3 hours ago
5
Christopher Berry, the man at the heart of a controversial and now-abandoned Chinese espionage case, appeared to be aware that he was supplying information to a non-commercial client, according to messages seen by the Guardian.
In August 2022, Berry sent a voice note saying that “they want me to work for them directly instead of going through the company”.
The messages are included in an expert report written for Berry’s defence team by Kerry Brown, the director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London.
The report was first leaked to the law and politics podcast Double Jeopardy, which is hosted by Tim Owen KC and the former director of public prosecutions Ken MacDonald KC. Brown, at the request of Berry’s legal team, has not shared the report.
Berry and the former parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash, who were charged under the Official Secrets Act, have maintained their innocence and were also approached for comment on Monday. Berry’s lawyer said they would be making no further comment.
They were charged in April 2024 in relation to more than 30 reports that Berry wrote for a Chinese handler between December 2021 and February 2023. The Guardian understands that Berry was paid about £20,000 for these reports. Cash did not receive any money.
In a statement on 16 October, Berry said his reports were “provided to a Chinese company which I believed had clients wishing to develop trading links with the UK”.
Those reports “contained no classified information” and “concerned economic and commercial issues widely discussed in the UK at the time and drew on information freely in the public domain, together with political conjecture, much of which proved to be inaccurate”, he said.
The Crown Prosecution (CPS) believed that the reports were in fact commissioned by “an individual assessed to be a Chinese intelligence agent”.
Brown’s defence report, seen by the Guardian, includes messages that suggest Berry was aware that some of his contacts came from a non-commercial background.
On 15 July 2022, weeks before Berry sent the message about being asked to “work for them directly”, he had a meeting with someone under conditions of “some levels of secrecy”, according to Brown’s summary of Berry’s messages. Berry later said that he had to Google the person to figure out who they were.
After being told about the meeting, Cash wrote to Berry: “You’re in spy territory now”, according to the government’s witness statement. Cash has complained that the statements shared publicly are “devoid of the context that would have been given at trial”.
The CPS believed that Berry had met Cai Qi, then the Chinese Communist party (CCP) secretary for Beijing and a member of the CCP’s executive body, the politburo. Berry denies that he ever met Cai, who is now the de facto chief of staff to Xi Jinping, China’s president.
China experts, including Brown, are sceptical that someone of Cai’s rank could have met a foreign national as junior as Berry. At the time of the alleged meeting in Hangzhou, Cai was in Beijing, a two-hour flight away.
On 29 November 2022, Berry messaged Cash to say that the “politburo guy” had been “back in contact”. The man asked Berry “to find out if Rishi has secretly been funding these ‘white paper revolution’ guys or supporting them in some clandestine way”. Cash is understood to have taken “politburo guy” to mean general CCP member, rather than someone from the 24-man Politburo.
Days earlier, mass protests involving thousands of people had erupted in cities across China in demonstrations against the harsh zero-Covid policies in place at the time. Rishi Sunak was at that time the UK prime minister.
Berry wrote to Cash that it was “funny that he thinks I would know if rishi had done it. I basically just summarize guardian articles most of the time.”
The messages in Brown’s report, which are only a sample of the reportedly more than 1,000 pages of WhatsApp evidence, also show Berry and Cash joking about passing on disinformation to bring about “regime collapse” in China.
In May 2022, Berry said to Cash that he had been asked to make a list of influential thinktanks in the UK that helped shape the UK’s China policy. “Do you reckon I should throw in some red herrings to troll?” Berry said.
In November 2022, Berry wrote that he wished to “make them [the Chinese] do something almost fully retarded just to see what we can get them to do just by telling them”.
The CPS dropped charges against Cash and Berry on 15 September, prompting a huge controversy.
