It has been a busy few weeks for Claude: its ever-improving coding capabilities were also credited with wiping trillions off software stocks (dubbed the SaaSpocalypse). Now, one of these developments Anthropic’s leadership was, presumably, very happy about. The other, rather less so. For months, Anthropic has been trying to maintain some say over how it is used. While the company is reportedly willing to loosen its usage restrictions, it still wants assurances that Claude wouldn’t be deployed for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems. These demands are not out of character. They are the founding commitments of a company whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has staked its identity on being the responsible actor in an industry not known for responsibility. Indeed, Anthropic is a company that has pushed for greater regulation at a moment when the White House has made deregulation the centerpiece of its AI agenda.

That tension has been building since last summer, when Anthropic was awarded a $200 million Pentagon contract, making it the first AI model developer deployed in classified military operations. But it was the Maduro raid that brought it to a head. First reported in Axios last week, the Pentagon’s response to Anthropic’s concerns has not been an apology, but an ultimatum. Grant us unrestricted rights to your models, or be designated a “supply chain risk” — a label normally reserved for foreign enemies like Huawei. This is the American state telling a private company that its ethics are a threat to national security. That its values are, in the language of trade policy, a hostile act. Not only would this see Anthropic’s contracts with the Pentagon voided, it would force other companies that work with the Pentagon to certify they aren’t using Claude in those workflows.

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The writing had been on the wall for weeks. Secretary of War Hegseth had already made this explicit at a January event announcing the Pentagon’s new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI. Back then, he announced that the agency would not “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars“. He was talking about Anthropic. This week, the rhetoric led to a physical confrontation. Hegseth has summoned Dario Amodei to the E-Ring for a Tuesday morning meeting that senior Defense officials described as a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot” moment. According to reports, Hegseth said: “The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

In the meeting, Hegseth reportedly told Amodei that when the Pentagon buys a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn’t get to tell them where to fly it. He set a Friday 5pm deadline to sign away their “safety filters”. Officials have even discussed invoking the Defense Production Act, which enables the government to exert control over domestic industries during national security crises. This would move beyond a contract dispute into a form of digital nationalization, giving the government the authority to essentially seize control of the technology and strip away the guardrails themselves.

Regardless of Anthropic’s decision on Friday, the state is making it clear: AI is no longer a product; it is a requisitionable resource. Now, ideological clashes in AI are nothing new (rumor has it that Musk built xAI to stop “woke AI” from ruining his mission to Mars). But the transition we’re seeing is from a boardroom culture war to an existential test of state sovereignty. In the 2010s, tech CEOs were treated like heads of state. Today, they are being reminded that their “safety filters” and private ethics cannot dictate American foreign policy. The state has reclaimed the veto.

This is a far cry from the world Alex Karp himself pitched to the tech world last year in his bestselling book, The Technological Republic. In it, Karp argued that Silicon Valley had a civic obligation to re-engage with the American state. Not because it was forced to, but because liberal democracy required it. It was a rallying cry for voluntary partnership: from software to hard power.

Silicon Valley’s old California ideology — apolitical, libertarian and vaguely utopian — was dying. Karp wanted to replace it with something more serious. In his view, the world’s best minds were busy building phone apps and marketing algorithms. Brilliant people, Karp argued, wasting their talents on shiny new toys while China built weapons.

His diagnosis is correct, but it is not without its flaws. If you accept his premise that Silicon Valley must serve the state because the stakes are existential, then voluntary cooperation was always going to struggle. The higher the stakes, the less the state was ever going to ask nicely. When Oppenheimer told Truman he had blood on his hands after Hiroshima, Truman’s response was withering: “He hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” Dario Amodei is not Oppenheimer. But both the logic and the tension are the same. Like nuclear, the ability to deploy AI at scale is likely going to be the defining strategic capability of the 21st century. Karp wanted a new Manhattan Project. In many ways, he got one.

This is what the White House’s AI Action Plan makes plain. It mandates that the government will only contract with frontier AI developers whose models are deemed free from “ideological bias”. Anthropic’s safety filters are precisely what they had in mind when they wrote this. The Pentagon’s ultimatum is not a departure from policy. It is the policy. The truth is that Karp’s book never truly specified what voluntary cooperation would actually require. Now the Pentagon has filled in the blank. The answer is that cooperation need not be voluntary. Karp called it a republic because that’s what he hoped it would be. After all, his own company was already aligned with the state. But the republic is already dead. The strategic importance of AI means that it was always going to be an empire waiting.

Like the merchant-captains of the 18th century, frontier companies are granted the right to profit only so long as their prizes, compute and intelligence, serve the Crown. They can chase commercial success, attract investment, hire the best engineers, build the most capable models. But the moment their values conflict with the state’s requirements, they learn what they actually are: subjects. The Pentagon’s ultimatum to Anthropic is not an aberration. It is a message to the entire industry: you are either an instrument of the state, or you are a pirate ship to be scuttled.

Some have already read that signal. Meta bent the knee and rewrote its policies in 2024 to permit military and defense applications of its open-source models, after reports emerged that Chinese researchers had adapted them for PLA use. On Monday, Musk’s xAI signed an agreement to allow the military to use its model, Grok, in classified systems. Google and OpenAI have also been in talks to move into the classified space. This is the trajectory.

