INVISIBLE WOMAN
ARE YOU A RUSSIAN SPY?
LAST TIME I CHECK, I WAS NOT
LAST TIME I CHECK, I WAS NOT
Yesterday, I published a rather unusual story.
It was called Find the Spy
I invited my readers to imagine themselves as counter-intelligence officers. A dossier arrives on their desk concerning a Russian-born British solicitor who has somehow found herself at the centre of an international NATO security controversy.
There is a Spanish naval commander. There are Russian intelligence-analysis courses, military shooting ranges, NATO installations, disappearing messages, security restrictions and rumours about a woman whom somebody has nicknamed Red Sparrow.
There is even a man in St Petersburg who claimed to be an officer of the FSB.
I suggested that perhaps the best way to resolve the mystery would be to make an investigative documentary with elements of a reality show. Bring in independent investigators.
Examine the evidence. Interview the witnesses. Put me in the interrogation chair.
Perhaps they would discover that I really am a Russian spy.
Perhaps they would discover something else.
Today is Sunday, however, and I am putting my lawyer's hat back on.
Because before anybody starts interrogating me, I would like to understand precisely what crime I am supposed to have committed.
And that brings me to a question I have been answering for almost two years.
Are you a Russian spy?
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
I. The question that started as a joke
When I began speaking to journalists about the NATO controversy, I knew that somebody would eventually ask whether I was a Russian spy.
It is a perfectly understandable question. If a woman has been described in the press as a possible intelligence threat, a journalist is entitled to ask her directly.
My answer has always been the same.
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
But I did not invent that answer for the press.
It dates back to approximately November 2024, when my then-partner, Spanish naval commander Laureano Pastor Veiga, began joking about my supposed secret identity.
According to his theory, I might be a Russian sleeper agent who had not yet been activated. I could therefore be a spy without knowing it.
I found this wonderfully convenient.
Normally, when somebody accuses you of doing something, they expect you to know whether you did it. Laureano's theory relieved me of that responsibility. Apparently, my subconscious could have an entirely separate career without consulting me.
Perhaps I would smell a particular perfume and suddenly remember my mission. Perhaps somebody would hit me on the head and the telephone number of Vladimir Putin would materialise in my memory.
Perhaps I would wake up one morning with an irresistible urge to transmit NATO secrets.
The possibilities were endless.
At the time, we laughed.
Later, the rumours ceased to be funny. My partner was questioned by Spanish counter-intelligence; security restrictions followed and his career was affected. More remarkably, my own Ministry of Defence — the British Ministry of Defence, of the country whose citizenship I hold — caused a restriction specifically concerning my name to be recorded in Northwood's access system. The repercussions did not stop at the gate. Other British institutions received or recorded assertions that I was under investigation and references to national-security or official-secrets legislation. What exactly was alleged, by whom, and under which statutory provision remains a matter I have been trying to establish through complaints, information requests and litigation. A security label had begun to travel; a legally particularised accusation had not been put to me.
But my answer remained unchanged.
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
Yesterday, however, I realised that I had never subjected that answer to a proper legal examination.
What, exactly, would I have to do to become a spy?
And what if I had already done it without appreciating the legal significance of my conduct?
Let us examine the possibilities.
II. How to become a spy: the legal problem
English criminal lawyers are familiar with two Latin expressions.
Actus reus concerns the prohibited conduct and other external elements of an offence.
Mens rea concerns the required mental element.
They are useful analytical categories, although not every offence is constructed around a simple pairing of a physical act and a subjective intention.
Modern espionage legislation is particularly interesting because Parliament has identified several different forms of conduct that may threaten national security.
The National Security Act 2023 is our starting point.
Under section 1, an offence concerning protected information requires, broadly, three elements.
First, there must be conduct involving protected information: obtaining, copying, recording, retaining, disclosing it or providing access to it.
Second, the conduct must be for a purpose that the person knows, or ought reasonably to know in light of matters known to them, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.
Third, the relevant statutory foreign-power condition — or, under the legislation as amended, an applicable designated-body condition — must be satisfied.
That last requirement matters enormously.
Being born in Russia is not the foreign-power condition.
Speaking Russian is not the foreign-power condition.
Having a Russian grandfather is not the foreign-power condition.
Even having an unfortunate taste in Russian food, culture or even men would not, without something considerably more, establish it.
The legislation is concerned with defined relationships between conduct and foreign powers, not with inherited nationality.
Which raises a curious question. Why was the imagination of everybody around me so exclusively occupied by Russia? The legislation does not say that the only possible foreign power is a Russian one. This week, in Chapter Four of Invisible Woman to be published this week, I intend to describe an episode from my own life in which I experienced what I WAS a genuine attempt at recruitment by a foreign intelligence service. No jokes, no perfume, no imaginary sleeper-agent activation, a straight forward offer. And the country concerned was not Russia. I shall leave its identity for the chapter.
A claimed recruitment approach, of course, is not proof that recruitment succeeded or that any offence followed. But it is a rather good reason not to confuse the phrase foreign power with a single country of birth.
Section 3 creates a different offence: assisting a foreign intelligence service.
This is particularly relevant to my hypothetical documentary.
The offence can concern conduct of any kind, provided the statutory requirements are met. One route requires an intention materially to assist a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities. Another concerns conduct likely to provide material assistance where the person knows, or ought reasonably to know, that this is likely.
Information need not necessarily be classified for this provision to become relevant.
That is a significant distinction from the popular understanding of espionage.
A person might materially assist a foreign intelligence service by providing information, services or other assistance without ever photographing a secret document.
