How Spies Target Parliament: Influence And The Value Of Westminster Gossip

(Collage by Antonello Sticca. Image credit: Rainer Mirau / Adobe Stock)

There was a time when recruiting an agent inside Parliament involved old-fashioned methods – maybe a chance encounter at a think tank event, followed by a slow cultivation over drinks or a long lunch. In the Cold War, Eastern Bloc spies worked the cocktail party circuit, hunting those with weaknesses.

Debt was one toehold, with envelopes of cash passed to MPs, particularly by the effective Czechoslovak spy service. Sex was another avenue. In the 1960s, Anthony Courtney, a Conservative MP and fierce critic of the KGB, was honey-trapped during a visit to Moscow. When he refused to resign, dossiers featuring pictures of him in a compromising situation were sent to his constituency association, his chief whip, the newspapers and his wife. He narrowly lost his seat in 1966. More recently, the authorities have pursued cases against aides employed in offices who were claimed to be sent from Moscow.

But, for better or worse, technology has transformed this world. These days it is more likely to be a click on a link than a honeytrap at the bar, although the old methods have not entirely disappeared.

The fact that most in Parliament do not have access to classified information makes some question why spies after secrets have them in their sights. But that misses the reality of what intelligence agencies are seeking to do.

One part of their work certainly is stealing material stamped “Top Secret Strap 2”, which reveal some new piece of defence technology. But another is something more nebulous: influence, or – to put it more accurately – interference.

Influence allows a foreign country to shape debate, for instance by making sure certain issues do or do not get raised in Parliament. Lots of countries do that. The issue is when some spy services do it covertly or coercively through their agents. That is increasingly a top priority for Chinese and Russian spies, and it is where the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate behaviour can be hazier.

There is also still plenty of confidential – if not classified – information flowing through the building in terms of how government policy is being formulated, and where it is heading or what people are up to.

Another value of a foothold in the parliamentary estate is for what is known as ‘targeting’. This is not looking for people who are going to be bumped off but building up a picture of who has influence and what their interests, weaknesses and vulnerabilities might be.

This is a classic part of spy tradecraft. Is this MP or researcher someone who has a problem with debt, drink or infidelity? The kind of gossip that rockets around Westminster is genuinely valuable to a foreign intelligence service and worth recording on a file somewhere for the future in case it offers leverage or a way someone can be subverted. “What someone thinks of innocuous tittle-tattle can be a useful part of a jigsaw that can end up getting people into trouble,” says one security official.

All of this is as true today as it was in the Cold War. What has changed are the methods.

Institutions like Parliament can be trawled with the hope of just catching one or two people in their net

The 18 November ‘espionage alert’ issued last year by authorities about two Chinese LinkedIn profiles reaching out to offer consultancy is a perfect example. Targets were said to include “Parliament staff, economists, think tank employees, geo-political consultants and those working alongside [the government] including MPs and members of the House of Lords”. Security minister Dan Jarvis said the government would not tolerate “covert and calculated” attempts to interfere with the UK’s sovereign affairs.

The point of this kind of approach is that it can be done at scale and remotely. Institutions like Parliament can be trawled with the hope of just catching one or two people in their net who might be tempted by the offer of extra cash. That consultancy might start with innocuous questions with answers that are entirely in the public domain and so do not raise many alarm bells. But that might be followed up with more carefully worded requests, which slowly draw someone over the line into sensitive or confidential information.

An all-expenses paid trip to China might be a further incentive, since the Ministry of State Security (MSS) – the spy service thought to be behind the approaches – likes to seal the deal in person and on their home turf. China has the resources to do this at scale and with few risks.

In the old days, if a KGB officer was caught propositioning someone for access in London by MI5, they would often be expelled from the embassy and made persona non grata. But now, when the two profiles used by the MSS were exposed in November, our security services knew it would take next to no time to develop more.

Cyber espionage is another new approach, with hackers from Russia, China and Iran targeting Parliament. It was Iran back in 2017 that compromised 26 users of the parliamentary email network. Three of the six MPs whose accounts were hacked were rendered vulnerable because their mailboxes were linked to their members of staff whose passwords were compromised. But for all the new online methods, face-to-face relationships still matter and offer their own value.

On 13 January 2022, MI5 issued an ‘interference alert’ over the activities of Christine Lee. The British-based lawyer was a highly visible presence around Westminster. As well as funding one MP’s office to the tune of nearly half a million pounds, she had also met figures from across the political spectrum. The alert did not say she was a ‘spy’ in the traditional sense but rather that she was linked to China’s United Front Work Department – what is best thought of as an influence rather than an intelligence agency.

Crucially, MI5 believed money was flowing from China into the UK political system and, further, there were signs of attempts to seed new candidates into political life. “One of the things that is very striking is that they are prepared to invest in cultivating people at local level potentially and at the outset of their political career,” head of MI5 Sir Ken McCallum said a few months after the alert.

This is the sign of a long-term strategy of getting people into the system rather than just subverting those already in. Lee denied the allegations but lost a case challenging the issuing of the alert before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

This was not the first ‘interference alert’ from authorities. China is the busiest threat to Parliament, but Russia is still a major player, more in the face-to-face world. A less high-profile warning just before had pointed towards Russia using pro-Moscow Ukrainians. The sentencing of Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, to 10-and-a-half years in prison after he admitted taking bribes for pro-Russia interviews and speeches, is a sign that Moscow is still busy. It tends to use more traditional methods of individual cultivation and cash. His contact had been Oleg Voloshyn, who was the subject of that first interference alert.

The collapse of the case against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry last autumn raised difficult questions for those tasked with dealing with these issues. The two men denied the allegations against them and never had the chance to clear their name in court. A December report by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy highlighted the way the failure of the case revealed significant structural problems: “The evidence we received showed a process beset by confusion and misaligned expectations. Some aspects are best described as shambolic… None of this was helped by the continued lack of clarity on China policy under successive governments.”

A key problem was the old Official Secrets Act, originally drafted before the First World War and containing antiquated language about handing over material useful to an ‘enemy’. A new National Security Act in 2023 offered new opportunities for prosecuting people for working for a foreign intelligence service (something which, bizarrely, was not technically a crime before). There have already been many more cases under the National Security Act than MI5 had originally expected. However, one of the interesting conclusions of the joint committee was that even this is not quite the solution that officials and ministers have suggested.

For instance, it raises the possibility of a foreign national instructing someone in Parliament but where there are ‘diplomatic sensitivities’ in labelling that person as a member of a foreign intelligence service. That might require some of the same difficult questions over witness statements that caused so many difficulties in the Cash/Berry case.

It is understood that between 15,000 and 20,000 people have passes to Parliament

Dealing with the range of threats certainly keeps those protecting Parliament busy. There was a time when MI5 kept a level of distance for fear of being seen getting too deeply involved in political life, something that it was accused of in the 1980s and which has been a problem in other countries. But that has now changed, and it works closely with the parliamentary security team.

It is understood that between 15,000 and 20,000 people have passes to Parliament, and many work there only for short periods, making the kind of vetting used for government jobs with access to secrets unrealistic.

One positive sign, those who deal with these issues say, is that the wave of recent publicity has certainly made those working in Westminster much more attuned to the threats than they had been a few years ago – whether that is the offer of drinks at the bar or the online profile offering a consultancy deal that might be just too good to be true. 

Gordon Corera is co-host of The Rest Is Classified podcast and author, most recently of The Spy in the Archive: How one man tried to kill the KGB

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