Two RAF Police officers. A Russian-spy rumour. An investigation nobody can clearly explain. And the terrifying ease with which a person can become a threat in somebody else's official records.

Imagine It Was You

Imagine sitting alone on a bench outside a military headquarters.

You are not trying to break in. You are not carrying a weapon. You are not running away.
You are a civilian who has been refused access to a building. You have come because somebody you legally represent needs documents and personal belongings returned.

You want an explanation.

Instead, four civilian police officers arrive.

What you do not know is that, before they reached you, they received information from military police.

Information about you.

They were told that you and your partner were “under investigation”.
They were told there was concern that your group was trying to gain access “dishonestly”.
National-security legislation was mentioned.

You have never been interviewed by an intelligence officer. Nobody has explained that you are suspected of an offence. Nobody has told you what investigation you are supposedly involved in.

But none of that matters at this moment.

Because the police officers approaching you have already heard a story.

And you have not.

Now imagine that you spend the following fourteen months trying to discover whether that story was true.

You submit complaints. You request records. You study legislation. You initiate legal proceedings.

Eventually, you receive an answer.

There was an investigation.

You read it again.

There was an investigation.

But that was not your question.

Your question was:
Was I under investigation?

And suddenly you realise something deeply uncomfortable.

An institution can possess enough information to describe you as a potential security concern without possessing, or at least without disclosing, enough information to explain precisely what you are supposed to have done.

Worse, the distinction may never be resolved.

Now stop imagining.

Because the woman on that bench was me.

And if your immediate reaction is that this could never happen to you, I would like you to read on.

That is probably what I would have thought, too.

1. The First Officer: The Power to Describe You

On 26 August 2025, I was at Northwood Headquarters, a British military establishment hosting NATO's Allied Maritime Command.

I had arrived with two men. By the time the incident escalated to civilian police involvement, both men had left. I remained.

The Royal Air Force Police officer subsequently identified in the complaint material as MO (Male Officer) was the Deputy Establishment Security Officer, serving within the Northwood Police and Security Squadron.

He knew something I did not.

A notification concerning me had been entered into the site's access-management system. It prevented my admission as an escorted visitor while a wider security matter remained unresolved.
The Ministry of Defence would later state in its Summary Grounds of Resistance of 13 November 2025 that no UK decision-maker had determined that I was a national-security threat.

That does not mean the access restriction was necessarily unlawful. Military establishments can impose precautionary restrictions without establishing a criminal offence.

But it does create an important distinction.

I was the subject of a restriction.

But was I also the subject of an investigation?

Those are not the same thing.

According to the account of police communications recorded in Review Wye, the statutory review completed in April 2026, Hertfordshire Police were told that the male and his partner were under investigation.

I was the partner.

The information was capable of influencing how the arriving officers understood the situation.
Imagine being an ordinary police officer receiving that briefing.

A military headquarters. An access restriction. An investigation. A suggestion of dishonest entry.
Would you approach the person involved as an ordinary civilian asking for help?

Or would your professional instinct tell you to be cautious?

Caution would be understandable.

That is precisely why the accuracy of the original briefing matters.

A few words spoken by one official can alter the circumstances in which another official exercises power.

The person being described may not even know those words have been spoken.

The first danger is not that an officer necessarily lies. It is that an officer's understanding can become another officer's starting point.

And once that happens, the person at the end of the chain is already at a disadvantage.

2. The Group That Wasn't There

There is another word in the police account that troubles me.

“Dishonestly.”

Three people had originally arrived at Northwood.

That is true.

But by the time civilian police were called, I was alone.

The RAF Police response subsequently relied on the fact that a group had originally been present and maintained that the potential threat assessment was not displaced by the group's changed composition.

I understand that reasoning as far as it goes.

An earlier event does not cease to exist because two people leave.

But my complaint was not that three people had never arrived.

My complaint concerned the basis for suggesting dishonest intention.

And those are entirely different propositions.

A group is a collection of people.

Dishonesty is a conclusion about conduct or state of mind.

One cannot establish the second merely by proving the first.

Think about how easily this could happen elsewhere.

You and two colleagues visit a government office to resolve an administrative problem.

Somebody describes your group as behaving suspiciously.

Later, the authorities establish that there were indeed three of you.

Does that prove the suspicion was justified?

Of course not.