There are also offences involving prohibited places, trade secrets, preparatory conduct and other activities.
So the legal question is not simply whether I possessed a classified NATO document.
It is whether identifiable conduct satisfies the constituent elements of a particular offence.
And now we can begin the experiment.
III. Experiment One: Was I a spy in 2025?
Let us return to the events that produced the controversy.
I was in a relationship with a serving Spanish NATO commander.
We had a clear personal rule: he did not discuss classified military business with me. I did not ask him to disclose it.
I visited Northwood as an escorted civilian guest in December 2024. In June 2025, I accompanied him to the STRIKFORNATO installation in Portugal under visitor arrangements, spending time in recreational areas while he attended his professional activities.
My NATO employment history is rather less dramatic than the dossiers might suggest. One application concerned a generic temporary position at NATO headquarters in Brussels; I was subsequently told that the position had ceased to exist. Two further applications to MARCOM remained, to my knowledge, without a clear outcome or explanation. I cannot establish from that silence whether the applications were rejected, lost, still technically pending or affected by security-related information.
Perhaps the surname White has a mysterious capacity to erase applications from administrative systems. Perhaps an unresolved access restriction would make a successful MARCOM application rather impractical: it would be awkward to obtain a job at a workplace whose gate might refuse to admit you. Or perhaps I am simply not qualified enough. Two master's degrees, decades of professional work with information, including two specialised trainings by instructors of the adversarial state, and roughly sixty Google training certificates apparently do not equip me with the exceptional institutional talent of identifying a spy without first establishing what she has done.
I had also undertaken openly available analytical training.
Those are the circumstances that might make an intelligence officer curious.
But curiosity is not a criminal-law conclusion.
Let us apply the legal questions.
Did I obtain protected information for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom?
Not knowingly, according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware.
Did I copy, retain or disclose such information as part of a foreign-power activity?
Not according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware.
Did I intentionally or knowingly materially assist a foreign intelligence service?
Again, not according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware, again.
Did I seek access to a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom?
My stated purposes were professional, social, personal and, where relevant, connected with accompanying my partner.
None of this means that my account should be accepted without verification. Investigators are entitled to test explanations against documents, witnesses and objective evidence.
But the distinction remains fundamental.
A suspicious circumstance is not a substitute for a statutory element.
Consider my birthplace.
The Ministry of Defence's Summary Grounds of Resistance, dated 13 November 2025, described my place of birth as an unarguably relevant factor in access-related decision-making.
For a security risk assessment, nationality or birthplace may be relevant contextual information, depending on the circumstances and the lawful purpose of the assessment.
But let us try to insert my birthplace into a criminal charge of espionage.
Is being born in Leningrad an act of obtaining protected information?
No.
Is it an act of assisting a foreign intelligence service?
No.
Is it an intention to prejudice the safety or interests of the United Kingdom?
No.
Was I acting on behalf of a foreign power when my mother gave birth to me?
I suspect the evidential difficulties would be considerable.
A security officer may reasonably ask questions about a person's background.
A prosecutor must do something rather different.
They must establish the elements of an offence.
And that brings us to the most extraordinary part of the documentary record.
IV. The crime nobody could name
On 26 August 2025, I attended Northwood and it was the first time I have experienced the effects of a personal restriction, which existence was confirmed in October 2025 at the stage, when I started my first legal battle.
What followed became the subject of complaints involving RAF Police, Hertfordshire Police and the Service Police Complaints Commissioner.
In Review Wye, dated 30 April 2026, the account of body-worn video evidence records that Hertfordshire Police were told that my partner and I were under investigation. The review also records references to Northwood as a prohibited place under the National Security Act 2023, and an assertion that refusing to leave when directed amounted to a criminal offence. Other accounts of the episode invoke the Official Secrets Act, sometimes without identifying which Act or section was intended. Those are references and reported assertions, not a charge sheet. I have not been provided with a properly particularised allegation explaining which provision I supposedly breached, what conduct constituted the breach, or who was competent to make that determination.
Now we need to distinguish three propositions.
The first is that somebody was under investigation.
The second is that an individual might have committed an offence concerning entry to, or presence at, a prohibited place.
The third is that the individual committed espionage.
They are not interchangeable.
Section 5 of the National Security Act 2023 concerns unauthorised entry and related conduct at prohibited places. It is distinct from section 4, which concerns prohibited-place conduct for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom.
And both are distinct from section 1, concerning protected information.
A person might commit an offence under section 5 without being a spy.
Equally, a person may be refused access to a military installation without committing any criminal offence at all.
The precise conduct, location, authorisation, knowledge and statutory requirements matter.
In my case, the dispute concerns, among other things, where I was standing, what instructions were given, who possessed the relevant powers and whether my conduct satisfied any identified offence.
Those questions remain contested.
In September 2025, the Hertfordshire Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner went further, stating in its complaint outcome that my non-compliance meant a criminal offence had taken place.
I repeatedly asked which offence.
By October 2026, the OPCC had explained that its review had not independently determined several matters I regarded as fundamental, including the identity and legal elements of the alleged offence, the operative police powers and the relevant geographical boundary.
I explored that administrative journey in my earlier essay, The Crime (She Committed) Nobody Can Name.
There is a particularly interesting evidential problem here.
An officer reporting that I was under investigation does not establish what investigation existed, who authorised it, what its subject was or whether I was personally suspected of espionage. Equally, a person of uncertain identity or authority suggesting that I might have breached the National Security Act or an unspecified Official Secrets Act does not thereby establish a statutory offence. There is a difference between an operational warning, an allegation, a formal investigative step, a charging decision and a judicial finding. Each requires its own legal and evidential foundation. I am still trying to determine which, if any, of those stages was actually reached.
