The British personnel were included in the leaked database because they had personally vouched for Afghans on the list.
Sources familiar with what happened said the leaked spreadsheet was a copy of the master database used by the MoD to process applications from Afghans to be relocated to Britain.
It can now be revealed that the database included the names, family names, telephone numbers and email addresses for thousands of Afghans. It did not contain photographs or home addresses, however.
As well as those details, some entries included details of those who could confirm individual Afghans’ bona fides. In more than 100 cases, those were British special forces personnel and MI6 spies.
‘Gut-wrenching’
Johnny Mercer, the former Conservative veterans’ minister who served in Afghanistan, said it was “gut-wrenching” to learn that the identities of UKSF soldiers and MI6 agents were likely to have fallen into the hands of the Taliban.
Mercer said: “I fought in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban. It is gut-wrenching, after all that blood was spilt, that this database may have fallen into their hands.
“I don’t disagree with the decision to get the injunction when this first came to light, but it was mad that it went on for so long. Now people need to be able to protect themselves, and we must look after these Afghan Special Forces properly.”
Mercer believes that members of the so-called Triples – Afghan special forces who worked with British personnel – should all be brought to Britain for their own safety.
Ministry of Defence (MoD) lawyers applied for a last-minute injunction banning the press from reporting the detail, even as they accepted that a super-injunction blocking any mention of the Afghan data leak would be discharged.
After that super-injunction was lifted, the Telegraph was able to report on Tuesday local time that Taliban sources claimed to have obtained the spreadsheet in 2022 – potentially more than a year before the MoD knew it had been accidentally leaked.
The fact that the leaked database included details of MI6 operatives and UKSF personnel was reported by the Sun and the Daily Express yesterday, yet the MoD insisted for most of today that those facts could not be reported by press outlets that were subject to the original super-injunction.
It can also be reported now that James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, asked in Parliament about whether “an apparent third party who obtained some of the data was engaged in blackmail” against the MoD.
The Telegraph remains banned from reporting extra details around Parliamentary statements about the breach, made by ministers and senior opposition frontbenchers alike.
Along with other news outlets that challenged the super-injunction, the Telegraph also remains prohibited from reporting what the MoD’s internal risk assessments about the breach said at various points over the last two years.
According to the Rimmer Review into the leak, carried out by the retired former head of Defence Intelligence at the request of John Healey, the Defence Secretary, the risk to the individuals named is now low enough for news of the leak to be published.
Yet the public is not allowed to examine why – or how – Rimmer’s conclusion was so different from that of fulltime professionals inside the MoD.
Accidental leak in 2022
A Royal Marine tasked with vetting people who had applied to the Government’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) accidentally leaked the database in February 2022.
He emailed what he believed was a small portion of it to a group of Afghans who were helping identify genuine applicants.
Although the scheme was meant to be only for those who worked with the British forces, many applied anyway in the hope of getting lucky.
Thousands of desperate Afghans hoping to flee the new regime of the Taliban, which had seized control in 2021 after the British and US withdrawal, had applied to Arap.
Yet instead of sending a small extract to his Afghan contacts in Britain, the Marine emailed them a spreadsheet containing hidden data relating to all 25,000 Arap applicants at the time.
The MoD has not explained how the Marine had access to the full database, understood to contain the identities and contact details of every single Arap applicant.
The MoD has been approached for comment.
