The previous government has been accused of an “Orwellian leap” in the use of a gagging order to cover up a massive data leak which potentially put the lives of more than 100,000 Afghans at risk.
The democratic process was “put in the deep freeze” for 18 months, journalists told MPs on the House of Commons defence committee on Wednesday as they gave evidence over the saga.
The superinjunction used by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) followed the February 2022 leak of details of thousands of Afghans, who feared they were in danger from the Taliban because of their links to UK forces and wanted to apply for sanctuary in Britain.
The unprecedented global superinjunction not only prevented the media from reporting on the leak, but also kept parliament in the dark, with the result that there was no scrutiny of a secret resettlement scheme which brought thousands of Afghans to Britain.
This meant journalists working to understand the life and death implications of the data breach were unable to report on the leak, while MPs could not debate the government’s stance and the Afghans whose data had been leaked remained at risk of reprisals from the Taliban.
The Independent’s home affairs correspondent Holly Bancroft told MPs: “In terms of response to the [data] breach itself, [the MoD] was very slow in terms of setting up a resettlement scheme, how many people you’re going to help.
“Part of why we got involved was that it took four or five months from the breach actually happening to them saying ‘we’re going to help 150 people’, this was so slow. We felt compelled to get involved in order to hold the MoD to account in whatever it was they were going to do.”
Larisa Brown, defence editor at The Times, said during the court hearings about the superinjunction, “our special advocate argued that the democratic process was ‘in the deep freeze’ and that was true”.
She added: “We were the only people that were trying to hold the government to account. Throughout this process we weren’t allowed into the closed hearings, so we were doing this with our hands tied behind our backs. We couldn’t make well-informed arguments without knowing what the MoD justification was for the superinjunction.”
Sam Greenhill, chief reporter at The Daily Mail, told MPs the judge presiding over the implementation of the superinjunction was “incredulous” when a statement was made in parliament in order to provide a “cover” story about the numbers of Afghans arriving in Britain, which he said the MoD described as an effort to “control the narrative”.
“The MoD suddenly said they’re going to fill the void with some selected facts, which I thought was a kind of Orwellian leap from the original purpose of the injunction,” he told the committee.
He added: “All of these things are bread and butter issues for the House of Commons. You should’ve all been debating this.”
Chair of the committee, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough, said many MPs had been “shocked” to discover earlier this year that a superinjunction had remained in place for almost two years, and praised the journalists for their efforts to shed light on the issue.
“On behalf of the committee, I am very grateful to journalists for their grit and their determination to pursue and expose this entire chapter where everybody was kept in the dark including many of us as parliamentarians.”
The leak came about following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021.
At the time, tens of thousands of Afghans were at serious risk of reprisals for fighting alongside British troops, and had asked the UK to bring them and their families to safety.
Six months after the disastrous evacuation of Kabul, an 80-strong MoD team was working through the task of assessing these applications, deciding if they should be approved or denied on the strength of each applicant’s ties to UK forces.
An unnamed British serviceman, in his office in Whitehall, thought his Afghan contacts might be able to help establish who was eligible for help and who was not. He decided to email the database, which he believed contained 150 names, to trusted sources.
But the document in fact contained 33,000 records, including details of more than 18,000 Afghan applicants and their families.
It was a full 16 months later the government realised the data had been leaked, when someone on a Facebook group claimed to be in possession of the list – which was described as a “kill list” if it fell into the hands of the Taliban – and asked if they should share it on the group.
The secretary of state for defence at the time, Ben Wallace, was informed of the breach “within minutes”, along with MI6, the CIA and the Foreign Office, according to an independent caseworker who was supporting Afghans with sanctuary applications.
The next day, the same caseworker emailed the armed forces minister James Heappey, and shadow minister Luke Pollard, describing the situation as “simply bone-chilling”.
“The Taliban may well now have a 33,000-long kill list – essentially provided to them by the UK government. If any of these families are murdered, the government will be liable,” they wrote.
As UK publications became aware of the leak, the MoD sought an injunction in a bid to protect those on the list who were unaware their data had been compromised.
Journalists were also acutely aware of the lack of scrutiny this meant for the government – not least because the 2024 general election was looming.
“We knew [the government] was making huge policy decisions behind the scenes and the public didn’t know about that… We felt that the public should know,” Ms Brown told MPs on Wednesday.
The superinjunction unravelled when a law firm, representing hundreds of Afghan clients intending to sue the UK government, revealed the scale of the effort required to maintain secrecy. Meanwhile, more newspapers piled pressure on the government to lift reporting restrictions.
A subsequent investigation into the leak and how it was handled, conducted by Paul Rimmer, a former deputy chief of intelligence at the MoD, found that creating a bespoke resettlement scheme and using an unprecedented superinjunction may have “inadvertently added more value” to the dataset for the Taliban – heightening the risk to those on the list.