But suppose the complaint investigator concentrates on whether the original report accurately recorded the presence of a group.

The factual point is established.

The report is defended.

The underlying question about suspicious or dishonest behaviour remains unanswered.

You are left trying to explain why a technically correct answer has not resolved your complaint.

And now you have another problem.

You are the person who keeps complaining.

3. The Second Officer: The Rumour in the Room

The second RAF Police officer is identified in the review material as FO (Female Officer).

She happened to be the Squadron Leader. She showed great leadership qualities, indeed. Good for the Squadron.

She attended the bench where I was sitting.

Our direct interaction was brief. She later acknowledged that her manner had been short and curt. She told me that she did not care if I was British or not, I had no rights in this country.

But something else emerged during the complaint process.

Before meeting me, she was already aware of rumours circulating within MARCOM that I was a “Russian Spy”.

Read that sentence carefully.

A serving military police officer, a Squadron Leader, knew of a rumour that a civilian woman was a Russian spy.

The woman was me.

I was born in Leningrad, but I am a British and Polish citizen. I am a solicitor. I have never been charged with espionage.

Yet the rumour had reached an officer who would subsequently interact with me in an operational setting.

FO said that it had not caused her to be biased against me.

That may be entirely true. It did not look to me it was, that is why in my original complaint I specifically complained about it.

I cannot establish that she acted out of prejudice. It looked to me it was, that is why in my original complaint I specifically complained about it.

Both these heads of complains were not upheld, as the investigating officer believed the Squadron leader who said that she was not prejudiced, not heard about Russian spy rumours, and that "nobody heard the discriminatory remark". Later, in the review of the complaint however, it was established, that she has indeed heard about the rumours, but in no way this knowledge made her prejudiced. The same review also stated that now she denies saying that discriminatory remark to me. From "nobody heard" to denial, at least we have some progress. No it is simply my word against hers and we all know whom to believe, aren't we? Clearly, not a solicitor with a label of being "under investigation", "committing an offence" and "acting dishonestly". We better believe people, who invented these labels, as, yes, we have the rules. Rule no. 1: Officer is always right. Rule no. 2: If they are not, see rule no 1.

The most interesting thing is that the reviewer did not even explain the rules, why the officer's account was believed, and mine was not. He simply adopted their account as true. No scrutiny, no explanation.

Dear Jonathan, we are now in court, where I challenge your methodology. You are welcome to adopt the proposed two rules as your official methodology, I have no IP claims about it. Rule No 1 and Rule no 2 is a very old joke originated in Stalin's Soviet Russia. It just had "KGB" adjective before the word "Officer".

Now imagine that you are the person on the receiving end.

You discover, long afterwards, that an officer exercising authority over you had previously heard an allegation that you were a foreign intelligence operative.

Would you be satisfied simply to learn that the officer did not believe herself biased?
Or would your instinct demand something more?
Who told her?
When?
What exactly was said?
Was it presented as a joke, gossip, intelligence or fact?
Was it ever checked?
Could it have affected how your behaviour was interpreted, even unintentionally?

These are not accusations of misconduct. They are questions about information entering an operational environment.

And they matter because people do not always recognise the assumptions influencing their own judgments.

We all understand this in ordinary life.

If a neighbour tells you that the man moving in next door is dangerous, you may insist that you are perfectly fair-minded.

You may genuinely believe that.

But when the man approaches your front door, you might nevertheless feel apprehensive.

You might interpret an innocent movement differently.

You might speak more sharply.

You might call for help sooner.

That is human.

Which is why institutions need safeguards that do not depend entirely on individuals assessing their own impartiality.

In my case, the latest complaint response did not identify a basis for further investigation into the rumour's influence.

The officer's denial of bias was treated as significant.

But the provenance and operational significance of the rumour remain questions I consider unresolved.

And here is the disturbing part.

I did not need to be a spy for the rumour to change the environment in which I was treated.

The rumour only needed to exist.

4. When Defending Yourself Becomes A Problem

Six months later, I was still trying to establish what had happened.

I had learned that there were access restrictions, police briefings, disputed statements and records I had not previously seen.

So I did what the law encourages citizens to do.

I complained.

On 25 February 2026, I submitted a complaint concerning Visitor Reception staff at Northwood.

