In the end, the villain turned out to be a young man who was unrivalled for his devotion to the socialist cause but also unrivalled for the fact that he had a criminal record as a paedophile and was being blackmailed over it by the police.

While I was dealing with the phone-tapping, I was also receiving the kind of letters which most people in the public eye are likely to attract. In fact, I received one only the other day, from someone claiming to know that I was an undercover Colonel in the Israeli Defence Force, and that he would reveal this secret to the world unless I placed a rather large amount of money in his bank account. Another correspondent sent me a letter to be passed on to my relatives to let them know that I had been killed in a camp for political prisoners in Columbia. It isn’t clear how the writer expected me to forward this news to my family from six feet under the soil. He added in a rather nonchalant postscript that his girlfriend had been killed in the camp as well.

Other letters continue to arrive from people claiming to be distant relatives or even illegitimate children of mine, all of them sadly reporting that they are in financial distress. In fact, the slightest association with me seems to spell disaster for people’s material well-being. Perhaps on account of some family curse, my second and third cousins are afflicted without exception with dire poverty, while alleged sons and daughters are prevented from working by incurable medical conditions. A benign Nature, however, has so ordered human affairs that people who write this stuff almost all have the same kind of handwriting — huge, erratic, flamboyant — so that you are braced for what lies within by the address on the envelope.

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Since my days of political activism now lie mostly behind me, my phone has resumed its normal behaviour — or so I thought. About a year ago, however, I rang a friend in Zurich only for her to hear the whole conversation played back as she was putting down the phone. This, I imagine, is more cock-up than conspiracy; someone had forgotten to switch something off. Or there was simply some kind of glitch, as the new head of my old Oxford college suggested to me. The fact that he was previously the director of GCHQ doesn’t inspire me with absolute faith in this hypothesis.

My tutor at Cambridge was a recruiter for this underworld. From time to time, some third-year undergraduate notable for combining high intelligence with athletic prowess, a rare enough synthesis, would disappear into what was euphemistically called the Foreign Office, where he was no doubt trained in how to kill people with a matchbox. My tutor never tried to recruit me, given that he was aware of my politics, but he did have a go at my room-mate, who was both clever and sturdy. The conversation went like this:

Tutor: What are you thinking of doing after Cambridge?
Room-mate: I really don’t know, sir.
Tutor: Have you considered espionage?
Room-mate (chucking at what he took to be a joke): I suppose that might be a bit dangerous.
Tutor (unsmiling): Yes, it would.

Obituaries give shape to a death and hold it in context, allowing us to extract explanations and lessons. But Scappaticci died distant from his victims, accusers, collaborators, investigators — geographically and chronologically removed from Northern Ireland, the Troubles and his role in them. He died far out of context, which was perhaps fitting for a spy.

Scappaticci had made an art of elusiveness. I searched for him 18 years ago, when he became known by the code name given to him by Britain’s security services: Stakeknife. As their agent, he had risen within the IRA to head its own internal security unit, the Nutting Squad, famous for shooting its subjects in the back of the “nut”, or head. Scappaticci stood accused of killing and torturing many people while also, his handlers claimed, saving untold other lives. Sir John Wilsey, the top British general in Northern Ireland during much of the conflict, called Scappaticci the army’s “golden egg”.

Along the way I found others close to him. A bomb maker. An intelligence officer. In 2005, in Belfast, I met Denis Donaldson, a longtime IRA recruiter and then Sinn Féin party leader. He sat at his kitchen table next to his wife and smoked, often glancing towards a set of security monitors. Just outside the kitchen, a wrought-iron gate blocked access to stairs leading up to his home’s second floor. Donaldson was a careful man who had survived hunger strikes and imprisonment at Long Kesh and cross-border IRA missions. Even so, the Stakeknife revelations shook him. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “My God.”

