This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

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Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

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A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

Demands on American and Israeli intelligence will increase regardless of whether the war stays cold or heats up once more. Donald Trump obviously doesn’t want to fight the battle to open the Strait of Hormuz. This means that Tehran, sensing victory, will probably be emboldened elsewhere, perhaps even trying to reactivate terrorist operations against American and Israeli targets. Iranian terrorist operations, which have ebbed and flowed through the years, haven’t been well run for some time. Some recent assassination attempts against Iranian expatriates have been awkwardly if not incompetently planned and executed. But when there is a will, ways improve. 

Beyond protecting against this possible resurgence, US and Israeli satellite surveillance of the bombed sites with buried enriched uranium will obviously continue. Ditto the bombed underground military facilities and factories involved in missile and drone production. According to Israeli intelligence officials, the Iranian regime is using the current ceasefire to clear access to crucial conventional weaponry. After the 12-Day War, and up to the start of the current conflict, Israel didn’t seem particularly worried by the state of Iran’s bombed nuclear plants. That may be because their long-distance assessment of the damage done was severe, or because they had reliable intelligence assets providing them with reassuring information.   

In either case, it’s doubtful that Tehran can now sprint to the bomb: the damage is far too great, both to personnel and the country’s uranium-enrichment facilities. The same may also be true of the stockpiles of centrifuge parts unaccounted for by Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. Counterintelligence concerns alone may well paralyze Iran’s ambitions for some time, as the intelligence ministry and IRGC try to figure out if Israel penetrated their nuclear inner sanctum. The conspiracy-addled nature of Iranian officials will incline them towards taking a counterespionage buzzsaw to a lot of innocent people, further convulsing what’s left of the country’s nuclear establishment.  

The Iranian regime, if it lasts, will eventually get around to testing Israeli and American intelligence. It wouldn’t be surprising to see it do this slowly through a small reconstituted nuclear program, perhaps by building another facility for turning uranium hexafluoride into metal, or by building new, advanced centrifuge cascades: then see whether anyone notices. If the regime managed to actually detonate a crude nuclear device inside Iran, the blast would likely guarantee the Islamic Republic’s immunity from further attacks. For Mossad and Aman, Israel’s military intelligence wing, the need to penetrate and report on what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program remains paramount. 

There are other focuses too. Assessing how many and what kind of missiles and drones the Islamic Republic will be able to build — and how quickly, given the damage to factories and supply lines — will surely consume a lot of Israeli attention. Another question will be whether the Russians and Chinese are meaningfully supporting these efforts. An Iranian victory at Hormuz might well have a decisive impact on Beijing, which could become far less circumspect in how it supports Tehran. If, months from now, the United States is still dueling with Iran over the Strait, then the CIA and other initialisms of US intelligence certainly won’t redirect resources to other foreign challenges. Surging intelligence capabilities on a target rarely produce a bonanza — unless information can be gleaned through technical means. 

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Fortunately for the US, satellites and intercept are two strong suits, while the Islamic Republic’s chatty ruling elites often have a hard time being disciplined about secure communications. Before the current war, Israel obviously had a network of local agents, all of whom aided military operations. Maintaining secure communication with these agents after all hell has broken loose and the internet has gone down could be hard, especially if timely communications are still needed for active operations. Another challenge is that information in wartime can degrade quickly, not least if it’s needed for assassinations. On this, Iranian counterintelligence outfits are undoubtingly working overtime, trying to figure out what Israel did and block its future actions. For the moment, it’s a good bet Israel is using some form of encrypted satellite-based system to reach its spies — and Iranian counter-intelligence officers are surely doing their best to locate those transmissions.    

That hints at broader challenges. Future recruitment efforts by either Israel or America will likely be more challenging; contacting IRGC officers will simply be harder than before. Both Americans and Israelis “cold pitch” Iranian officials: that is, walk up to a target and, with little chit-chat, ask him to work for them. Such pitches don’t have a great track record and IRGC officers don’t usually travel to places where either American or Israeli operatives can safely reach them. 

It’s possible that Israel’s recruitment of so-called “covert-action” agents — whose primary task would be to give logistical or tactical intelligence support to an Israeli military operation (imagine Iranian Kurds or Azeris helping Israel launch drones) — has also allowed some access to important Iranian officials. Really talented agents can occasionally recruit others without having direct contact with their foreign case officers.

But developing these contacts indirectly would be devilishly risky. As a rule, intelligence services don’t like mixing covert-action agents — who in Iran would be easier to recruit given the disgruntled minorities living on the country’s borders — with “foreign-intelligence” assets who report on government policy and suchlike. Covert-action agents often work in teams; foreign-intelligence agents almost never do. If Israel has been able to mix the two successfully, these operations would be serendipitous. 

Developing new assets in Iran with Iranian counterintelligence services on high alert will be daunting — unless internal dissent leads to waves of Iranians, especially ethnic Persians, eagerly ratting on the theocracy and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials sometimes give the impression that this is exactly what has happened, with average Iranians somehow getting information out to the Israelis about the whereabouts and movements of senior Iranian officials, allowing the IDF to target them. If this is happening in the way Israeli officials suggest, then untrained Iranians and Israeli intelligence have found a means of communication that allows for almost real-time targeting irrespective of whether the internet is working. 

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A sign that the Iranian regime might be cracking would be more IRGC volunteers to Western intelligence services. Mass defections don’t appear likely — the regime’s spiritual and financial hold on its hardcore supporters has always been impressive. As average Iranians have fallen away from the regime by the tens of millions, loyalists, seeing themselves as the guardians of Islam and a nation besieged by disbelief, depravity, and Satan’s paladins, have only grown more determined. Throughout this war, we’ve seen the IDF or Mossad attempt to intimidate or turn senior military commanders and officials via threatening telephone calls. It’s still too soon to have a scorecard on what happened, but it appears Israel hasn’t so far reaped the desired results. Even so, we might yet see more senior officials having serious doubts. Iranian memoirs, leaked conversations, and intrepid Western scholarship conducted inside Iran over the last 30 years suggest that doubt is infecting ruling families.

Intelligence success is inevitably tied to how much risk clandestine services and their political overlords are willing to endure. The Islamic Republic is an existential threat to the Jewish state; to the United States, the clerical regime is surely not. Despite murderous Iranian machinations, since 1979, Washington has been reaching out to Tehran, under both Democrats and Republicans, both openly and secretly. This quintessentially American disposition to say “Hi!”, hoping for a reset of the regime’s enmity towards the United States, has affected, sometimes seriously, how the White House, and therefore the CIA and the Pentagon, have approached Iran policy. No such hope has ever altered the fundamental Israeli analysis of the Islamic Republic. The regime’s lethal antisemitism, present since its birth, is tightly tied to how it sees and reacts to the world.  

These differences help explain why the Israelis have had the patience and fortitude to work the Iranian target in ways that have been impossible for American or European intelligence services. Even today, after numerous deadly Iran-orchestrated terrorist strikes against Americans; after kidnapping plots against US citizens; after planned assassinations against senior US officials; after the deadly Iranian covert action in Iraq, which cost hundreds of lives — Americans who didn’t have doubts about assassinating members of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State can still feel a bit squeamish when Washington helps Israel off Iranian officials. To that extent, the clerical regime has always benefited from Iran’s cultural magnetism and historical preeminence. 

Besides, major American intelligence operations against the Islamic Republic will require bipartisan support in both the House and Senate intelligence committees. That seems unlikely. Democrats have been trying to find a less hostile modus vivendi with the Islamic Republic since Bill Clinton. With Obama and the nuclear negotiations, it became a passion. This passion has since been deflated, especially in January when the theocracy savagely attacked its own people. But the reflex to engage, and to feel guilty about American actions — especially the now-mythologized coup in 1953 against Mohammad Mosaddegh, and basically everything Trump has done since 2017 — seems set in stone. 

The intelligence war against Islamic Republic will therefore likely remain overwhelmingly an Israeli mission, with the US in a supporting role. Mossad now has an Iran regime-change desk. The Israelis hadn’t traditionally been fond of regime change in the Islamic world, primarily because they had such a low regard for the possibility of salubrious political evolution among Muslims. Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles altered this calculation. So too did the realization that “mowing the lawn” in Iran isn’t the same as cutting the grass in Lebanon and Gaza. It requires US approval from the get go, which even under Trump may not be forthcoming.