A statement that an offence occurred is not a conviction.
And a reference to the National Security Act is not automatically a reference to espionage.
As far as the disclosed material permits me to establish, I have not been arrested, charged or convicted of an espionage offence.
I have also not identified a record of a formal counter-intelligence interview in which the alleged espionage conduct was put to me.
That absence does not prove that no intelligence investigation occurred. Such investigations may not be disclosed to their subjects.
Nor does the absence of a criminal record on a DBS certificate prove that a person has never been investigated. DBS disclosure operates under its own statutory rules, and not every investigation appears on a certificate.
But it does leave an important accountability question.
If a civilian is described to police as being under investigation, what precisely is the recorded factual basis for that description, and how is its accuracy subsequently tested?
That is not a demand to disclose operational intelligence indiscriminately.
It is a question about the reliability of information used to exercise state power.
V. Experiment Two: Am I committing espionage now?
Let us move forward to November 2026.
My relationship with the Spanish commander has ended.
I no longer have the social access to his professional environment that originally attracted so much attention.
But I have acquired something else.
Documents.
A great many documents.
Over the past year, I have collected legal submissions, complaint decisions, disclosed records, correspondence, police-related material and institutional explanations.
I have analysed them using conventional legal methods and artificial intelligence.
I have published articles about administrative contradictions, security labels, police information-sharing and accountability.
And here comes the question that interests me most.
Those articles are publicly available.
They can be read in Britain, Spain, Russia, Singapore and almost anywhere else.
Potentially, they could be read by people working for a foreign intelligence service.
Am I therefore providing information to a hostile foreign power?
In an ordinary linguistic sense, public publication makes information available to everybody, including people whose intentions I do not know.
But criminal law requires a more disciplined analysis.
The mere possibility that an intelligence service might read an article does not automatically establish the elements of section 3.
We would need to examine the nature of the information, whether the conduct materially assists or is likely materially to assist a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities, and the relevant intention, knowledge or objective knowledge standard.
Similarly, section 1 requires protected information, a prejudicial purpose satisfying its statutory mental element and the relevant foreign-power or designated-body condition.
Public availability is not a universal defence. Information can sometimes be sensitive even when portions have already circulated, and a compilation of apparently innocuous material may acquire significance through its context.
Nor is publication necessarily lawful merely because a document reached a journalist or litigant. The Official Secrets Act 1989, particularly section 5, may create separate risks in relation to certain information derived from unauthorised disclosures or entrusted in confidence.
So I cannot sensibly say that publishing anything in the name of accountability could never raise national-security issues.
That would be legally irresponsible.
But the reverse proposition is equally unsustainable.
A public-interest investigation does not become espionage merely because a foreign intelligence officer might read it.
My stated purpose is to examine how public institutions make decisions, classify individuals, exchange information and respond to complaints.
Those activities may embarrass institutions.
They may expose contradictions.
They may be uncomfortable for the people whose decisions are being scrutinised.
But embarrassment to a government department is not, by itself, the statutory test for espionage.
A democracy must be capable of distinguishing between scrutiny of its institutions and assistance to its adversaries.
Otherwise, the state could transform criticism into a security concern simply by pointing out that hostile governments might enjoy reading it.
That would be a remarkable constitutional proposition.
And a rather useful one for any government wishing to avoid criticism.
VI. Experiment Three: What if I wake up tomorrow and remember everything?
Now we reach the part that would probably make Laureano smile.
Suppose I wake up tomorrow morning, open a bottle of perfume and experience a sudden revelation.
I am a Russian spy.
I have always been a Russian spy.
Somewhere in my subconscious, apparently, there has been a dormant identity waiting patiently for the correct fragrance.
I now remember my secret mission.
Would I immediately have committed espionage?
Not simply because a memory has appeared.
A recollection is not itself proof that the remembered events occurred. Nor does discovering an alleged former affiliation automatically establish that a particular offence has been committed.
The legal analysis would still require evidence.
What did I actually do?
When did I do it?
What information did I obtain or disclose?
Whom did I assist?
What did I intend, know or ought reasonably to have known at the relevant time?
Did the conduct satisfy the law then in force?
If I had genuinely undertaken past clandestine acts, remembering them could help reveal earlier criminal conduct. It would not create that conduct retrospectively.
And if the memory concerned only an intention to become a spy in the future?
An intention, standing alone, is generally insufficient to establish a completed espionage offence.
I should add an important qualification: section 18 of the National Security Act criminalises certain preparatory conduct undertaken with the required intention. The law does not always wait for a completed disclosure or other ultimate harmful act.
But it still requires conduct falling within the statutory provision.
So even my newly awakened subconscious would have some legal work to do.
And this produces an unexpected practical difficulty.
What exactly would my mission be?
I am a solicitor. I am a writer. I analyse documents and publish articles. I am also trying to become a producer — as readers of yesterday's Find the Spy will have noticed. My ambition at present is to produce a documentary, not a clandestine intelligence operation. This is indeed my mission now.
I am not employed by NATO. I do not possess security clearance or authorised access to classified military systems. My former relationship did not, according to my account, involve the disclosure of classified information.
I could theoretically commit espionage without any of those advantages. The law does not require a spy to have a NATO pass.
But I would still need to engage in conduct meeting the requirements of an actual offence.
My newly discovered secret identity would not be enough.
Even a sleeper agent, it seems, cannot dispense with actus reus.
VII. The problem of motive: why would I betray Britain?
There is another question that deserves examination.
Why would I want to betray the United Kingdom?
In my earlier Alien Mind essay, Can a Citizen Betray a State That Has Already Betrayed Them?, I examined the asymmetry of the modern social contract.
The state possesses a sophisticated legal vocabulary for describing betrayal by citizens.
But what happens when citizens experience the conduct of public institutions as a betrayal of the trust they placed in them?
Last Sunday, in I Broke Up with the State. It Still Has My Case Number, I took that question further.
I described my emotional separation from the British state after years of litigation, administrative conflict and disappointment.
I no longer regard its institutions with the same instinctive confidence.
But disappointment is not allegiance to a foreign power.
Distrust is not espionage.
And a citizen who brings proceedings against the government is not thereby acting against the country.
I make an important distinction between the state as an enduring political community and the particular officials, departments and decisions through which public power is exercised.
I can profoundly disagree with the Ministry of Defence while remaining concerned about Britain's national security.
Indeed, one reason I take information accuracy and institutional accountability seriously is that unreliable security processes can undermine the very security they are intended to protect.
I have spent more than twenty years building my life in Britain.
My professional qualifications, citizenship, legal obligations and much of my personal history are rooted here.
Why would I want to damage the society in which I live?
One might suggest money.
People have betrayed states for money before.
But even if I were offered a spectacular sum to betray Britain, the existence of a financial motive would not itself establish that I had committed an offence.
There would still have to be legally relevant conduct and the other required elements.
The same applies to resentment.
The law does not make every angry citizen a spy.
And I would suggest that a democratic state should be particularly cautious about confusing hostility towards an administrative decision with hostility towards the country itself.
There is an enormous difference between wanting to expose a public institution's mistakes and wanting to assist an adversary in harming the public.
VIII. Are you are Russian Spy?
So where does that leave me? In the past, there were circumstances capable of attracting legitimate security questions, but the material available to me does not establish espionage. In the present, I publish documentary investigations which require careful attention to confidentiality and national-security law, but public criticism is not automatically assistance to an intelligence service. And in the future, even if a mysterious perfume activates my alleged sleeper-agent memory, the law will still demand evidence of conduct and the requisite mental and contextual elements.
But there is another, much less amusing possibility. It concerns the information that was already moving around us.
On 28 October 2026, Aurelio Ruiz Enebral published an investigation in El Confidencial Digital about anomalies affecting Laureano Pastor Veiga's WhatsApp and personal email after his June 2025 counter-intelligence interview. In my own article, The Vanished Messages, I described what I witnessed in Sintra on 28 June: messages apparently disappearing, problems accessing Hotmail and our subsequent efforts to preserve records. The reporting also describes concerns about a NATO UNCLASS work laptop through which personal accounts could be accessed, and which was outside Laureano's control after his exclusion from Northwood.
Laureano reportedly raised those concerns through Spanish and NATO channels repeatedly, requesting a forensic examination. Neither the published investigation nor the material available to me identifies a completed forensic examination or an explanation of the anomalies. That is not proof that no examination took place; it is an important evidential gap. It is also not proof of hacking. Synchronisation failures, account settings, unauthorised access and several other possibilities remain open.
There is a further complication. I have described a later encounter with a man whom I understood to be connected to the FSB. He appeared to possess information which, in my assessment, resembled material from Laureano's personal archive. I cannot independently establish his affiliation, authenticate the provenance of the material or prove a chain of transmission to Russian intelligence. I know that I did not provide it. But I cannot responsibly claim that the available evidence proves who did.
Now return to section 3 of the National Security Act 2023. Recall its alternative route: conduct likely to provide material assistance to a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities, where the person knows, or ought reasonably to know, that it is likely to do so. The statutory context, including the foreign-intelligence-service and UK-related requirements, matters. Mere negligence, an unexplained leak, or an embarrassing security failure does not automatically satisfy that offence.
Nevertheless, the question is worth asking. If sensitive personal information concerning a NATO officer and a security controversy was mishandled, circulated without appropriate controls or deliberately passed onwards, who handled it, who received it, and what did those individuals know? If any person knowingly facilitated material assistance to a foreign intelligence service, could their conduct satisfy a statutory offence? That would require evidence of the specific acts, their likely effect and the required mental elements — not an inference from institutional incompetence alone.
And this is where my Sunday exercise turns unexpectedly back towards the investigators. The woman whose birthplace attracted such attention has spent almost two years trying to discover what happened to information about herself and her partner. Meanwhile, a reported communications-security incident remains, on the accessible record, forensically unresolved.
Perhaps the explanation is entirely innocent. Perhaps it is administrative negligence. Perhaps there was deliberate misconduct. The documents presently available do not permit me to choose between those possibilities, much less accuse identifiable British or Spanish officials of espionage.
But if national security was genuinely the concern, why is the trail of information itself not the centre of the inquiry? A risk label is not a criminal conviction; a rumour is not evidence; and an institution's security function does not place its own information-handling beyond scrutiny.
I began this article trying to construct the legal case against myself. Being born in Leningrad was not an act of espionage. Falling in love with a NATO officer was not an act of espionage. Knowing how to shoot, criticising the Ministry of Defence, applying for NATO jobs or publishing public-interest analysis did not, without more, establish the offence. Nor would waking up tomorrow with a dramatic new memory.
The more consequential question may not be whether the suspected Russian woman was a spy, but whether anybody can account for what happened to the information gathered and circulated in the name of protecting national security.
So here is my answer, once again.
Are you a Russian spy?
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
And to everyone in the British, NATO and Spanish institutional chains who handled our information, assessed the alleged threat or repeated the allegations, I have one final question:
Have YOU checked?
