Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring
You're invited
On Sunday March 16 at 18:30 Paris time, we will be hosting a live discussion with my friend Sergei Cristo. All subscribers are invited. I’ll send out the Zoom link beforehand.
Sergei Cristo is the main protagonist of the podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, featuring the journalists Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes, in which Sergei Cristo offers evidence of a spy ring operating at the heart of the British establishment. I’d heard this story from Sergei prior to the release of the podcast, and I’ve heard related stories from others.
Here’s a description of the podcast:
… From exclusive parties at the Russian Embassy to the corridors of Westminster, journalists Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes—with the help of Conservative party whistleblower Sergei Cristo—expose an alleged secret spy ring operating at the very heart of the British political system. This is the untold story of the most audacious Russian influence operation in British history. It involves honey traps, Russian agents, and information warfare.
You can expect a nine-part series, where Russian wealth and glamour collide with a wild west of new digital landscapes. As Sergei tries and fails to raise the alarm, this intoxicating cocktail—shaken and stirred from within the Russian Embassy in London—masks the tightening iron fist of Vladimir Putin inside Russia and murder of traitors on foreign soil. All while MPs, intelligence officers and the police turn a blind eye.
Not since the reach of the Cambridge spy ring in the second half of the 20th century has the Kremlin aimed so high and gone so unnoticed in penetrating the highest echelons of British politics.
Together, Conservative whistleblower Sergei Cristo, Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr and creator of the hit podcast, Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder, Peter Jukes, uncover a story that forms one small corner of Vladimir Putin’s plot against the West.
It’s a story we’re still living, where the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Citizens is a nonprofit journalism and pressure group that focuses on the intersection of technology and politics. The podcast is part of their ongoing campaign to force the UK government to act on the 2020 Russia Report.
The fifty-page report, produced by parliament’s cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee, found that the British government and the UK’s intelligence agencies had failed to conduct any rigorous assessment of the Kremlin’s interference with the Brexit referendum. Ministers, it found, had ignored the allegations of Russian disruption, despite what the committee found to be credible evidence of Russian interference in UK elections since, at least, 2016. The committee called for an investigation, and for the creation of a new legal and institutional framework to protect the UK’s elections from foreign interference.
In the United States—not that it did any good—allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election led to an intelligence community assessment two months later, an unclassified summary of which was made public, and a Senate investigation followed by a comprehensive report. The British government has conducted no such review, even though it is well known that London has been the world’s biggest laundromat for dirty Russian money.
The Citizens have therefore joined a group of British parliamentarians in suing the government. The case is now before the European Court of Human Rights. The plaintiffs argue that the government is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires regular, free, secret-ballot elections ensuring “the free expression of the opinion of the people.”
As the MP Caroline Lucas put it, by failing to undertake a full investigation of the evidence, the British government is jeopardizing “the free and fair elections we hold dear and [allowing] Putin to believe that, once again, he can get away with hostile state interference in our democratic processes.” And she is absolutely right.
The case is hugely significant, not least because it will have ramifications for every state governed by the convention. With the United States in chaos—and out of the fight for Europe’s security and independence—Russia is certain to redouble its efforts to bring Europe under its control.
To combat this, it is not enough for European governments to rearm. They must take equally vigorous action against Russia’s and psychological and covert war. The United States will not be a partner in these efforts: As we recently saw during in JD Vance’s trip to Europe, when he threw the weight and prestige of the American presidency behind Russia’s puppet party in Germany, and as we’ve also seen from Elon Musk’s efforts to interfere in both German and UK politics, it is, in fact, a party to them.
Between them, the United States and Russia have a great deal of experience in influencing foreign elections. If Europe wishes to remain free and independent, it cannot dismiss Russia’s efforts as insignificant. It must also grasp that from now on, Russia will be reinforced in these efforts by the United States.
My friend Sergei has found himself at the forefront of efforts to force the government to take Parliament’s report seriously. He’ll be discussing this with us. In preparation for the discussion, I strongly recommend listening to Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, which you’ll find fascinating (and deeply dismaying) whether you join the discussion or not.