In the meantime, Scappaticci — Scap, to his IRA friends — had disappeared from the landscape of County Antrim only to reportedly reappear, vaguely, somewhere in Italy. Then back in Northern Ireland, somehow. Then maybe a coastal village in Scotland. In retrospect, he had better instincts for survival than some of his cohort; early one morning, I received a call from a source who said: “Yer man Denis Donaldson has just been expelled from Sinn Féin, about three minutes ago — for being a British spy.” A few months later, my source called again, to say Donaldson had been found in County Donegal, in a remote cottage without electricity or running water. He’d been shot to death. “Missing a hand,” he said.

So, when I heard Stakeknife had died on Tuesday, I wondered at first who had finally found him. It seems time itself had.

Scappaticci grew up in Belfast’s Markets area in the Fifties, the son of an Italian immigrant who sold ice cream from a van. He had the funny name, with its plosive foreign consonants, but he lived like any other Belfast boy — playing football for fun, then laying bricks for money — until the Troubles began. In 1971, police picked him up for rioting and interned him at Long Kesh alongside Gerry Adams, the future Sinn Féin president; Scappaticci became his bodyguard. The short, broad-chested young man was, like all of Northern Ireland, reborn as something new.

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The IRA was hard on its foot soldiers and, the story goes, in 1978 one of Scappaticci’s senior officers beat him as punishment for some organisational infraction. Afterwards, outraged, he marched into a British army office and offered his services as a spy. The impulse was small but pivotal for the entire conflict; with the help of his handlers, Scappaticci climbed into the untouchable role of the IRA’s head spy-hunter. From that vantage he interrogated and allegedly killed informers or “touts”, some of whom were his own unwitting British security counterparts. Investigators say he is “linked” to at least 18 deaths, and may have played a role in many more.

That violence — that intensity of violence, at least — came to an end 25 years ago this week, with the Good Friday Agreement. The peace has held, defying gravity all these years. The “peace walls” still divide Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and social housing is still almost entirely segregated, but the churn of blood and flesh has stopped.

The price is weak government. The Good Friday Agreement is a power-sharing arrangement with parity and fragility built in; if either side walks away, the government falls apart. That has happened half a dozen times since the Agreement began, and it’s happening now. Today, people in Northern Ireland can expect a handful of the barest public services, but there’s no leadership in power, no direction. The Northern Irish are, in many ways, adrift.

A generation of people have grown up under the Good Friday Agreement, knowing only peace. Some of them — a frustrated splinter — feel a nostalgia for a conflict they can’t remember. So they romanticise past violence. Now, on the Republican side, the New IRA gathers young people to itself, and lashes out in old ways. In February, its gunmen attempted to kill policeman John Caldwell in Omagh, shooting him multiple times as he finished coaching a youth football practice, scattering children and leaving Caldwell almost dead. In March, MI5 raised the threat of terrorism from “substantial” to “severe”, indicating an attack is highly likely. And this week police foiled a New IRA bomb plot in Derry, set to coincide with Joe Biden’s brief visit.

There is frustration on the opposite side, too. The feeling of adriftness has deepened in recent years as Brexit has forced the government to draw a customs border on one side or the other of Northern Ireland, implicitly asking whether it is more Irish or British. The Sunak administration has placed the border in the Irish Sea and Westminster has assented, alienating Unionists on the outlying side of that border. They view it as a government capitulation to the threat of Republican violence.

Most young people, though, simply want something resembling the life Freddie Scappaticci knew before the Troubles began: playing sports, finding productive work. They go to concerts, buy homes, start families. And they yearn for something they have never known: a functioning government. The power-sharing structure of the Good Friday Agreement dictates, absurdly, that votes from third-party representation in the Northern Ireland Assembly don’t count. Despite this, the third-largest, fastest-growing party now is the centrist Alliance Party. The Protestant and Catholic wings have shrunk so that neither holds a majority, and it’s not difficult to imagine a day when a plurality of Northern Irish voices go unheard, while outnumbered partisans bicker over control.

