Deny, delete and delay: the secrecy operation inside special forces

It’s a go/no-go prerequisite before soldiers are sent out on an armed raid that they wear body cameras and that those cameras are working. So an early request from Northmoor was to see the videos from 10 SAS raids in Afghanistan chosen at random. There aren’t any, the SAS said, without, as far as we know, offering any meaningful explanation.

Years later the veterans minister, Johnny Mercer – a veteran of three Afghan tours – asked the director of special forces to help him find the video footage. The answer, Mercer told the Afghanistan inquiry, was: “It isn’t available, Johnny”, followed by a shrug.

Mercer let off steam about that incident at the inquiry: “If it was my unit and there was no video available for 10 operations selected at random by an external chief constable, I’d rip the place apart to find out what was going on, because if they’re not telling me the truth on that, what else are they not telling me the truth about? It is not plausible to tell me that nothing exists … It exists somewhere.”

And so the RMP’s attention turned to a computer server called ITS1 – the landing place in London for some of the SAS’s most secret data about past and future operations. Maybe the videos existed there?

Accessing ITS1 was the devil’s own work. UK special forces (UKSF) argued that letting the RMP into the server could compromise live operations. Negotiations between the police and UKSF dragged on for more than a year until, in December 2016, the senior investigating officer on Northmoor emailed his team to say they had got the green light. They were to go to UKSF’s headquarters three days later to retrieve what they needed.

On the appointed day, a small team from Northmoor turned up. One member later said they were met by counterparts from UKSF who looked “sheepish”. As well they might. Everything on ITS1 had been deleted, and not simply deleted but erased in a forensic way that was irreversible. It was “in direct disobeyance to our demands to preserve the data in its entirety and [UKSF’s] agreement that they would do so,” the senior investigating officer wrote to his gold command. Special forces told the RMP the deletion had been an accident which happened while data was being migrated from one system to another.

Gold command was offered three courses of action, which included prosecuting UKSF for perverting the course of justice and doing nothing. He chose something close to the latter: UKSF would conduct its own inquiry into what had happened.

In March 2023 ITS1 was raised at the Afghanistan inquiry. There were no back-ups of the server, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said. Nine months later, that evidence was turned on its head. A witness to the inquiry testified that back-ups of ITS1 did exist, and the inquiry went quickly to work. In a statement which gave no hint of the drama that took place in December 2023, it said: “With the independent support of the Defence Serious Crime Command, [the inquiry] seized drives containing terabytes of ITS1 data from UK special forces locations.” Seven years after the police were told that everything on the server had been irrevocably deleted, it turned out that UKSF had been in possession of it all along.

The saga of ITS1 had an unforeseen effect: it jogged memories of an incident in 2010 when the RMP was examining separate allegations of war crimes under Operation Pavo. A special forces laptop held potentially important evidence, and the RMP was promised access to it. The day before officers were due to see it, everything on the laptop was forensically wiped. The senior investigating officer on Operation Northmoor spotted a pattern of behaviour: “This similar deletion of evidence immediately prior to RMP recovery was coincidental at best; at worst it may be deemed suspicious.”

If the SAS set out to shut down an electronic witness by emptying ITS1, as its critics believe, there were human witnesses too. The most compelling were members of elite Afghan units known as the Triples, who went on raids with the SAS. Occasionally the Triples refused to serve alongside them because they claimed they were appalled at what they’d seen the SAS do.

After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of former Triples applied for resettlement in the UK for fear of reprisals. Thousands of other Afghans who’d never been near a special forces unit tried to jump on the bandwagon, so someone in London had to sift real Triples from fakes. Extraordinarily, this job was handed to a small office in UKSF headquarters run, for some time, by Gen Jenkins.

The argument was that British special forces had worked hand-in-glove with the Triples – who better to decide if the applications were authentic or not? But hovering in the background was the possibility that letting Triples into the UK would allow them to testify in person to the Afghanistan inquiry about war crimes they might have seen.

UK special forces had been given an effective veto, and the conflict of interest was clear. If they chose to, they could block visa applications from all the former Triples – and that’s more or less exactly what they chose to do. In court earlier this year, their approach was described as a “blanket refusal” of more than 2,000 visa applications from former Triples. Intentionally or unintentionally, it may have kept witnesses off the stand at the Afghanistan inquiry.

It was from the small office in UK special forces HQ, under the command of Gen Jenkins, that the list of Afghans who’d worked with British authorities leaked.