And today's song is IMMORTAL GAME
It was called Find the Spy
I invited my readers to imagine themselves as counter-intelligence officers. A dossier arrives on their desk concerning a Russian-born British solicitor who has somehow found herself at the centre of an international NATO security controversy.
There is a Spanish naval commander. There are Russian intelligence-analysis courses, military shooting ranges, NATO installations, disappearing messages, security restrictions and rumours about a woman whom somebody has nicknamed Red Sparrow.
There is even a man in St Petersburg who claimed to be an officer of the FSB.
I suggested that perhaps the best way to resolve the mystery would be to make an investigative documentary with elements of a reality show. Bring in independent investigators.
Examine the evidence. Interview the witnesses. Put me in the interrogation chair.
Perhaps they would discover that I really am a Russian spy.
Perhaps they would discover something else.
Today is Sunday, however, and I am putting my lawyer's hat back on.
Because before anybody starts interrogating me, I would like to understand precisely what crime I am supposed to have committed.
And that brings me to a question I have been answering for almost two years.
Are you a Russian spy?
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
I. The question that started as a joke
When I began speaking to journalists about the NATO controversy, I knew that somebody would eventually ask whether I was a Russian spy.
It is a perfectly understandable question. If a woman has been described in the press as a possible intelligence threat, a journalist is entitled to ask her directly.
My answer has always been the same.
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
But I did not invent that answer for the press.
It dates back to approximately November 2024, when my then-partner, Spanish naval commander Laureano Pastor Veiga, began joking about my supposed secret identity.
According to his theory, I might be a Russian sleeper agent who had not yet been activated. I could therefore be a spy without knowing it.
I found this wonderfully convenient.
Normally, when somebody accuses you of doing something, they expect you to know whether you did it. Laureano's theory relieved me of that responsibility. Apparently, my subconscious could have an entirely separate career without consulting me.
Perhaps I would smell a particular perfume and suddenly remember my mission. Perhaps somebody would hit me on the head and the telephone number of Vladimir Putin would materialise in my memory.
Perhaps I would wake up one morning with an irresistible urge to transmit NATO secrets.
The possibilities were endless.
At the time, we laughed.
Later, the rumours ceased to be funny. My partner was questioned by Spanish counter-intelligence; security restrictions followed and his career was affected. More remarkably, my own Ministry of Defence — the British Ministry of Defence, of the country whose citizenship I hold — caused a restriction specifically concerning my name to be recorded in Northwood's access system. The repercussions did not stop at the gate. Other British institutions received or recorded assertions that I was under investigation and references to national-security or official-secrets legislation. What exactly was alleged, by whom, and under which statutory provision remains a matter I have been trying to establish through complaints, information requests and litigation. A security label had begun to travel; a legally particularised accusation had not been put to me.
But my answer remained unchanged.
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
Yesterday, however, I realised that I had never subjected that answer to a proper legal examination.
What, exactly, would I have to do to become a spy?
And what if I had already done it without appreciating the legal significance of my conduct?
Let us examine the possibilities.
II. How to become a spy: the legal problem
English criminal lawyers are familiar with two Latin expressions.
Actus reus concerns the prohibited conduct and other external elements of an offence.
Mens rea concerns the required mental element.
They are useful analytical categories, although not every offence is constructed around a simple pairing of a physical act and a subjective intention.
Modern espionage legislation is particularly interesting because Parliament has identified several different forms of conduct that may threaten national security.
The National Security Act 2023 is our starting point.
Under section 1, an offence concerning protected information requires, broadly, three elements.
First, there must be conduct involving protected information: obtaining, copying, recording, retaining, disclosing it or providing access to it.
Second, the conduct must be for a purpose that the person knows, or ought reasonably to know in light of matters known to them, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.
Third, the relevant statutory foreign-power condition — or, under the legislation as amended, an applicable designated-body condition — must be satisfied.
That last requirement matters enormously.
Being born in Russia is not the foreign-power condition.
Speaking Russian is not the foreign-power condition.
Having a Russian grandfather is not the foreign-power condition.
Even having an unfortunate taste in Russian food, culture or even men would not, without something considerably more, establish it.
The legislation is concerned with defined relationships between conduct and foreign powers, not with inherited nationality.
Which raises a curious question. Why was the imagination of everybody around me so exclusively occupied by Russia? The legislation does not say that the only possible foreign power is a Russian one. This week, in Chapter Four of Invisible Woman to be published this week, I intend to describe an episode from my own life in which I experienced what I WAS a genuine attempt at recruitment by a foreign intelligence service. No jokes, no perfume, no imaginary sleeper-agent activation, a straight forward offer. And the country concerned was not Russia. I shall leave its identity for the chapter.
A claimed recruitment approach, of course, is not proof that recruitment succeeded or that any offence followed. But it is a rather good reason not to confuse the phrase foreign power with a single country of birth.
Section 3 creates a different offence: assisting a foreign intelligence service.
This is particularly relevant to my hypothetical documentary.
The offence can concern conduct of any kind, provided the statutory requirements are met. One route requires an intention materially to assist a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities. Another concerns conduct likely to provide material assistance where the person knows, or ought reasonably to know, that this is likely.
Information need not necessarily be classified for this provision to become relevant.
That is a significant distinction from the popular understanding of espionage.
A person might materially assist a foreign intelligence service by providing information, services or other assistance without ever photographing a secret document.
There are also offences involving prohibited places, trade secrets, preparatory conduct and other activities.
So the legal question is not simply whether I possessed a classified NATO document.
It is whether identifiable conduct satisfies the constituent elements of a particular offence.
