In the dark days of the spring in 2022, as Russian troops terrorised Bucha and every day brought shocking new scenes of Ukrainians fleeing for their lives, I rang an old acquaintance, Sergei Cristo. Cristo is a Russian-born British citizen and I prepared for what I suspected might be a long conversation: he is a talker. He was born in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, but he moved to Britain when he was 19 and it’s fair to say we’re not the most obvious of allies. He loves the royal family and is a passionate Conservative party activist. He used to be on the committee of a donor club for young Conservatives, “and then I became vice-chairman, I knew the cabinet, I knew the leader, everybody”.
He’s not kidding. He has photos of himself with everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson, and his favourite place to hang out used to be the Carlton Club, the grand Conservative private members’ club in central London.
As a student, I read and loved The Adventures of Roderick Random, an 18th-century novel by Tobias Smollett that’s cited as a classic example of the picaresque. The picaresque hero has random encounters with random people and goes on even more random adventures. And Cristo I always think of as the classic picaro. His life is the opposite of linear, much like his speaking style: if you ring him for a quick chat, you’ll be on the line for at least an hour. But if you have the patience to follow him as he takes you down some meandering path, usually via an anecdote involving a high-ranking member of the Conservative party, there’s often a nugget buried at the end. And so it was this time.
We were discussing another Sergei: Sergei Nalobin, the former political first secretary at the Russian embassy in London and a subject of special interest to us both. For Cristo, it was because he believed Nalobin was a spy. He thought he’d been targeted by him when Nalobin was looking for a route into the Conservative party, which Cristo believed he later successfully infiltrated. For me, it was because of my interest in Russian information warfare: he is a self-described expert in “digital diplomacy”.
Nalobin had been an early pioneer of the Russian government’s understanding of the internet, organising events in London to meet bloggers and political strategists, learning techniques and best practice. And it was the Russian embassy in London that first turned its Twitter account into a trolling machine – it used memes and lies and jokes to undercut the truth, a practice that’s known on the internet as “shitposting”. It was a technique that was very visible that spring: the Russian ministry of foreign affairs had been posting photos of the hospital bombing in Mariupol from its Twitter account with “FAKE” stamped over them.
In 2012, Cristo had become a whistleblower. He’d teamed up with the Guardian’s Luke Harding to expose Nalobin’s involvement with a group called Conservative Friends of Russia. They had revealed it to be a Kremlin-supported influence operation. It was a big front-page story and the group had collapsed in disgrace. But a decade on, Cristo was agitated. He’d only gone to Harding, he told me, after he’d taken the matter to MI5.
What did they do?
“Nothing. I had two meetings, the second one in a government building off Whitehall.” There were two officers, he said, one junior, one senior. “The senior one just had a very offhand kind of attitude, very superior attitude, almost like treating me like an idiot.”
And it increasingly bothered him. He hadn’t managed to persuade the authorities to take the allegation seriously.
“So two years ago I wrote to the chair of the [parliamentary] intelligence and security committee [ISC], Julian Lewis, a very old friend – we used to campaign together – and he told me to go to the police. So I went to Charing Cross police station to report it.”
What?
“Julian said the first port of call, if you think there’s any impropriety on the part of the security services, is to go to the police.”
You walked into Charing Cross police station and said: “I want to report MI5 for failing to investigate a suspected Russian spy”?
“Yes. I said: ‘Can we just speak somewhere where we cannot be overheard?’ And the police officer said: ‘No, here’s fine.’ So I told him that I’m concerned for my security because I took a matter about a Russian spy to the security services and they didn’t do anything about it.”
This incident is typical Cristo, not least because he’s a stickler for due process. In the early 90s, still in Rostov-on-Don, he learned English from the BBC Russian service and used to write to the British Council and British embassy in Moscow. He was sent a map of London that he stuck on his bedroom wall and a picture of the queen that he framed and put on his desk. And when he got to Britain, he tells me, what he loved was its “openness”, its transparency. “You knew you could just walk into parliament and there was this special clerk in the central lobby and he could call your MPs out of the chamber, and you could lobby them on any subject, or leave a note.”
He’s absorbed that and respects and honours it in a way that maybe only an immigrant can. And he asserts his rights: he’s an endless letter writer. He showed me the letter he’d sent to the ISC – on proper stationery, with a personalised, embossed address – and the response he got from the chair.
A whole chain of other letters followed, including from the investigatory powers tribunal, the judicial body that oversees the intelligence agencies. Because Cristo believed he had evidence that confirmed what the ISC had itself already revealed when, in July 2020, a scandal that had been rumbling under the surface of British politics for months erupted into the news.
The committee had finally published the Russia report, two years in the making, into Kremlin interference in UK politics. And at the press conference to launch it, the committee’s MPs couldn’t contain their anger. “The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum because they did not want to know,” one said. “The outrage isn’t if there is interference,” said another. “The outrage is [that] no one wanted to know if there was interference.”
The report “was unforgiving about who is protecting British democracy,” the New York Times reported. “No one is,” the authors said.
In fact the report should have been published in October 2019, before the general election a month later, the election that gave Boris Johnson the mandate for the Brexit on which he’d pinned his reputation. But at the last minute, there had been an intervention that stopped the report being published. The prime minister’s office refused the committee permission. And the man behind that decision? Boris Johnson.
And then Johnson had doubled down. The committee’s MPs said Britain urgently needed an inquiry to understand what had happened in order to protect Britain from future foreign interference: Johnson refused again, calling it a plot by “Islingtonian remainers” to stop Brexit.
As we stand on the verge of a whole new world of national security threats from a new world order, with Elon Musk already interfering in UK politics, the question is: why?
It’s a question that I’ve spent a long time attempting to understand with Cristo and fellow journalist Peter Jukes, the co-founder of Byline Times, in an investigative podcast we’ve made, Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring.
It’s crowdfunded, made on a shoestring with the help of freelance producer Ruth Abrahams, and it’s the latest step in a nearly five-year effort to force the government to launch that inquiry. In 2020, I helped organise a group of MPs – including Caroline Lucas and Chris Bryant – to sue the government to demand that inquiry.
With the help of two campaigning lawyers, Tessa Gregory and Tom Short at Leigh Day, that case is now working its way to the European court of human rights, challenging the government under article 3 of the convention, the right to a free and fair election. It’s been flagged as an “impact” case of significance to other member states and is being expedited.
The podcast, launched between Christmas and the new year, shocked us by reaching the top of the Apple podcast chart within 48 hours of release. But the most shocking thing is that Cristo stumbled on a Russian diplomat who looked very much like a spy operating with impunity at the heart of Westminster. And the authorities looked the other way.
In the 1950s, revelations about a group of British spies who passed information to the Soviet Union scandalised Britain. Here, the alleged spies weren’t part of the British establishment, but it was the British establishment that the Kremlin was targeting. And it was an operation just as bold and ambitious. The difference, maybe, is that they got away with it.
Cristo’s story begins in the summer of 2011 with a phone call. The man on the other end introduced himself and said he had newly arrived in the capital to take up a post as a diplomat at the Russian embassy, in the political section.
They talked and although Cristo was suspicious – he’d left Russia aged 19 and had his own reasons to mistrust the Russian government – he agreed to a meeting. “Curiosity got the better of the cat,” he said. And he arranged to meet the diplomat at the Carlton Club. “So this little man turns up, smallish, fattish, baldish, with spectacles. He looks a bit like a professor and wearing a shapka, one of those hats where the ears come down.”
Cristo suspects his contacts within the Conservative party had drawn Nalobin’s attention. But expecting a serious conversation about policy, he says he was taken aback when Nalobin focused on what he thought was gossip. “It was all chit-chat. One question was about the relationship between Boris Johnson and David Cameron, who was prime minister at the time, and he was basically asking me whether they had real rivalry between them, or was it just something that the press made up.”
Given how Cameron and Johnson’s rivalry played out in the EU referendum, Cristo now thinks it was actually a pretty smart question: he wanted to understand their psychology. But it was what came next that took him back.
“He said: ‘We have Russian companies that would like to contribute to the Conservative party.’ I thought that was illegal. That’s the one that raised the red flag.”
And if true, it was a red flag; it is illegal in the UK for foreign companies to donate money to British political parties. It’s why there’s been such alarm about suggestions Elon Musk might donate £100m to the Reform party.
