China obtained “vast amounts” of classified government information over a period of many years by compromising a network used to transfer data across Whitehall.
Dominic Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to Boris Johnson, said he and the then prime minister were informed about the breach in 2020 but that there had subsequently been a cover-up.
He was warned at the time that disclosing some specific details of the breach would be a criminal offence. He claimed that the breach included some “Strap” material — the highest level of classified information.
The breach was said to have been connected to a Chinese-owned company involved in Britain’s critical national infrastructure.
Cummings said that he and Johnson were informed of the breach in the “bunker” of No 10 — the secure room in Downing Street.
“The cabinet secretary said, ‘We have to explain something; there’s been a serious problem’, and he talked through what this was.”
“And it was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this — ‘Am I somehow misunderstanding what he’s saying? Because it sounds f***ing crazy’.”
“What I’m saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised.”
“Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it.”
One senior Whitehall source confirmed that at the time the government had evidence that sensitive government information was being transferred to China. The information had been encrypted but there were concerns that this could still have been accessed by the Chinese.
However, the source contradicted Cummings’s assertion that Strap data was involved in the breach. They insisted that Strap material was kept on separate secure networks.
Among the information that would potentially have been available to China would include diplomatic messages from Britain’s ambassadors around the world. It would also include information that could damage the security and resilience of critical national infrastructure as well the operational effectiveness of UK or allied forces’ military operations.
Cummings found it “ludicrous” that the China spy trial had collapsed because the government refused to describe Beijing as a threat to national security.
“Anyone who has been read in at a high level with the intelligence services on China knows that the word threat doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
“The degree of penetration in espionage, in all kinds of operations, penetration of critical national infrastructure, theft of intellectual property, the whole range of things is absolutely extraordinary. A hundred times worse than it is in the public domain.”
“Everybody who has been briefed on the critical analyses of these things from the intelligence services knows this is true. The idea that it is somehow a difficult semantic question of whether to define them as a threat, or how much of a threat, is absolutely puerile nonsense. And everybody in the heart of Whitehall knows this.”
“The Strap system was compromised. All sorts of systems were compromised. Fundamental infrastructure for transferring the most sensitive data around the British state was compromised for a long time. For years.”
“The Cabinet Office’s priority, obviously, was to make sure that no one knew about it.”
“The answer was there’s been a political choice made in this country to prioritise Chinese money over security against China … Strong Whitehall forces are desperate for Chinese money.”
A Cabinet Office spokesman: “It is untrue to claim that the systems we use to transfer the most sensitive government information have been compromised.” He did not deny, however, that China had obtained years worth of secret material.
thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar
