C2, who has held multiple roles in the British government, has not been criminally charged, but is seeking court to regain his British citizenship, which was revoked in 2019. He is a muscular-looking middle-aged man with a trimmed beard and wearing a leather jacket. and jeans, and did not speak to the few reporters who attended the sessions.
C2 denied in court that he worked as a Russian agent. Instead, he added, he served Britain honorably. It was dangerous work. He claimed to have survived several assassination attempts.
C2's lawyers claim that British security services provided only circumstantial evidence that C2 was a spy.
His lawyers said that C2 may have attended meetings with two Russian military attaches named Boris and Dmitry in Kabul, as the government claimed, but that those were merely friendly encounters between men who liked to attend alcohol-fueled parties in Kabul. He posted pictures of rocket launchers and naked women.
Either way, Britain's assertion that C2 may have been a Russian spy is embarrassing for the government and its intelligence services. Either he was a spy working at the heart of British intelligence, or they misread the evidence and got wrong information.
This fascinating case is being heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Committee, known as SIAC, which is charged with dealing with secret evidence, or what it calls “closed material.”
Last year, the Special Committee on Migration heard an appeal from young British woman Shamima Begum, a “jihadi bride” who went to Syria to marry an ISIS fighter. After she was found in a refugee camp in Syria, the then British Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of her British citizenship. SIAC rejected her appeal.
In these cases, judges have access to sealed materials that are not only permitted to the public, but even to C2's lawyers.
Glimpses into C2's life and times came from the guarded testimony heard in the “open” portions of the trial and court papers, from sources like “FL” who worked for the agencies but was not particularly forthcoming.
In the case of C2, government security services assessed that he may have acted as a Russian spy and posed a future risk to national security – and so took away his British citizenship. However, C2 exited Afghanistan on one of the last British evacuation flights before Kabul fell to the Taliban.
C2 is in court to regain his British citizenship and avoid possible deportation to Afghanistan or Russia.
C2 was born and raised in Afghanistan, where his father was a career military officer. The Times of London, which is closely following the case, reported earlier this week that on the day of his testimony, C2 said in court that MI5, the UK's domestic counter-espionage and security agency, accused him of being groomed by the Russians from the age of five. .
C2 said that in the 1990s he traveled to Moscow, and crossed into Russia from Afghanistan with the help of a smuggler. He lived in Moscow for six years, attended university there and married a Russian woman.
In 2000, with the help of another smuggler, he said he obtained a fake Russian passport and boarded a plane for a holiday in the Caribbean, with a stop in London. At Heathrow Airport, he requested asylum, saying he had fled the Taliban. He admitted that he lied to the authorities.
Regardless, C2 seems to have flourished in London. He worked as a translator, attended Brunel University and obtained a master's degree in intelligence and security studies.
Although an alleged Russian asset, C2 rose through the ranks of British intelligence, working at GCHQ, the country's intelligence, security and cyber agency, in London.
According to the government brief, C2 returned to Afghanistan, where he was posted to the British Foreign Office, as a Cultural Affairs Advisor in the Reconstruction Team in Helmand, Afghanistan.
In this position he met Prince Charles, now king, Prince William, and former prime ministers David Cameron and Gordon Brown. He was featured in a British Ministry of Defense press release praising his work.
Court papers also showed that C2 spent time working for NATO in Kabul. He went to work as an official in the Afghan Ministry of Commerce. Later he participated in oil deals.
His lawyer, Robert Palmer, told the judges that the Russians were major trading partners with Afghanistan. That his client speaks multiple languages, including Russian. He suggested that C2 was a player in Kabul, a hard-working hustler in the shadow world of wartime Kabul, at embassy parties and military bases, familiar with bribes and deal-making – and that he may have suspected that his Russian friends were GRU agents “but could not know.” for sure.
“Everyone in Afghanistan was fishing for information,” Palmer said.
In his closing arguments, Palmer said, in essence, that the hunting trips included one by MI5, who tied C2 to an hours-long “alleged lie detector test” and then told him he had failed it. Perhaps curiously, one of the questions asked by investigators at C2 was whether he had ever met Donald Trump.
The lead judge in the case, Judge Robert Jay, told the courtroom that it was possible for a court to find C2 credible but that he could still be considered a threat to national security.
Rory Dunlop, the barrister representing the government's home secretary, said bluntly that C2 had given the court “misleading and implausible answers”. “He lied several times,” he said.