However the Trump administration’s recent launch of the US Tech Force, billed as America’s elite corps for the AI revolution, reminds us that the privateer era is transitional. States have always, eventually, built their own navies. But while that navy is still being built, the Crown still needs its privateers. And it intends to extract its due. When Trump approved H200 chip sales to China in January, he imposed a 25% tariff and a 50% volume cap. Just as the Spanish Crown demanded the Quinto Real — a royal fifth of every privateer’s plunder — Washington now claims sovereign royalty on the most strategic resource of the century: compute. But the Quinto Real was never just about the gold. The Crown controlled the ports, the licenses, the routes. Who could sail, where, and on what terms. Washington is doing the same. The tariffs and caps are not trade policy. They are the architecture of a technological empire: the terms on which the rest of the world gets to participate in the intelligence age.

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The strategic logic here is not new. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that whoever controlled the sea lanes controlled the century — not just by sailing them, but by setting the terms on which rivals could access them at all. Britain didn’t just use the oceans. It ruled them by decree. Today’s sea lanes are chips, clusters, and the models trained on them. Washington is not simply trying to win the AI race. It is trying to become the power that decides who else gets to run it, and on what terms. As Trump’s AI Czar David Sachs has repeatedly stated, “I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack”.

But America is not the only technological empire. On the other side of the Pacific, Beijing is playing a similar game. Already its internet regulator has banned its biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia chips entirely, ordering ByteDance and Alibaba to switch to domestic alternatives. The message, as one executive put it, is “loud and clear“. That AI is a sovereignty project, not a tech one.  Data centers have been instructed to purge foreign components entirely. Beijing is calling it “algorithmic sovereignty” — complete control over its computing infrastructure by 2027. That logic is already visible in the behavior of Beijing’s so-called “Six Tigers”: Zhipu, Moonshot, DeepSeek, MiniMax and their peers — which in recent weeks have launched a flurry of highly specialized frontier models focused on coding, reasoning, and cost efficiency. The emphasis is not simply on capability, but on independence: training on domestic chips where possible, optimizing for lower computational footprints, and aggressively undercutting Western pricing in emerging markets. For China, the main aim is not to reach AGI, but to diffuse its technological sovereign stack around the world.

This is looking less farfetched than it did even just a year ago. In December, China built a working prototype of an EUV lithography machine — the technology Washington believed it had successfully ring-fenced. Beijing is building its own empire, on its own terms — and its frontier firms are integrated into that project from the outset. Both Beijing and Washington understand that whoever controls the compute, the models, and the political authority to deploy them will likely own the next century. Unfortunately for Anthropic, that framing leaves no room for negotiation. You are either an instrument of the empire, or you are an enemy to be managed. Karp wrote the right book. He just gave it the wrong title. The technological republic is dead — if it ever existed at all. The Anthropic saga shows that the technological empire, however, is well underway.

Britain’s intelligence agencies have belatedly admitted the gravity of the challenge. After a decade of neglecting the threats posed by an increasingly assertive China, MI5 warned of the “epic scale” of CCP espionage: the world’s largest intelligence apparatus, which commands tens of thousands of officers and agents, targets the UK “prolifically and aggressively”. According to MI5’s director, the CCP represents Britain’s most “game-changing” security challenge.

Yet while MI5 sounds the alarm, Britain’s response remains entirely incoherent. This month, the most serious breach of parliamentary security in living memory — an alleged spy operation run on behalf of the Chinese state — collapsed in court. Despite “slam-dunk” evidence of intelligence reaching Beijing’s top leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service could not persuade a single minister to state, on record, that China posed a national-security threat during the charge period.

On 21 October, the Labour government will decide whether to approve the construction of a vast Chinese embassy, opposite the Tower of London. This represents more than a planning dispute: it is a choice of whether to anchor, in the heart of the capital, the surveillance machinery of a one-party state which systematically crushes free expression, jails lawyers, and tortures its critics. The five-acre compound, heavily fortified and opaque by design, would be Britain’s largest foreign mission, housing more than 200 CCP employees and their families — any number of whom could be intelligence operatives.

The site offers Chinese intelligence an ideal perch within the arteries of the British economy. It is slated to sit directly atop sensitive fiber-optic cabling which transmits the City of London’s financial data — and a large share of global transactions. And this is a regime at the bleeding edge of digital surveillance technologies, actively working to reengineer the global financial system away from the dollar, and towards the Chinese yuan. Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove has warned that such proximity could allow China, “with impunity”, to tap those lines and “collect anything and everything going down those communication chains”. The White House has already expressed “deep concern”. For Britain’s allies, this is a critical test of reliability: as a member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, the UK cannot afford to be regarded as the “weak link” through which sensitive intelligence might bleed to Beijing.

While intelligence officials now reassure Parliament that the risks are “manageable”, it is not clear why Britain’s allies should be convinced. The CCP has already successfully infiltrated Parliament; cultivated influence within the monarchy, and mounted large-scale cyber-attacks which compromised the data of 40 million UK citizens. Now, the collapse of the spy-case prosecution has dispelled any pretense of control. Britain’s China problem is an open wound — exposed, untreated, and festering in full view of its allies.

Beijing has made little effort to assuage concerns. On the contrary, it has refused the British government’s request to explain why its blueprints include mysteriously blacked-out rooms and an underground tunnel, insisting that further detail is “neither necessary nor appropriate”. It is a curiously contemptuous attitude. And when the roles are reversed, it becomes absurd. It is inconceivable that China would permit Britain to erect a vast fortified compound on Chang’an Avenue — within walking distance of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound and atop critical data infrastructure — let alone tolerate omissions labeled “none of your business” in the plans.

