New Tory chairman believes Russian spy tried to recruit him in pub

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New Tory Chairman Believes Russian Spy Tried To Recruit Him In Pub
Cabinet reshuffle, © PA Wire/PA Images
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By Laura Parnaby, PA

Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands has said he believes a Russian spy tried to recruit him over a pint of beer in a London pub.

The UK Cabinet minister said he met Alexander Kashitsyn – who he now thinks was a secret agent – at the Seven Stars pub in Fulham while he had been seeking election as Tory MP for the area almost 20 years ago.

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Mr Hands, who was elected MP for Chelsea and Fulham in 2010, claimed Mr Kashitsyn had first introduced himself as a Russian Embassy worker during a Conservative event in 2004 at which Boris Johnson was a guest speaker.

 

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He said Mr Kashitsyn asked for a meeting shortly afterwards and, at the pub, probed Mr Hands for information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Speaking with Channel 4 for a Dispatches documentary, Mr Hands said: “First he’d said he wanted to talk about street-sweeping cleaning or bin collection.

“Then suddenly he asked me to get him a document about the Iranian nuclear programme from the House of Commons Library.”

Mr Hands said he declined to help, adding: “I was very suspicious.

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“I thought he was a Russian intelligence officer getting a soon-to-be British Member of Parliament to do something for the Russian state.

“This is sometimes a sort of a classic kind of… a sort of espionage technique.

“You get somebody to steal something or get you a document that is easy to get – not that you need the document – but the idea is to test somebody’s willingness to do something for you that’s essentially what the technique is.”

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Mr Hands said two years later, MI5 officers told him that his number had appeared on the phone of a Russian intelligence operative.

He said the officers told him there was a “real problem” with “people like Kashitsyn in London” who were “very, very active” in trying to infiltrate British politics.

Channel 4 has said the Russian Embassy declined to comment on the allegations made in their film.

The documentary also claims that Conservative Party activists visited a strip club in Moscow in a suspected Russian intelligence operation aiming to collect compromising material on future political leaders.

Airing on Sunday at 10pm, Strippers, Spies And Russian Money: Dispatches investigates how Russia sought to influence British politics in the years before the invasion of Ukraine.

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