What made the diplomat’s intervention unusual was his reaction. He “got really upset and aggressive with people on the call over it,” according to a current US official with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal deliberations. “He kind of does this thing where it’s an implied threat that certain people won’t be happy with this” decision — including “potentially his stepfather.”

The diplomat in question is David Milstein, a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Jerusalem. His famous stepfather is Mark Levin, the Fox News anchor who over the past year or so has emerged as Trump’s favorite TV pundit. Another senior Trump World figure confirmed the outlines of what transpired, including “the threats regarding [Milstein’s] stepdad,” adding that it is “very unusual to do what [he] was doing for Israel.” 

In recent weeks, Milstein has emerged as a lightning rod for critics of Team Trump’s policies on the Jewish state. Figures across the administration have also grown weary of his abrasive style and what they see as his cavalier attitude toward diplomatic security and the prerogatives of the US Intelligence Community and security apparatus. 

His contentious tenure is a register of the dramatic changes roiling US-Israel relations. The briefings and counter-briefings — for and against Milstein — reveal the strains running through the heart of an administration otherwise marked by remarkable outward cohesion (by Trump GOP standards).

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Milstein represents an older consensus that found few, if any, shades of difference between American and Israeli interests. That consensus is now coming under question, from the Left and the Right. Yet it still has the backing of one very important person, Donald J. Trump. And Milstein, his defenders contend, has passed the true test of a political appointee: serving his president loyally, at least by his own best lights.

To those defenders, Milstein has — unfairly — come to serve as a sort of stand-in for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump World critics blame for maneuvering the president into waging an unpopular and strategically exhausting war with Iran. Yet the president makes his own decisions at the end of the day, the defenders argue, regardless of the sort of language Milstein inserts into State Department memos or what his famous stepdad says on TV. 

As one former Foreign Service Officer told me, “Embassy communities can be incredibly unforgiving, especially toward a smart newcomer with strong beliefs. The largely anonymous effort to scapegoat David for the perceived failures of the bureaucracy is disturbing and absurd.”

Still, the missteps have been glaring. Take the dust-up over the proposed deal with Rafael. Several insiders characterized Milstein’s role as highly atypical. “Traditionally,” one former senior Senate foreign-policy aide told me, “diplomats representing the United States have focused on directing investments into American companies, not directing American taxpayer dollars into foreign companies.” 

The current Trump official, meanwhile, questioned the utility of greater integration with Israeli contractors. “The thing about these companies,” the official said, “is that they rely a tremendous amount on US contractors for research, production, capacity, etc. Their innovation is usually just tweaking and incrementally improving our stuff, and sometimes [that] actually turns out not to be as effective as our systems.”

Defenders counter that the Israelis are, in fact, highly effective at certain kinds of frontier weapons development and testing that can redound to the benefit of the US military. And there is no denying that anyone who takes unorthodox stances in diplomatic and intelligence circles is likely to be met with the sort of shunning and gossip Americans normally associate with high-school mean girls. Even granting all this, however, doesn’t resolve questions about the way Milstein has gone about promoting his positions — not least what critics describe as an easy resort to pulling personal rank, given his family connection to Fox News.

Critics also point to Milstein’s clashes with others in the State Department. Milstein, The New York Times recently reported, has sought to quash or soften internal State Department reports that took Israel to task over settler violence in the occupied West Bank, for example. 

Milstein has also butted heads with the Intelligence Community. The issues have included the IC’s assessment of the Iranian threat, as well as the goings-on in the West Bank. The biggest upset involved the July 2025 visit to the Jerusalem embassy by Jonathan Pollard, the former US naval intelligence officer imprisoned for spying for the Jewish state. “David was the primary driver of that,” said the current Trump official, who added that Milstein “hid [the Pollard visit] from the CIA’s station chief” in Jerusalem. The senior Trump World figure echoed this.

“It’s a big middle finger to them,” said the current Trump official, “because whatever you think of the CIA … these people devoted their lives to protecting and securing the United States, and they’re bringing in a guy that, in their mind, betrayed some of the most sacred oaths.” Another official, who has since left the administration, said, “Nobody was happy with that one.”