On 19 March, I submitted another concerning the Northwood Police and Security Squadron.
These were separate civilian complaints, although some issues overlapped with an existing Service Police complaints process.

The same male RAF Police officer, MO, encountered this correspondence in his security role.

One complaint included protectively marked material from an earlier police investigation.

He did not know how I had obtained it.

I had obtained it through a Subject Access Request.

He had not seen the final report of that earlier investigation.

He believed some of the matters raised resembled questions already addressed elsewhere.
I can understand an officer being concerned about the provenance of protectively marked material.

I can understand him asking whether complaints were duplicative.

But what happened next deserves attention.

On 23 March 2026, he sent an internal email describing my complaint activity as “increasingly vexatious” and apparently attempting to “circumvent the established process”.

Imagine discovering that.

You have spent months trying to find out what was recorded about you.

You have sought documents through lawful procedures.

You have submitted complaints because you believe separate issues remain unanswered.

And now an official email suggests that the problem may be your behaviour in complaining.
Perhaps you are being difficult.

Perhaps you are circumventing something.

Perhaps you are vexatious.

There is a profound psychological effect in that transition.

At first, you are asking the state to account for its conduct.

Then you discover that the state is discussing your conduct in asking.

The scrutiny has changed direction.

I have written about this before in I Broke Up with the State. It Still Has My Case Number

I call one part of the mechanism issue substitution.

You ask one question.

The institution answers another.

The answer may be accurate.

It may even be reasonable.

But the original question survives.

And every attempt to bring the conversation back to it risks making you appear more persistent, more demanding and more troublesome.

For a person without legal knowledge, financial resources or the confidence to challenge official correspondence, that is an extraordinarily powerful deterrent.

Because eventually the question becomes not How do I obtain an answer?

It becomes:
How can I stop HER making my situation worse?

That is self-preservation.

And that is where the balance of power becomes frightening.

5. An Official Opinion That Is Not an Official Decision

The subsequent RAFP investigation examined the March email.

According to the outcome described in the complaint materials, the officer's comments were not treated as a formal vexatious classification.

No formal vexatious marker had been created on police systems.

The investigation concluded that the email reflected the officer's genuine concerns at the time.
Its formulation was:

“The content of the email was an accurate reflection of the concerns of the author at the time.”

This is the sentence I cannot stop thinking about.

Because it contains two very different kinds of accuracy.

An email may accurately describe what somebody believed.

That does not establish that the belief itself was factually justified.

Suppose I write to a public authority:
“I believe my neighbour is committing fraud.”

The email accurately records my belief.

But is my neighbour committing fraud?

That requires evidence.

Now imagine the person expressing the belief is not an ordinary neighbour.

He is a serving security officer.

The email is sent through official channels.

It reaches managers, Professional Standards personnel, investigators and oversight bodies.
The language acquires an institutional audience.

And the person described is not notified because the statement is treated as an informal opinion rather than a formal classification.

Do you see the problem?

The opinion can be official enough to circulate, but informal enough to escape the safeguards associated with a formal decision.

I am not suggesting that every internal opinion must be disclosed immediately or that every security concern requires an adversarial hearing.

Institutions must be able to communicate operational concerns.

But when an adverse description of a named individual travels through official systems, there is a legitimate question about accuracy, context, retention and correction.

What happens if the opinion is mistaken?
Who is responsible for correcting it?
Who knows where it went?
And how does the person affected establish whether it influenced anything?

Those questions matter even where no misconduct has been found.

Perhaps especially then.

Because misconduct procedures are designed to examine whether individuals breached applicable standards.

They do not necessarily answer every question about the quality of information flowing through the institution.

6. The Complaints That Travelled Somewhere (Nowhere?)

There is another detail in the investigation that deserves more attention than the colourful word vexatious.

The report established that my February and March civilian complaints had reached Northwood.

They had been considered and passed onwards to what the outcome describes as the “relevant personnel” or “appropriate person”.

But the material available to me does not identify the next essential steps.

Who received them?
Who registered them?
Who decided which department was responsible?
Were the separate issues distinguished from those already before the Service Police complaints system?
Who was supposed to respond?
What decision was made?

The investigation established part of the route.

Then the trail became unclear.

Think about that from the perspective of an ordinary citizen.

You send a complaint to a public authority.

Somebody reads it.