Chinese intelligence services represent a different kind of threat from most other states. Edward Snowden’s disclosures stripped away a polite fiction, revealing that embassies are not neutral houses of diplomacy, but platforms for espionage. Yet where embassies are typically used to gather information or advance strategic interests, Beijing integrates traditional espionage with the policing of ideology abroad. Its mission goes beyond the defense of China’s security to the preservation of the CCP’s monopoly on power through silencing critics wherever they live. This entails monitoring, intimidating, and neutralizing civilians — including students, dissidents, exiles, and academics — as much as it targets foreign governments.

At the heart of this effort is the Party’s United Front system, a global political influence network operating through Chinese embassies to co-opt institutions, silence dissent, and enforce ideological conformity beyond China’s borders. In practice, this means surveillance of diaspora communities, pressure campaigns against exiles, and harassment of activists associated with the CCP’s so-called “five poisons”: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese independence advocates, Falun Gong practitioners, and Chinese democracy activists. Uyghur activists in Britain have been threatened, while Hong Kong activists, including then-teenager Chloe Cheung, have had bounties placed on their heads. At times this repression has been brazen — as in 2022, when a Hong Kong pro-democracy protester was dragged by his hair into China’s Manchester consulate and beaten — but more often it works through fear and impunity, creating conditions where critics censor themselves rather than risk retaliation.

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This machinery has already extended into British academia. The Party’s ears and eyes are embedded within UK campuses through the United Front system. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, nominally cultural clubs, double as surveillance and pressure groups against dissenting voices on campus — reporting on peers and pressuring universities to cancel events critical of Beijing. At Cambridge, one friend, whose father was imprisoned and likely tortured in Xi Jinping’s political purge, confided that she only ever dared to speak about politics behind closed doors in her room, never on campus. “You never know who is listening,” she told me. Politically vetted teachers at Confucius Institutes, another arm of the Chinese state, mold China syllabi in the CCP’s image in over 30 British universities.

A CCP mega-embassy in London would reinforce this apparatus of intimidation. Britain cannot credibly condemn Beijing’s abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong while granting the Party greater capacity to harass its critics and chill debate on its own soil. To do so would not just endanger dissidents; it would accelerate the alarming drift towards illiberalism already visible in the UK, at a moment when comedians are arrested over provocative tweets and elderly ladies are branded as terrorists for holding pro-Palestine placards. It would also embed in British territory the very form of arbitrary power the country has spent centuries struggling to restrain.

For much of British history, the royal prerogative was enforced through terror — treason suspects could vanish into the Tower without trial or be disemboweled before jeering crowds. Slowly, a constitutional tradition was formed in opposition to such tyranny: Magna Carta bound the monarch to law; the Habeas Corpus Act barred imprisonment without charge, the Bill of Rights curtailed the Crown and secured freedoms of speech and petition, and, in modern times, the Human Rights Act armed the individual with legal protections. The settlement which emerged is simple and profound: no one is above the law, no one is beneath its protection.

China under the CCP represents the inversion of this tradition. Its leaked “Document No. 9”, circulated under Xi Jinping in 2013, castigated constitutional democracy, universal human rights and press freedom as “extremely malicious” Western imports. The Party does not recognize law as a constraint on power but wields it as a tool of domination. Arbitrary detention is routine, from the mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to the prosecution of peaceful activists in Hong Kong. And freedom of expression is curtailed by the most comprehensive censorship and surveillance system on the planet. Petitioners who persist in challenging authority may be imprisoned or forcibly confined in psychiatric hospitals, fed anti-psychotics in the name of “stability”.

The implications of inviting such a system to plant its largest embassy in Europe beside the Tower of London would be long-lasting and corrosive. To the Chinese diaspora in Britain, it would signal that their security cannot be guaranteed. To allies, it would suggest Britain is a weak link in the defense of the international order, shared intelligence, and common values. And to the world, it would mark the end of Britain’s reputation as a defender of liberty.

But one factor remains underplayed. The United States is currently engaged in a fiercely contested space race with China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Space offers unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity — and the High North is crucial. This is because satellites that orbit from pole to pole must pass each pole with every orbit, which means that they fly over a given point in the High North far more often than a given point toward the Equator. As such, places like Svalbard are ideal locations for ground stations that keep in touch with constellations of satellites, be they commercial or military.

Those ground stations are where data transmitted by the satellites, from UberEats orders to key Ukrainian intelligence, are funneled into high-speed subsea internet cables. It’s little wonder, therefore, that Svalbard is always mobbed by Nato ships, and little wonder that those subsea cables have, in recent history, been attacked. Previously, space was about scientific discovery, but now, as the newly appointed Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged, it is also about strategic security dominance — it is the most important war-fighting domain. Whoever controls the highest altitudes in space, controls the battle domains on earth. And the world’s first space war is already well underway: Kyiv would have very limited offensive or defensive capability if it were unable to use Elon Musk’s Starlink service. China has therefore designated Starlink as a military entity rather than a private company, and is building satellite networks that have the ability to damage or destroy Starlink satellites.

Given this security situation, the US doesn’t want to rely solely on Svalbard. So it maintains another space base, Pituffik, on the northwest coast of Greenland. As the second most important space base after Svalbard, it is of immense strategic importance — not least because, being closer to the US, it is much more easily defended.

Given that Denmark already allows the US to maintain Pituffik and other bases, one might ask why the White House wants sovereignty over the territory. The answer is that the White House does not trust Europe to be a reliable partner. Remember Russiagate? Back in 2016, Trump, then Republican nominee for the presidency, was smeared by a dossier that was written by a former British intelligence official. The Democrats used this information against Trump, whose administration takes a dim view of European interference with American elections — especially when that interference is targeted against the MAGA movement. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, has been declassifying material that the White House views as incriminating evidence of “weaponization and politicization of intelligence”, going so far as to refer to a “treasonous conspiracy” to prevent Trump from winning in 2016. It is an extraordinary political moment in American history, one where Trump is on the brink of bringing legal charges against the former heads of the intelligence agencies and former presidents.