In a long-term clandestine campaign, Mossad and Aman don’t have many options available to them beyond continuing assassinations and sabotage. These actions can possibly fly under the American radar — that really depends on their size, targets, and whether Washington could envision blowback. Israel could also try to feed Iran’s simmering ethnic tensions, where violence is already common, especially among the Kurds and Baluch. Both have established armed opposition groups, making weapons deliveries easier and less of a counterintelligence headache; these groups internally police themselves and, as they are often tied together by blood, are less open to Iranian intelligence penetration. Netanyahu supported, likely drove, a joint Israeli-American operation to support an armed Kurdish uprising in Iran during the current conflict; it appears that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan learned of the plan and called Trump, who aborted the operation.

These actions cannot bring the regime down — and the Israelis know it. But they could be seriously annoying to Tehran. Especially if armed with shoulder-fired missiles or heavy machine guns, these groups certainly could harass the IRGC more effectively. And if Israeli-aided ethnic irruptions happened while larger protests occurred elsewhere in Iran, this might seriously strain the regime’s mobile internal-security forces. Certainly, this ethnic route, operationally, seems like a better option than trying to get significant quantities of weaponry to the confused, leaderless Persian opposition, which could take years to organize and risks simply giving supplies to the IRGC.  

Minority-targeted operations do run the risk of alienating Persians, who whatever their views of the Islamic Republic almost universally believe that minorities don’t have the right to secession and must not challenge the supremacy of Iran’s Persian identity. Iranians who want to topple the Islamic Republic could cheer, or anyway be apathetic towards, rebellious minorities being crushed by the theocracy. 

Despite all the difficulties involved, the Israelis still may try to arm, or protect from the air, an Azeri or Persian insurrection. Rebellions within these two groups would give the regime pause. Given their numbers and how important they are within the regime, Azeris are the only ethnic minority, if they were to rebel en masse, that could collapse the Islamic Republic. The Israelis may recall, however, that while armed opposition to the Shah by the late Seventies was certainly frustrating for his SAVAK intelligence service, it didn’t ultimately challenge the monarchy’s survival. In 1979, the army collapsed for entirely unrelated reasons. 

The key then was the ability of Ruhollah Khomeini’s people to piggy-back on and guide the anger of what eventually became a widespread revolutionary movement, where the military and civilian elites no longer supported the monarchy. When it mattered, Mohammad Pahlavi was unwilling to kill his countrymen in large numbers; the theocracy has shown no such hesitation. Any armed struggle against the Islamic Republic would have to defeat a far more determined foe.

For the Israelis, getting payback against the Islamic Republic may nonetheless make the ethnic card compelling, overcoming the objections of Persian expatriates and internal dissidents who worry about Persians losing their primacy in the country — to say nothing of the ugly internecine strife that could result. Meanwhile, the Israelis will certainly keep collecting intelligence on all Iranian personnel involved with the nuclear and missile programs, with the aim of eventually eliminating them. Knocking off the occasional Iranian politician could also become standard practice, regardless of possible American objections, since such operations would continue to convulse Tehran’s counterintelligence establishment, cast doubt on the integrity of Iranian communications, and discombobulate the daily life of the ruling elite.

Though many Americans and Europeans might want to believe that only diplomacy offers a solution to the current conflict, Mossad, Aman, and the IRGC know better. For them, it’s a duel to the death. 

The abandoned criminal case, involving Westminster researchers accused of passing material to Beijing, reveals the ghost in the machine: the British establishment’s rank hypocrisy over what constitutes national security. To put it simply, espionage isn’t espionage when politically it’s inconvenient. For the police and security services, this poses an obvious dilemma. Why bother chasing spies in the first place? Such hypocrisy was ever thus, from the kid-glove treatment of the Cambridge Five, to MI6’s decision to hide Michael Foot’s suspected status as a Soviet “agent of influence” before the 1983 election.

For decades, then, our political culture has been seeped in opacity and hypocrisy, something I’ve encountered myself. As a special branch detective, I remember a routine financial vetting review. This was invasive — yet entirely necessary. Any counterintelligence officer knows employees with money troubles constitute a potential point of compromise. I, a lowly detective, spent hours accounting for every penny I’d spent over the past year.

I saw other incongruities, especially where the Official Secrets Acts was concerned. When MI5 officer David Shayler removed a hoard of secret files from the records section at Thames House, we found them in a newspaper editor’s safe. This constituted several offenses, including under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, which features prominently in the Chinese scandal. Created to combat German naval espionage, it is a stuffy Edwardian sofa of a law, its definition of what constituted “damage” to the state better suited to the age of the telegram.

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Faced with these challenges in the Shayler case, our financial investigator suggested an elegant solution: simply charge the newspaper editor with the bog-standard offense of Handling Stolen Goods. This, we at Scotland Yard agreed, was a good idea; the CPS, and no doubt the Attorney General, disagreed. This was during the early days of New Labour, when news management trumped all. I later heard rumors that a senior Labour figure confessed there was no appetite for “going to war with The Mail on Sunday.”

This culture of “rules for thee but not for me” runs rampant across all political parties and Whitehall elites. That’s especially frustrating when public bodies spend precious time and resources fostering a “security culture” — one where operational security (OPSEC) is paramount. Intrusive vetting is one common tactic here, with probing questions about a candidate’s political views and private life (sex life included). So-called “clear desk” policies are obsessively policed too: leaving a document on a desk while you pop to the loo can lead to a reprimand. All the while, restrictions are habitually placed on private conduct, from being a member of a controversial political party to having contact with foreign nationals.

Then there are the so-called “STRAP” rules, a codeword to designate a ban on the use of digital devices in areas where sensitive intelligence is handled. Yet as so often, senior police officers, or civil servants, seem strangely exempt here. I remember attending a mandatory GCHQ OPSEC briefing, where a technical officer from GCHQ demonstrated how easily everyday devices can be hacked. When he asked what might shield a phone from hostile compromise, a wag put up his hand. “The rank of chief superintendent and above,” he suggested, “protects mobiles from all foreign intelligence services.”

Like much else in Britain, then, attitudes to secrecy appear two-tier. Over my own career, I often got the impression that senior officials conflate their own importance — and political hobbyhorses — with those of the wider United Kingdom. And as Jonathan Powell may yet learn, backroom deals are all very well until you piss on the wrong people. Either way, realpolitik becomes more difficult in an era of instant rebuttal, quicksilver-fast social media and febrile, impermanent governments.

You grow pretty cynical after a career in the police — but even I’m shocked by the unsightly infighting between the Government and CPS, not least because of the Prime Minister’s previous (and much-referenced) incarnation as director of public prosecutions. The current DPP, Stephen Parkinson, is a Westminster lifer, not known for rocking boats. Significantly, Parkinson is also the first DPP who served as a solicitor rather than a barrister. Could he, finally, be giving the KC old boy’s network the finger, standing his ground against the elite consensus? Such details are the cogs upon which mighty wheels turn. Then there are the Cabinet Office veterans Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, both veritable Jacques Cousteaus of the Deep State, and both immersed in national security matters.

How, then, does this Whitehall’s dead, invisible hand impact actual investigations? The China case is perhaps instructive. Unlike TV spooks, real intelligence officers don’t mysteriously appear at crime scenes and tell the cops what to do. The dark deeds are performed in the Cabinet Office, or in Whitehall pubs. Then there are the courts, where sensitive evidence is subjected to endless voire dire, or meta-trials, as lawyers join silky verbal battle to establish the admissibility of evidence. These arguments happen in camera or in a judge’s chambers, or else involve issuing “Public Interest Immunity” certificates, which render testimony secret. The whole process is typically English: nominally open, but in fact very, very closed. To be fair, opacity is sometimes needed. The state is entitled to keep secrets, but that’s exactly why the privilege shouldn’t be casually abused. Certainly, I suspect the police case was solid — the CPS don’t charge this stuff lightly.

Then there’s the issue of the Government’s attitude to counterintelligence, which occasionally acts as a brake on diplomacy. It’s difficult to drink champagne at the ambassador’s reception if the bloke who planted microphones in the Ferrero Rochers is on trial at the Old Bailey. Capacity is another factor. When I worked on the Alexander Livinenko investigation, almost 20 years ago, MI5’s Russia desk had atrophied. After 9/11, tracking foreign spies was of limited interest to a government focused on counterterrorism and, this being New Labour, “community cohesion”. Besides, City bankers were happily stuffing their Church’s brogues with pilfered Russian cash, earning Britain the nickname “The Laundry”. Given Litvinenko’s murder was a naked act of radiological terrorism, I’m amazed it never escalated further. Which brings us back to money: pre-2008, New Labour bet the bank on financial services, and lost. It’s a gamble we’ve been paying for ever since, as the Chinese know.