Early in 2022, a junior soldier at a barracks in Regent’s Park accidentally released details of 18,714 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK under the Afghan Resettlement and Assistance Policy (Arap). They included Triples and British army interpreters who, after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, had been asked to send their pleas for help by email, naming their contacts in special forces or MI6 as referees. These applications were compiled into a spreadsheet and given to the soldier to check. He sent it to contacts in Afghanistan to verify some of the claims.

“There was no database of Triples,” said a source familiar with the process. “The poor bastard was basically at the end of a line of complete ineptitude, doing his best to save people’s lives, having been given the most ridiculous tools possible.”

After the leak was eventually noticed in August 2023, Rishi Sunak convened Cobra, a meeting described by someone present as “the original holy shit meeting”, with Ben Wallace, the defence secretary. They were unanimous in the need for an injunction – without it, Wallace and armed forces minister James Heappey would probably have had to resign, sources indicated.

Would Jenkins resign, a minister asked at the meeting. “Certainly not,” Jenkins answered, according to The Times. The newspaper tried to report the comments when Jenkins was promoted to First Sea Lord, but the government intervened, arguing that simply mentioning a “national security incident” would breach the superinjunction that was imposed by courts in response to the MoD’s request for complete secrecy.

Ministers pressed on with a secret programme, the Afghan Relocation Route (ARR), to evacuate many of those on the list deemed at risk from the Taliban, but news had already spread within the Afghan community in the UK, including to Sara de Jong, an academic who co-founded the Sulha Alliance to help Afghan interpreters to safety. She was bound to secrecy at a time when her volunteer group was working hard to get people out who were at risk.

“Suddenly these people were going to the back of the queue because of a UK government fuck-up,” she said. “But I couldn’t say that. It’s frustrating, right?”

An MoD source said that Jenkins “had no role in any aspect of Arap”, but some are sceptical about official attempts to separate the leak from the resettlement decisions.

Dan Carey, whose firm DPG Law is representing Triples, said that the soldiers had seen their cases needlessly delayed. “We have now learned that many were also put at greater risk by the data breach. Alarmingly, both the unlawful refusals and the breach – occurring a year apart – appear to have involved UK special forces liaison officers. The delays in these cases are four years in many cases.”

Meanwhile, those left behind in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for the fallout. The superinjunction was lifted after the government supplied the court with a risk assessment by Paul Rimmer, a retired civil servant, who turned the logic of the MoD’s case on its head.

Triples, interpreters and others on the list were not being systematically targeted by the Taliban, Rimmer concluded, and the list was less important than “the wealth of data inherited from the former government” that the Taliban already had.

Many say Triples, interpreters and their families are still being targeted. Herat (not his real name), a former British army interpreter supported by the Sulha Alliance, said his brother had been arrested in 2022 after applying for a British visa via the Arap scheme. He is suspicious that the application led to the arrest: “The Taliban asked: ‘Why did you apply for the UK – what is your connection?’ This was all information I received by email from him. Nobody else knew.”

Others told The Observer that they change locations every few weeks and receive phone calls from Taliban intelligence telling them to turn themselves in, and that their relatives have been tortured. For them, there is now no legal safe route to the UK.

A MoD spokesperson said: “Since coming into office, this government has put a huge emphasis on improving data security across the Ministry of Defence.” It had introduced new secure software and appointed a chief information officer “to strengthen data protection across the department”.

The spokesperson added that it was fully committed to the Afghanistan inquiry and it would not be appropriate to comment on allegations which may be within the inquiry’s scope. It’s a position which, if the MoD holds to it, will buy it a lot of time. The inquiry isn’t expected to publish its findings for perhaps two years.

It’s not clear that Afghans have benefited from the secrecy imposed by the superinjunction but it appears to have been beneficial to British politicians and to Gen Jenkins. The media sought to overturn the superinjunction before last year’s general election, but the government made the case – and won – to keep it in place.

If the data leak had been revealed shortly after it happened in February 2022, it’s likely that there would have been casualties among the political leadership of the MoD because of the ineptitude it revealed, the cost of putting things right and the likely debate over bringing thousands of Afghans and their families to the UK. In those circumstances, if the question which was asked of Gen Jenkins in Cobra – will you resign? – had been asked loudly in public, it might have received a different answer.

Photographs Lee Black/Alamy and Ben Birchall/Pool/Getty