It’s not just the Steele “Russiagate” dossier that embroils Europe in these high-stakes domestic politics. The White House also blames Europe, and Europeans such as George Soros, for funding Antifa, and other movements and organizations that oppose Trump. Combined, all this dirty laundry has been disastrous for Transatlantic relations, and it has come at a time when there has already been tension between Europe and Trump. In his first term, Trump loudly chastised Europe for sponging off the American defense budget. In his second, he has been trying to end the war in Ukraine. Europe’s leaders have, in the White House view, been nothing but obstructive to the goal of bringing peace to Europe. Trump thinks of himself as trying to prevent World War Three from breaking out, even as the Europeans oppose peace deals and call for more aggressive action against Russia and Putin.

And the White House believes that Europe is only going to become even more difficult to deal with. In 2024, JD Vance suggested that the “first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon” might be the UK, which had just elected a Labour government. At the end of last year, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) struck a similar note, arguing that mass migration has created the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” for Europe as we know it. “Should present trends continue,” the NSS had it, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” JD Vance spelled it out, expressing concern about who is going to be in control of the nuclear arsenals in Western Europe, given the rise of “Islamist aligned” parties. Europeans might strongly disagree with this, but it is the White House’s interpretation; seen in this light, the purchase of Greenland would represent the transfer of a crucial security asset from an unreliable partner to the direct ownership of the US.

And there is specific dissatisfaction with Denmark as well as with the EU. The administration’s view is that Denmark has been at the forefront of not only supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, but blocking any possibility of a peace negotiation going forward. Denmark, in short, is a troublesome vassal — and a vassal that happens to own an immensely valuable defense asset within the hemisphere that the “Donroe Doctrine” posits as America’s to dominate.

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Nor has the administration ruled out the use of force to take the island. One of Trump’s key advisers, Stephen Miller, was singularly belligerent, telling CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”, and that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”. The pugnacity has shocked European leaders, who have issued a joint statement to say they are willing to defend the island. But the shock is all part of Trump’s plan. In every one of his negotiations, from property deals to international treaties, he first throws a negotiating grenade to create chaos. Then in he walks, and offers to talk. In this case, the seizing Greenland rhetoric is the grenade. Trump, who cares little about the norms of international relations, is probably hoping that this detonation will encourage Denmark and its allies to accept a deal.

Meanwhile, the White House is deploying a charm offensive towards the Greenlanders — fundamentally an Inuit population rather than a Danish one. The history between the Greenlanders and the Danes is a troubled one, which is partly why Denmark, over recent years, has devolved political authority to Greenland — and also because it is a terrifically costly territory to support. Trump, then, is reaching out to the Greenlanders and offering them the opportunity of no longer having to answer to the Danes, and instead gaining a privileged status within the United States. In financial terms, the Greenlanders have much to gain from being folded into the American economy: they could, for example, cut deals for the extraction of minerals. Denmark is vehemently objecting to these American overtures, but the fact is that it has devolved enough power for Greenland to be able to make its own decision about whether to be incorporated into the United States.

Europeans are now obviously hoping that Trump will get distracted and that the matter of a Greenland purchase will go away. But the game is already in play, and the White House knows it probably has limited time. Trump wants an expanded US, within a more secure hemisphere, to be the legacy he hands on at the end of his second term. Woe betide the Europeans who stand in his way.

Until now, little has been known about how or where these agents are recruited. But UnHerd can now reveal an extraordinary security loophole — one increasingly exploited by the Iranian state. Its London embassy is routinely enabling Iranian refugees to break UK immigration rules and secretly visit their homeland. These operations are so routine, that the embassy even has a form it issues to refugees wishing to illicitly return to Iran.

But this assistance comes with a price: the embassy then blackmails the refugees into becoming intelligence service informants, with potentially dire consequences for British security.

***

Since 2010, about 1,300 Iranians have been granted full refugee status every year in Britain. In the year to March 2024, over 8,000 Iranians applied for asylum here, and since 2018 they have consistently been among the top three nationalities arriving in small boats.

It’s impossible to know how many have been encouraged by the Iranian government to visit the country they supposedly fled. But it’s nonetheless clear that the system is a well-oiled machine — as one 34-year-old discovered.

In 2018, Amir* was granted refuge in Britain, telling the authorities that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. In the government’s theocratic eyes, this meant he was an apostate, a crime punishable by death. As far as Amir knew, his conversion had been successfully concealed from the regime.

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Three years after Amir arrived in Britain, his mother fell seriously ill. Fearing she might not survive, he applied for a passport from the consular section of the Iranian embassy in Kensington. During this visit, Amir said nothing of his conversion, telling embassy officials he had invented a story about being an anti-regime activist to gain a better life in Britain. Amir was duly granted a passport.

Amir knew full well that his visit would jeopardize his refugee status in Britain: a status contingent on the claimant never returning home other than in exceptional circumstances, and then with HK government permission. He did not tell the Home Office about his trip, first flying to Turkey using the British refugee travel document issued by the UK government to people given asylum. Once in Turkey, Amir swapped it for his newly issued Iranian passport.

When he landed in Tehran, though, things took a dark turn. Amir’s passport was confiscated, and he was told to attend an interview at an office of Iran’s primary intelligence agency: the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

Disguised as an import-export business in uptown Tehran, the office wasn’t far from MOIS’s official headquarters. A security guard checked Amir’s name and led him to a small, empty white room where he was left for hours and denied access to a lavatory.