And now we can begin the experiment.
III. Experiment One: Was I a spy in 2025?
Let us return to the events that produced the controversy.
I was in a relationship with a serving Spanish NATO commander.
We had a clear personal rule: he did not discuss classified military business with me. I did not ask him to disclose it.
I visited Northwood as an escorted civilian guest in December 2024. In June 2025, I accompanied him to the STRIKFORNATO installation in Portugal under visitor arrangements, spending time in recreational areas while he attended his professional activities.
My NATO employment history is rather less dramatic than the dossiers might suggest. One application concerned a generic temporary position at NATO headquarters in Brussels; I was subsequently told that the position had ceased to exist. Two further applications to MARCOM remained, to my knowledge, without a clear outcome or explanation. I cannot establish from that silence whether the applications were rejected, lost, still technically pending or affected by security-related information.
Perhaps the surname White has a mysterious capacity to erase applications from administrative systems. Perhaps an unresolved access restriction would make a successful MARCOM application rather impractical: it would be awkward to obtain a job at a workplace whose gate might refuse to admit you. Or perhaps I am simply not qualified enough. Two master's degrees, decades of professional work with information, including two specialised trainings by instructors of the adversarial state, and roughly sixty Google training certificates apparently do not equip me with the exceptional institutional talent of identifying a spy without first establishing what she has done.
I had also undertaken openly available analytical training.
Those are the circumstances that might make an intelligence officer curious.
But curiosity is not a criminal-law conclusion.
Let us apply the legal questions.
Did I obtain protected information for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom?
Not knowingly, according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware.
Did I copy, retain or disclose such information as part of a foreign-power activity?
Not according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware.
Did I intentionally or knowingly materially assist a foreign intelligence service?
Again, not according to my account. Not to the account of any other party, as far as I am aware, again.
Did I seek access to a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom?
My stated purposes were professional, social, personal and, where relevant, connected with accompanying my partner.
None of this means that my account should be accepted without verification. Investigators are entitled to test explanations against documents, witnesses and objective evidence.
But the distinction remains fundamental.
A suspicious circumstance is not a substitute for a statutory element.
Consider my birthplace.
The Ministry of Defence's Summary Grounds of Resistance, dated 13 November 2025, described my place of birth as an unarguably relevant factor in access-related decision-making.
For a security risk assessment, nationality or birthplace may be relevant contextual information, depending on the circumstances and the lawful purpose of the assessment.
But let us try to insert my birthplace into a criminal charge of espionage.
Is being born in Leningrad an act of obtaining protected information?
No.
Is it an act of assisting a foreign intelligence service?
No.
Is it an intention to prejudice the safety or interests of the United Kingdom?
No.
Was I acting on behalf of a foreign power when my mother gave birth to me?
I suspect the evidential difficulties would be considerable.
A security officer may reasonably ask questions about a person's background.
A prosecutor must do something rather different.
They must establish the elements of an offence.
And that brings us to the most extraordinary part of the documentary record.
IV. The crime nobody could name
On 26 August 2025, I attended Northwood and it was the first time I have experienced the effects of a personal restriction, which existence was confirmed in October 2025 at the stage, when I started my first legal battle.
What followed became the subject of complaints involving RAF Police, Hertfordshire Police and the Service Police Complaints Commissioner.
In Review Wye, dated 30 April 2026, the account of body-worn video evidence records that Hertfordshire Police were told that my partner and I were under investigation. The review also records references to Northwood as a prohibited place under the National Security Act 2023, and an assertion that refusing to leave when directed amounted to a criminal offence. Other accounts of the episode invoke the Official Secrets Act, sometimes without identifying which Act or section was intended. Those are references and reported assertions, not a charge sheet. I have not been provided with a properly particularised allegation explaining which provision I supposedly breached, what conduct constituted the breach, or who was competent to make that determination.
Now we need to distinguish three propositions.
The first is that somebody was under investigation.
The second is that an individual might have committed an offence concerning entry to, or presence at, a prohibited place.
The third is that the individual committed espionage.
They are not interchangeable.
Section 5 of the National Security Act 2023 concerns unauthorised entry and related conduct at prohibited places. It is distinct from section 4, which concerns prohibited-place conduct for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom.
And both are distinct from section 1, concerning protected information.
A person might commit an offence under section 5 without being a spy.
Equally, a person may be refused access to a military installation without committing any criminal offence at all.
The precise conduct, location, authorisation, knowledge and statutory requirements matter.
In my case, the dispute concerns, among other things, where I was standing, what instructions were given, who possessed the relevant powers and whether my conduct satisfied any identified offence.
Those questions remain contested.
In September 2025, the Hertfordshire Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner went further, stating in its complaint outcome that my non-compliance meant a criminal offence had taken place.
I repeatedly asked which offence.
By October 2026, the OPCC had explained that its review had not independently determined several matters I regarded as fundamental, including the identity and legal elements of the alleged offence, the operative police powers and the relevant geographical boundary.
I explored that administrative journey in my earlier essay, The Crime (She Committed) Nobody Can Name.
There is a particularly interesting evidential problem here.
An officer reporting that I was under investigation does not establish what investigation existed, who authorised it, what its subject was or whether I was personally suspected of espionage. Equally, a person of uncertain identity or authority suggesting that I might have breached the National Security Act or an unspecified Official Secrets Act does not thereby establish a statutory offence. There is a difference between an operational warning, an allegation, a formal investigative step, a charging decision and a judicial finding. Each requires its own legal and evidential foundation. I am still trying to determine which, if any, of those stages was actually reached.