Somebody forms an adverse opinion about your behaviour.

That opinion is circulated.

Your complaint is forwarded somewhere.

And you still cannot identify who is responsible for answering it.

Now imagine that the institution tells you the officer acted acceptably.

That may be the correct conclusion under the relevant disciplinary standards.

But it does not tell you what happened to your complaint.

The officer's conduct and the institution's administrative responsibility are separate questions.

This is why I have referred the civilian complaint-handling issues to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, while pursuing the Service Police outcomes through their separate statutory review routes.

I am not asking one body to decide matters belonging to another.

I am asking each to answer the questions within its responsibility.

Because there is a difference between defending the person who forwarded a complaint and establishing that the complaint was properly handled afterwards.

And I think that distinction matters to every person who has ever written to a government department and waited for an answer that never came.

7. No Lessons to Be Learnt

The investigation into the March email concluded that the service provided was acceptable.
The outcome did not identify misconduct requiring proceedings or further institutional action.
The Provost Marshal's conclusion, as recorded in the materials, was particularly memorable:
“There are no lessons to be learnt from the case in question.”

I have thought about those words.

I do not need an officer punished to believe that something deserves examination.

I do not need an institution to admit liability before it can improve a procedure.

I do not need every concern I raise to be upheld.

But I struggle with the proposition that a process can reveal this many unresolved questions about information, complaint routing and adverse descriptions without generating any useful institutional learning.

Consider what the documents have brought into view.

An investigation existed, but the precise basis for describing me personally as under investigation remains disputed.

A group existed, but the factual foundation for suggesting dishonest intention remains contested.

An officer knew of a Russian-spy rumour, but its source and possible influence remain unresolved.

Another officer received protectively marked material without knowing that I had obtained it through a lawful disclosure process.

He characterised my complaints adversely.

That characterisation travelled through official channels.

The underlying civilian complaints were forwarded onwards, but their subsequent administrative handling remains unclear.

Perhaps the statutory reviews will conclude that every relevant decision was reasonable and proportionate.

Perhaps they will not.

I cannot predict their findings.

But surely an organisation can ask whether its procedures might be improved without first deciding that an individual officer has done something wrong.

That is the distinction between institutional learning and institutional defence.

And it brings me to the question at the heart of this article.

8. The Instinct to Protect Your Own

I have spent almost two years studying the behaviour of institutions. I even developed a couple of legal doctrines around it.

I have examined records, compared statements, traced information between departments and challenged decisions.

At first, I approached the problem primarily as a lawyer.

What power was exercised?
By whom?
Under which statute?
What evidence supported it?
What remedy was available?

Those questions remain important.

But I have increasingly come to believe that another mechanism deserves attention.

Self-preservation.

Not merely mine.

Everybody's.

Imagine being the first officer.

You have received information from a security environment. You believe there is a potential risk. You communicate your understanding to another police force.

Later, somebody questions the accuracy of your words.

What is your immediate human instinct?

To defend your decision.

Imagine being the second officer.

You have heard an ugly rumour. You believe you remained professional. Months later, somebody asks whether the rumour affected your judgment.

What is your immediate instinct?

To defend your integrity.

Imagine being the investigator.

Your colleagues have acted in a difficult operational environment. You must assess their conduct against applicable standards.

You may quite properly conclude that the evidence does not establish misconduct.

But there is also an institutional tendency worth examining: the temptation to treat the defensibility of each individual action as an answer to the wider question of whether the system worked.

And now imagine being the institution itself.

It has records, chains of command, previous decisions, legal advisers, complaints processes and reputational interests.

An error in one record might raise questions about another.

A questionable description might have reached several recipients.

A complaint-routing failure might reveal weaknesses in administrative oversight.

Correction may require several departments to revisit assumptions they have already adopted.

The path of least resistance is obvious.

Defend the original decision where defensible.

Defend the officer where defensible.

Defend the investigation where defensible.

Close the complaint where the rules permit.

None of that necessarily requires bad faith.

But it can create a powerful cumulative effect.

Everyone is protecting their own position.

Who is protecting the person described in the records?

This is not a finding about the motives of the RAF Police officers or their investigators.

It is a question about how institutional incentives can operate, even when individuals believe they are acting properly.

And it is a question we should be willing to ask of every public authority.

9. Why This Should Frighten You

My circumstances may seem unusual.