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The peace exacts one other price, in the form of accountability. Various inquiries and reports have investigated the worst atrocities of the Troubles, and one, Operation Kenova, is dedicated entirely to the work of Stakeknife. It has employed 50 investigators and cost more than £30 million, but has not yet issued its report. On the news of Scappaticci’s death, Kenova’s head investigator, Jon Boutcher, told the BBC that “old age may catch up with those affected, be they perpetrators, witnesses, victims, family members or those who simply lived through those times, before matters are concluded”.

That’s more revealing than intended. As we search for the meaning in Scappaticci’s death, it seems he has made one last escape. It may upset us that he and his controllers have eluded justice, but there lies the truth of Northern Ireland’s future. Most of us who did not grow up within the Troubles remain unable to grasp the fullness of the conflict. It’s too complex. It unfurls and loops back to touch itself, an endless fractal of loyalties and recriminations: thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of lives destroyed, and countless ugly street encounters and dinner-table spats.

Instead, this one death — this informer, this spy — seems more graspable. So we reach for explanation, for understanding, for warning. But the lessons of Freddie Scappaticci’s death, even placed in its context, are ultimately as unsearchable as the man himself. Scappaticci, for his part, denied ever spying in the first place. His death offers no solutions to or illumination of the chaos in which he lived and acted, and no hope for Northern Ireland. Those answers, like Stakeknife, remain elusive.

Over two decades later, the flaws in Holbrooke’s grandiose plan for a global propaganda war directed from Washington are glaringly obvious. At the heart of Holbrooke’s conception of what became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the idea that the crucial post-9/11 battles would be won or lost not in physical locations in Afghanistan and Iraq but rather inside the heads of ordinary Muslims. The truth was that bin Laden and his terrorists understood their target audience far better than the White House, the CIA and the FBI ever could or did. Yet bizarrely, the dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home.

The idea of “information warfare” was born in the Seventies, when Pentagon war colleges began to take notice of the role played by so-called information operations in Soviet military planning, particularly in promoting third-world insurgencies. In 1991, American military planners included a heavy “information operations” (IO) component in the first Gulf War, which, despite featuring large set-piece tank battles in the desert, was widely labelled “the first information war”. In American military doctrine, IO was defined as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. It was these capabilities, merged with high-flown Cold War rhetoric about freedom and democracy, that Holbrooke, President George W. Bush and others imagined would ultimately win the war against Al Qaeda.

America’s withdrawal of its military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan under Barack Obama left many with a less optimistic view of US IO capabilities. “Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favour of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups,” wrote Amy Zalman, an expert who frequently consulted for the Pentagon. “When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication.”

Yet the failure of the American war in Iraq, launched 20 years ago this month, and the seeming futility of IO efforts when confronted with the ungovernable spaces opened up by the internet and mobile phones, only seemed to strengthen the Pentagon’s underlying belief in the fusion of information operations (IO) and counter-terror (CT) tactics as the future of modern warfare. “In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield,” summarised an article in The Nato Review in May 2021. “The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions.”

A key turning point in transforming these tactics from a war-fighting technique to a new theory of Western governance happened quietly a decade ago, when large-scale spying on US citizens by the NSA was licensed by the Obama White House. Documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden alerted the public to a series of domestic spying programmes, as well as the fact that the NSA was routinely mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans without judicial review. While the NSA had previously been required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a US citizen, a change in policy allowed intelligence services to continue tracing the online contacts of Americans so long as there was a “foreign intelligence” purpose to justify the snooping.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, hints of further centralised US government surveillance activities using private technology companies began to emerge. The Obama administration routinely spied on reporters by monitoring their private telephone records and using that information to issue subpoenas to force them to reveal their sources. In 2014, Twitter filed a suit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI, stating that it had been served FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants to collect the electronic communications of its users. Some of these efforts were apparently focused on the Obama administration’s attempts to sell the Iran Deal, the centrepiece of his second term.

