Why can’t the government keep a secret?

It’s not a good time for government secrets and confidentiality. First we have the 50 or so pages of Ministry of Defence “secrets” cast aside at a Kent bus stop as if they were yesterday’s fish and chip paper – this was last Tuesday.

Then there was the CCTV camera shot of the now ex-health secretary in a life affirming clinch with his special adviser, friend and now live-in companion, Gina Coladangelo. By the end of the weekend Hancock was gone, out of office and out of his home.

It transpired that the camera was inserted in his government office without his knowledge. Undoubtedly without his knowledge, too, the images taken on 6 May were purloined and flogged to the Sun last week. By whom and for what motive beyond filthy lucre are yet to be established by Scotland Yard’s finest.

More intriguing, and looping back to the scattering of the defence secrets at the Kent bus stop, is the revelation that Hancock was discussing government business on a personal Gmail account. Which probably means that he was being hacked on a regular basis by Russian and/or Chinese interests. The account was seen regularly by Coladangelo.

Honestly, had Matt Hancock not heard of Hillary Clinton and all that mess with Russia hijacking her private emails in her presidential bid in 2016?

When is a government secret not a secret? Apparently when it is on an MoD print out, whatever the labelling may say, and on a cabinet minister’s private email account.

We are told by the BBC – the first recipient of the dumped defence papers – that they were “pretty routine.” They discussed the intrepid voyage of the destroyer Defender skirting Crimea which brought the Navy its own sound and light show on Wednesday last week. There were position papers on defence contracts, relations with Nato allies, and – more worryingly – various scenarios of British force dispositions once American and Nato forces pull out of Afghanistan in September.

Routine business for a medium power like the UK, but hardly of the peace-shattering gravity of the Bruce-Partington submarine plans, the most serious case of espionage investigated by Sherlock Holmes. The documents revealed that the MoD and Foreign Office had gamed the likely outcome if HMS Defender touched territorial waters west of Sebastopol. Those waters are claimed as Russian since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014. The UK, along with the rest of Nato and the EU, says the waters are still Ukraine’s.

The possible routes sketched were one well out into the Black Sea, or one much closer to the Crimean coast, which was sure to get Russian close attention.

“It was a policy devised by the Foreign Office wrapped around military capability and execution,” a senior defence official told me last week. Since then there has been a bit of finger pointing between the FCO and MoD about who owned the plan.

What happened when Defender cruised close to Sebastopol and Yalta should now be taught in military academies, and serious courses of journalism and media studies. The defence chiefs and the Navy were indulging in what they like to call “information operations” (“info ops”) or “information manoeuvre.” Before the run from Odessa to a port call in Georgia, the ship had embarked a BBC TV crew plus reporter, and a reporter from the Daily Mail. In no way can either the Russians or the Royal Navy claim what happened was spontaneous or unplanned.

Taking what is seen a recognised shipping channel around Crimea, HMS Defender knew it would be followed by Russian naval ships and aircraft. The Russians claimed to drop bombs in the path of the destroyer and fire warning shots – in fact there may have been some distant gunnery in an adjacent naval exercise by the Russians. Unarmed Su-24 aircraft, some 20 of them, flew overhead and a gunboat came within 100 metres, shouting warnings to change course.

Within minutes the Russians had their highly coloured version of events out on the airwaves and cyberspace of the Moscow propaganda machine. It took two hours for the MoD to release a statement from Whitehall – so they lost the sprint for the narrative. But at least they had the BBC footage and the Daily Mail.

And this is where I have a problem. The whole episode had an air of contrivance, what the Italians call una montatura. Not totally artificial, it was just a bit stagey. The Navy had set out to establish the right of navigation in disputed waters by the Russian, and this would have full Nato backing. It was, and is, a challenge to a fundamental piece of new-fangled Putin doctrine known as AAD – Area Access Denial. This means Russia will defend areas of sea vital to its sovereignty and that of its allies. Putin repeated a version of this briefly in his remarks after the Geneva meeting with Biden. He announced Russia’s plans to open up the Arctic, where it anticipated full international cooperation, and welcomed scientific cooperation from America, provided the 12-mile territorial water limit was respected.