Eventually, a man in his mid-40s entered. The official was calm and emotionless, and led Amir to a private office, where his passport was lying on a desk.

It soon became obvious the interrogator knew all about Amir’s life: his conversion, the underground churches in Tehran he had attended years earlier, and the friends he worshipped with in Britain and Iran. Then the man said: “You know, you could be executed for leaving Islam.”

After Amir insisted he had only returned home to see his dying mother, the man responded: “You may die before she does.” Then came a further threat. “As a refugee, you shouldn’t be coming back to Iran. Do the English authorities know?”

Amir spent the next two weeks in turmoil, terrified he might be arrested, tried and executed in Iran, or arrested and deported after his return to England.

And then, he was summoned again, this time to an apartment near his family’s home. There, the interrogator, a Mr Mohammadi, immediately asked: “Do you want to go back to London? Or should I refer your case to the court to review your apostasy?”

Mr Mohammadi started reeling off the names of Amir’s Iranian Christian friends, as well as activists he followed on Facebook, saying Amir he had to “get close” to them in London and supply information to his handlers. The embassy would report his trip to the Home Office if he refused, and his parents, both in Iran, would be targeted.

Left with no choice but to agree, Amir was then given a phone number and $1,000 in cash, saying it was a “token of appreciation”. Back in London, Amir was “filled with paranoia. A few days after I arrived, a message came from an Iranian phone number. It was Mohammadi, asking questions, dropping names, fishing for information. The messages came and went, sporadic but unnerving.” Amir cooperated.

It was only after the death of his parents that Amir feel safe enough to cut contact. He blocked the number, changed his handset, and vowed never to return to Iran. “But I’m still haunted,” he tells UnHerd. “I’ve never reported any of this to the UK authorities, because I’m terrified I could be removed.”

***

It would seem, according to our interviewees that the British government is aware that some Iranians clandestinely return to their homeland. It is increasingly suspicious of refugees traveling to Turkey. So visitors — and the Islamic Republic — are working to stay one step ahead.

A case in point is Mehdi*, who three years ago was allowed to stay in Britain after claiming to be an anti-regime activist. Now working in construction, Mehdi visited his homeland last summer using a different route. He traveled first to Italy, using his refugee travel document and then used a newly acquired Iranian passport to enter Armenia. From there, Mehdi crossed into Turkey, before finally reaching Iran.

Mehdi also avoided visiting the London embassy in person. Refugees fear that the building is under surveillance by the British authorities, so he used a UK-based Iranian travel agent to deliver the application form and pick up his passport. But this service is anything but secretive, advertising on Facebook in Farsi: “Leave everything related to the Iranian embassy to us. In the shortest time, the fastest service!” The travel agent also gives advice on how long refugees can stay outside Britain without losing entitlement to benefits, and promises to secure the necessary visas for travel via Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan.

Posing as refugees, we managed to contact this agent via a phone number she posts on social media to advertise her services. She told us that if we had no Iranian documents, such as a military service card, a relative in Iran could go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to verify our identities. If that were not possible, she said, her agency could arrange the necessary verification.

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The embassy, the agent continued, would not take issue with us being refugees. “We assist refugees with this process regularly,” she said, “and there haven’t been any problems.” She also said the only problem was that so many refugees were applying that the next available appointment would only be in mid-July — we applied in May. “Once processed, it takes about a month to receive the passport,” she added. “We send clients with refugee travel documents to the embassy daily, and to date, no one has reported any issues upon re-entering Iran.”

The agent also repeated the assurance given to Mehdi: that we need not attend in person. “We’re able to verify your identity on behalf of the embassy,” she said, “and your passport will be sent to you by mail.”

To avoid being caught with an Iranian passport upon returning to Britain, there are even courier services available from overseas. Once again, Mehdi is a good example here. Before returning to Britain, he left his Iranian documents with an agency in Armenia, which then delivered them to his home.

All the while, the Home Office remained unaware of Mehdi’s movements, a recurring theme in our investigation We spoke to Rezvan*, for example, a third refugee who returned to Iran via Iraq for a holiday this spring. When Rezvan returned to the UK border, he was ready to present the Iraqi stamps in his travel document, “but the officer didn’t even ask to see them”.

You can find similar discussions online, too. The travel agent’s Instagram feed includes semi-open discussion from refugees about the risks of being detected by the UK authorities. One man calling himself Iranian.london.2020 says he had applied for an Iranian passport three weeks earlier, but had since been contacted by the Home Office, asking awkward questions. “I have not told anyone that I took this action,” he wrote. “I swear to God I am extremely stressed. Has anyone else had such an experience?” Another user offered reassurance. “Don’t worry, the Iranian embassy won’t give any notice to England… just deny it and say that you don’t have an Iranian passport.”

In another private social media group, an Iranian who returned for a holiday offers advice on how to handle the inevitable meeting with the MOIS. “Have something unimportant ready to give them, some information,” they suggested. “It will help you.”

***

Like Amir, Mehdi was pressured to become a spy once he arrived in Iran. His passport was confiscated, and he was told to attend a meeting with MOIS officials. He too disclaimed involvement in politics, claiming he had come to Britain because a friend had told him it was a “great country” where he could do well: and that he was merely a builder. Mehdi was asked about his social circle in the UK, and if he had ever participated in anti-regime protests. He replied that he had, but only to support his asylum claim. Iranian officials also asked him to identify other protestors from photographs. Eventually, MOIS let him go, while Mehdi himself insists he never became a spy. Rezvan said that he, too, was forced to meet the MOIS, but declined to give details.