I am a Russian-born British solicitor.

I had a relationship with a Spanish naval commander serving at NATO.

There were security restrictions, rumours of espionage and an incident at a military headquarters.

It sounds like a television drama. Maybe one day you will watch it on your TV. I am working on it, as sometimes it is highly entertaining. Sometimes it is a real drama, which shows fascinating mix of sex, death and power.

I have already suggested turning parts of it into one.

But remove the NATO headquarters.

Remove the Russian-spy rumour.

Remove the military uniforms.

What remains?

A person about whom an official forms an adverse impression.

That impression enters a record.

The record is shared.

Other officials may rely on it.

The person does not know what has been said.

When they discover it, they ask for an explanation.

The explanation addresses a nearby question.

They complain again.

Their persistence becomes part of the institutional narrative.

Now replace my circumstances with your own.

Perhaps you are a parent challenging a school safeguarding record.

Perhaps you are a patient disputing something entered in your medical notes.

Perhaps you are a professional facing a regulatory referral.

Perhaps you are a bank customer trying to correct a fraud-related marker.

Perhaps you are an employee who has been described as difficult after reporting a problem.

You might be entirely innocent of the conduct suggested.

You might also be mistaken about some facts yourself.

That is why fair procedures matter to everyone.

Because when the authority holds the records, controls the terminology and decides how the complaint is processed, the ordinary citizen may have very little power to correct the story.

And the first instinct of a person in that position is not to launch a constitutional challenge.

It is to survive.
Protect your job.
Protect your family.
Protect your reputation.
Avoid further attention.
Do not make things worse.

Most people will not spend fourteen months examining police reports and complaint regulations.

Most people will stop.

Some will stop because they trust the institution.

Others will stop because they are frightened of it.

And some will stop because the cost of continuing has become greater than the harm they are trying to correct.

That is why this story matters beyond me.

A complaints system should not require exceptional persistence, legal training and personal resilience merely to establish what was said about somebody and what happened to their complaint.

10. The Boundary

There is one thing I want to make clear.

I do not claim that two RAF Police officers have been proved dishonest, corrupt or guilty of misconduct. In my personal opinion - there were in circumstances they interacted with me, and most likely they still are. But not because they are bad humans, but because they are corrupted individuals, who were corrupted by the corrupted institution, they serve within. And the institution itself is corrupted by the toxic culture it developed and allowed to flourish.

The outcomes presently available do not establish the facts strong enough to prove this corruption in court. It is a criminal offence and the thread hold is high. Also, ultimately, this is not my job. It is a job of people who, yes, correct, reviewed my complaints and stated that there is no lessons to be learnt.

I recognise that security officers work with incomplete information, sometimes under pressure. I recognise that precautionary decisions may be necessary. I recognise that a public authority must be able to defend its employees against unfounded complaints.

But I also believe that a citizen is entitled to ask whether information communicated about them was accurate, appropriately qualified and capable of correction.

Both October Service Police outcomes have been challenged through statutory review applications. Those processes remain to be determined. The separate MoD civilian complaint-handling issues are before the Ombudsman, and my judicial proceedings have their own legal questions.

I respect the distinction between those processes.

But I will not confuse the absence of a misconduct finding with proof that every administrative question has been answered.

For years, I thought the most dangerous word in my story was spy.

I was wrong. Only if it were. The state would acted - arrest me, interrogate me, punish me. Eventually, if they discovered that I have indeed breached any spy related legislation.

The dangerous words are often much smaller.

Concern.
Potential.
Relevant.
Investigation.
Vexatious.
Appropriate.

They sound reasonable.

Sometimes they are entirely reasonable.

But they can also become the vocabulary through which uncertain information acquires consequences before anybody has established its accuracy.

It is the boundary between suspicion and fact.

Between caution and accusation.

Between institutional self-preservation and public accountability.

And that boundary does not exist to protect people who have the resources to fight for fourteen months.

It exists to protect the person who cannot.

The person who will never see the email.
The person who will never know what the police were told.
The person who will never discover why an application failed, a complaint disappeared or a record followed them into another institution.
The person who will simply feel that something has changed, without knowing why.
That is the person I want you to think about.

Because next time, the woman on the bench may not be me.

It may be you.

And today's song - WRONG WOMAN. This time in Blues.