He worked for the Foreign Office and UK security agency GCHQ, where he had access to secret documents. He met the future British King and worked with two prime ministers while employed by the UK government in Kabul. He was also an alleged Russian spy.
The Afghan national, who over the course of a varied career also had Nato security clearance, was stripped of his British citizenship in 2019 after MI5, Britian’s domestic intelligence agency, accused him of being a spy. This week he appealed against the decision, in a hearing at the Special Immigration Appeal Commission.
The alleged spy, who can only be identified as C2, denies being an agent for GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency that according to the UK attempted to poison double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
During closing arguments on Friday, C2, who has both British and Russian citizenship, sat in the courtroom wearing a suit and polished shoes, occasionally inspecting the pattern on his tie.
Robert Palmer KC, C2’s barrister, asked SIAC to “make a finding of fact that he is not, and never was a GRU agent and therefore to allow his appeal”.
Rory Dunlop KC, acting for the government, said: “the case now being advanced is wrong”, and argued that C2 “would be of particular utility to the GRU as a UK national who had previously held security clearance”.
The details of C2’s case offers a glimpse of the shadowy world of intelligence, and how the border between spying and ordinary civilian life can blur in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan.
“He sounds like just the kind of man the GRU would want to recruit,” said a former western intelligence officer who was stationed in Kabul at the time but never met C2 and is not involved in the case. “However he could have just been caught up in the general Afghan madness.”
C2 was born to a prominent Afghan family. Having grown up under the Soviet regime, he left Kabul after it fell to the Mujahedeen and moved to Russia in 1994. He lived there for six years, studying Russian language and literature, and married a Russian, court documents showed.
He came to the UK in 2000, after paying a people smuggler, who arranged a Russian passport and a Caribbean holiday. C2 claimed asylum at a connecting flight in London, as part of what he acknowledged was an “embellished and untrue” account of being an Afghan refugee.
He studied at university and, being fluent in Dari, Pashto and Russian, earned a living as an interpreter — eventually for GCHQ. He joined and underwent security vetting — including, he claimed, a request to undergo “developed vetting”, the highest level of security clearance.
C2 returned to Afghanistan in the late 2000s, working with the Foreign Office, where he met Prince Charles and Prince William, as well as leading UK politicians including Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
It was after he took a role in the Afghan government, court documents showed, that his work led to frequent meetings with Russian officials. He travelled to Russia six times. He also befriended two Russian defence attaches, having met one of them at a British embassy event.
C2 acknowledged that they might have been GRU agents, but that many of his other acquaintances might have been intelligence agents too. “I don’t know that and I can’t determine that,” he said, according to court documents.
Palmer, his barrister, told the court: “That is the same position most individuals working and living there [in Kabul] would have been in.”
C2’s life began to unravel in 2019, when British security services began to question him about his Russia ties. By then C2 had changed jobs again and was working in the energy sector, “following the money”.
It was during a London visit in April that he was asked to meet members of the UK and US security services. Two agents, who identified themselves as “Andy” and “Robert”, questioned C2 about his meetings with Russian officials — in particular those he met during a 2016 trip to Cyprus made on Afghan government business.
At a second London meeting in July, C2 was taken to the roof of a hotel and told he would have to take a polygraph test. Several weeks later, back in Kabul, he was informed that the UK believed he was working for the GRU and that he had been stripped of his nationality.
One of the quirks of C2’s case is that he was evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021 as part of Operation Pitting, when 15,000 people deemed to be at risk from the Taliban were flown to the UK — even though he had been stripped of his citizenship two years earlier.
The government neither confirms nor denies that he returned during Operation Pitting, but argued in court that it was “irrelevant” to the case against him.
C2 was arrested on arrival, and subsequently released on bail. The SAIC ruling on his case is not expected for several weeks.