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Twitter’s lawsuit, which asked the court for permission to release a public report containing the precise number of warrants it had been served, was filed by Perkins Coie, the prominent Democratic Party-aligned DC law firm. The firm’s lead attorney in the case was a former DOJ cybersecurity expert named Michael Sussmann. Then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was friends with Sussman, refused Twitter’s request. Crucially, the entire cast of characters involved — including Obama, Twitter, the FBI, Perkins Coie, James Baker and Michael Sussman — would soon play important roles in a startling expansion of the US government’s nascent efforts to wage information warfare against its own citizens.

The device by which this transformation was effectuated was the so-called Russiagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Donald Trump had been handed the White House by agents of Vladimir Putin. Even if the evidence for Russiagate was often only legible to true believers on social media, who often sounded like characters in a Philip K. Dick novel, its function in Washington was entirely practical. By identifying Trump as an extension of Putin, the Russiagate theory neatly transformed a foreign threat into a domestic one — thereby legitimising all-out warfare by the Washington establishment against a President that many believed to be a dangerous lunatic.

Russiagate began when Perkins Coie, then employed by Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, paid a company called Fusion GPS, run by an ex-journalist named Glenn Simpson, to produce a dossier of dubious reports under the by-line of a British ex-spy named Christopher Steele. Before leaving office, Obama ordered his spy chief John Brennan to draft an official assessment claiming that the Steele dossier was real — and that Putin had helped put Trump in the White House. Obama then signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, targeting Putin, and by extension Trump.

If the Global War on Terror was founded on a profound misapprehension of America’s ability to control how other people interpret reality, Obama’s war on foreign propaganda and disinformation was founded on an outright lie that was kept alive for years by a pliant media addicted to taking handouts from nameless operatives who waged information warfare against their political enemies — and a majority of the country. “The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter,” a typical 2018 feature in The New York Times falsely asserted. The extent of the “massive fraud” that had occurred on social media platforms suggested a “plausible case that Mr Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr Trump”. Yet according to exhaustive investigations by Robert Mueller and the US Department of Justice, the only fraud that occurred was the promotion by every normative authority and publication in the county of a hallucinatory conspiracy theory that allowed the DC establishment to bring the GWOT back home and use it an instrument to control the American public.

In the autumn of 2017, the FBI increased its leverage over the content of social media by establishing the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations” through “strategic engagement with US technology companies”. The Department of Homeland Security set up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to serve a similar purpose. Together, these and similar nodes in other agencies helped knit together US intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organisations into a single warfare behemoth whose job it was to “secure” the US information environment. And since “Russia” equalled Trump, stopping “Russian disinformation” meant censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the bureaucratic takeover of domestic communications infrastructure.

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CISA’s censorship of Twitter, which is now a matter of public record, provides one example of how the new public-private information warfare partnerships worked. One such partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a DC-based company made up of former national security officials and employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to the recent Twitter files dump, CISA regularly censored information by filing requests with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies.

By this point, Twitter had given up suing the US government. In fact, James Baker, the former FBI chief counsel who had refused to allow Twitter to spill the beans on the US government’s use of its platform, and then authorised the FISA warrant that laid the basis for Russiagate, was now Twitter’s own in-house lawyer — one of at least a dozen former FBI and intelligence community operatives working to actively promote censorship policies based on a conspiracy theory that the platform’s own internal metrics showed was a lie.

In pressuring technology companies to do their bidding, the US security bureaucracy and its external allies in the Democratic Party and anti-Trump circles utilised two key levers of power. The first was the threat to regulate digital monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second was to label the technology companies that had supposedly been leveraged by Putin as national security threats. Both these tactics relied on the wording of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law originally intended to punish the distribution of child pornography, which exempted Google and Facebook from libel and other claims for which publishers of newspapers, magazines and other editorial products remained liable — on the theory that tech platforms were not publishers.

Monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook were now caught in a bind. Facing potentially ruinous regulation, and at risk of being labelled national security threats, the platforms were prohibited from engaging in editorial decision-making that would turn their shiny liability-free monopolies into ordinary publishing pumpkins under the terms of Section 230 of the CDA. What the technology companies needed, in other words, was an external authority that would make editorial decisions for them, on a basis that would be acceptable to Democrats and national security bureaucrats.