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Then there is the question of information and diplomatic security. As Politico reported last month, Milstein sent out an online wedding invitation — including an illustration of the Temple Mount with the Al-Aqsa Mosque seemingly removed — that solicited cash gifts in either “US dollars or Israeli shekels.” To be fair, monetary gifts are routine in Israeli weddings, and Milstein’s action looked worse in theory than it was in practice. In theory, Milstein was putting himself at risk of falling in thrall to foreign nationals who’d give him money. This, in a country that poses an elevated counterintelligence risk to US officials, according to multiple sources familiar with the IC’s current assessment. 

In practice, though, it’s hard to see a modest cash gift rendering Milstein more pro-Israel than he already is. The real problem, to his critics in Trump World, is double standards and the impression of impropriety. “The reaction has been,” the Trump official said, that “if this were any other government employee with a clearance who was soliciting money like this, they would have their clearance suspended. They would have likely been put on administrative leave.”

The State Department didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment. The department’s apparent reluctance to vigorously defend Milstein — including in response to earlier queries from the Times and Politico — is itself evidence that “even they’ve had enough,” as the current Trump official put it. Direct messages to Milstein likewise went unanswered. As did a request submitted to the CIA.

Still, Trump continues to stand by Milstein, and the latter can’t be said to have acted against the directives of either the commander-in-chief or his immediate boss, Huckabee. Fact is, the second Trump administration has been the most pro-Israel in US history. Milstein reflects the general policy thrust of the administration, for good or ill. The direction of travel will almost certainly change in the near future, however, regardless of who wins the Oval Office in 2028. The divisions laid bare by the Milstein controversies are thus only a preview of what’s to come.

On Wednesday, Andy Burnham finally acknowledged the Iran link, and the defense secretary, Wes Streeting, admitted that Britain faces state-backed threats to our military bases. On the same day, Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had told Britain there was going to be an attack; and on Thursday, Scotland Yard said a 27-year-old British-Iranian man had been arrested in Westminster on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts.

In short, the details of the Fairford incident remain murky. But the wider story, at least, is becoming clearer. This week I have spoken to current and former military personnel, Ministry of Defense civil servants, members of the intelligence community, and family members of soldiers, for whom these bases are home. What emerged was an account of new technologies and new social phenomena imperiling military bases. British territory as a whole, it seems, can no longer be thought of as wholly safe and friendly.

Of the 2,000-odd military bases in Britain, among the most significant are the far smaller number that host runways and aircraft. An even smaller portion of these, such as RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, both in Suffolk, as well as RAF Fairford, are used by the US Air Force. Fairford, like most runway-equipped RAF bases, has its origins in the Second World War, before being expanded in the Cold War. It is the only European airfield from which the USAF launches bombing sorties.

Even during the Cold War, the bases in Britain itself — those in Northern Ireland being a separate matter — faced few direct threats. As a result, they are far less secure than British bases abroad. Typically, they are guarded by a chain-link fence, a gatehouse, and a flimsy barrier. One army wife, who lives on a base, told me that damage to the perimeter fence has gone unrepaired for years. I was also told of procedural weaknesses as well as physical ones. It is widely-known that at some bases, staff do not check the ID of every person entering. 

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Those security weaknesses are becoming increasingly dangerous. Our adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran, conduct proxy and gray war against us, and have even recruited in-country agents via social-media platforms. On the one hand, these subcontractors might not have the competence of seasoned agents. On the other, they can offer our adversaries plausible deniability. And if they are caught, they will not be able to reveal much valuable information.

A recent example of this “Deliveroo terrorism” came via the Ukrainians whose arson attacks target a property and vehicle owned by Keir Starmer. These men were recruited via Telegram, and offered money for the task. There have also been instances of foreigners being seen around key military sites. Britain’s adversaries can call on organized crime networks of Islamists, Iranians or Albanians. “They can enact whatever form of mischief they want to create,” said George Simm, former Regimental Sergeant Major of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, calling it “terrorism by proxy”.