In light of the lamentable developments in the United States, it is absolutely imperative that British government take serious action to end, or at least constrain, Russia’s active measures, espionage, influence campaigns, and subversion in the UK, not least because this has never been, and certainly is not now, only about the UK. The UK is the strongest supporter of Ukraine in Europe, and with the United States now on Russia’s side, it has become the world’s strongest supporter. This means Russia’s. attacks will intensify.
Let the United States be warning. If the UK doesn’t want to go the way of the United States, it must, at long last, act on the recommendations of its own Intelligence and Security Committee. It must open a public enquiry into Russian intelligence operations targeting the UK, exposing all of the political actors, all the money they’ve taken, and all the techniques of Russian manipulation that have been used.
Sergei, meanwhile, has undertaken an investigation into so-called “sustainable and ethical” European investment funds that are no such thing, because they invested in Putin’s regime in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. (Would anyone like to calculate the carbon footprint of the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War? I leave it to readers as an exercise.)
The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, or SFDR, is an EU regulation meant to ensure transparency in financial sector products that market themselves as ESG—Environmental, Social and Governance—compliant. It was passed as part of the so-called European Green Deal, which envisions a climate neutral Europe by 2050, in line with the Paris accords. (Good luck with that.)
Sergei has so far uncovered no less than 70 British and European funds that claim to be “deep green,” meaning they enjoy a sustainability rating of 9 on the SFDR’s 1-10 scale, but nonetheless invested in Putin’s regime in the run-up to the war. In other words, these funds were a complete environmental fraud; as for their claim to support worthy “social and governance” ends, suffice to say Russia’s was probably not the society and governance in which consumers proudly imagined they were investing. He has also uncovered some 320 funds with a sustainability rating of eight that do the same.
He’s now seeking funding for his research into these companies’ Russian holdings: From his fundraiser:
[L]eading European asset managers misused their sustainable funds in supporting a ruthless dictator as he prepared to unleash carnage on a young, aspiring democracy, Ukraine.
By dissecting the Russian exposure of each fund over the six months before February 24, 2022, Sergei will track each Russian holding, with the help of his friends in the Russian and Ukrainian investigative community, confirming links with the Kremlin regime, cases of corruption, and how each of the investee entities fit within the Russian war machine.
These asset managers not only harmed their national security, they also betrayed the expectations of their investors, including ordinary savers and pensioners who thought they were helping good causes by investing in ESG funds.
A former communications specialist with over 20 years’ experience in asset management, Sergei blew the whistle in 2023 in one such case. Now, he wants to establish the scale of what really happened, looking at all of the “sustainable” funds run by the biggest asset managers in Europe.
Since becoming a whistleblower, Sergei had to leave the [financial] industry, so he is asking you to help him fund this work while he seeks a proper research grant, which may take many months. This can’t wait until then, however, because in 2025, the European Commission will rewrite its SFDR rules for sustainable funds. The results of this research could help the European Commission and the UK financial industry, to put a stop on “sustainable” investments into oppressive regimes.
Once this research work is underway, donors will receive invitations to dinner debates and other events hosted by Sergei in London, featuring prominent speakers, including journalists, politicians, and investment experts.
You’ll notice that lately I’ve been posting links to the GoFundMe account of every guest I invite to speak to us. This is because journalism is in a desperate crisis, newspapers having found no reliable financial model in the age of the Internet, and funding for this kind of research having largely disappeared—a problem that will only get worse, now, with the erasure of USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. Precisely as we most need the resources of large, well-funded newsrooms with the money, time, and expertise to conduct this kind of deep investigation, there are none to be found.
Journalists who look too closely at Russia have long been accustomed to finding out that their funding has mysteriously dried up (or worse). This occurred even before Trump’s victory. One case is partly described here:
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded news organization, has cut funding for The Interpreter magazine, an online publication that has critically covered Russia.
People who I will describe for now as “anonymous sources” have told me that while this may have taken place before Trump’s victory, it had everything to do with Trump and his connections to Russia.
This is why, whenever I invite a guest who investigates Russia’s activities to speak to us, there’s a crowdfunding link in the post. In due course, this too will probably disappear as a funding option. The way authoritarian regime can censor the news people receive, even in countries that supposedly have a free press, are vast—as I discovered living in Turkey. This is a point I should probably write about at length.