Iran clearly sees Britain’s émigré community, perhaps as large as 500,000, as one that needs monitoring — and as a source of vital intelligence. Yet if that explains the cases of Amir and Mehdi, seemingly apolitical Iranians blackmailed by the MOIS, the regime targets other refugees in a more concerted way.

In January, a London-based opposition journalist called Reza* received a call from his father in Tehran — who told him he was at a hotel with an unnamed MOIS officer. He told Reza that if he did not start collaborating, he would never see his parents again, and their pensions would be cut off. He added: “Our friends in London know how to find you.” He was given a week to consider the offer.

The call, seven days later, came from Reza’s father’s phone, and this time the MOIS officer revealed he had intimate details of his work and associates. But unlike in Amir’s case, Reza’s blackmail was more specific, with the officer offering him $70,000 if he agreed to become an informant on the channel where he worked. Reza declined, saying he would rather leave his profession entirely. “That’s not enough,” the officer responded. “You have no choice. We need your access.” Since then, his parents’ pensions have been suspended, and they have been barred from leaving Iran. Despite this pressure, Reza continues to do his job in London and says he will not give in to the MOIS.

Even so, his case is far from unique. This week, the BBC said the families of staff at its Persian service were also being targeted and harassed. In the wake of its announcement, a BBC Persian journalist told us that his family had been approached in Iran, and told to persuade him to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan for a meeting with MOIS agents. He said that many of his colleagues experienced the same threat.

***

Consider this. A hostile state is facilitating the apparently illegal travel of supposed refugees as a means of recruiting spies. Whitehall, according to our interviewees is aware. But what are they doing about it? When we asked, a Government spokesman said: “We take all allegations of abuse of the immigration system extremely seriously and will not hesitate to take appropriate action where necessary.” For its part, the Iranian embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

Last month, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement in Parliament, saying Iran “poses an unacceptable threat to our domestic security which cannot continue”, promising new powers to strengthen border security and “keep the public safe”. Yet given the agility and relentless nature of Iranian methods — and the apparent inability of Britain to staunch it — she won’t find it easy to fulfill her pledge.

*Names have been changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A political blame game has since erupted in Poland. Both Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak have denied being aware of the incident when it took place, with the latter implying that members of the Polish armed forces had obfuscated it in official reports at the time — a claim which seems unlikely.

However, regardless of who is to blame, the episode reveals a state hierarchy vastly underprepared to protect Poland, and by extension the rest of Nato, from Russian threats. Not only did a missile manage to fly over more than half the country, including potentially over its capital Warsaw, without being shot down, but the Polish government chose to keep emergency services in the dark rather than risking attracting media attention, despite the threat to civilian lives. After it landed, authorities allegedly called off the search without locating the missile, reportedly refusing to widen it for similar reasons — even though no one at that time knew what sort of payload the Kh-55 had been carrying. It’s a wonder no one was hurt.

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The fact that the missile didn’t hit any civilian infrastructure appears to have been a stroke of luck. Some commentators in the Polish media have noted that, had it continued on its course, the missile could have hit a key LNG terminal near Poland’s border with Germany, which would have endangered the region’s energy security. And if the missile’s angle of flight had been just slightly different, we may instead have witnessed an assault on Poland’s eighth-largest city, which would have seen civilian casualties and potentially the invocation of Nato’s Article 5 against Russia.

“This was a significantly more serious incident than anything that had happened previously,” Marek Świerczyński, the head of the security desk at the Polish research institution Polityka Insight, told me. “I imagine that all the decision-makers and military leaders who knew about this were sweating from head to toe, and were praying to all the gods they knew that this wasn’t an attack, that this wasn’t war.”

The Polish government has never revealed whether contact with the Russian side ever took place, and although it’s clear in hindsight that the strike was likely a mistake, there’s no knowing if Poland’s leaders were aware of this on 16 December. With this in mind, the Polish government’s lack of communication and apparent predisposition to hiding facts to save face presents a grave risk not only for Poland’s security, but for Nato’s as well. Although we do not know the full facts of the case, and possibly never will, the strike appears to have exposed vital gaps in the bloc’s security and Poland’s crisis management readiness — gaps that could be exploited by Russia.

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What we do know is this: on 16 December, during a Russian missile barrage on targets across Ukraine, the Ukrainians alerted the Polish military to a potential rocket moving towards the Polish border, likely originating over Belarus. The Poles scrambled fighter jets to track the missile. Soon enough, they lost it from their radar systems, as the missile was apparently only in the air over Poland for about half an hour. A single local police patrol was dispatched to search for the missile on the ground, and helicopters also reportedly searched from the air. Both gave up after failing to locate anything out of the ordinary, even though it remained possible that an unexploded ordinance, potentially of a nuclear variety, remained somewhere in the area.

Speculation has swirled about why a missile was able to fly for such a long distance over Nato territory without being neutralised. According to some analysts, Poland’s armed forces are not equipped for continuous tracking of low-flying airborne objects when in a peacetime posture, and it would have been nearly impossible for the jets to catch up with the missile given its head start. But Poland’s missile systems, deployed along the border and around Warsaw, were not activated to meet the threat either. Poland has purchased billions of dollars’ worth of air defence systems in the past year, and already has several US-made Patriot batteries at its disposal. According to Świerczyński, ground-based air defence systems are historically quite poor at engaging targets like this one without a dense array of radar systems at their disposal. But while Poland is still in the process of dramatically upgrading its armed forces, the impression that the nation is unable to secure its airspace with its current capabilities, outside of wartime, is deeply concerning.