Enter the fact-checkers. As a profession, fact-checking was once a minor ornament of the grand edifice of mid-20th-century American journalism. As that edifice collapsed in the face of competition from internet platforms, which hoovered up all their advertising dollars, fact-checkers began to replace actual journalists. Between 1990 and 2017, US newspapers lost more than a quarter of a million jobs, a decline of more than half. Meanwhile, between 2014 and June 2021, the number of fact-checking organisations in the US — employing mostly freelance workers with no particular qualifications or prior experience — rose from 44 to 341, an increase of nearly 800%, the vast bulk of that rise having been funded in order to support the false assertion that “foreign disinformation” had swung the 2016 election in favour of Trump.

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On November 17, 2016, an organisation called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company’s acceptance of $150,000 in Russian-linked ads supposedly resulted in Trump’s victory. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN suggested on behalf of the 20 fact-checking organisations belonging to its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in fact-checking all claims made on the world’s largest social media platform.

The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a media non-profit. Initial funders of the IFCN included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The partisan nature of “fact-checking” activity provided by the IFCN and its partners and similar agglomerations was not hard to spot: analysis from 2018 of fact-checks by the Associated Press found that 94% were made on Republican and conservative statements. The new “fact-checking” system allowed the major internet platforms to keep their monopolies, at the price of binding them to the Democratic Party and the DC bureaucracy.

The pandemic only tightened the elite nexus between bureaucrats, the Democratic Party, and technology companies in the attempt to make information safe for Americans. In February 2020, for example, The Washington Post denounced Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 had escaped from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. In May 2020, the Post’s head “fact-checker”, Glenn Kessler, a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a laboratory. The head of the FBI, Cristopher Wray, has now acknowledged that scenario as likely. Heretical information on the failure of lockdowns in halting transmission of Covid and the regressive inefficiency of masking children in schools was treated the same way, skewing public opinion in favour of bureaucratically convenient falsehoods and radically decreasing public trust in doctors and public-health authorities.

In October of 2020, the new domestic information security complex showed its overt partisan political purpose by massively censoring news reports about the contents of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden while his father was running for the presidency. In addition to lurid footage of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with prostitutes, the hard drive, which had turned up in a Delaware repair shop, contained politically-damning information about business dealings between the Biden family, including Joe Biden, and companies with ties to the governments and spy services of China and Ukraine. It was, in other words, a huge political story of the type that decides elections — except very few Americans saw it in time. When they did see it, they were told that the story was a fake, the likely product of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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At Facebook, Andy Stone, once the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee press secretary, explained that the reduction of Facebook’s “distribution” of the article would go into place while it was looked over by Facebook’s “third party fact checking partners”. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, and his top attorney, Vijaya Gadde, kept the article from being shared on their website on the grounds that the material potentially constituted an invasion of Hunter Biden’s privacy. Meanwhile, the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content.

The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election was the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was led by agent Elvis Chan and corresponded with Twitter and other tech companies to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering. Chan openly pushed the theory that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation operation” — a theory underwritten by an open letter signed by no fewer than 50 distinguished US intelligence officials. Yet former head of site security Yoel Roth, himself an impeccable leftist, claimed to have found little evidence of Russian activity on Twitter. According to Roth, the FBI primed him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian hacking operation. Needless to say, the FBI’s reports — and subsequent “disinformation” claims — were disinformation invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year and therefore knew the material on the Bidens to be authentic.

Donald Trump may indeed be a dangerous lunatic, or simply a crackpot — but the attempt to “secure” the US information environment from his supposedly malign influence has proven to be far more destructive than anything Trump actually did as President. As our brains were turned into battlefields by political operatives and government bureaucrats, using their power over private companies to manipulate and censor information in the service of what they regarded to be publicly beneficial falsehoods, it is hardly surprising that public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country. Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.

Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”. None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East. Twenty years later, it would appear that bin Laden’s paradoxical understanding of asymmetric warfare was right: the most powerful weapon against the West is the West.

The reason for China’s brazen balloon launch is simple. Since 1989, the Communist Party’s leaders have learned that Americans are very similar to the Xiongnu nomads the Chinese encountered 2,500 years ago. While formidable warriors, the Xiongnu were easily manipulated once their chiefs became addicted to Chinese silk robes in place of smelly furs, and to alcoholic beverages.

Each time the Party leadership does something outrageous — from the Tiananmen Square Massacre to the mass campaign to forcibly transform Uyghurs and extinguish Hong Kong’s liberties — US sanctions are loudly threatened or even imposed amid talk of decoupling once for all. Until, that is, key members of America’s ruling class emerge to explain the utter necessity of more trade and more financial cooperation, easily enlisting perennially needy political leaders, bankers and brokers, but also prestigious academic institutions whose leaders seem to view the FBI more negatively than China’s Guóānbù intelligence service.

They always have good arguments against making a fuss about Chinese misconduct. After Tiananmen, the secular religion of Free Trade was invoked to resume increasingly large investments in Chinese manufacturing, notwithstanding the catastrophic loss of manufacturing employment to Chinese imports. Free trade was supposed to generate increasing numbers of free traders in China, who would undermine, if not overtly resist, the Communist Party’s absurdly ill-fitting Maoist ideology. The same false promises — this time to resume investments in Xinjiang — are once again invoked in Germany and France, while prominent American CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, have resumed their pilgrimages to Beijing and Shenzhen. Woke capitalism, it seems, stops at the water’s edge, overlooking China’s persecutions of entire nations while furiously denouncing solitary incidents at home.

To explain away the latest aerostat outrage, China’s faithful defenders could start by pointing out that, while the minimum orbital altitude for satellites is 160 kilometres (99 miles) above sea level, there is no lower limit to the freedom of movement in space, nor an upward counterpart in sovereign territorial waters out to 12 nautical miles, or 24 with the “contiguous zone” for customs and police enforcement. True, most countries seem to claim unlimited altitude sovereignty. But enforcement is actually a requirement for such claims, and that necessitates territorial air defences that very few countries have, and which the US itself dismantled long ago, scrapping its squadrons of specialised interceptor fighters, countless radars for search and fire control, and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. This time, the offending aerostats were shot down by “air superiority” fighters designed to outfly other fighters.

China’s defenders could also point out that, as far back as 2006, Beijing publicly declared its intention to rely on ”stratospheric airships”, as well as satellites and reconnaissance aircraft. Or they could point out that spy balloons are a common feature in the West. The Franco-Italian Aerostar partnership, for instance, modestly describes itself as “a world leader in the design, manufacture, integration, and operation of stratospheric balloon platforms and airships” — neither of which are likely to be confined to national airspace. And how did the US respond to the 2006 Chinese announcement? With the US-China Agreement on Earth Observation System and Related Data Activities, amicably signed in November 2, 2010, as if Chinese intentions were actually friendly.

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Despite the events of the past week, the United States and its allies should not now divert military funds to build enormously costly national air defences specifically designed to detect and shoot down a handful of aerostats as soon as they enter their national airspace. Such defences are justified to defeat aerial attacks, not to see off a few balloons. Instead of guarding their territory, both the United States and its allies must deter intrusions by inducing fears of prompt and effective retaliation in Beijing — first and foremost by further restricting investments in China, as well as technology transfers. This will not be easy. As I write, Italy’s Leonardo aerospace company is still trying to sell airframe technology to the Chinese, while Germany’s Siemens, repository of much of the country’s high-tech material, eagerly invests in China with the help of successive Chancellors to defend it from criticisms.