But for now, I’ll leave it at that, and finish by republishing, below—with his permission and that of the editors—an article Sergei wrote recently for Byline Times.
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The Truth about Russia’s Campaign of Interference in British Democracy
The British people have been lied to and manipulated for years. It’s time we learnt the whole truth, writes whistleblower Sergei Cristo
Nations would be terrified if they knew by what small men they were governed—Talleyrand
About fifteen years ago, in late Autumn 2010, I was contacted by a young high-ranking Russian diplomat in London, Sergey Nalobin. He was extremely interested that I was helping Conservative Party Treasurers to recruit future financial political donors, and stated that he could help with that. “I know Russian companies that would like to contribute to the Conservative Party,” he told me.
For me, this was a massive red flag and potentially a serious criminal offense. I warned the Security Services (MI5) but they refused my offer to collect proof of Nalobin’s proposed criminal activities and, instead, allowed him to remain en poste in London for a further few years. Eventually, this Russian diplomat was gently pushed out of the country by the Foreign Office, although not without causing yet another controversy, but that’s another story.
When Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) was finally allowed to publish its Russia Report in 2020, it unleashed fierce criticism at MI5 for “actively avoiding looking for evidence that Russia interfered in our democracy.” It then dawned upon me that my encounter with Nalobin could have been an important illustration of that, and I wrote to my old friend in the parliamentary Conservative Party and chairman of the ISC at the time, The Rt Hon Sir Julian Lewis MP, for advice. I was told to go to the police.
Special Branch
Of course, walking into a police station with a report about MI5 and expecting to be taken seriously is not as straightforward as it may sound. However, I got talking to SO15 (formerly the Special Branch) of the Metropolitan Police, who also dealt with foreign espionage, and eventually began to feel that I was being listened to. However, my optimism was short-lived.
On a cold January evening in 2022, just a few weeks before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, at a London railway station, a plain clothes police officer handed me a letter from a detective superintendent at SO15. The letter basically stated that MI5’s refusal to investigate possible activity of a foreign diplomat did not, in their view, amount to a criminal offence. I was advised that “the proper forum for [my] complaint would be the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).” The letter was dated May 5, 2021, about eight months prior, and bore an incorrect post code. I was left with a distinct feeling that the police were stalling.
On February 24, 2022, while I was still planning to write and securely send my complaint to the IPT, the Russians attacked Ukraine. My family, like so many other families caught up on different sides in any war, was broken. My mother, my father, and my half-sister had become completely brainwashed by Russian propaganda. As Putin banned and expelled all independent media from the country, my mother believed what she was told by the federal TV. Things got so bad that she refused to believe anything I was trying to explain to her, and eventually she refused to talk to me for more than a year. 2022 was a terrible year. and spending my time making yet another complaint about Nalobin did not seem to me a priority.
But eventually I got round to it in November that year, after receiving a call from Channel 4’s Dispatches asking to interview me about Nalobin. My story seemed important again.
Intelligence Tribunal
The response from the tribunal arrived a mere three months later. The IPT refused to investigate my complaint about MI5’s refusal to investigate Mr. Nalobin, with no right of appeal. It justified its decision by my complaint being, apparently, “out of time” as the IPT, under its current statute, does not have to consider events that took place over a year ago.
While the Tribunal had discretion to waive that requirement, apparently it was not satisfied with my explanation that I “was unaware of the significance of the event until the publication, in July 2020, of the Russia Report.”
Additionally, the tribunal stated that it had turned down my complaint because “there [was] also no explanation as to why the complainant did not receive the letter dated 5 May 2021 until sometime in 2022. We note that it is addressed to the complainant at the same address given in the complaint form. The complainant has not explained who handed him the letter or when, other than it was ‘earlier this year.’”
Clearly, if the IPT really wanted to know the answer to the last question then it could have obtained it from the police. Their first point about the Russia Report sounded like an empty excuse. The whole thing stank to me of whitewash.
It also seemed, from the irritated tone of the IPT decision, which sounded like a cantankerous elderly aunt just woken from her afternoon nap by a noisy child, that the presiding Judge really did not want to be drawn on such controversies, even if both the Police and the ISC thought the tribunal was the correct avenue for the resolution of my concerns.
Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring
It was around this time that Carole Cadwalladr, the investigative journalist with the Guardian and Observer, involved me in the recording of this chart-topping podcast. And it was during my trips to London to be interviewed for various episodes that I learned more about the significance of my experience of the Russian interference, prompted by this brilliant podcast. I talked to my friends in the Conservative Party, Parliament, government, journalism and diplomacy. Most of the answers seemed to point back to the Russia Report.
The Russia Report
There were several intriguing discoveries. First, that Conservative members of the ISC knew the reason why Prime Minister Johnson came up with bogus excuses to prevent the publication of the Russia Report before the 2019 election. He was afraid that the controversy around the Russian interference would derail his campaign to “get Brexit done,” and might have even ended up in the courts.
Second, the report was massively redacted. I was told that it goes to the other four of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies, who take out anything that they believe came from their sources. That meant that we would not have had the chance to see any American information, which was a pity because US agencies clearly keep a close eye on us. Once, a credible source in the US told me that when Cameron was PM, the CIA tipped off the British several times over the so-called “suspicious” deaths of Russians in the UK—but London dismissed them.
Third, that Johnson wanted Grayling to take over the ISC not only to soft pedal the release of the Russia Report and how it was presented to the public, but also to destroy the Committee’s independence, remove part of its funding and fire key expert personnel. Other than that, Grayling had no interest in being on the Committee – he left soon after he lost the election as Chairman to Julian Lewis.
Fourth, I confirmed my suspicions that the relationship between the Committee and the intelligence and security services, which it is supposed to oversee, and the rest of the Executive, has been a constant struggle. In its annual reports, the ISC complained about the Services failing to answer their requests in time, if at all. The PM has not made himself available to the Committee, as it used to be the case, for several years. Apart from complaining about all this in their reports, the Committee, which represented us, the electorate, could not really do anything to force the executive to take their responsibilities before Parliament seriously. In the meantime, the Committee sits firmly within the Cabinet Office structure, with its every move carefully monitored by the Executive. Indeed the Committee can’t even publish a fully redacted report without asking the Prime Minister for permission.
Smoke and Mirrors from Boris Johnson
The report was published in July 2020, soon after that exhilarating feat of multi-party collaboration, so unlike the confrontational nature of British politics, as members of different political parties wrestled the ISC’s independence back from Mr. Johnson at No 10.
In its pages it hid a startling revelation: Our excellent intelligence and security agencies did not see it as their national security objective to protect our democratic process from foreign interference. The powers that be were pretending to be blind, and they were leading the blind.
Prime Minister Johnson wasted no time in rubbishing the report. He simply politicized this crucial national security issue. “It is about pressure from the Islingtonian Remainers, who have seized on this report to try and give the impression that Russian interference was somehow responsible for Brexit,” he said.
I found this blunt accusation puzzling, like one of those Trumpian tweets. I spent most of my time at the grand Conservative Carlton Club in St. James’s Street of Westminster, not in Islington. And while I, like many in my party, happened to think that Britain’s place was at the biggest table in Europe, my efforts to educate people about the Russian threat well predated my “Remainism.”
This was also true of Luke Harding, who first helped to get my story out in 2012. He is currently The Guardian’s correspondent on the Ukrainian front, and the first Western journalist expelled from Russia since the fall of communism. And for the two key witnesses to the ISC, who provided our podcast with incredible insight into the report. Edward Lucas has known Boris Johnson personally for 20 years or so and has watched Russia for about 40 years. Chris Steele spent over two decades at the SIS (MI6) watching and analyzing Russia.
All that might well have been double Dutch to Prime Minister Johnson, who, like a certain bird, seemed to be attracted to everything that shined—be that the lavish hospitality of KGB oligarchs in England and Italy, populist red campaign busses, or political donations from various Russian sources, some obvious and some less so.
Political Funding: From Russia with Brexit
At a luxurious office at the presidential palace in one of our more friendly European states, the senior official looked at me very firmly and answered: “The thing about those Russian donations was that they were a part of a scheme.”
We were talking about donations to the Conservative Party made, over the years, by Russians with British passports. These donors lived mostly in the UK, but the source of their wealth tended to come from Putin’s Russia or what it regarded as its “satellites.”