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By Dominic Adler

This brings us to the nub of the problem, one which Keir Starmer seems to have missed: the Government’s blatant gaslighting over China. In the end, whether or not the People’s Republic constitutes an “enemy” feels insultingly nebulous; as far as I know, such considerations have never been much of an issue before. Besides, even Jonathan Hall, the government’s own advisor on national security law, agrees China is an obvious threat. And Hall, the most fair-minded and experienced barrister in his field, isn’t known for partisanship. This speaks to the depths of high-level disagreement over this issue, with China presenting a unique problem for British policymakers. The communist state views close governmental involvement in private enterprise — including intelligence — as a given. Virtually all Chinese technology, business and diplomacy serves the Communist Party’s insatiable appetite for sensitive information.

And so politicians wilfully ignore the obvious: what we see as spying, the Chinese consider due diligence, simply part of Beijing’s game of hegemonic chess with the United States. In this reckoning, the UK is basically irrelevant, whatever hawks like Tom Tugendhat might imply. We’re surely in no position to retaliate with an intelligence campaign of our own, particularly given the parlous state of our economy. And so, despite our allegedly Rolls Royce civil service, diplomatic corps and spooks, Powell seems to have decided that acquiescence is the only game in town. Counterespionage, old boy? Over-egged. Needs to be seen in context. And, perhaps, those Chinese businessmen will rescue our steel industry in return? Just, whatever you do, don’t tell the plebs.

The entire affair suggests a system in meltdown. Dysfunctional, arrogant and — crucially — impoverished, Britain is caught in a trap of its own design, where we chase Chinese pennies like paupers teased by ancien régime aristocrats. All the while, the national security charade continues. The official secrets, the MI5 briefings and intelligence-gathering. All poured into the colander that is the Cabinet Office, leaked, lost or hacked to whoever wants to steal it. Should the scandal end Starmer’s unhappy tenure as Prime Minister, it would be apt. A lawyer to his bones, he seems convinced he can prove that black is white and night is day, that a secret isn’t a secret and an enemy isn’t an enemy.

But, as a result, every page was stamped CLASSIFIED in capital letters, both above and below the text. In the end, my friend, despite the support of his colleagues and office chief, had no choice but to resign.

To this day, vast reams of pseudo-secret documents are manufactured whenever a Diplomatic, Consular or State Department official adds a comment to the lengthy daily media summaries produced by every US diplomatic post across the world. And if the comment is from a member of the local CIA station (perhaps to the effect that so-and-so is at it again with some anti-American comment), this trivial addition becomes “super-secret”, even though its contents are still 99.99% publicly available as an “open-source” material that all in the organisation can see.

Yet this daily output is only a mere rivulet when compared to the Amazonian flow of documents produced by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, who are equally liberal in elevating trivia to “secret” or even “top-secret” status. But they are all outclassed by the Navy’s nuclear submariners, for whom even a toothpaste order is issued “for official use only”, and the US Special Operations Command — which used to be the Joint Special Operations Command, of which I was once the sole consultant — whose toothpaste purchase order are not just “official use” but “secret”, if not more.

Even with genuine secrets, such as the scope and limits of “overhead” (satellite) photography, there is habitual and extreme exaggeration. Long ago, an exceptionally competent National Security Council official and that rare thing, a genuine “country expert”, asked me to visit his office to discuss some phrases I had included in a report for the Defense Department. It contained not a jot of secret data, but was nevertheless stamped “for official use only”, the equivalent of “Airman 1st class” in the hierarchy of secrecy.

In deference to the rules, I kept no copy of my own at home, so he arranged for the document’s delivery from the Pentagon via official mail, and we sat down to discuss the phrases in question. It turned out they contained information that he believed was very, very important — he planned to take it to the President — and, to make his point, he impulsively whipped out another report that included a small black-and-white satellite photograph of very small rectangles (Russian tanks) on his country’s border.

There is a very good reason why satellite photography should be kept secret: by understanding exactly what appears and what remains unclear in any given image, vehicles, buildings and entire bases can be camouflaged to exploit the limitations of whatever lenses and cameras are being used. In showing me that photo, the distinguished official had just breached a strict security rule. He had theoretically “compromised” America’s use of contemporary satellite photography, even though the photograph was so small that it could not have been used to improve camouflage techniques even if carefully examined by experts. Nevertheless, once the official reported his own violation, he set off unending investigations that could have terminated his career had it not been for very firm presidential support — he eventually became an ambassador. Along the way, however, he discovered how many copies of the supposedly ultra-secret “code-word” documents had been printed and distributed to US facilities around the world: more than 1,000.

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Thus, all the way upstream from the latest leaked-document embarrassment in the Pentagon, here is the real scandal: the mindless mass production and very wide distribution of supposedly secret and relatively few seriously secret documents, whose oceanic abundance makes it impossible to treat secrecy seriously by restricting access to those who actually need to know the information.

Even if need-to-know criterion is very broadly interpreted to include all who just might, perhaps, one day, need the information, it would still exclude a very junior airman in a clerical job in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. It would also exclude the likes of Edward Snowden, who was merely the employee of a contractor that efficiently extracts vast sums from the public purse by employing hordes of ex-officials and retired officers, whose very presence signals to serving officials where to award contracts if they want to supplement their pensions with post-retirement jobs or consultation fees. And because contractors are always trying to add something — anything — to their vast output of worthless “reports”, they eagerly add classified bits, thereby adding to the abundance of supposedly secret documents.

Secrets of real importance do exist, of course — most obviously in wartime, when a surprise action can yield the ultimate advantage in battle. But that is only so if secrecy is indeed preserved. When it is not, as was the case on February 24, 2022, when Russia’s elite Airborne Assault troopers were ambushed and failed to seize the Antonov airfield just outside Kyiv, it can quickly backfire. Even now, more than a year later, the Russians have yet to overcome their failure to keep their plan secret.

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In peacetime, the greatest number of genuine secrets are technological, and therefore in the possession of engineers and the like, who are, by nature, less loquacious than policy officials. Besides, their secrets cannot be whispered or casually emailed, but only transferred in encrypted bulk data packages. The secret documents disseminated by Jack Teixeira, by contrast, were “policy papers” — that is, the observations of sundry officials on the Ukraine war that incidentally cited bits of intelligence data, whose best use for the Russians is not for intelligence purposes but for propaganda: the documents, for instance, seem to have been altered to exaggerate the number of Ukrainian casualties, while understating the number of Russian losses, and not very cleverly given the wildly improbable low numbers.

It would be nice to think that the Massachusetts Air National Guard out there in Cape Cod — the cold-water Riviera of the American elite — was included in the distribution list, perhaps along with the Coast Guard’s Antarctic patrol ship in a contemporary version of Churchill’s “bodyguard of lies”, which relies on the sheer gigantic mass of pseudo-secret documents instead of double-agent deception to hide true secrets.

Alas, that is a vain hope. But after the ravages of Teixeira, the time has come to finally enforce “need-to-know” rules that would immediately and very drastically limit the number of readers of any given document. This in turn should generate counter-pressure against the bureaucratic malpractices that fuel the production of unnecessary classified documents — many of which deserve to be stamped “Unread” and returned to the sender.

Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM).

The latter induced President Emmanuel Macron to rush to Moscow and Kyiv to avert Ukraine’s imminent downfall by offering last-minute concessions to Putin. But the BND’s error had far graver consequences: told that it was impossible to stop Russia’s swift conquest, German chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to send weapons to Ukraine, refused to allow Estonia to send 122mm howitzers originally received from Germany, refused to rule out restricting its use of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and refused to allocate funds to rehabilitate Germany’s sadly diminished armed forces. Since Putin is especially attentive to German politics, this served as a strong green light for his war.

As for the CIA’s totally wrong assessment, it had still more serious consequences. Acting under the impression that the Russians would swiftly conquer Ukraine, the White House chose to evacuate the US Embassy in Kyiv instead of rushing in weapons that would only become Russia’s booty. The demoralising effect was amplified as other Western diplomats followed suit and fled.

