How bad is Afghan data breach for MI6 and SAS?

On the face of it, the Afghan data breach is very bad indeed.

It is arguably the worst leak of secret UK government names since the former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson went rogue and published a list online containing dozens of names of MI6 officers in 1999.

For a case officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), having your name and details outed in public is potentially a career-killer.

That said, names can be changed, forged or disguised.

What cannot be is biometric data - something increasingly used in counter-intelligence to uncover and catch spies - and there is no indication so far that UK officers have had this data leaked as well.

For serving and former members of the highly secretive Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS), leaks like this one can, in theory, expose them to the risk of threat to life, given the lethal, covert operations some will have taken part in that may have involved the deaths or capture of individuals. The physical risk resulting from this leak to those members of UK Special Forces whose names were on the leaked dataset is judged to be minimal.

Those who face the greatest risk are Afghans still in Afghanistan.

The revelation that, in addition to the thousands of leaked names and details of potentially vulnerable Afghans, there are 100 or more involving British operatives is certainly shocking.

But this "unauthorised data breach" was - belatedly - discovered as far back as August 2023.

So that has given the UK intelligence and special forces communities nearly two years in which to come up with ways to mitigate this disaster and adopt whatever protective measures they can, for both Afghans and Brits on the leaked dataset.

Amongst the worse-case scenarios that MI6 in particular will have had to consider is that Russia, China, Iran or even North Korea may now also be in possession of those leaked names.

It is a fair assumption to make that the Taliban's intelligence apparatus would have had little interest in the names of long-departed British soldiers and spies. But they would be canny enough to work out who would be interested: the UK's global adversaries.

For now, those who have most to fear are the 600 former Afghan government soldiers and their estimated 1,800 relatives who are still in Afghanistan.

Whatever routes out were being suggested to them will have now been compromised and the publicity surrounding this whole story will have inevitably re-energised some of the more fanatical members of the Taliban to hunt down those on the list and exact what they perceive as rightful vengeance for treachery during the 20 years when they were out of power.