Conservative governments of the post-Brexit period have always denied that Russia has “successfully” interfered in British politics. Would bankrolling a big part of the Brexit campaign count as successful interference? I would say yes, given that the £7 million alone (that we know about for sure), given by just two Russian donors in the last few years, would have funded the whole Central Conservative Party operation for a year. I worked with conservative treasurers at the Conservative Party HQ, so I know that the annual budget was normally about that at the time.
In Episode 8 of our podcast, Chris Steele confirms that according to his intelligence, the Kremlin allocated a large secret budget to influence the Brexit campaign and says that “money changed hands”.
Another senior European security official to whom we also spoke said that the level of support that Russian intelligence gave to various British “independence” campaigns, over a long period prior to the Brexit campaign, is widely underestimated.
He also stressed that while Russians have long supported and secretly funded nationalist and separatist movements across Europe, the UK has always been seen by the Kremlin as the most dangerous power in Europe, and therefore a priority.
The Kremlin Razzle Dazzle
So, how did we get here and where are we heading? My personal instinct is that part of Putin’s long-term strategy might have involved pushing the UK’s intelligence and security agencies and those of their allies away from counterintelligence by encouraging them to focus more on counterterrorism and spend their resources there instead. As Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former Director General of MI5, liked to repeat, it is all about setting priorities. And Putin was there to help us set them.
He was the first Western leader who called President George W. Bush after the terrorist attack on September 11. He also encouraged intelligence cooperation over Afghanistan and Syria, as well as domestic terrorist threats.
The consequences of this shift, in early 2000s, soon became apparent. Many of the most experienced officers at Thames House, who worked through the 1980s and 1990s and knew Russian active measures when they saw them, left or retired.
Most of the remaining experienced officers ended up on the counterterrorism side, despite, according to one former chief of the SIS, even though terrorism was never a systemic threat to the UK. Russian espionage had become a marginal area for MI5, staffed by young graduates, and Moscow used that weakness to build the largest hostile espionage presence in London since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
It is true that most embassy-based Russian spies have been expelled. However, Russia is increasingly cooperating in their political interference and espionage operations with other autocracies, such as China, Iran, and North Korea. The UK will need to revolutionize its national security infrastructure if it is to address this growing threat effectively.
To me, foreign interference in our democratic processes ceased to be an issue of political debate as soon as it came firmly under the remit of MI5 in 2023 under the new National Security Act.
However, the unscrupulous politicians who enabled Putin’s geopolitics by taking political donations from his proxies and doing his bidding remain a growing threat to Britain. All this time, they kept us, the ordinary voters, in the dark, taken for granted, patronized, and led by the nose.
It is time to have a proper public enquiry into the Russian interference. It could be presided over by three of the most senior judges in the land, authorized and cleared to look at all intelligence reports.
To the hesitating members of the new Labour government, I would remind you of the immortal words of the late Senator Diane Feinstein, chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, when she presented the CIA torture report:
This clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, it is going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not. There are those who will seize upon the report: “You see what the Americans did?” And they will try to use it to justify evil actions and incite more violence. We can’t prevent that. But history will judge us, our commitment to a just society governed by law, and our willingness to face an ugly truth and say, ‘Never again.’
Listen to Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, a podcast by Carole Carwalladr and Peter Jukes
Sergei Cristo, a former BBC journalist, asset management specialist and Conservative Party fund raiser, is a whistle-blower against Russian interference in British politics.
I'll try to be there; it sounds really interesting. As many spies that we catch in Estonia - we are very good at counterintelligence - it's strange how few are unearthed in the western capitols.
Two things - have you given up on the Elephant Cage? I enjoyed it when you did it. If it just didn't work for your co-host, I suggest you could turn it into a weekly pod, and have a stable of guest hosts from different parts of the world that you could team up with to talk about what's going on in their region.
Second, I would suggest Michael Weiss for a future chat. I'm sure you could reach him through his website, if you are not mutuals on Twitter.
I might actually be able to participate in this since I am listening to the podcast right now and it's amazing!! I think my great uncle who had a lengthy career with MI5 is probably turning in his grave.