The failure to dissuade Putin, then, was an intelligence failure — but this is something that only requires the resolve of 51 Senators and one President to fix. By contrast, Russia’s war-making capacity has failed at every level: in the quality of individual and unit tactical combat, in operational capacity, and, most egregiously, at the level of theatre strategy (the deployment of forces over the territory). The attempt to conquer Kyiv with an endless double column of armoured vehicles advancing on a single vector meant that every act of Ukrainian resistance generated cascading stop-and-go delays that emptied out fuel tanks.

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The most important tactical failure came right at the start. In the pre-dawn hours of the war on February 24, elite “air assault” infantry proved incapable of executing the key mission of the entire invasion. This was the Coup de Main that was to secure the Antonov airfield in Kyiv’s Hostomel exurb and open the way to the heart of the city, from where Zelenskyy was expected to flee in panic, leaving Ukraine’s forces leaderless and exposed. Arriving in a fleet of helicopters, the Russians duly seized the little-used airfield. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports were then expected to bring in many more troops to secure it, pending the arrival of mechanised units from nearby Belarus. But Zelenskyy and his ministers, who had gathered for war instead of fleeing, immediately ordered an all-out effort to counterattack the Russians with any and all forces that could reach the scene quickly.

In any normal scenario, to send odd lots of soldiers against cohesive elite units would be a sure recipe for disaster — but the ferociously determined Ukrainians overcame the Russians, who were disconcerted by having to fight hard just to survive, instead of advancing triumphantly to Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The IL-76 transports could not land amid the fighting, so the surviving airborne troopers had to be relieved by troops from Belarus. By that point, Ukraine’s forces were mobilised nationwide and the rapid capture of central Kyiv was out of the question.

Having blocked the Russians in Hostomel, the Ukrainians were unable to gather larger forces to crush them rapidly because they needed to send units across the country — from Kyiv and Kharkiv all the way round to Mikolaiv and Odessa. But by then the crucial fact had been established: the Russian airborne troopers in Hostomel were not tactically superior as professional elite troops should have been. The subsequent weeks of war have shown that the same was true of Russia’s tank crews, mechanised infantry and the artillery units that pounded towns and cities. Whether it was down to inattentive officers, perhaps distracted by business opportunities on the side, or because of inadequate supplies of fuel and ammunition, almost all Russia’s troops were badly undertrained, and therefore tactically inept.

Russian tactical incapacity also magnified the consequences of another surprise of this war: the emergence of super-empowered infantry that can destroy main battle tanks and knock helicopters out of the sky with shoulder-launched missiles, thereby regaining its long-lost role as the Queen of the battlefield. By 1943, the rocket-launcher M1A1 — nicknamed the “bazooka” — allowed heroic and very lucky infantrymen to occasionally destroy tanks; by 1955, the French produced wire-guided missiles that could destroy tanks if shielded from artillery, smokescreens or gunners on the hunt for them. But neither weapon could seriously impede armoured operations given normal artillery covering fires.

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Now it is different. With today’s missiles, soldiers can reliably destroy tanks and low-flying helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles that need only be pointed at the target once — while still retaining the infantry’s ancient advantages of economy, of abundance, and its ability to find cover far more easily than mechanised forces.

Russian army chiefs must have missed this tactical shift — not because they are still focused on re-fighting the last war, but because, just like their American counterparts, they were hypnotised by the trendy next war. This was meant to be fought with “post-modern information warfare”, or hybrid warfare, or “4^th Generation warfare ”— all so much more sophisticated, more advanced, and more high-tech than the old-fashioned “kinetic” warfare fought by blokes shooting at each other. It must have come as a big shock to Russia’s generals when Ukrainian soldiers could not be persuaded to surrender by sending menacing messages to their smartphones.

But now that the Ukrainians have gone on the offensive, they have lost their key advantage of remaining under cover while firing at exposed advancing enemies. They need armoured vehicles to avoid being held up by Russian fire, but so far they have received only a handful from the Czechs and Germans. What happens next in this war will very largely depend on the quantity and quality of the armoured vehicles friendly countries are willing to hand over to the Ukrainians. There is certainly no shortage of them in Europe, where shrunken armies have placed thousands of armoured vehicles in storage, ranging from thinly protected ten-ton M.113 troops carriers that are still better than nothing, to full-weight battle tanks with guns that can still be formidable if supplied with up-to-date rounds.

And this is just one more challenge in a war that will continue until Putin is willing to cut his losses and accept the one thing that Zelenskyy can give him: a promise that he will not apply for Nato membership. As to why the stalwart Zelenskyy has indicated he will do this, declaring that Ukraine’s model will instead be self-sufficient Israel, the answer is obvious: instead of strengthening its members, in recent times Nato has provided an alibi for their unilateral disarmament, which persisted even after Russia’s annexation of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea. Not only have armies shrunk, but their training is more ceremonial than functional, as became painfully evident when supposedly well-trained units were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In the years since Putin ended the post-1945 peace by seizing Crimea, only two European countries have acted to strengthen their armed forces: Finland in diverse ways, and Sweden whose government promptly reintroduced conscription to rebuild a strong army — neither of which are Nato members. Poland, which is a Nato member, contrives to have an army of 60,000 with its 37 million inhabitants, as opposed to Finland’s 280,000 on mobilisation with one sixth of the population.

As it happens, I was in Warsaw in November 2021, admittedly long ago, before the war. Upon asking the Presidential adviser whom I met for dinner why it was that Poland did not have a remotely commensurate army to defend itself given that it was next to Russia, he cited Nato’s security guarantee, which allowed Poland to spend its defence funds on what really mattered: a frigate in the Baltic (admittedly an excellent target for torpedoes or missiles), fancy helicopters for Polish units sent on peace-keeping missions, and the elaborate peaked hats of Polish officers. No wonder Zelenskyy gave up on Nato membership so easily.

The very great problem we all face — Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians and even Russians — is how to end this new European civil war. Now we are all stuck: Putin cannot leave the roulette table without the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as his prize, but Zelenskyy does not have the authority to give away Ukrainian territory even if he wanted to.

So here is my modest proposal: a referendum in each of the regions that requires a total ceasefire and which itself implies the renunciation of any further claims on Ukraine. Putin’s invasion failed within hours of being launched. Almost 50 days later, it is time for it to end.

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

In that remote past of a month ago, those were all decidedly mainstream preferences throughout Europe, albeit with a north-south divide. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden had all resurrected their ancient Baltic connections and therefore viewed Russia as a live threat. But in Italy and Spain such attitudes were rare, and declared Putin admirers could become ministers in coalition governments. As for France, Macron did not oppose the effectively pro-Russian stance of the German government because he also wanted a European defence, led by France, of course, as the only European nuclear power.

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

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In every country’s military, the equally abrupt reversals are causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets. The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Because Nato has not instituted a no-flight zone, for the excellent reason that it would lead to air combat that the loser might try to nullify by escalation, and with everything happening much too fast for adult supervision, no new air combat lessons have been learned. While the heroism of Ukrainian pilots flying older models of Russian aircraft against newer models is highly admirable, it adds nothing that is not already written in The Iliad.

At the level of grand strategy, the largest and by far most consequential discovery is that in spite of decades of talk about the “diffusion of power”, particularly with the rise of China but also of Turkey, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, it is still the same old G7 countries that hold the keys of the world. Once the US, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union make a decision, any country can be cut off from world finance and most of world commerce. Russia’s Aeroflot, for instance, had to stop flying abroad because its aircraft are leased from Western companies, and the money-transfer sanctions blocked its payments to them, leading to the confiscation of its aircraft if they land outside Russia.

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That would not bother the Chinese, whose airlines do not depend on foreign lessors. But by the second day of the Ukraine war, Beijing realised that China also lives in a G7 world, with its economy utterly dependent on the daily arrival of bulk carriers loaded with animal and human food from the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and a slew of other countries. China’s economy was self-sufficient if miserably poor in 1976 when I first visited, with a population on the edge of malnutrition. But today’s citizens will not grin and bear it without their meat, eggs, or milk. Last year, Xi Jinping’s naval groupies, including the jovial retired Admiral Luo Yuan, suggested that the US could be scared off from defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion by sinking a US warship or two, perhaps even an aircraft carrier. Now Xi must realise that if a US warship is sunk, the supply of animal feed would end.