In the US, meanwhile, the China lobby steps in with its long list of eminent advocates: from Henry Kissinger, who famously called for a US-China “G-2” condominium, to assorted Wall Street moguls led by Ray Dalio, founder of the gigantic Bridgewater investment house. As well as offering their own pearls of wisdom, they dispense ample funds to think tanks that disseminate their views, and obediently exclude dissenters. (According to Wikipedia, I am the inventor of “geo-economics”, but have never been asked to speak at Washington DC’s Geo-Economic Centre, funded by a prominent China investor.)

Of course, the China lobby does not actually defend the Communist Party’s regime. It merely deploys its influence against any serious retaliation for each particular outrage, from the Tiananmen massacre to last week’s balloons. Remarkably, this free-trade crusade is still vigorously advanced even after Xi Jinping’s recent announcement of his goal to build a “country that leads the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century”. Given this open pursuit of supremacy, what exactly is the justification for investing even a cent or centime in China?

For now, at least, some hope can be found in President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken’s refusal to revoke any of Trump’s unprecedented technology-transfer prohibitions against China, as leading figures in both Silicon Valley and Wall Street loudly demanded. Indeed, Biden even strengthened such measures. But the China lobby will no doubt keep trying to revert to its preferred policies, and Beijing’s balloons will no doubt still lurk on the horizon.

But not all its products are so benign. The firm also makes key parts for military drones, vehicles, and artillery; its website is illustrated with photos of RAF helicopters, Royal Navy destroyers and Army tanks. And it’s with these products in mind that the team from the China North Industries Corporation, a Chinese manufacturing giant usually known as Norinco, paid a visit in 2015.

The Norinco team, led by Wang Yulin, president of its Development Academy of Machinery and Equipment, and Xiaoqing Cheng, the general legal adviser to its Vehicle Research Unit, were evidently impressed. “They are a large industrial company with 300,000 employees that covers planes, trains and automobiles,” Charlie Bamber, G&W’s business development manager for Asia, later told the Shropshire Star. “There’s no limit to the opportunity.”

Among the possibilities was a “joint venture” — the building of a “mass production entity” that would use G&W’s technology in China. Such a factory, Bamber continued, “can’t be in Shropshire, but parts leading up to it can. It’s clearly an opportunity for the county”.

Yet a crucial detail was left out from his statement. Namely, that the Chinese characters that make up Norinco’s name in Mandarin — 中国兵器工业集团公司 — do not mean “China North Industries Corporation” in English, as the firm implies. What they really stand for is: “China Arms Industry Group Co. Ltd”.

Even so, G&W could not plead ignorance. It is well-reported that Norinco, owned by the Chinese state, is the biggest weapons manufacturer in China, producing tanks, grenade launchers, shells, rotary cannons, drones, missiles and strike aircraft. In 2003, George W. Bush sanctioned the company for selling ballistic missile technology to Iran. It has since been blacklisted in America because of its close relationship with the People’s Liberation Army, following executive orders issued by Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

One might think, then, that G&W would have something to say about its partner’s dubious reputation. Yet when I enquired about its Chinese business, which has grown significantly since 2015, it refused to answer any of my questions, beyond issuing a blanket statement insisting that it had done nothing wrong and always obtained UK government approval. On a brief phone call, Bamber suggested I was xenophobic for even questioning its relationship with Norinco. “I think you’re probably aligning yourself with many people who are extremely racist,” he said. “You’re fabricating a scenario which doesn’t actually exist.”

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In all fairness, G&W’s dealings with Norinco began in the so-called “Golden Age” of Anglo-Chinese relations under David Cameron and George Osborne, when far from being seen as a possible threat, China was promoted by the British government as a rich and generous benefactor.

Since then, however, the political atmosphere has soured dramatically. Hong Kong’s freedoms have been crushed, the Uyghurs have been subject to genocide and China has threatened to invade Taiwan. Fears over China’s acquisition of advanced Western technology have reached an all-time high, as MI5’s Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Chris Wray warned in their joint address in London last month. During their press conference, McCullum pointed out that China doesn’t even need to resort to “clandestine espionage methodology” to get its hands on the West’s technological secrets. British businesses and academic institutions are giving IP away in plain sight, under the guise of seemingly innocent commercial deals or academic partnerships.