Cristo held back from asking him how or which companies. One of the more unlikely bits of his CV is that he once went undercover for the BBC’s Panorama and infiltrated a human trafficking gang. “I knew from working for Panorama that if you ask once, the second time you ask, it looks suspicious.”
An even more extraordinary bit of his CV is that he’s a great friend of Oleg Gordievsky, an ex-KGB colonel who’s the highest-ranking double agent and defector of modern times. Gordievsky was recruited by British intelligence and his escape from Russia – in the boot of a car driven by a British diplomat and his wife – is one of the great spy tales of our time. At that first meeting, Cristo says Nalobin had made it clear to him that he knew Cristo and Gordievsky were friends. “How’s Oleg?” he asked, gesturing to an article he’d written in that day’s Telegraph.
It was Gordievsky whom Cristo went to for advice. He found evidence (confirmed later by Harding and journalists at Russian outlet The Insider) that Nalobin’s father, Nikolai, had been high up in the KGB, and then its successor, the FSB, as had his brother. Gordievsky’s opinion was that Nalobin was also an intelligence officer. Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-FSB agent murdered on Putin’s orders with a nuclear isotope, is another of Cristo’s friends. And she actually remembered her husband mentioning Nikolai’s name: they worked together.
“It’s not a very common surname,” she told us. “When Sergei named Sergei Nalobin, I immediately thought it must be the son of Nikolai. Of course, people with this background can’t be a simple diplomat.”
When Cristo first told me that story it was November 2017. I’d rung him because I was interested in a photo I’d found of Boris Johnson with Sergei Nalobin. And rereading Harding’s piece, I’d spotted something else. The photo that illustrated it showed members of Conservative Friends of Russia, who’d been invited on an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow, and there among the “young political leaders” – hand-picked by Nalobin – was someone else I recognised. Posing on the red carpet inside the Duma, the Russian state parliament, was a key figure in the Brexit campaign that Johnson had fronted: the chief executive of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott. There’s no suggestion that Elliott – now Lord Elliott since he was elevated to the peerage by Liz Truss – did anything untoward, only that he’d been targeted by the friendliest diplomat in London, Sergei Nalobin.
The article I wrote prompted a ferocious response from various quarters, including a volley of letters from the Russian embassy to the Observer.
It was unhappy – very unhappy – with how I’d reported the circumstances of Nalobin’s departure from Britain in 2015, information that had come to me via Cristo. “The Home Office refused to renew the visas of four Russian diplomats, normally a rubber-stamping exercise, Nalobin among them,” I wrote. “The timing was not a coincidence: a week earlier, the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko concluded he was “probably murdered on the personal orders of Putin”.
The correspondence continued over months and included a letter from Alexander Yakovenko, the ambassador, and eventually a long note was added to the end of the article saying the Foreign Office confirmed Nalobin was “not expelled from the UK” and that “Mr Nalobin left the UK upon the expiry of his vignette”, but also noted the embassy refused to comment on why it had complained that he was and refused to “correct” anything.
Why was the Russian government so upset about what you told me, I asked Cristo. “I was only quoting RT [the Russian state-run news organisation]!” he said. “And it quoted the Russian government’s own press release that said Nalobin left the country after the British government refused to renew his ‘vignette’ or diplomatic visa. They were furious at the time. They said it was a breach of the Vienna conventions.”
He speculated that maybe the embassy had messed up: that its statement had blown Nalobin’s chances of getting another foreign posting. A month later, we learned Nalobin had been expelled from Estonia for “undermining its security”. He’s now high up in the Russian ministry of foreign affairs in Moscow.
I recently rediscovered the emails from the embassy. “We think it’s a textbook example of bad journalism, which raises quite a few questions regarding the true colours of the author,” reads the first one.
This autumn those letters did give me pause. The threat level from Russia has only gone up. There are many people, myself included, who believe we are already at war with Russia. Last month Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said “in 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in such a dangerous state”. The “staggeringly reckless” campaign of Russian sabotage believed to include cutting underwater internet cables is just one alarming new tactic. Norway has issued its citizens with emergency instructions that include having a wind-up radio and a stock of drinking water. Sweden has leafletted 5m households.
