Leaked Defence Report Sharpens Analysis of UK Spy Scandal — Would Xi’s Chief of Staff Really Meet a Young British Teacher?

LONDON — Leaked defence material has added striking details and fresh questions to Britain’s most serious espionage scandal in decades, sharpening the portrait of how a young British teacher allegedly became entangled in a Chinese intelligence operation — one that, according to national-security assessments, apparently included meetings run through Xi Jinping’s chief lieutenant, reaching deep into Parliament and giving Beijing real-time insight into the thinking of British politicians.

Documents produced after the collapse of the case revealed that British counter-intelligence believed Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash were tasked to produce real-time intelligence on Conservative critics of Beijing for transmission to the highest levels of Xi Jinping’s Politburo — allowing the Ministry of State Security to calibrate its actions against British politicians viewed as potential threats to China’s interests.

Prosecutors have testified that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government decided not to classify China as an ongoing threat to national security — a technical legal issue that effectively answered what one called “the million-dollar question” for a jury, and caused the prosecution to collapse.

“The witness (National Security Adviser Matthew Collins) was clear to me that he would not say that China posed an active threat,” lead prosecutor Tom Little KC testified to British lawmakers. “Once he had said that, the current prosecution for those charges was effectively unsustainable. It brought this case to a crashing halt.”

The decision provoked diplomatic rebukes from Washington and raised alarms across the Five Eyes alliance. A letter from U.S. lawmakers to the British Embassy in Washington, reviewed by The Bureau, warned that abandoning the case sets a dangerous precedent, suggesting that foreign adversaries can target elected legislators with impunity.

As The Guardian revealed this week, Christopher Berry, a 33-year-old academic charged under the Official Secrets Act before the case was dropped in September, appears to have understood that his Chinese “clients” were not commercial intermediaries but state-linked actors. In August 2022, Berry sent a voice note saying, “They want me to work for them directly instead of going through the company.” The message, along with a series of WhatsApp exchanges, appears in an expert report written for Berry’s defence by Professor Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London.