Ben Wallace gave officials in the Ministry of Defence a “good bollocking” after he was put on a video call with an imposter pretending to be the Ukrainian prime minister.
The armed forces minister, James Heappey, said after the incident yesterday that the defence secretary can “dish out a good bollocking when he needs to”.
Heappey told LBC that the call happened on Microsoft Teams and could therefore be “easily intercepted” and “listened in to” by hackers or fraudsters.
“He has asked some pretty tough questions of the department as to how that was able to happen,” he said. “He acknowledges that it very much shouldn’t have [been] done.”
Heappey told Sky News that the call had been “pretty bland”. But he added: “When the caller started to ask more pointed questions about our intentions militarily in the region, Ben knew full well that was not the sort of question anybody would normally ask on Teams and so he became pretty suspicious and terminated the call.”
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The defence secretary condemned Russian “dirty tricks” and told The Times that a man pretending to be Denys Shmyhal on a video call had asked him a series of questions that “got wilder and wilder so I ended the call”.
Priti Patel, the home secretary, has also been the target of a hoax call but in her case it was unclear who that caller was pretending to be.
One line of inquiry is that Wallace’s call was orchestrated by Russian intelligence to try to extract information or embarrass him.
The former Scots Guards captain, who was in Poland at the time, ordered an immediate inquiry to find out how the impostor was able to speak to him. It is understood that the call lasted less than ten minutes.
Wallace said: “The man looked like the prime minister and sounded like him and had a Ukrainian flag in the background. He was clearly trying to dupe us.” The impostor asked if Britain would send warships to the Black Sea and about a possible security pact, with questions alluding to whether Ukraine should get nuclear weapons.
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The minister was also asked about the prospect of Ukraine dropping its ambition to join Nato and becoming a “neutral” state. Wallace apparently replied that all subjects were a matter for “wider discussion” although he explained that the UK would not be deploying forces to defend Ukraine and could not be involved in discussions about nuclear weapons.
The impostor asked whether Wallace had received a “substance”, to which he responded that he did not know what he was talking about.
It is thought that the impostor was a person who looked like Shmyhal rather than a “deepfake” manipulation of video and audio files.
There are fears, however, that there may be an attempt to distort or edit Wallace’s answers. Government officials are concerned about disinformation being spread by the Russians, with a Whitehall team working around the clock to dispel online myths. It is unclear if other ministers were targeted.
Philip Ingram, a security expert and former senior British intelligence officer, said: “There’s something wrong in the system if someone like that has managed to get through to the secretary of state. The gatekeepers who should vet all connections clearly haven’t been effective.” He said that it could have been a prankster or Russia “trying to mess around”.
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Ingram added that because Wallace had answered some questions “they could play them back to try to generate anti-Ukraine propaganda or use them to embarrass the British government”.
Wallace, 51, the defence secretary since 2019, said that “no amount of Russian disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks” could distract from the human rights abuses carried out by President Putin’s forces.
The fact that a caller was able to speak directly to the defence secretary raises security questions, particularly given Wallace’s suggestion that Russia was behind it. The Times understands that the call request originated in an email purporting to be from an aide in the Ukrainian embassy in London. The request was sent from a government department to the Ministry of Defence.
Wallace tweeted: “An attempt was made by an impostor claiming to be Ukrainian PM to speak with me. He posed several misleading questions and after becoming suspicious I terminated the call . . . a desperate attempt.”
The home secretary said that the same had recently happened to her, tweeting: “Pathetic attempt at such difficult times to divide us. We stand with Ukraine.”
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Aides refused to disclose any details of the call, insisting that doing so would “give these people exactly what they want”. The source added: “We don’t want to give them the oxygen.”