Finally for the United States, the greatest lesson of immediate importance is that its foreign and defence policies are drastically degraded by the lack of basic intelligence about foreign countries — not because the CIA fails to steal their war plans, but because it cannot acquire elementary situational awareness. This is an inevitable consequence of a cultural collapse: in the old days, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible. But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

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In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

There was, however, a small glint on the horizon: a fleet of 31 privately chartered passenger jets that were scheduled to land, regardless of the new restrictions. Their cargo? Some 7,000 students from China — all specially flown in to study at universities in Manchester and the north of England.

After they landed, a handful of Manchester’s leading dignatories lined up to talk about the importance of “links between Britain and China” and “greater cultural understanding”. The socially distanced love-in was cemented by none other than the Chinese Consul General in Manchester, Mr Zheng Xiyuan: “We trust all students will work hard to become not just the backbone of our society but also messengers of friendship between our two peoples.”

Of course, no one would surely deny that it is important to maintain cordial relations with one of the world’s superpowers. But, as those planes touched down on the runway, there was no getting away from the cold reality — even in this time of crisis, even with all scheduled direct flights between China and Manchester cancelled at the time, Britain’s university sector simply could not do without Beijing’s moneybags. And the implications of this extend well beyond the beleaguered souls and balance sheets in the finance departments of our universities. In fact, as other countries across the world are starting to discover, we are not just offering China the chance for a British education; but quite possibly the keys to our nation’s security as well.

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In the UK alone, Chinese students account for almost £2 billion in revenue for the higher education sector. Crucially, nine British universities — many of them members of the Russell Group — depend on Chinese students for more than 20% of their revenue from tuition fees. Take Imperial College London, which gets more than 20% of its tuition fees from China. Without these students, it would face a £73 million black hole; all at a time when its research projects — which include a Covid-19 vaccine trial aimed at targeting the new mutant strains of the virus — could not be more crucial.

But this link between Britain’s universities and the Chinese state is hardly a new phenomenon. For years they have made for an inseparable couple, one whose relationship has longed looked, at the very best, questionable; at worst, potentially criminal.

“I think it’s probably going too far to suggest that we have become a client state of the Chinese,” Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute tells me. “But we have certainly been putting too many eggs in the Chinese basket. Inevitably having such dependent relationships with a country such as China — or Saudi Arabia even — is going to bring with it political challenges.”

In light of recent events, however, Mr Hillman’s use of the term “political challenges” seems worthy of a PhD in understatement. Indeed, such is our desperation for foreign investment that one particularly apposite Chinese proverb seems almost too prescient: “In every crisis, you will find an opportunity.” The Chinese state is certainly testing that maxim to its very limit.

Only yesterday it was revealed that Oxford University has agreed to re-name its Wykeham Chair of Physics as the Tencent-Wykeham Professorship — after Tencent, a Chinese software firm with links to the Communist regime’s intelligence services, offered a £700,000 donation in return. Meanwhile, on Monday it emerged that almost 200 British academics are being investigated by HMRC on suspicion of helping the Chinese Government build weapons of mass destruction. They have not been accused of spying per se, but unwittingly passing intellectual property to the Chinese authorities and thus violating strict laws on exports.

The British government is yet to send enforcement notices to the staff, who teach at more than dozen universities. Yet its warning certainly lends a sense of urgency to a report, published by Civitas this week, which alleges that 20 British universities have dealings with 29 Chinese institutions, as well as nine companies that have military links, including weapons conglomerates. It warned that UK research sponsored by Chinese organisations could have an “inadvertent dual use” in a military capacity — including hypersonic technology and research into Graphene which is used by the Chinese military in helicopters.

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Yet Britain’s universities seem more concerned with the economic fall-out from than pandemic than with any unseemly political or security repercussions. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when, for example, Manchester University has more Chinese students — they make up roughly one in eight of its student body — than any other university in Europe. That may explain why, when the pandemic first hit last year, Britain’s higher education sector was struck by a sense of impending doom. One minister reportedly said last summer that officials were “shitting themselves” at the prospect of a Chinese brain drain.

All of which raises an obvious question: how has Britain got itself into this mess? After all, there is nothing new about the Government’s security concerns over Beijing inveigling its way into our higher education sector. Even two years ago, the academic world was warned that “hostile state actors are targeting UK universities to steal personal data, research data and intellectual property, and this could be used for their own military, commercial and authoritarian interests.” University staff were also told that they “may also be targeted by an academic institution to undertake research which is of strategic benefit to that country”.

In fact, GCHQ had by 2019 already counted 500 Chinese military scientists attached to British universities who were working on technology platforms with a number of military applications, including missiles, supercomputers and fighter aircraft. And it’s all too easy to see how this research could end up being used as part of Beijing’s ever-expanding toolbox of state repression. Only last week, Manchester University was forced to cancel a contract with a Chinese company after it was warned that the software it supplied was being used by Beijing in its mass surveillance of Uighur Muslims.

Nor is that an anomaly. As recently as last summer, some UK universities were testing a new online teaching link which could prevent students based in China from remotely accessing material deemed unfavourable to or critical of the Communist regime. Moreover, a recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the infiltration of our universities by China lists, among others: Cambridge University’s links with a Chinese military institution already blacklisted by the US Government; a recruitment drive by Imperial College at the Harbin Institute of Technology, whose scientists work for the PLA and which is one of only eight Chinese universities with access to classified weapons research; and a laboratory funded jointly by Manchester University and a Chinese developer of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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For their part, the universities insist that due care and diligence is in place. In the wake of the ASPI report, Manchester University put out a back-covering statement: “We take all necessary measures to assure ourselves that our research is not used beyond its agreed application.” But whatever steps are being taken — both by universities and the security services — it may be too late.

Last year, a report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 900 graduates of Chinese universities allegedly linked to the PLA were enrolled in postgraduate studies at 33 British universities. And while we are yet to experience the full repercussions of such folly, we need only look across the Atlantic to see what could be in store for us.

Just a few weeks ago, the US attorney’s office announced the arrest of Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for “failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards from various entities in the People’s Republic of China to the US Department of Energy.” It came just a day after Meyya Meyyappan, NASA’s Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology, pled guilty in New York for lying about his participation in a Chinese government recruitment program.

But not all such American investigations have proved so fruitful. Last year, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Boston University student Yanqing Ye, who was unmasked as a lieutenant in the PLA. She was charged with being an agent of a foreign government, accessing US military websites and sending classified material back to China — but is now believed to have fled back to her home country.

In Britain, meanwhile, we continue to turn a blind eye to such threats. No doubt this is an inevitable consequence of the unseemly lengths our universities go to in order to secure funding from China. But it’s worth noting that Britain’s begging bowl has been in place for some time, and not just in the higher education sector. Indeed, it seems not so long ago that David Cameron spoke so enthusiastically about the “golden era” of Sino-UK relations.

This new relationship was sealed by Cameron and President Xi Jinping over a pint at the Plough, a pub near Chequers which, like all drinking spots in Britain, it is now firmly locked down. Locals, however, have every confidence that it will have the wherewithal to open again when the pandemic restrictions are finally lifted. The reason? The Plough was bought up by Chinese investors almost as soon the Supreme Leader downed his pint.

The mysterious creature known as Bellingcat bounded into the public consciousness in September 2018, when it “outed” the would-be Salisbury assassins. The two Russians who poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter had been identified by the UK authorities as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, but it was assumed that these names were false. Bellingcat found that the pair, who had presented themselves as tourists in a widely ridiculed interview on Russian television, were in fact intelligence officers: Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga.

Bellingcat commanded headlines around the world for its discovery, naming first Mishkin then Chepiga on its website, two weeks apart. What is more, unlike most traditional media, it revelled not only in its scoops, but in explaining step by step just how it had outsmarted the competition, by using information entirely in the public domain: Russian military academy yearbooks, open databases of car registrations, passport numbers.

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Even before the Salisbury incident, Bellingcat had a reputation. It put itself on the global sleuthing map in 2014 by publishing its painstaking research into the downing of MH17, just four months after the disaster. Bellingcat showed that a Buk missile system had been transported to Ukraine from a military base in the Russian city of Kursk, before being spotted on the return journey without one of its four missiles. Its evidence has been key in the criminal trial of three Russians and one Ukrainian believed to have been involved, which opened last year in The Hague.

Again, Bellingcat researchers said they worked entirely from sources — such as various Google platforms, press photos, crowd-sourcing and social media — available to anyone with the time and curiosity to look.

