A third cabinet minister was targeted by suspected Russian impostors pretending to be Ukrainian politicians, it can be revealed.
Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, was sent a request for a call on Tuesday. It is understood that before taking the call her staff contacted the Foreign Office who then got in touch with the Ukrainian embassy.
They were told it was a “hoax” and so the call never happened as her private office blocked it.
The Foreign Office did not pass the information on to ministers. Both Priti Patel, the home secretary, and Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, subsequently fell for the prank after being put through by members of their team.
Wallace gave officials in the Ministry of Defence a “good bollocking” after he was put on the video call with an impostor pretending to be the Ukrainian prime minister.
Advertisement
During the call, which lasted nearly ten minutes on Thursday, Wallace said that the questions got “wilder and wilder” so he hung up.
He 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.”
A defence source said the Foreign Office was warned earlier by the Ukrainian embassy there were scam emails going around but failed to pass on the information to all government departments. The Foreign Office said that it was aware of the calls and had flagged them to national security organisations so they could issue an appropriate warning to other government departments.
A second defence source said the call request to Wallace’s team came via another government department.
“It wasn’t a cold call so the due diligence wasn’t carried out in the normal way. We wouldn’t have taken the call had it not been put via another department. We would have checked it”, the source said.
Advertisement
A Foreign Office source said that high-level calls with prime ministers should always go through No 10 and the Foreign Office. The source said: “Why would you arrange and agree to a conversation with the supposed PM of another country without informing No 10 and the FCDO [Foreign Office] first? It’s all very unusual. I suspect this would have been picked up had the proper process been followed.”
James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said after the incident that Wallace could “dish out a good bollocking when he needs to”.
Wallace ordered an immediate inquiry into how he ended up speaking to the prankster. Heappey told LBC that the call happened on Microsoft Teams and could therefore be “easily intercepted” 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.”
Advertisement
Patel tweeted on Thursday that she too had fallen victim to the prank but no further details were given. She spent more than ten minutes on the phone with the hoax caller and discussed the general situation in Ukraine but their conversation did not include national security issues, a government source said. The prankster who called Patel also pretended to be the Ukrainian prime minister.
The home secretary’s team blamed Home Office officials for failing to screen the call. A source said it was the responsibility of officials, rather than ministers, to check with the Foreign Office and No 10 before taking calls with foreign government prime ministers.
“It’s fair to say that the regular process wasn’t followed,” a government source said. “It’s never something that ministers get involved with, it goes into ministers’ diaries by officials — it’s the machinery around them.”
