What does the report tell us? The Russia report accuses the government of failing to investigate Russian interference in British politics, in particular during the 2016 EU referendum. The Commons intelligence and security committee’s language is scathing. It says Downing Street showed a “lack of curiosity” over Kremlin meddling. The report doesn’t say whether this complacency was deliberate or an omission. Either way, it amounts to a stunning rebuke of Boris Johnson and his predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May. We now know why Johnson sought to bury the report before last December’s general election. It is embarrassing. He burned political capital to keep it secret. The report broadly reflects the expert view of Christopher Steele, a former MI6 spy who gave evidence to the ISC in 2018. He said Johnson, as foreign secretary, and May “threw a blanket” over indications that the Russians had pushed for Brexit and may have covertly funded the campaign. They put Tory party politics above national security, Steele alleged. The ISC says: “The written evidence provided to us appeared to suggest that HMG [Her Majesty’s government] had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes or any activity that has had a material impact on an election, for example influencing results.” There is abundant evidence that the Russians were actively seeking to undermine British democracy, the report says. The intelligence agencies – including MI6, MI5 and GCHQ – were acutely aware of Kremlin activity around the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. They had early warning in spring 2016 of Moscow’s email hacking and dumping operation against the Democrats in the US, done to damage the party’s then presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and to help the Republicans’ Donald Trump. Yet no Russian “threat assessment” was carried out before the 2016 EU vote, the ISC says. The referendum was therefore left “unprotected”, it says.
The report is equally critical of the spy agencies. They appear to have been reluctant to take responsibility for defending the UK from hostile state meddling, it suggests. None of the agencies carried out an assessment of what Moscow did during the EU vote. When asked, MI5 sent the committee a cursory six-line note. GCHQ failed to provide information about the numerous pro-leave troll accounts run from inside Russia. And the report suggests MI6 didn’t ask its secret agents “to provide information on the extent or nature of Russian influence campaigns”. The big picture is damning: of a government that didn’t want to know, and of spooks who were too timid to ask. Where does this leave the Brexit vote? Four years on we still don’t know the extent of Russian meddling in the referendum. Nor did we discover whether it affected the outcome. Leave.EU, funded by the Bristol businessman Arron Banks, claims the report exonerates the campaign, which included multiple meetings with the Russian ambassador in London. It doesn’t accuse or clear Banks; he makes a brief appearance in a footnote. The question of how deeply Moscow meddled cannot be answered because it was never asked, the ISC says. As the Scottish National party MP and ISC member Stewart Hosie said on Tuesday, nobody in government wished to go near the Russian meddling issue “with a 10ft barge pole”. The committee has called on Johnson to carry out a “post-referendum assessment” of the degree to which the Kremlin interfered in the vote. It argues this would be a useful exercise even if it establishes that there was minimal interference. Any reckoning would reassure voters worried about the integrity of elections. And it would help pre-empt future attacks by Russia on British democracy. The report notes that the US special prosecutor Robert Mueller carried out an analogous exercise which concluded last year, after a two-year investigation, that Vladimir Putin had run a “sweeping and systematic” operation to make Trump president.
