The former defence secretary Ben Wallace was advised by his permanent secretary that a public inquiry into allegations of SAS executions in Afghanistan would be “expensive, unproductive and extremely bad” for the reputation of the British military.
Sir Stephen Lovegrove tried to persuade Wallace not to commission formal hearings in August 2020, fearing the Ministry of Defence (MoD) would be embarrassed if soldiers and key figures said they could not remember what had happened.
The civil servant’s advice was made public as Wallace was giving evidence to the inquiry that he did ultimately commission in response to allegations that up to 80 Afghan civilians had been summarily killed by members of the elite force.
During a daylong evidence session, Oliver Glasgow KC asked Wallace what steps he had taken while he was defence secretary in the last Conservative government to try to get to the bottom of long-running concerns about SAS conduct in Helmand between 2010 and 2013.
The barrister focused on a part of document Wallace had received in response to recently emerged claims by two Afghan families in the civil court which had been extensively reported by the BBC’s Panorama and the Sunday Times.
It was dated 26 August 2020, and Glasgow told Wallace it was “sent to you by the permanent secretary”. He proceeded to read out extracts , which began by noting: “I and the team are acutely aware of the political challenges ahead.”
“I believe that we should also continue to resist commissioning a public inquiry,” Lovegrove continued. It “would be expensive, unproductive and extremely bad for the reputation of defence and for armed forces morale, particularly if, as seems likely, a succession of witnesses were unable to recall their part in events on the ground”.
Wallace told the hearing that by this time “his mind was turning to the fact that the only real solution was a public inquiry, which as you’ll see from the documents officials didn’t want”. New information that was unknown to ministers kept emerging, he said, and indicated there was a case for the SAS to answer.
Questions about the conduct of British elite soldiers in Helmand had been swirling around the military and the MoD from the early part of last decade. However, an investigation by military police and prosecutors, Operation Northmoor, led to no charges and was shut down in 2019.
But suspicions lingered. A mixture of media reports and civil claims turned up fresh evidence and, in particular, the MoD unexpectedly disclosed documents in the spring of 2020 in response to the claims from the Afghan families.
In one email, an SAS sergeant-major ironically described the deaths of four men from one family on a night raid as “the latest massacre!”. Another document revealed that a secret review had been conducted into a series of incidents, where the SAS had suddenly killed men because they were said to have produced a gun or grenade.
Other official papers released to the inquiry show that shortly after Wallace became defence secretary in July 2019, he was asked to approve the closure of Operation Northmoor quickly in order to get ahead of investigations by Panorama.
A memo told him the Panorama programme was likely to be “highly critical” of the handling of “historical criminal allegations” from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was advised “it would be advantageous for MoD” to shut down Northmoor before transmission – advice that Wallace said he rejected.
A few months later Jonny Mercer, a junior minister responsible for veterans, told Wallace he was concerned that he had misled the Commons, when in an adjournment debate in January 2020 he had denied that the SAS operated “death squads” in Afghanistan. Mercer said he wanted to correct the record.
Wallace told the inquiry he had advised Mercer it was “a very difficult language” to correct because “the alternative is that it is true”. The former minister said it was the purpose of the public inquiry to establish whether there was “evidence to substantiate this allegation” – and at the end of his evidence called for anybody who had direct knowledge of what had happened in Afghanistan to come forward.