Worse, the recruitment efforts appear to have stepped up. Gwythian Prins, a geopolitics strategist and research professor emeritus at LSE, said that, since the beginning of the Iran War, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has switched to “swarm” tactics, meaning they are seeking to overwhelm our intelligence service by “recruiting useful idiots in the thousands”. “Can [the security services] monitor them? Not a hope.”

Many of these potential operatives have arrived via legal immigration, which has expanded in recent years to an unprecedented scale. Some of them have slipped in via Britain’s porous borders. Iran is among the countries believed to have sent agents or proxies via small boat. And if operatives arrive in boats which aren’t intercepted, or via light aircraft, they are able to bring with them equipment such as weapons or detonators. Simm warned that poorly guarded airfields are enabling adversaries to carry out smuggling operations “all the time — contraband, guns, people. I mean, the whole thing’s wide open”. This is a threat the state seems to be aware of, with Border Force issuing guidance in August encouraging people to report suspicious activity at private airfields. For its part, recent Royal United Services Institute report warned that “aviation misuse may extend beyond organized crime to wider national security”. 

Roy McComb, a former Detective Chief Superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland told me: “If you’re a hostile force, you find the weakest part of your enemy’s armor. There’s no doubt in my mind that the border is one of those vulnerabilities, and if you wanted to bring people in who were going to be involved in a hostile act, the easiest way [is to] bring them in, have them go dark for a period of time, have them meet up with some of their compadres, and then go to work.”

The task of the subcontractors is made easier by advances in drone technology. Thanks to the technological foment of the war in Ukraine, one can now legally purchase devices that can carry 40 kilograms, and be controlled via the internet from anywhere on Earth. Modern drones, I was told by Steve Tisseyre, a former police officer who specialized in counter-drone work and is now a director of an aerial defense firm, are “attractive to anyone wanting to carry out surveillance, cause disruption or get around traditional security measures”. They could also, as we have all seen in the Ukraine war, be used to directly attack vehicles and kill people. 

Only in February did the Ministry of Defense establish restricted airspace areas over 44 critical bases. Until those orders were in place, therefore, it was legal to fly a drone over those bases. Indeed, it remains legal to fly drones over many other military sites. The MoD told me that restrictions will be put in place over 160 further sites “in the autumn” — surely an unnecessary delay.

What form could an attack take? Roy McComb, a former Detective Chief Superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told me that a “capable opponent” might even attack a base with an improvised bomb, “whether it’s placed within the fence, driven inside the compound, brought in as a proxy, or launched as a mortar attack, I don’t think most of the bases in Great Britain are ready for that.” Other forms of attack, I was told during the course of my reporting, could come via drone, on foot, or through surface-to-air missile strikes against military aircraft during takeoff. 

As McComb added, Troubles-era attacks on police bases in Northern Ireland resulted in significant effort and expenditure being directed towards hardening those bases with enhanced physical security, patrols and other measures. “Whether we get to the point of having to do that in GB is the question.”

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Maximal physical security, however, is not necessarily optimal. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired very senior British army officer, told me that “there is a high degree of pragmatism necessary when one’s talking about protecting military bases, because the whole of the military could consume itself in marching up and down behind the wire.” 

What, then, does Fairford mean for the defense of this country? Prins described it as “a wake-up call… we have become lazy and lax. And we know that our exposure to infiltration through immigration is wide-open.” The situation is exacerbated, he said, by Israel’s decision, following Britain’s sanctioning of its West-Bank settler population, to withdraw its intelligence cooperation.

A spokesperson for the MoD told me that the Government maintains “robust and proportionate security measures across the Defense estate,” and takes action where necessary “in response to evolving threats.” The MoD , I was also told, has committed £790 million to strengthen protection from air, drone and missile threats. “Whilst we will not comment on specific security measures, the public should be reassured the UK, and its allies remain vigilant against potential threats.”

