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Details of members of the SAS are among more than 100 Britons named in the database of 18,700 Afghans, the accidental leak of which by a defence official led to thousands being secretly relocated to the UK.
Defence sources said the highly sensitive document contained names and email addresses belonging to people sponsoring or linked to some individual cases. Personal information about MI6 officers was also included.
The identities of members of the SAS and MI6 are a closely guarded secret, and the possibility that following the leak such information could have ended up in the public domain was a source of significant official concern.
SAS and other special forces officers were involved in assessing whether Afghans who said they were members of the elite 333 and 444 units, known as the Triples, were allowed to come to the UK.
Defence sources said the dataset also referred to a “secret route” that Afghans could use to come to the UK.
This week it emerged that the Ministry of Defence had obtained a superinjunction preventing the disclosure of the leak and that a £2bn-plus scheme had been created to relocate some Afghans affected by the breach to the UK to protect them from the Taliban.
That superinjunction lapsed on Tuesday, when a high court judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, concluded after a government review that the threat to the 18,700 Afghans was no longer very significant.
However, there were some remaining restrictions, some of which were relaxed on Thursday after another court hearing. The MoD said it would be possible to publish some additional descriptions about contents of the database.
In a statement on Tuesday, after the unprecedented superinjunction was lifted, the defence secretary, John Healey, offered a “sincere apology” on behalf of the government for the data breach.
He later told the Commons that the spreadsheet contained “names and contact details of applicants and, in some instances, information relating to applicants’ family members, and in a small number of cases the names of members of parliament, senior military officers and government officials were noted as supporting the application”.
“This was a serious departmental error,” he added.
Parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), which monitors the UK spy agencies, said it would scrutinise the affair, following on from an inquiry announced by the Commons defence select committee.
The ISC asked that all intelligence assessments that had been shared with high court in secret now be shared with the committee. Its chair, Lord Beamish, asked why “material relating to the data loss” could not be shared with the committee early given that it routinely reviews classified material.
The MoD said it “strongly welcomed” the proposed review. “Defence intelligence and the wider department have been instructed by the defence secretary to give their full support to the ISC and all parliamentary committees,” spokesperson said.
The decision to seek an injunction preventing the disclosure of the data breach was first taken by the then Conservative defence secretary, Ben Wallace, in August 2023, when the MoD first became aware that the personal information had leaked onto a Facebook group.
A judge then ordered that the injunction remain secret, turning it into a rarely used superinjunction. Wallace’s immediate successor, Grant Shapps, sought to maintain the gagging order until the general election in July 2024 while developing a secret relocation scheme for about 15,000 Afghans affected.
The day-to-day task for developing the scheme was handed to one of Shapps’s deputies, James Heappey, the then minister for the armed forces. On Thursday, in a social media posting, Heappey said the scheme was discussed in the Cabinet’s domestic an economic affairs committee.
He said the committee “tried to extend entitlements by smallest number possible”, as led by legal advice, with little resistance from other members of the government. “I don’t recall fierce opposition. There was frustrated resignation that it was necessary,” he said.
It can now be reported that the leaked leaked data included the names, email and phone numbers for thousands of Afghans who had applied to come to the UK under an existing relocation scheme designed for those who had helped the British military.
In some instances the data contained further written information about their case and status of their application – focused on whether they had in fact helped the UK or British forces in Afghanistan – but it did not contain addresses or photographs.
This week Afghans affected by the breach received a message addressed from the UK government, and sent in English, Pashto and Dari, that warned the recipient’s email address had been used to make a resettlement application and that some personal data may have been compromised.
Details of the breach were limited, but recipients on the email – some of whom remain in hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan – were advised “not to take phone calls or respond to messages or emails from unknown contacts” and to limit who could see their social media profiles.
