Two weeks ago, the UK Whitehall mandarins, ministerial aides and officials who will be in Beijing when the Olympic Games open on Friday were summoned for what they thought would be a series of pro-forma chats with MI5. What they heard was hair-raising.
“It was all very James Bond,” according to one of the 100 or more who were called in by the security service. “We were told to trust nobody. We were warned that there is going to be a huge spy presence in Beijing, and that we should expect to be followed wherever we go.”
The alert came after The Sunday Times reported that a top aide accompanying Gordon Brown to China early this year had been caught in a suspected “honeytrap” by a woman who vanished from his hotel room with his BlackBerry.
The aides and officials accompanying Brown and four ministers to the Olympics were told they must take no laptops and that all BlackBerries or mobile phones must be “clean” – containing no contact numbers or other information. Times Online