A statement that an offence occurred is not a conviction.
And a reference to the National Security Act is not automatically a reference to espionage.
As far as the disclosed material permits me to establish, I have not been arrested, charged or convicted of an espionage offence.
I have also not identified a record of a formal counter-intelligence interview in which the alleged espionage conduct was put to me.
That absence does not prove that no intelligence investigation occurred. Such investigations may not be disclosed to their subjects.
Nor does the absence of a criminal record on a DBS certificate prove that a person has never been investigated. DBS disclosure operates under its own statutory rules, and not every investigation appears on a certificate.
But it does leave an important accountability question.
If a civilian is described to police as being under investigation, what precisely is the recorded factual basis for that description, and how is its accuracy subsequently tested?
That is not a demand to disclose operational intelligence indiscriminately.
It is a question about the reliability of information used to exercise state power.
V. Experiment Two: Am I committing espionage now?
Let us move forward to November 2026.
My relationship with the Spanish commander has ended.
I no longer have the social access to his professional environment that originally attracted so much attention.
But I have acquired something else.
Documents.
A great many documents.
Over the past year, I have collected legal submissions, complaint decisions, disclosed records, correspondence, police-related material and institutional explanations.
I have analysed them using conventional legal methods and artificial intelligence.
I have published articles about administrative contradictions, security labels, police information-sharing and accountability.
And here comes the question that interests me most.
Those articles are publicly available.
They can be read in Britain, Spain, Russia, Singapore and almost anywhere else.
Potentially, they could be read by people working for a foreign intelligence service.
Am I therefore providing information to a hostile foreign power?
In an ordinary linguistic sense, public publication makes information available to everybody, including people whose intentions I do not know.
But criminal law requires a more disciplined analysis.
The mere possibility that an intelligence service might read an article does not automatically establish the elements of section 3.
We would need to examine the nature of the information, whether the conduct materially assists or is likely materially to assist a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities, and the relevant intention, knowledge or objective knowledge standard.
Similarly, section 1 requires protected information, a prejudicial purpose satisfying its statutory mental element and the relevant foreign-power or designated-body condition.
Public availability is not a universal defence. Information can sometimes be sensitive even when portions have already circulated, and a compilation of apparently innocuous material may acquire significance through its context.
Nor is publication necessarily lawful merely because a document reached a journalist or litigant. The Official Secrets Act 1989, particularly section 5, may create separate risks in relation to certain information derived from unauthorised disclosures or entrusted in confidence.
So I cannot sensibly say that publishing anything in the name of accountability could never raise national-security issues.
That would be legally irresponsible.
But the reverse proposition is equally unsustainable.
A public-interest investigation does not become espionage merely because a foreign intelligence officer might read it.
My stated purpose is to examine how public institutions make decisions, classify individuals, exchange information and respond to complaints.
Those activities may embarrass institutions.
They may expose contradictions.
They may be uncomfortable for the people whose decisions are being scrutinised.
But embarrassment to a government department is not, by itself, the statutory test for espionage.
A democracy must be capable of distinguishing between scrutiny of its institutions and assistance to its adversaries.
Otherwise, the state could transform criticism into a security concern simply by pointing out that hostile governments might enjoy reading it.
That would be a remarkable constitutional proposition.
And a rather useful one for any government wishing to avoid criticism.
VI. Experiment Three: What if I wake up tomorrow and remember everything?
Now we reach the part that would probably make Laureano smile.
Suppose I wake up tomorrow morning, open a bottle of perfume and experience a sudden revelation.
I am a Russian spy.
I have always been a Russian spy.
Somewhere in my subconscious, apparently, there has been a dormant identity waiting patiently for the correct fragrance.
I now remember my secret mission.
Would I immediately have committed espionage?
Not simply because a memory has appeared.
A recollection is not itself proof that the remembered events occurred. Nor does discovering an alleged former affiliation automatically establish that a particular offence has been committed.
The legal analysis would still require evidence.
What did I actually do?
When did I do it?
What information did I obtain or disclose?
Whom did I assist?
What did I intend, know or ought reasonably to have known at the relevant time?
Did the conduct satisfy the law then in force?
If I had genuinely undertaken past clandestine acts, remembering them could help reveal earlier criminal conduct. It would not create that conduct retrospectively.
And if the memory concerned only an intention to become a spy in the future?
An intention, standing alone, is generally insufficient to establish a completed espionage offence.
I should add an important qualification: section 18 of the National Security Act criminalises certain preparatory conduct undertaken with the required intention. The law does not always wait for a completed disclosure or other ultimate harmful act.
But it still requires conduct falling within the statutory provision.
So even my newly awakened subconscious would have some legal work to do.
And this produces an unexpected practical difficulty.
What exactly would my mission be?
I am a solicitor. I am a writer. I analyse documents and publish articles. I am also trying to become a producer — as readers of yesterday's Find the Spy will have noticed. My ambition at present is to produce a documentary, not a clandestine intelligence operation. This is indeed my mission now.
I am not employed by NATO. I do not possess security clearance or authorised access to classified military systems. My former relationship did not, according to my account, involve the disclosure of classified information.
I could theoretically commit espionage without any of those advantages. The law does not require a spy to have a NATO pass.
But I would still need to engage in conduct meeting the requirements of an actual offence.
My newly discovered secret identity would not be enough.
Even a sleeper agent, it seems, cannot dispense with actus reus.
VII. The problem of motive: why would I betray Britain?
There is another question that deserves examination.
Why would I want to betray the United Kingdom?
In my earlier Alien Mind essay, Can a Citizen Betray a State That Has Already Betrayed Them?, I examined the asymmetry of the modern social contract.