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There is an even more pressing problem: that political concerns were prioritised over the security of Polish citizens. According to Błaszczak, American fighter jets were dispatched along with Polish ones on 16 December. This would have necessitated communication with US allies, making it highly improbable that the defence minister wouldn’t have been made aware of the incident at the time. Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg appeared to confirm that such communication took place this week, making it all the more perplexing that neither Polish nor Nato authorities seemed particularly interested in locating the potentially lethal rocket.

In conversations with Stoltenberg on Monday, Polish President Andrzej Duda implicitly admitted that the system had failed, calling in particular for revised Nato search procedures in such situations. It remains to be seen whether these revisions would extend to the vital procedures that should have taken place in the minutes after the missile was first detected and before it landed.

“The most difficult and important issue is not whether some radar detected something, or if some ground-based air defence system was ready to shoot it down,” Świerczyński said, “but if on the side of Nato and Poland there was clarity on whether this was a mistake or whether this was an attack.” According to the recent Discord leaks about the war in Ukraine, the US has considerable intelligence about Moscow’s moves in the theatre of war. But even so, it would be difficult to imagine that the Americans had advance knowledge about whether this missile had been dispatched toward Poland intentionally — let alone about its payload. Therefore, it was likely that there was no such clarity about the nature of the Kh-55, making the Polish government’s lacklustre response seem all the more irresponsible.

That Poland’s government has learned so few lessons from November’s rocket incident is something that bodes ill not just for Poland, but for many Nato states that have tacitly started to rely on it as a “linchpin of regional security”. Poland has become particularly crucial to guaranteeing the security of natural gas flowing from Norway through pipelines in the Baltic Sea, and to the security of the neighbouring Baltic states. With such growing regional responsibilities, Poland increasingly has little room for error in the security sphere.

We can only hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call for Polish and Nato leaders and paves the way for greater transparency. Poland’s politicians must realise they cannot afford to sacrifice national security for the sake of their political careers. After all, it was a fortunate accident that this Kh-55 failed to cause any real damage or endanger any lives — but next time, we may not be so lucky.

Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the committee, was alarmed by the admission. Britain was at greater risk at the moment, not just because of Covid-19, but because, as Wallace had attested, our traditional enemies were not stopping in their testing of Britain’s defences.

Worse still, by confirming the Council had not met, had not Wallace bequeathed an advantage to those enemies? The NSC, after all, is the only meeting of all the major figures involved in maintaining the security of the nation.

Covid-19 is Britain’s most serious national security event since the Second World War. But the UK was well prepared, according to international standards, for a pandemic that had for years been deemed a Level 5 national security risk — the highest level — in the National Risk Register, the formal measure of ranking the risks to the country.

In the 2015 Strategic Defence and Spending Review (SDSR), the foreword by David Cameron, then prime minister, mentioned the threat of a pandemic in the same sentence as the threat from Isis, Russia’s annexation of Ukraine and cyberattacks. It was also there in the foreword to the 2010 SDSR, and the 2017 National Security Review said: “…one or more major hazards can be expected to materialise in the UK in every five-year period. The most serious are pandemic influenza, national blackout and severe flooding.”

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Yet despite this acknowledgment of the threat of a global pandemic, a disturbing picture forms: no one can recall, with any certainty, ever discussing pandemic preparedness policy at the National Security Council. One attendee, with the benefit of hindsight, said, “they never took it seriously”.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, politicians and officials who have served on it, in it and around it for the past decade paint a picture of disastrous structural problems in dealing with threats not considered to be “immediate enough”, huge issues with accountability, even once decisions were made, and of a perceived over-focus on specific, operational risk. The NSC, to quote one long-time attendee, had been “captured by the security services”; a perception that the focus become tilted more towards intelligence and immediate challenges than longer-term strategic aims.

It is only now, as the previously abstract pandemic now kills tens of thousands and causes an economic catastrophe, that the shortcomings of Whitehall’s national security apparatus are being laid bare. One NSC source said: “The crisis handlers are actually handling immediate crises, [those planning for one] are theoretical people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

It all started with the best of intentions. The NSC was formally set up in 2010 by David Cameron partly in reaction to the informal way in which decisions about the Iraq War were taken under Blair, and partly, says one, because they were “sort of copying the Americans”. It was, another says, established to “do the thinking that would then go across all the departments”.

It is all very secretly done and protocol strictly adhered to. Minutes of the meetings and the outcomes of decisions taken are closely guarded: sometimes, not closely enough. It is perhaps surprising, given how much of a toll global health insecurity can take, that the Health Secretary is still not an automatic member of the Council: another example of the types of security threats that were deemed most immediate and most worthy of the NSC’s time.

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To discuss certain topics, a non-member Secretary of State would have to submit agenda items and be invited into the meeting. Those items would then be filtered by NSC officials over a lengthy period. Given the Council normally meets weekly, items would be put on the agenda three or four months in advance with the running order of that agenda discussed with the different departments over the preceding three to six months. Discussions were focused on those areas where ministers needed to make choices about what to do next: “this isn’t a ‘show and tell’ meeting”, said one senior official, “we need a decision [from it].”

But members of the Council were frustrated at what they saw as a lack of time for the politicians to be given the space to make decisions and interrogate the advice. “By the time we had heard from the deputy national security adviser, the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, each of the agency chiefs, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary, the ambassador to the country concerned, and the Chief of Defence Staff, there was relatively little time for the senior ministers present to review and test the merits of the policy or findings in discussion,” says a previously long-standing member. “It became a cumbersome process with too many officials, and too little political input”.

