Scary monsters and super-spies
The British press looks under trucks for terrifying terrorists and in parliament's crumbling cupboards to find super-spies. Reality is rather less-overheated.
Previously: The Vampire Graveyard
Old monsters emerge from their political graves and the British press suggests that Labour is New once more.
If you relied on newspaper reports and the heavy manners of the police guarding his court appearance, you might imagine Daniel Khalife was some kind of terrorist super-soldier rather than what appears to be a fairly dim and tittish twentysomething who, despite escaping from HMP Wandsworth last Thursday, only got as far as Northolt — roughly 13 miles away.
Khalife is accused of trying to pass information to a hostile state — Iran — while a member of the Royal Signals, as well as of planting ‘fake bombs’ at Beacon Barracks in Staffordshire, where he was based. He’s now also charged with escaping from lawful custody, actions that made him headline news. But does the 21-year-old caught after being pushed off a bicycle on a canal towpath and reported to have laughed when he was arrested, sound like the man described by The Sun last week?
JAILBREAK terror suspect Daniel Khalife has specialist military escape and evasion training from his spell in the Army, The Sun can reveal.
Khalife, 21, learned how to avoid capture during his time with the Royal Signals at Blandford barracks.
… The Signaller underwent SERE — Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape — training during his service.
The course teaches recruits how to avoid population centres, cameras and main roads — and stay “off-grid” while trying to find friendly forces.
It has led to fears that Khalife — who completed basic infantry training and specialist signals courses —— could be evading police by relying on survival skills he learned in the corps.
It is understood the SERE 1 training Khalife received often includes a one-hour tuition video from ex-SAS soldier Chris Ryan, who wrote the 1995 book The One That Got Away.
A defence source said: “It is only the basic course, but it could be useful to a fugitive from justice.”
He didn’t “avoid populations, cameras, and main roads”; he was arrested cycling not far from his uncle’s house in Kew (which was also raided by police at the weekend). Maybe he just didn’t pay sufficient attention to Chris Ryan’s one-hour tuition video.
The Daily Mail fed its readers similarly breathless coverage including a technique you might call the ‘Barack Hussein Obama’…
Police hunting escaped terror suspect Daniel Abed Khalife were scouring Richmond Park this morning amid suggestions the former soldier could be using his army training to hide out there.
… Mr Murphy said: 'Khalife's out in the open now, so who's to say whether he has money available to him. He's a very resourceful individual, clearly, and our experience of him shows that. So nothing is off the table with him at the moment.'
… and, of course, so did The Daily Telegraph:
One senior defence source told the Telegraph that Khalife would have received training in the Army that would help him stay one step ahead while on the run.
The source said: “We teach them initiative, command tasks, problem-solving skills. We train people well, to be individuals, to adapt, overcome and improvise.
“He’s not in the infantry so doesn’t have the same resilience level as an infantry soldier, but even our basic soldiers are trained to be resilient to adapt, overcome and survive in harsh and unpredictable environments.”
The source went on: ”We do something called ‘survive, evade, resist and escape’, known as SERE training. It’s one of the basic annual training events each year.
“Soldiers are taught how to escape in the wild, to build shelters, and basic communication skills.”
The legal cases against Khalife are live and editors know contempt of court is a concern but the reporting walks a very narrow line, inserting lots of innuendo about his background and the nature of the charges. Opinion columns and ‘analysis’ which talk about the threat of ‘foreign actors’ sit cosily alongside the news reports; there are so many nudges and winks, that the papers resemble tedious music hall skits.
The coverage of the ‘Tory parliamentary researcher arrested on suspicion of spying for China’ story is following a similar pattern. While the majority of the press has opted not to name the man at the centre of the story, The Times’ front page splash today featured his name and photo, with a headline that put the word ‘spy’ in pole position:
Revealed: spy suspect at the heart of power
In the same way that reporting on Khalife tries to make a fairly standard squaddie — albeit one who may have some serious issues — into a super-soldier, the ‘China mole’ allegations have prompted stories that make a researcher sound all-powerful.