I didn’t plan for the podcast to take in Brexit and some of the people whom I’ve previously investigated. But the story has just gone where it’s gone. It’s been pored over by an eminent media lawyer. And we have found some answers. We can now see Nalobin’s activities in London as part of the Kremlin’s attempts to understand, operationalise and weaponise the blogosphere, the new alternative media space from which its most powerful and feared critic, Alexei Navalny, had sprung.
We’ve even learned some detail of what’s in the censored annexe of the Russia report – and why that might have scared Johnson, the man at the centre of all this.
The person taking the real risk here is Cristo. Until now, the Kremlin has only targeted its own citizens on foreign soil. Cristo gave up his citizenship after the security services failed to act for exactly that reason and has never been back to Russia.
But we are all at risk if this government does not take action and prepare for what we know is going to be foreign interference of a strength and type we’ve never seen before. “Foreign interference” is what the KGB called “active measures”. And it’s one aspect of what modern militaries understand as “hybrid warfare”.
I rang Cristo to ask him some more questions. He’s doggedly pursuing this and many other matters, is in protracted correspondence with the Electoral Commission over donations to the Carlton Club, and is studying for an MA on western investments into Putin’s regime. I ask him how he feels about us naming Sergei Nalobin. In my experience, it’s when things get personal that they start getting ugly.
Cristo, inevitably, takes a wildly circuitous route to answer that question. Back in Rostov-on-Don as a teenager, he set up an environmental group that was invited to an event at the UN, “and then I met some Southern Baptists who invited us to Texas so we got on a bus and that’s where I met George W Bush”.
This is not going to be one of his shorter stories. At one point in the recording, we started calling him Zelig, the Woody Allen character who turns up at every pivotal moment in history.
He eventually gets to the point and tells me a tale he’s never disclosed to me before: he had also come to Britain on an environmental trip. But before leaving he had to get a stamp in his passport. His three friends had all got theirs but his hadn’t arrived. “My father was working in light alloys at the time, which is not a code name for nuclear research,” and there were some incidents on his US trip that he thought could have tripped their alarms. His friend’s father pulled strings. “He got another deputy to take my file out, sign and stamp it.
“Then when I was in England, the KGB visited my mother.” He didn’t go home. Instead he applied for asylum. And four years later, when freelancing at the BBC, he went to interview someone at Kroll Associates, a corporate security firm, and found himself chatting to someone who said he worked on the security side at the British embassy in Moscow.
“And I said: ‘There was this very nice lady at the embassy who’d send me leaflets about Britain and I once went to visit her and she gave me tea and biscuits.’ And the man said: ‘Oh yes, that’s my friend’s wife. Her husband was the air attache.’ So the nice lady’s husband was basically military intelligence, and my father was in the aircraft industry. And I believe the KGB made the connection. I wrote to the Foreign Office, I still have the correspondence, and it was very soon after that, I got my status.”
It’s a classic spy story buried deep inside this other tale of intrigue. It’s how Cristo got his British citizenship, and it’s his patriotism to Britain – its values, that open society that took him in – that has fuelled his persistence to expose the malevolent forces that have sought to undermine it and corrupt it from within.
And then there’s a Cristo conversational hand-brake turn. “Have you ever seen Carry On Up the Khyber?” he asks me, and I think: oh God, how long is this going to take and where is it going? But he’s off. “There’s this scene where the Khazi of Kalabar, who’s played by Kenneth Williams, is outside the embassy with all his troops and they’re bombarding it.
“And inside, the governor, Sir Sidney Ruff Diamond, is having this grand dinner under crystal chandeliers and the band is playing. And they just sit there as the ceiling is collapsing, bits are falling off the crystal chandelier into their soup and they’re all pretending it was just the weather and saying: ‘The band is not very good today.’ And that’s what Russian interference reminds me of.”
We are under attack. And we can’t pretend any more. The chandeliers are falling into our soup. The Kremlin is slicing through underwater cables and the best time to have had an inquiry was five years ago. The second best time is today. Follow Cristo’s example: write a letter, tell your MP, demand answers. We are not safe. This is hybrid warfare and we’re living it.
