Red faces

IT IS a fair bet that a young British woman in Moscow would not fare as well as Katya Zatuliveter did in London. She worked for an MP, Mike Hancock, who sits on the defence committee, and had a four-year affair with him. A later conquest was a senior official at NATO who dealt with Russia. Even in trusting Britain, she came to the attention of the Security Service (colloquially known as MI5). It snooped on her e-mails to her pal in NATO, observed her meeting “Boris”, a Russian intelligence officer in London, and in December 2010 asked the home secretary to deport her.

But Ms Zatuliveter, who is now 26, insisted that her relationship with the married Mr Hancock was innocent (at least in espionage terms) and that she was not a spy. The Special Immigration Appeal Commission, after hearing evidence both in open and closed sessions, agreed with her. The result is a blow to MI5, which likes to be believed, and to the Home Office, which acted on the service's warning. It also confounds Russian commentators who had argued the hearing was a secretive farce (not least because one of the adjudicators is a former director of MI5).

The tribunal accepted that someone in Ms Zatuliveter's position would be of interest to Russia's spymasters and that MI5 was rightly suspicious about her contacts and behaviour. It called her “immature, calculating, emotional and self-centred”. But it found nothing to suggest that Russian intelligence had sent her to Britain. Her thoughts about her lovers, cloyingly recorded in a diary, proved that the relationships were genuine (and the diary, replete with convincing minor errors, could not have been forged, it said). The e-mails to her friend in NATO were jokey rather than sinister. And her meetings with the Russian intelligence officer suggested that she was at most a target for recruitment, not an actual spy.

The adjudicators admitted to “real reservations” about Ms Zatuliveter's relationship with Russian intelligence. Their ruling hints that MI5 in closed session had produced at least some evidence of contact with spy agencies during her regular trips to Russia. Their questions to her on intelligence matters elicited “defensive responses” and an ignorance of the subject “inconsistent with her compendious and penetrating understanding of political and international affairs”. But such oddities do not justify deportation.

Other questions abound. The tribunal said it did not believe all of Mr Hancock's testimony. It is unclear why MI5 pounced when it did; quiet observation could have been more fruitful. And why did the government try to deport Ms Zatuliveter so publicly? Were she a real spy, a quiet warning would have ended her activities: “Boris” went home with no public fuss. The shadows deepen.