Most recently, Bellingcat has garnered headlines for the help — though the extent and precise nature of that help is not entirely clear — that it provided to Alexei Navalny during his five-month stay in Germany after he was poisoned. Bellingcat also established that a top-secret FSB (Russian security service) team had shadowed Navalny around Russia for at least five years. It is not clear whether the team ever had orders to kill him. But Bellingcat describes it as a “poison squad” and says it included people with chemical weapons expertise.

Apparently, no issue is too daunting. Over a decade, the organisation has fixed responsibility for atrocities during the war in Libya; found evidence of the Syrian government’s use of chemicals weapons against rebel forces; located ISIS sympathisers in Europe; and identified neo-Nazis in the Charlottesville protests. It has also been tackling disinformation connected with the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, it was nominated for an Emmy award, in the Outstanding New Approaches category.

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By Mary Dejevsky

So it’s worth asking: who is Bellingcat? This is the question its founder, Eliot Higgins, sets out to answer in his new book, We are Bellingcat. The story told is of a shape-shifting feline that grew from modest beginnings in a Leicester family home to become the global byword for open-source journalism. Higgins now has staff and a research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. Bellingcat has its claws hooked to a bunch of collaborative international ventures and is ever on the prowl for more. “This is only,” he concludes, “the start.”

In many ways, the evolution of Bellingcat has depended on a climate in which traditional journalism and traditional funding models are in difficulty. It is a non-profit; its methods are collaborative, transparent and moral — and enable it to prove what others cannot. Its early “staff” began as volunteers; they work from home, or wherever they may be. Bellingcat does not deal with commercial concerns; it crowdfunds where it can. It does not hack anyone or anything — or, just for argument’s sake, curry favour with anyone from the murky world of intelligence. That is olde worlde investigation; Bellingcat is the new.

The small team Higgins originally assembled — including an ex-Stasi agent, a Dutchman and a Bulgarian who first “met” through their obsession with social media investigations — would perfectly meet Dominic Cummings’s specification for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills”. Its motto is “Identify, Verify, Amplify”. The appeal should be obvious. It doesn’t matter where you come from or how many degrees you don’t have (Higgins himself dropped out of university): you are your results. In fact, he and his crew find a certain satisfaction in their lack of formal qualifications. They acquire their expertise — for recognising weapons, say, or reading satellite images — as they go along. But so skilled have they become, Higgins suggests, that old-fashioned professionals increasingly approach Bellingcat when their own investigations reach a dead end.

And this might be the nub of it. Bellingcat has, through its undoubtedly dogged and impressive work, achieved huge success and, with it, such standing that reporters lap up its every finding. Bellingcat basks in universally warm journalistic profiles.  The BBC routinely gives its findings top headlines and its Newsnight programme worked with Bellingcat on its research into the Salisbury “third man”. Higgins recently had “lunch with FT”, where he was presented as a doughty fighter against misinformation.

A recent article by Tom Burge, who works for the FCDO, a defence-related think tank, offered some insights. He noted that not only could such groups ferret out hard-to-find information, but that at a time of declining trust in officialdom, Bellingcat et al enjoyed a credibility Western governments have largely lost.

But is it not here that the alarm bells — from which, incidentally, Bellingcat’s name derives — might start tinkling at least a little? Why should Bellingcat be exempt from the scepticism that journalists are trained to apply to every source and every conclusion? How does its (now considerable) self-regard stack up?

Yes, Bellingcat’s methods are new in that they exploit the precision and global reach of new communications. But the opportunities — provided by the quantity of information out there — are newer than the actual methods. To probe beyond the “usual suspects” is fundamental to investigative journalism. Bellingcat, it should be realised, has antecedents. The Troubles in Northern Ireland provided fertile territory for digging up facts inconvenient to the governments of the day. The revelations about rendition and torture during the US-led “war on terror” relied on dogged research — using flight manifests among other things — not dissimilar to the methods used by Bellingcat. Such investigations were at least as challenging to the establishment of the time as Bellingcat, which has mostly discomfited foreign governments.

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Another, more important, question rarely asked among the blizzard of facts kicked up by Bellingcat’s investigations is how transparent is the organisation really? How genuinely open are all its sources? Higgins is impressive in his insistence that every fact and every conclusion is tracked, so that any amateur with sufficient application can, as with the scientific method, replicate the findings. But this boast, it emerges, is not quite true.

Many of the Russia-related investigations have relied to a greater or lesser degree on enormous data bases that somehow came into Higgins’s possession; other information has, at one time or another, involved payment, both above and below board. Sometimes Higgins notes these exceptions in his book and the possible qualms they might prompt; at other times he skirts delicately around the subject.

And a central question that proceeds from that is whether Bellingcat might, at any stage, have cooperated with a nation’s security services. With very few exceptions — including a report of a US strike on civilians in Syria — Bellingcat’s findings bolster what might be called a Western case: for anti-Assad rebels in Syria, against the Kremlin (MH17, the Salisbury poisonings, Navalny).

Does Higgins know with whom exactly he is consorting? He is upfront about funding from, and cooperation with, the US-based Atlantic Council, which in turn has received money from the UK Foreign Office. But where does the initial information or the tip-offs come from? How trustworthy are they? Those leaked Russian databases — who acquired them? Might they have been doctored in advance? Higgins doesn’t even hint at the possibility.

When Bellingcat identified Mishkin and Chepiga as the culprits in the Salisbury poisoning — and a third, more senior, character called Denis Sergeyev — did this information really come as news to the UK security services? Or was it helpful, shall we say, for that information to be released by a source that journalists, and the general public, might find more credible than the guys whose duff intelligence triggered the Iraq War? It is admitted (usually behind closed doors) that launching this war on a false premise has undermined trust in the intelligence services for a generation.

Likewise, does the tracking of Navalny by Russia’s security service imply orders to kill? Bellingcat’s own headlines give that impression, but surveillance and hit squads are rather different things.

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Higgins’s partial answer is that some recent Russian actions — restrictions on conscripts using social media, better data-base security — amount to an admission that Bellingcat got it right. But always, everywhere? If Bellingcat wasn’t beholden to anyone at the start, is it now? And even if it isn’t, are there ways in which it has knowingly or not been co-opted? Tom Burge argues that organisations such as Bellingcat provide cover for information that governments want out there, but do not want to sign. He also notes, with disarming frankness, “unaffiliated analysts are harder to smear”.

Which might prompt the biggest question of all. Just who is Eliot Higgins? Beyond the barest mention of his failure as a student of journalism, his obsession with gaming and his Leicester home, he refers only to having held some “administrative” jobs, before what had been an absorbing hobby made him an expert and progressively became his work. We are Bellingcat, says the title of his book, and by the end we know something about Bellingcat as “an intelligence agency for the people”, as the subtitle has it. What we don’t know is: who’s the “we”?

This approach manages to coexist with the overwhelming evidence that cognitive ability — human intelligence — has a significant heritable component. We are not blank slates, at least not when it comes to our ability to think, yet while the evidence is overwhelming — see here, here and here — the Left, in particular, is hostile to the idea, or even discussing it.

The reason, at least on the surface, is well-intentioned. Progressives can say, with some justice, that categorising people by intelligence is an ethical nightmare. The use of epistocracy – government by the clever – to justify everything from the oppression of women to slavery goes all the way back to Aristotle. It is no coincidence that “intelligence testing” and eugenics emerged at the same moment. Indeed, the history and validity of measuring and testing “intelligence” is itself fraught with controversy.

But in seeking to push back against narratives that could be used to encourage bigotry, the Left has blinded itself to the biggest contemporary inequality story of all: the emergence of a new cognitive elite.

Consider ‘John’. Our hypothetical John is a poster boy for social mobility: born amid the industrial decline of a post-industrial community, to working-class parents, he did well at school and won a scholarship to a top university. John did not go back home, but instead moved to a flourishing global city for a career in financial services. He married another high flyer, and they live a middle-class life in a leafy suburb.

John could be British or American, Canadian or Australian. He has counterparts — Jean, Hans, Gianni — in many other countries. His story is a textbook case of meritocracy in action, rewarding the determination, hard work and natural ability of someone from a working-class background with a successful career in a field far removed from that of his parents.

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His story is also a parable of what in human genetics is called “assortative mating“: the tendency of people to pair up with partners of a similar social status. A 2017 paper that studied assortative mating in humans found, among other factors, a strong correlation between the educational attainment levels of life partners. If we take educational attainment as a rough proxy for cognitive ability, we can infer from this paper that assortative mating will result in couples of a similar intelligence.