But concerns remain that we are not doing enough to be secure. For instance, the British military has been slow to adapt to drone warfare. On 1 March, Iran launched strikes on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. “The only way we could think of defending the RAF base at Akrotiri,” said the retired senior officer, “is to send one of our Type 45 destroyers out [rather than deploying] some sort of system in a box that could be whizzed out there”.

And military bases are far from the only potential targets of hostile states and their proxies. Our military supply chain, as well as our critical national infrastructure, including power plants, water supply and airports, are all at risk of attack. And the targets aren’t only on land. As Prins noted, we face an acute and proven sabotage threat to British undersea critical infrastructure — internet, gas pipelines, electrical interconnectors — from Russia’s formidable GUGI fleet of specialized submarines, which are designed to attack targets on the sea floor.

Intelligence is absolutely key to defending our bases. As Simm put it, that the men arrested near Fairford “could rock up almost to the fence unchallenged is a sign the system is overwhelmed or at least confused”. It doesn’t help that operatives are savvier than they used to be. “These days the terrorists are very surveillance aware and good at communicating in codes, which makes it harder to know exactly what they’re talking about.” This means that intelligence is rarely able to identify a “specific threat” unless we have “got an agent in there”.

As several of my interviewees said, Britain is still underspending on its military. We need better-resourced intelligence services and urgent investment in anti-drone technology — as well as radically strengthened borders, both at sea and at our airfields.

For the long peace is long over. The rules-based international order is dead. Soft power, always a comforting lie, must be cast aside. We need to get serious about security, serious about funding the military, and serious about our borders before it is too late. 

On December 1, 2022, the Taliban issued a decree closing down the two local stations run by the BBC’s rivals: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to a Taliban spokesman, they were being silenced for their “non-compliance with journalistic principles and one-sided broadcasts”. Remarkably, though, the militants are happy to indulge their British counterpart, which broadcasts from Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto, while also hosting local variants of the BBC news website.

But while the Corporation clearly enjoys its unusual role, is editorial independence really maintained? For as UnHerd has discovered, BBC funds frequently end up Taliban coffers, channeled via organisations led by extremists at the very heart of government. More worrying still, these relationships seemingly shape the Corporations coverage in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that just two weeks before the Corporation’s rivals were banned, its South Asia bureau chief, Jacky Martens, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani: the Taliban’s deputy leader and Afghanistan’s interior minister. The notorious jihadi, proscribed on both sides of the Atlantic for terrorism, clearly enjoyed his encounter with Martens. According to a statement from Haqqani’s ministry, the BBC was “an important media outlet at the international level” and could rely on the Taliban’s “cooperation”. While others had been hostile when reporting the country’s “internal” issues, the BBC was “impartial”.

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How, then, to explain such enthusiasm?

One answer is likely financial. The BBC refuses to disclose exactly how much it pays the Taliban, but the Corporation sends considerable sums to Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the group’s propaganda network. As a BBC spokesperson confirmed, these figures cover items including the use of transmitters, power and maintenance: but also “security”. BBC Afghan service sources say this last service is provided by Taliban fighters, led by Haqqani from his office in Kabul.

As for BBC Media Action, the Corporation’s charitable wing, we have obtained a copy of a “memorandum of understanding” between the organisation and RTA covering health education projects worth $1.9 million. The organisation has also confirmed that Media Action has paid both “fees” demanded by the Taliban and income tax on staff salaries — money that feeds the Taliban’s exchequer. Until early February, when President Trump and Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, the agency was one of BBC Media Action’s biggest sources of income, financing its scheme to train Afghan journalists.

And if that chimes with other foreign organizations in Afghanistan — which pay levies as high as 60% of a project’s total budget to secure the Taliban’s blessing — the BBC’s situation is complicated further by who, exactly, its money goes to.

Aside from his avowed extremism, Haqqani is also the former head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a group responsible for kidnapping American citizens and conducting deadly suicide bombings. Since Haqqani remains on Britain’s sanctions list, it is a criminal offense under UK law to have any financial dealings with him. Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, head of RTA, is on the sanctions list too, not least for writing articles glorifying attacks on Western troops.