In recent months, Britain’s politicians have also woken up to such dangers. The National Security Bill — currently going through parliament — would grant further powers to the British government to “combat state threats not just to national secrets but to your intellectual property, your commercial edge, your unique research”. Yet the proposed new law will not be retrospective: intellectual property that has already been shared cannot be taken back. This means the near-decade that G&W has spent working with Norinco is unlikely to come under scrutiny.

It is hard to say precisely when G&W first became involved with China, given its reluctance to talk about it. But it appears to have taken place in 2013, when a company called FLUID Transmission Technology became G&W’s Chinese agent, tasked with looking for business that might benefit from its intellectual property. FLUID doesn’t even try to hide its connection with the Chinese military. Its goal is to promote “military-civil fusion” (MCF), which the US State Department describes as an “aggressive, national strategy of the CCP” to help China develop “the most technologically advanced military in the world”, partly by “acquiring and diverting” cutting-edge technology from around the globe.

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The most sinister aspect of this MCF strategy is that China is seeking to “exploit the inherent ‘dual-use’ nature” of many civilian technologies that can also be used for defence purposes. In other words, it aims to use seemingly harmless Western technology to strengthen China’s military.

In 2018, FLUID met with the Communist Party leadership of the heavily industrial Minhang district of Shanghai, known to be dedicated to MCF. It was the start of a blossoming relationship. Later that year, Matthew and Edward Grainger, the brothers who run G&W, visited Norinco’s Beijing headquarters along with FLUID’s chief executive, Liu Guosheng.

The visit was a triumph for everyone involved. It paved the way for Factory 616 — a casting plant in the city of Datong — built using G&W’s technology by a firm called Shanxi Diesel, a subsidiary of Norinco. The plant is making parts for high-speed water-cooled diesel engines, which could be used in civilian or military vehicles. As G&W has itself pointed out, such technology is a perfect example of dual use.

G&W seemed determined to conquer the Chinese market. It went on to set up a version of its website in Mandarin. In 2020, however, the site abruptly disappeared — when the Huawei scandal hit Britain. It advertised one of G&W’s most innovative and desirable products: a cast made of Compact Graphite Iron, which set “new standards in terms of weight, size, reliability and most importantly, fuel consumption”. This too could have military applications for vehicles and aviation.

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Then, in November 2019, G&W’s top leadership visited Minghzi Technology, a casting manufacturer in Suzhou. There they signed an agreement, which Minghzi said was “the start of a comprehensive collaboration” — the goal being “to expand business in China and Europe… by tapping the unique strengths of each company”.

When I approached the firm, all it would do was issue a statement insisting everything was above-board: “Each G&W customer opportunity is reviewed for business and commercial fit, moral and ethical soundness, and against UK Government controls. All recommendations and decisions made by the ECJU and DIT are strictly complied with by G&W. In no circumstance is business undertaken in controlled geographic regions or market sectors without the full knowledge and approvals of UK Government. G&W regularly undertake strategic reviews of international operations, taking into account legal, moral, ethical, and geo-political situations.”

Despite their apparent confidence in the deal’s propriety, Matthew and Edward Grainger have refused to be interviewed. Bamber, too, avoided me after our first phone call. After accusing me of racism on the phone, he promised to answer my further questions via email, but never replied.

At some point, though, G&W may have to explain itself. Charlie Parton, a former Foreign Office China veteran and now a Royal United Services Institute fellow, said: “There needs to be a full investigation into what this firm is actually doing… It’s basic: you don’t help a political enemy acquire technology that might be used against you. If that’s what G&W has done, we need to know.”

And we need to know sooner rather than later. As its recent exercises just off the coast of Taiwan demonstrated, Beijing has no qualms with showing off its new weapons. For now, it is preoccupied with its battles in the East. Should its focus shift Westwards, Grainger and Worrall — not to say the UK government — may just find they’ve shot themselves in the foot.