It is difficult to argue against meritocracy. Who could object to people being rewarded for their ability and hard work regardless of background? What happens, though, when you generalise that pattern over several generations, and add in the fact that cognitive ability is highly hereditary?

The children of John and his wife are unlikely to grow up poor or leave school with no qualifications. Those children will be more likely than not to pair up with similar partners. And every time someone like John leaves home for the opportunities of the big city, taking his genes with him, the chances of someone with the most sought-after cognitive abilities being born in his new home increases fractionally, and decreases correspondingly in his place of birth.

We should expect the entry of women into education and the workforce to accentuate this effect. Two clever, well-paid professionals, benefiting from meritocracy to have successful careers before pairing up to start a family, will have a combined income far beyond what could be achieved by a family with one breadwinner and a stay at home parent, or indeed any but the most high-earning of single parents. They will pass these opportunities – along with their genes – to their children, and thus perpetuate the pattern.

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Over time, the country’s Johns and their equally ambitious wives will increasingly filter out of the general population and pass the fruits of their meritocratic success and genetic ability on to their children. These generations will be doubly advantaged, by their inherited ability and also by their parents’ relative wealth. They will also be more and more geographically concentrated in places where their aptitudes command the highest rewards.

These are tendencies, of course, to which there will be many exceptions, but in aggregate they will make a difference.

In 2017, the Social Mobility Commission reported on a growing concentration of opportunity in some areas and away from other geographic “cold spots”; in 2018 the OECD reported that inequality was becoming more acute and social classes more rigid. It is not news to point to the emergence of an elite, increasingly concentrated in areas economically, geographically and culturally distinct from the “left behind” places abandoned in the pursuit of social mobility.

But the Left has little to say about the role of intelligence in this.

For one thing, it is a little awkward. The chance for anyone to get a great job regardless of origin, and the right of women to enter and succeed in the workplace, have been cherished liberal ideals for decades. It is perhaps easier to ignore or traduce discussions of intelligence and genetics than to consider whether the long-term interaction of hereditary intelligence with meritocracy and second-wave feminism is contributing to other forms of inequality.

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In an alternative world, where we accepted the influence of heritability on cognitive ability but still cared about the poor or vulnerable, what would Left-wing policy look like? Education might be less obsessed with trying to give everyone the same education, or get everyone to university, and more focused on bringing out the best in everyone regardless of natural ability. It might also pay more attention to forms of intelligence overlooked by conventional qualifications and corporate recruitment practices.

Social policy might be less fixated on “social mobility” (in other words easy movement of the clever and motivated toward the elite), and more interested in cohesion across socioeconomic strata. One way this could be applied in practice might be requiring housing developers to pay more than lip service to building a walkable, multigenerational blend of more or less affordable homes.

Such a world might also expect the cognitive elite to be less self-congratulatory about the meritocratic righteousness of their position on top of the pile. Differences of dignity or worth do not follow from differences of intelligence, a fact that seems to have escaped those members of the cognitive elite busy lecturing us de haut en bas about everything from sugar to climate change.

A Left-wing worldview that took into account cognitive ability might even ask an emerging elite to exchange self-righteous entitlement for a sense of duty to the wider community. Something, indeed, not unlike what was once called “noblesse oblige“.

Except, of course, you can’t. Or, at least, it’s not as straightforward as you might think. Decades of studies have showed that our personality, and specifically our self-control – our ability to override impulses to do pleasurable things now, in order to gain reward later – is heavily influenced by our genes. But there was wide variation in how much. Now, a fascinating meta-analysis has taken lots of studies on the topic of self-control and heritability and combined them, to see what, taken together, they all said.

These were all studies in twins: either identical (“monozygotic”) or non-identical (“dizygotic”) twins. Identical twins are genetically identical; non-identical twins share 50% of their genes, just like normal siblings. The studies measured how similar each set of twins was on some measure of self-control, usually a questionnaire filled out by either the twins themselves or a parent.

If identical twins were more similar than non-identical twins, then there was some genetic role; but if they were less than twice as similar, then there was some role for the “shared environment”. The shared environment is all that stuff that siblings go through together: parenting, schooling, neighbourhood, the stuff we think of when we think of “nurture”. Everything that’s not genetics or shared environment is known as “non-shared environment”, a technical term that essentially means “random stuff”.

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The finding was that the average correlation among identical twins was 0.58 (on a scale of -1 to 1), while the correlation among non-identical twins was 0.28. That is: the study found that about 60% of the variation in our ability to control our impulses is genetic. And the identical twins’ score was twice that of the non-identical ones, so the shared environment seems to have “little influence”. It appears to be essentially genes plus random stuff.

This isn’t the final word; for one thing, the paper hasn’t been through peer review yet. For another, no one study, even a meta-analysis, is unvarnished truth. But it’s in line with expectations.

And it’s worth thinking through the implications. We criticise people for laziness, but laziness is a manifestation of poor self-control; an inability to overcome the urge to do nothing. People with low impulse control find it harder to resist psychoactive substances – drink, drugs, tobacco – and to resist high-calorie foods. They also may struggle to resist violent or aggressive impulses, and be more likely to face trouble with the law.

People look at this the wrong way, sometimes. They reject genetic explanations for social problems, such as obesity or drug addiction or violence, because they think it implies that when someone is obese or addicted or violent, it’s their fault. But it’s the opposite. It implies that it’s absolutely not their fault, any more than it’s a short person’s fault that they can’t reach fruit on the high branches of a tree.

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For instance, in the case of obesity. Coincidentally there’s another study out, about the genetics of obesity, and it finds that – unsurprisingly – there is a strong genetic component to whether we are fat or lean. Again, that’s confirming something that we largely already knew. But what might be more surprising is that previous research has found that many of the genes that are relevant in obesity are genes that control the brain, not the metabolism.

The neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet’s book The Hungry Brain details how our brains govern our weight; people differ in how attractive they find high-calorie food, and in how able they are to resist the impulse to eat it. And our brains try to keep the level of fat in our bodies stable, but are especially worried about losing fat. So if we end up fatter – because highly palatable modern junk food attracts us even when we’re not hungry – and then try to lose some weight, our brains make us extra hungry to get the food back on.

What’s interesting, though, is how that manifests. Previous experiments had showed that people on severe calorie-restricted diets – starvation diets, essentially – became obsessed with food: they talked about little else, they dreamt and fantasised about food, they “became fascinated by recipes and cookbooks, and some even began collecting cooking utensils”, writes Guyenet.

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What was interesting, was that severely obese people who lost large amounts of weight in laboratory settings, but who were still obese and still eating more than enough to sustain life if not weight, exhibited the same symptoms. Their brains ramped up the obsession with food.

OK, you might think. But you still can resist the impulse to eat. It’s still free will.

Think, though, about other impulses in your life. For instance, as Jeff Friedman, a geneticist at Rockefeller, pointed out, you can consciously resist the impulse to breathe – for a while. But eventually that impulse will overwhelm your conscious control and there is nothing you can do about it. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty,” writes Friedman. That is the sort of impulse that obese people have to resist, constantly, to lose weight.

That’s how all these drives must feel. It’s not that laziness manifests itself as a conscious decision to sit on your arse playing Call of Duty rather than going to do your job. It manifests as a powerful resistance to doing something, as though action is almost literally painful. It’s not that drug addiction feels like you’re weighing up the pros and cons of robbing a house to pay for heroin; it’s a drive like starvation, or oxygen deprivation.

Some people are genetically lucky enough to have a greater ability to resist those drives. But that’s winning a lottery of birth, not something morally praiseworthy.

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Our society uses the term “meritocracy” quite a lot. It’s a word born of satire, but we use it earnestly. People who pull themselves up by their bootstraps deserve the better life they achieve.

But that’s just not how it can possibly be. There may be unavoidable practical reasons why we give people who work hard greater rewards (on average) than those who don’t, just as we give people who are intelligent greater rewards (on average) than those who aren’t – we need to attract and incentivise hard-working, intelligent people to do the jobs we want doing.

But those people who are able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps will, usually, have attributes – intelligence, self-control – that are as much a lottery as being born rich in the first place.

If you think I’m saying this means that the people who didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps are to blame for that failure, then you’ve missed the whole point. I’m saying no one should be blamed or praised for their personalities. This is not the same as saying that everyone who’s successful is clever, and that we don’t need to work to address social injustice.