The state possesses a sophisticated legal vocabulary for describing betrayal by citizens.
But what happens when citizens experience the conduct of public institutions as a betrayal of the trust they placed in them?
Last Sunday, in I Broke Up with the State. It Still Has My Case Number, I took that question further.
I described my emotional separation from the British state after years of litigation, administrative conflict and disappointment.
I no longer regard its institutions with the same instinctive confidence.
But disappointment is not allegiance to a foreign power.
Distrust is not espionage.
And a citizen who brings proceedings against the government is not thereby acting against the country.
I make an important distinction between the state as an enduring political community and the particular officials, departments and decisions through which public power is exercised.
I can profoundly disagree with the Ministry of Defence while remaining concerned about Britain's national security.
Indeed, one reason I take information accuracy and institutional accountability seriously is that unreliable security processes can undermine the very security they are intended to protect.
I have spent more than twenty years building my life in Britain.
My professional qualifications, citizenship, legal obligations and much of my personal history are rooted here.
Why would I want to damage the society in which I live?
One might suggest money.
People have betrayed states for money before.
But even if I were offered a spectacular sum to betray Britain, the existence of a financial motive would not itself establish that I had committed an offence.
There would still have to be legally relevant conduct and the other required elements.
The same applies to resentment.
The law does not make every angry citizen a spy.
And I would suggest that a democratic state should be particularly cautious about confusing hostility towards an administrative decision with hostility towards the country itself.
There is an enormous difference between wanting to expose a public institution's mistakes and wanting to assist an adversary in harming the public.
VIII. Are you are Russian Spy?
So where does that leave me? In the past, there were circumstances capable of attracting legitimate security questions, but the material available to me does not establish espionage. In the present, I publish documentary investigations which require careful attention to confidentiality and national-security law, but public criticism is not automatically assistance to an intelligence service. And in the future, even if a mysterious perfume activates my alleged sleeper-agent memory, the law will still demand evidence of conduct and the requisite mental and contextual elements.
But there is another, much less amusing possibility. It concerns the information that was already moving around us.
On 28 October 2026, Aurelio Ruiz Enebral published an investigation in El Confidencial Digital about anomalies affecting Laureano Pastor Veiga's WhatsApp and personal email after his June 2025 counter-intelligence interview. In my own article, The Vanished Messages, I described what I witnessed in Sintra on 28 June: messages apparently disappearing, problems accessing Hotmail and our subsequent efforts to preserve records. The reporting also describes concerns about a NATO UNCLASS work laptop through which personal accounts could be accessed, and which was outside Laureano's control after his exclusion from Northwood.
Laureano reportedly raised those concerns through Spanish and NATO channels repeatedly, requesting a forensic examination. Neither the published investigation nor the material available to me identifies a completed forensic examination or an explanation of the anomalies. That is not proof that no examination took place; it is an important evidential gap. It is also not proof of hacking. Synchronisation failures, account settings, unauthorised access and several other possibilities remain open.
There is a further complication. I have described a later encounter with a man whom I understood to be connected to the FSB. He appeared to possess information which, in my assessment, resembled material from Laureano's personal archive. I cannot independently establish his affiliation, authenticate the provenance of the material or prove a chain of transmission to Russian intelligence. I know that I did not provide it. But I cannot responsibly claim that the available evidence proves who did.
Now return to section 3 of the National Security Act 2023. Recall its alternative route: conduct likely to provide material assistance to a foreign intelligence service in its UK-related activities, where the person knows, or ought reasonably to know, that it is likely to do so. The statutory context, including the foreign-intelligence-service and UK-related requirements, matters. Mere negligence, an unexplained leak, or an embarrassing security failure does not automatically satisfy that offence.
Nevertheless, the question is worth asking. If sensitive personal information concerning a NATO officer and a security controversy was mishandled, circulated without appropriate controls or deliberately passed onwards, who handled it, who received it, and what did those individuals know? If any person knowingly facilitated material assistance to a foreign intelligence service, could their conduct satisfy a statutory offence? That would require evidence of the specific acts, their likely effect and the required mental elements — not an inference from institutional incompetence alone.
And this is where my Sunday exercise turns unexpectedly back towards the investigators. The woman whose birthplace attracted such attention has spent almost two years trying to discover what happened to information about herself and her partner. Meanwhile, a reported communications-security incident remains, on the accessible record, forensically unresolved.
Perhaps the explanation is entirely innocent. Perhaps it is administrative negligence. Perhaps there was deliberate misconduct. The documents presently available do not permit me to choose between those possibilities, much less accuse identifiable British or Spanish officials of espionage.
But if national security was genuinely the concern, why is the trail of information itself not the centre of the inquiry? A risk label is not a criminal conviction; a rumour is not evidence; and an institution's security function does not place its own information-handling beyond scrutiny.
I began this article trying to construct the legal case against myself. Being born in Leningrad was not an act of espionage. Falling in love with a NATO officer was not an act of espionage. Knowing how to shoot, criticising the Ministry of Defence, applying for NATO jobs or publishing public-interest analysis did not, without more, establish the offence. Nor would waking up tomorrow with a dramatic new memory.
The more consequential question may not be whether the suspected Russian woman was a spy, but whether anybody can account for what happened to the information gathered and circulated in the name of protecting national security.
So here is my answer, once again.
Are you a Russian spy?
Last time I checked, I wasn't.
And to everyone in the British, NATO and Spanish institutional chains who handled our information, assessed the alleged threat or repeated the allegations, I have one final question:
Have YOU checked?
And today's song is IMMORTAL GAME