When asked about these links, the BBC said the Corporation is sure its dealings with Ahmadi and Haqqani don’t breach UK law, citing FCDO guidance that suggest that “a public body in which a designated person holds a leadership position is not automatically subject to sanctions”. 

For its part, BBC Media Action also insisted it wasn’t in breach of sanctions, stating that “we have no reason to believe that any benefit has been provided to any person or entity who or which has been sanctioned” and that the FCDO was “fully sighted” on all Media Action’s work. 

But a London-based sanctions expert we spoke to was less convinced. The risk sanctions had been breached would be considerable if it could be shown that Haqqani or Ahmadi exercised a “high degree of control” over the bodies that deal with the BBC or its charity — and derived direct benefit from their funding.

To listen in, you might think that the BBC has paid a high price for the privilege of remaining in Afghanistan. For one thing, it no longer broadcasts programs showcasing Western music, nor the once-popular songs of local pop stars. Condemned by the Taliban as un-Islamic, they used to be mainstays of the BBC’s Afghan schedule. Asked about this, the BBC said it had recently used part of a track by an Afghan female singer to accompany a news story, and that it sometimes broadcast “traditional” Afghan music. 

Anti-Taliban stories found elsewhere on the BBC are also absent from the Afghan service — and sometimes aren’t broadcast at all. One example was a powerful TV report on the collapse of female education under the Islamists. Covering Afghanistan’s last female schools, it showed students wearing burkas and reciting the Quran. These places were starkly contrasted with shots of the now-empty schools that thrived before 2021, when girls were taught a full secular curriculum. 

In the end, though, the BBC decided not to run the film. Staff who worked on it were told by their editors that it was “too sensitive” to broadcast. 

Such compromises predictably frustrate the Corporation’s female staff. One BBC Afghan service journalist, speaking anonymously, says it was “incredibly difficult” to persuade editors to cover women’s rights and freedom of speech. She continues: “People call and beg us to play more music on air, but we don’t — because if we do, our operations inside Afghanistan could be shut down.” Women themselves are being purged too. There used to be several female presenters on the BBC station broadcasting in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Now only one remains. On its sister Pashto station, women presenters are totally absent. 

The same journalist adds that Taliban complaints have sometimes led to internal investigations of BBC staff — as Ali Hamedani, the co-author of this article, learnt first-hand. 

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An experienced BBC journalist, Hamedani is gay and had often reported on anti-LGBT discrimination in Afghanistan. In October 2022, the month before Martens met Haqqani, Hamedani covered the killing of a local gay student. Forces answerable to Haqqani detained Hamed Sabour at a Kabul checkpoint, before torturing and shooting him dead. His killers then made a video of Sabour’s execution and sent it to his family.

Before broadcasting his story, Hamedani interviewed Sabouri’s relatives and friends. Yet after the Taliban submitted a complaint, he was forced to undergo an internal disciplinary investigation that lasted almost a year, requiring him to prove his story was accurate — including providing a photograph of the murder victim’s body. He was only cleared 11 months after his initial report.

Yet, it seems that not everyone at the BBC was up to speed, for when we asked last week why Hamedani had been investigated, its spokesperson said his report “contained an image of a living man who wasn’t Hamed Sabouri. It therefore did not comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.” This is simply false: Hamedani’s report, though made for TV and radio, clearly contained no images of the victim. The incorrect photo appeared in The Guardian, which later acknowledged its mistake, and on a BBC Instagram feed — for which Hamedani had no responsibility. 

Despite all this, the BBC has defended its work in Afghanistan. The Corporation says it’s proud to be “the only international news media organization still broadcasting” in the country. Media Action defends its actions too, stating it “plays a critical role supporting local journalists to provide life-saving information on matters including health, nutrition and food security”. It’s also “proud of our work with local radio stations to support some of the last remaining women journalists working in radio in the country”. 

Yet perhaps the most telling statement comes from the Taliban itself. “The BBC is a credible source of news for Afghanistan,” says its official government spokesperson. “[The Corporation] collaborates constructively with the Islamic Emirate.” With praise like that, it’s hard to see how the Corporation can truly wave the flag for journalistic impartiality.