In order to achieve decisions, those officials within the National Security Council (NSC-O) meet to refine agendas and coordinate departments, along with at least four sub-committees including one which looked after “threats, hazards, resilience and contingencies”. This sub-committee, despite having its membership listed at Secretary of State level, was “mainly attended by junior ministers”, and one of those who did attend said “there was one discussion of bio-warfare”, but at no stage did a need arise for senior ministers to make a decision on policy relating to a pandemic. “We never had it flagged as an issue,” said one former NSC official, “if there was no policy decision to be taken there was no particular reason for it to come back to the NSC”.

When asked about the types of discussions had inside the NSC, Liam Fox, former Conservative Defence Secretary, told the Rule Britannia podcast: “I always felt there was too little discussion about what one might describe as blue-sky thinking — what are the things that are not happening yet that we need to incorporate into our planning?” In describing the ineffectiveness of parts of Whitehall Rory Stewart, the former Conservative MP and cabinet minister, puts it more bluntly: “Nobody on the National Security Council wants to tell you what a total joke the National Security Council is.”

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Given that pandemics were rightly identified as such a significant threat, why wasn’t there more discussion about a response? If the meetings became focused on ministers making policy decisions, could it be because policy towards a pandemic was settled outside the NSC: why ask for discussion and decision on a policy that causes no disagreement?

There was, after all, a strategy in place. In 2011, the Department for Health produced the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy that superseded a previous plan produced in 2007. The document “describes the Government’s strategic approach for responding to an influenza pandemic”, displays the “lessons learned” from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Its target audience was health bodies, and the professionals within them, as well as children’s services and local authorities.

It was produced by the Department’s own Pandemic Preparedness Team in consultation with other departments deemed important to carrying out its directions. A senior figure in the Department of Health at the time recalls that the general response from the public health community was that the plan was as good as anywhere in the world and that the Department had put considerable effort into the preparation of it. Rightly, the document was discussed with the-then Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley.

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But as Covid-19 arrived and spread, the policy advice, which even until very recently was being cascaded down to local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, had to be ripped up. It was inadequate. On mass gatherings, the document states that “there is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission”, and nowhere is the need for social distancing mentioned: the view was that those unaffected would be allowed to carry on with “business as usual”.

“We planned,” recalls a senior figure in the Health Department in 2011, “for an influenza pandemic, not coronavirus.” When asked whether there were similar plans drawn up in response to a SARs-like outbreak, a respiratory virus closer to Covid-19, the source said “we didn’t think about SARs in an influenza plan — we needed to think separately about SARs”. The source did not know if the department had done that.

So how was it that the lauded text on pandemic preparation, used as the formal guide by government departments and public health bodies nearly a decade later, and which set out the response to a Level 5 national security threat, and which then had to be ripped up, was never discussed by the National Security Council? According to one source involved in the 2011 strategy: “Why would you go to the NSC? Everybody who needed to have input had it. You’d call for the NSC to meet if the threat actually emerged.”

Surely this is a significant failing. How can the NSC be helping to protect the nation, its primary task, if those with the greatest responsibility for that protection never saw, discussed or questioned the only plan in place to tackle the greatest threat?

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There are several reasons, as I see it, it failed in this task. The first, is that ministers did not push hard enough in tasking officials to show they had thought through the various possible scenarios. Preparation had only been done for an influenza pandemic but no questions seem to have been asked at NSC level about whether that template would cover other types of pandemics, or indeed whether plans for different types of pandemics had even been considered. As one NSC attendee told me: “There is nobody who has got the power and heft and who understands the problem who will say to their departments and officials, ‘You will spend another £100m on preparing kit.’ Putting things aside wins no votes.”

Another flaw can be found in the national security system in Whitehall as a whole. “David Cameron wanted the NSC meeting to be operational rather than strategic and Theresa May was mostly focused on domestic security and cyber,” says an ex-senior official. Liam Fox has said previously that the NSC “focuses too much on the traditional security threats, largely terrorism, and in recent times that has been more than enough of a threat to take up the time of the National Security Council”. In any case, even if emerging threats had eaten up more of the thinking of NSC members and even if decisions had been taken on those strategic threats, a highly-regarded security source asked, perhaps rhetorically, “who would be charged with following up on that?”

There is no doubt that many of the decisions made at the NSC have saved lives and protected the United Kingdom. But the fact that the policy response to the top-tier threat was not discussed at the top-table of our national security structure in the years before it happened, surely points to a weakness in the effectiveness and assiduousness of that system.

After correctly identifying a pandemic as a serious risk to the country, the NSC did not interrogate the policy response to it: a lack of oversight that would be unthinkable for threats from terrorism or kinetic warfare. Why does it seem that no one on the NSC asked to see the preparations? Why was time not built-in to discuss them? Either the National Security Council is where decisions about the UK’s responses to managing serious threats to the nation are taken, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, what is it for?

In the 10 years since its inception, the most august and important meeting of the most senior ministers responsible for the security of the nation did not pay enough attention to what they themselves acknowledged as one of the biggest threats. And not only did it fail to properly contemplate the British response to a conceivable pandemic, it has now gone missing during it, as the Defence Secretary confirmed.

If the system is not made more effective, more robust and is given a clearly defined purpose, not just to anticipate threats but to question the preparations for them, what happens next time catastrophe falls?

In response to the issues raised in this article, a Government spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on matters relating to the National Security Council.

“The government continues to protect the UK’s national security, while addressing the pressing demands of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have been proactive in implementing lessons learned around pandemic preparedness. This includes being ready with legislative proposals that could rapidly be tailored to what became the Coronavirus Act, plans to strengthen excess death planning, planning for recruitment and deployment of retired staff and volunteers, and guidance for stakeholders and sectors across government.”