The Times writes, presumably with an inhaler close at hand:
The suspect is the son of a GP and grew up in a wealthy suburb of Edinburgh. He went to the fee-paying George Watson’s College, where he was a head of house, and later studied history at the University of St Andrews. He became active on Westminster’s social scene and used a dating app, making several attempts last year to arrange a date with a political journalist.
The detail about the researcher “making several attempts… to arrange a date with a political journalist” is allowed to sound sinister — could he have been trying to make connections for his masters in Beijing?! However, the hack — Sun political reporter, Noa Hoffman — offers her own account of Hinge chats for the paper and singularly fails to make it dramatic:
What no one prepares you for are the warning signs you could be flirting with a spy for the Chinese.
I matched with Mr. X on Hinge after being impressed by his sweet profile.
He was attractive, clearly into sports and had a thriving social life. On the app, he told me he worked in Parliament, just as I do.
… We arranged to go for drinks at a swanky Covent Garden cocktail bar on multiple occasions – but at the last minute, something always came up. One time he tested positive for Covid.
"In the cruellest twist of fate, I've succumbed to Covid after two years of avoiding it," he told me. The other I was tired and just couldn’t be bothered meeting up. Eventually I lost interest.
But I often saw him swanning around parliament and he continued to message me and many other journalists with briefings on China and invitations to "Westminster China Policy'' socials.
MR. X, who was well groomed with a big cheeky smile, was just like any other bright and attractive professional in his 20s. That’s why my jaw dropped when I learned he’d been arrested in March on spying allegations.
If someone so seemingly normal could live a double life and lie like this – who else is doing the same? Who can we really trust? Last night I re-read our text exchanges – and I was shocked.
When I asked him if we were “still on” for a date planned one evening, he responded: “Such as sceptic! Not without good reason to be fair.”
On another occasion, I made a joke about joining his organisation.
He replied: “Be careful what you wish for.”
… I had a lucky escape with Mr X – but what if the next person, or far more importantly, the country, doesn’t?
Mr X has issued a statement via his lawyers, Birnberg Peirce, in which he says that he is “completely innocent” and that he “feels forced to respond to media accusations that I am a ‘Chinese spy’. It is wrong that I should be obliged to make any form of public comment on the misreporting that has taken place”. The statement continues:
However, given what has been reported, it is vital that it is known that I am completely innocent. I have spent my career to date trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist Party. To do what has been claimed against me in extravagant news reporting would be against everything I stand for.
The details of what the man has been accused of remain unclear which is actually quite useful for grandstanding backbenchers and journalists who are all too delighted to quote them extensively and get excited themselves about the prospect of a “Chinese spy ring” in Westminster.
It may be that this is a serious case but reach the bottom of most of the stories on the researcher and the accusations and you’ll find inconvenient details like these from The Times report:
The case is likely to raise serious questions about security. [The researcher] was vetted as a parliamentary passholder but did not have a security clearance.
The Times understands that the material exchanged was not necessarily classified or top secret. However, a security source said that information did not need to be top secret to be highly sensitive and valuable to China: “It’s about networks and about influence. What do people in parliament think, which other people can be spoken to?”
“You expect me to talk, Blofeld?” “Yes, exactly, Bond and if you could tell me about the best bars in Westminster for networking and nibbles, I’d be most grateful.”
The problem with the reporting of both the Khalife and ‘alleged spy’ stories is that reporters and their editors are desperate to turn the central figures in both into characters that are far bigger than the facts suggest. Is it possible that a junior soldier and a fairly early-career researcher could do the things they are accused of?
Yes, of course. But there is an abject lack of proportion in the reporting. One reason for that may be that, in both cases, the stories can be easily shifted from the micro — single cases — to the macro — big themes of prison failures, terrorism, corruption, espionage, politics, and China. If the truth turns out to be more boring, it’s likely the press and broadcasters will follow all that shouting with barely a whisper.
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All a bit desperate and pathetic isn’t it. Cue, yet again, for GB Shaw: a (British) newspaper is a device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
What a country we live in 💩💩💩and run by 🤡🤡🤡