He then went on to explain that Russia intended to maintain sovereignty and limit access to its “six interior seas.” He didn’t have time to specify, but it was unclear if these just meant enclosed Arctic waters, or would include the Sea of Azov and other parts of the Black Sea basin.  

The British were on their mettle because they had faced Russian opposition off Crimean shores last October when Defender’s sister ship Dragon also patrolled Ukrainian waters. The Russians then claimed they “chased Dragon off” with a robust show of force. This the Navy denies, so this time round they ensured they had the media aboard.

This is the area for discussion. The danger is that the Defence Ministry and the British government treat independent media as an extension of their “information manoeuvre operations” – which can include black propaganda and cyber deception operations. Other Nato allies, the Canadians especially, make sure that plain objective information and media operations – on the record, factual reporting – are fed from one department. The business of propaganda and deception, persuasion and psychological operations (“psy ops”) – which can carry an undercurrent of exaggeration and distortion of truth – come from a separate department altogether.

The problem for any reporter in a contested or combat context is the issue of collusion. After reporting the non-clash of Defender off Crimea, in which there was a high propaganda element, albeit in what nonetheless was a real news event, the reporter has to maintain their independence. They must be at pains in the future not to seem to be the information arm of the Navy or the UK Defence Department.

This is likely to come up again very soon in the operation in which HMS Defender is now engaged. Currently she is part of the allied Carrier Strike Group 21, led by the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth. This is destined to head across the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Gulf, to the Indian Ocean and the waters in and around the South China Sea and the East China Sea, where the People’s Republic of China claim sovereignty over tracts of sea, atolls and islands, and over the East China Sea air control sovereignty.

China works on the basis that it must defend anything vital to national security. In recent years it has been upping pressure on fishing fleets of neighbours such as Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Three of the worst confrontations have occurred near Natuna, one of the northern groups in Indonesia’s archipelago of 17,500 islands, the largest of any nation state. China has pushed into these fishing grounds with swarms of fishing boats backed by armed ocean-going gunboats of the Coastguard. On occasion the gunboats have seized Indonesian fishing craft because they were “threatening China’s national security.”

Under current plans the Queen Elizabeth task force is not intending to try to navigate international shipping lanes in the hotly contested Straits of Taiwan. But there are plenty of opportunities for frisky encounters in the surrounding seas as they head to South Korea, possibly livelier than anything seen off the coasts of Crimea this year.

Quite why anybody needed to print out 50 pages of MoD notes about navigation exercises for HMS Defender, Nato business, and the future of Afghanistan, is baffling. Why not put it on an iPad or send it to the Cloud?

A rather different mystery surrounds the private Matt Hancock email account. As with the unfortunate or unwitting dumper of the MoD documents, the big question is what on earth was he up to? What business did he need to do on his private account, no doubt surveilled by his personal adviser, Gina Coladangelo? Were there deals and contracts involved? We are told that some feared this may be the case, and this is why the second Permanent Secretary, David Williams, now in charge at the MoD, raised a professional query last autumn.

Quite what advice Coladangelo was providing is yet to be clarified. She is said to be “a very private person” who doesn’t divulge details such as her birthday and family background. But she is married, at least until last week, to Oliver Tress, creator of the clothing enterprise Oliver Bonas, where she is listed on open media as “communications director.” She is also described as a founding partner of the finance enterprise Luther Pendragon.

So we have Oliver Bonas, the award of contracts and what looks like a confusion between private lives and private businesses and the business of government in a national pandemic emergency. So it quickly slips into realms of national security, given the vulnerability to hacking by hostile powers and interests.

The dots are difficult to join. But the investigators might do well to follow Sherlock Holmes’s most famous precept: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”