Downing Street has said it will not do what the ISC wants. There would be no cross-Whitehall investigation of the EU referendum, it said after the report was released. This position is short-sighted: Putin is happy to support any political party if it suits his strategic purpose. In the absence of a Mueller-style inquiry, the debate over the legitimacy of the UK’s historic vote to leave the EU will rumble on. Neither side won a knockout blow on Tuesday. But the report fuels suspicion that the victorious Brexiters have something to hide, and will leave remainers feeling a little cheerier. What do we learn about the Putin state? Twenty-first-century Russia is a malign entity. In the list of Kremlin enemies, Britain is near the top, just below the US and Nato. The ISC took evidence from a range of intelligence chiefs. All say the Kremlin is notoriously opaque and that Putin surrounds himself with a “small group of trusted and secretive admirers”. Moscow is therefore a formidable counter-intelligence challenge. The Russian president is able to take decisions far more quickly than his democratic counterparts, as seen for example in his lightning move in 2014 to annex Crimea. Nonetheless, the ISC is critical of the UK’s spy agencies. It accuses them of not allocating sufficient resources to a metastising problem. It suggests that in the 2000s they “took their eye off the ball” – the ball being a resurgent and aggressive Moscow. At the time, the west was busy with the danger from Islamist terrorism. Successive governments “badly underestimated” the threat posed by Putin and the multi-level response needed. In their submissions, the agencies pushed back against this critique. MI5 says it was preoccupied with dealing with “appalling terrorism”. The report starkly sets out the multi-faceted nature of Russian activity. It mentions the 2006 polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the 2018 nerve agent attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. Putin’s attempts to subvert the UK come in many guises, the ISC says. They include hacking; the use of Russian state media, such as RT and Sputnik; social media bots and trolls; and the financing of far-right political parties in Europe, such as National Rally (former the Front National) in France. There is recognition that the Kremlin is engaged in ongoing disinformation warfare, characterised by lies, “pro-Russian narratives” and deliberate confusion. What about donations from Moscow-linked donors to the Conservatives and other parties? The report does not name names but offers a few clues. The key paragraph says: “Several members of the Russian elite who are closely linked to Putin are identified as being involved with charitable and/or political organisations in the UK, having donated to political parties”. Their “public profile” allows them to “assist Russian influence operations”, the ISC says. It adds that Russian business and intelligence are “completely intertwined” – in other words, oligarchs who live and invest in London may well be following the Kremlin’s geo-political agenda, as well their own private interests. The report acknowledges the UK has long had a welcoming attitude to Russian money. Few questions are asked. It notes that this approach has turned London into a “laundromat” for dirty money. Beneficiaries include PR firms, charities, universities and members of the House of Lords. It is too late to “untangle” Russian cash from the UK, the report says, but the government needs to do more to tackle hostile activity at source. The National Crime Agency is limited in what it can do. It lacks the resources to take on billionaire oligarchs, who can comfortably afford top lawyers, the ISC notes. What has been redacted? Sections of the report have been deleted and replaced with asterisks. It’s unclear whether it was Downing Street or the security services that did this. Or both. Additionally, the report contains a confidential annex. This will only be read inside Whitehall, unless a public-spirited civil servant leaks it. The suspicion is that many of these deletions have been made for political rather than security reasons. One example: “The extent to which Russian businesses are using access to UK businesses and politicians to exert influence is ****.” Another: “The government must ****, take the necessary measures to counter the threat and challenge the impunity of Putin-linked elites.” What recommendations does the ISC make? A key ISC complaint is that the government’s response to the Russian threat is badly coordinated, with little clear idea of who is supposed to be in charge. It compares the current Whitehall arrangement to an “unnecessarily complicated wiring diagram”. The ISC wants new legislation to counter Russian espionage and the flow of murky money from Moscow, and to deal with “enablers” in the UK who allow influencing to take place. It advocates greater international cooperation, of the kind seen in spring 2018 when the UK and its allies expelled 153 Russian spies after the Salisbury attacks. The report recommends a US-style “foreign agents” law. This would mean anyone working for a foreign power would have to register as a foreign agent. It also calls for an overhaul of the Official Secrets Act and for “greater cohesion” among the spy agencies in dealing with the cyber-threat from Moscow. The report says the approach should be to publicise the activities of hostile Kremlin agencies such as the GRU, which carried out the Skripal hit. The UK also needs to push back more against covert digital influence. Social media companies that fail to identify and remove Russian troll operations should be named and shamed, it says. • On Wednesday 22 July, Luke Harding will join Carole Cadwalladr for a Guardian Live online event about Russian interference in western democracies. They will also be answering your questions. Book tickets here