As the Marxist blogger Chris Dillow points out in the analogous case of IQ, being intelligent is helpful in any social structure, but that structure can still be immensely unjust. “You needed cognitive skills to climb the USSR’s bureaucracy or to pass the civil service exam of medieval China”, he writes, but that doesn’t make them egalitarian paradises.

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Just as that is true of intelligence, it’s true of self-control. Being born rich is lucky; being born intelligent is lucky; being born with good self-control is lucky. None of these things makes you a better or more valuable person. Society needs to look out for people who were born with attributes that aren’t suited to modern life, rather than blame them for not fitting in.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about “neurolaw”; rethinking the justice system in the light of the fact that we’re not all equally capable of resisting impulses, and thinking in terms of crime prevention rather than blame: some people might need to be imprisoned for crimes because they’re likely to reoffend, but not for reasons of punishment. Comparably, we need to accept that there are people in society who are born with less ability to work hard, and less ability to control their eating and their substance use, than others.

For a start, this understanding supports the case for taxes on fattening foods or restrictions on advertising for addictive substances – the libertarian case against that is undermined if we are not all equally free to resist them.

And, like the understanding that not everyone is equally intelligent, it implies that society ought to be more willing to provide for people who are less capable in the world of work. Perhaps that means a greater social safety net, more money taken from people who have been lucky enough to be born rich, clever, or hardworking, and given to those who aren’t; Dillow suggests a universal basic income, so that no one is forced to rely on luck to survive in the first place.

But the most important thing that needs to flow from it is a more forgiving approach. You wouldn’t (I assume) believe that people born tall, or good-looking, are morally superior. You should stop thinking that about people born hard-working or slim, too.

And we’re going to get better at it. That means that, as a society, we’re going to have to make big decisions on this, soon. As it stands, we know many bits of DNA that are involved in intelligence; we have the technology to select embryos for them, or to (crudely) edit embryos to include some; and while Britain has stringent legal oversight of genetic research and its clinical applications, that is far from true everywhere.

Here’s how it works. First, stop talking about “the gene for” intelligence. Genes are ‘coding’ regions of the chromosomes: the bits that tell your cells to make specific proteins. There are about 20,000 of them.

Genes, though, only make up about 2% of your actual genome. The other 98% doesn’t code for proteins, but can have profound effects. Nowadays geneticists are much less likely to talk about “genes”, and much more likely to talk about changes to the individual building blocks of DNA anywhere on the genome. The different forms of those building blocks are called “single nucleotide polymorphisms” or SNPs, pronounced “snips”.

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Also, for almost all complex traits, it’s not “a” gene or SNP, it’s absolutely loads of them. For instance, one big study looked at 1.1 million people’s genomes, and found 1,271 SNPs relating to intelligence. It estimated that those SNPs explain about 11% of the variance in educational attainment and about the same in cognitive ability. (The “variance” is a measure of how spread-out the scores are around the average.) A review in Nature Genetics this year estimated that our current knowledge allows us to explain about 20% of the overall variance in intelligence in terms of specific SNPs.

We know, from twin studies, that intelligence is at least 50% heritable, so there’s a lot more to find. But still, that’s a big deal. For comparison, the impact of (non-negligent, non-abusive) parenting on IQ is probably essentially zero; the most generous estimates put it at 10%.

So, we know lots of SNPs that are involved in IQ. Using statistical techniques, we could predict quite effectively which of two people was more intelligent simply by looking at their genomes.

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And, right now, we can look at the genomes of embryos before they’re implanted during IVF. It’s already done for various diseases caused by single mutations – it’s called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. At the fertility clinic, a couple might have 10 or so viable embryos; the clinicians would test them all, and if one of them were to have the gene for cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anaemia or Huntington’s disease, you throw that one away and implant one of the ones that doesn’t.

But now we can do it for the complex, ‘polygenic’ conditions. Things like diabetes, many cancers, and depression are heavily genetic. There’s no one SNP that causes them, but you can estimate an embryo’s risk by looking at the whole genome.

That’s easy, now. Less than 20 years ago, it took the Human Genome Project more than a decade and over a billion dollars to sequence one single genome. Now you can do the same thing for about £1,000 in less than 24 hours. There’s at least one company offering to do exactly this with “type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease” etc and so on. This isn’t, necessarily, selling snake-oil to idiots: a new study thinks you can identify people at a greater than 50% risk of diabetes from their genetics alone.

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You could do exactly the same thing with intelligence. You could sequence the genomes of a couple’s embryos prior to implantation and select the one with the selection of SNPs most correlated to intelligence. And this is before we get onto the possibilities of actually editing the genome, with tools such as CRISPR

There’s an objection some people make at this point. We can’t select for intelligence, they say, because we don’t know what intelligence is. IQ tests, they say, only measure how good you are at IQ tests.

That’s not really true. How well you do at IQ tests is highly correlated with how well you do at school and work, and how much you earn, to your physical and mental health, to your reaction time, even to your per-year risk of death. It also correlates with all the many different ‘kinds’ of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. (All this holds even after you control for race and social class: this isn’t, or isn’t simply, about posh white people making a test that posh white people do well at, in a society that makes it easy for posh white people in general.) There have been awful misuses of IQ research, but it is clearly measuring something real. And it is clearly highly genetically influenced.

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So there are incentives for parents to test their embryos for the SNPs correlated to IQ. One statistically minded blogger I follow estimates that, with current knowledge and technology, selecting the highest-scoring embryo from 10 would correlate to about a 3-point bump in IQ. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University says that research finds that each 1-point gain in IQ roughly correlates to a 1% increase in income. It’s not huge, it’s wildly variable, and it may be that the causal direction isn’t as straightforward as that, but it’s certainly not negligible.

If you look at a national level, though, things get interesting, if controversial. While individual IQ scores are only fairly predictive – someone with a high IQ is more likely to have a high-paying job, but there’s lots of variation and a bad score on an IQ test definitely does not mean you’re going to have a terrible life (lots of professors have below-average IQs) – national IQ effects are much stronger. One, admittedly controversial, study suggests that a 10-point jump in average IQ correlates to a doubling of the size of the national economy.

But how accurate is that? Many people have argued against it, others in support of it. It’s also likely that the causation is complex: a bigger economy leads to higher IQs, as well as the other way around. But even if the figure is off by an order of magnitude, and a 10-point jump in IQ merely leads to a 10% increase in GDP, that is still big. You’d need to do a lot of genetic engineering for it to have an effect – it would probably have to be state-supported – but over a few generations it could be dramatic.

In the West, we’re wary about human genetic engineering. A recent survey found that 80% of Americans opposed editing an embryo’s genes to improve its intelligence. There are concerns over its safety, which presumably will reduce as the technology matures.

But there is also a fear of ‘playing god’ and interfering with nature. More seriously, to my mind, people worry, not unfairly, that it could lead to the creation of a genetic underclass; with rich people able to afford cleverer children, poorer people not.

Where you stand on all this will be largely a matter of temperament: different people will have different feelings about the same evidence. But arguably, everything humans have done since the invention of the flint axe is ‘playing god’, and everything that humans do is easier for rich people to do. In fact, rich people have traditionally been able to boost their intelligence through better nutrition and education. Genetic editing at least has the advantage that the benefits will be in the gene pool for everyone, and as it gets cheaper it’ll be more accessible for lower earners, just as food and education has become.

And the advantages are obvious. Smarter countries are happier, richer, and longer-lived. Being smarter is correlated with being happier and longer-lived. My own feeling is that – with due attention being paid to the caveats, the risks and the downsides – genetic selection for intelligence (and other traits) will probably be, on balance, a good thing, Brave New World notwithstanding.

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In any case, it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. China is heartily embracing the possibilities. The facility at BGI Shenzhen is the largest genetics research centre in the world and does huge amounts of research into human intelligence. The Chinese population is less wary of genetic engineering than Western populations are. And while “germline” editing – editing the DNA in our eggs and sperm that would be passed on to our children and their children – is banned in many Western countries, including Britain, it’s not in China (or several other countries). China was the first country to edit human embryos, back in 2015.

Essentially, we can’t stop this sort of genetic engineering. The incentives, at national and individual level, make it inevitable. China is simply going now where we’re all going to follow later. It would be better to acknowledge the reality and try to shape it – rather than try to hold back the flood.

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