Former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was advised by his permanent secretary that a public inquiry into alleged executions by the SAS in Afghanistan would be “costly, counterproductive and extremely damaging to the reputation of the British military”.
Sir Stephen Lovegrove tried to persuade Mr Wallace in August 2020 not to commission a formal hearing, fearing embarrassment for the Ministry of Defence if soldiers and key figures said they could not remember what happened.
The civil servant's advice was made public as Mr Wallace was giving evidence to an inquiry he eventually commissioned following allegations that up to 80 Afghan civilians were summarily killed by members of the elite unit.
During the day-long evidence session, Oliver Glasgow KC asked Mr Wallace what steps he had taken while he was Defence Minister in the previous Conservative government to get to the bottom of long-standing concerns about the SAS's actions in Helmand province between 2010 and 2013.
The lawyers focused on some of the documents Mr Wallace received in response to recent claims by two Afghan families in civil court, which have been widely reported in BBC's Panorama and the Sunday Times.
It was dated 26 August 2020 and Mr Glasgow told Mr Wallace it had been “sent by the Permanent Secretary”. He read out an extract, which began with: “My team and I are acutely aware of the political challenges ahead”.
“We continue to believe that we should resist the commissioning of a public inquiry,” Lovegrove continued, “which would be costly, counterproductive and extremely damaging to defence's reputation and force morale, particularly if, as seems likely, witness after witness is unable to recall their role in events on the ground.”
By that point “it was dawning on me that the only real solution was a public inquiry, but as you can see from the documents, the authorities did not want that,” Mr Wallace told the hearing. New information that ministers did not know was constantly emerging that suggested the SAS had a case to answer, Mr Wallace said.
Questions about the actions of elite British soldiers in Helmand province have been swirling within the army and Ministry of Defence for a decade, but an investigation by military police and prosecutors, Operation Northmoor, did not result in any charges and was closed in 2019.
But the suspicions persisted. A combination of media reports and civil lawsuits led to new evidence emerging, notably after the Defense Ministry unexpectedly released documents in spring 2020 in response to complaints from Afghan families.
In one email, an SAS sergeant sarcastically described the deaths of a family of four in a night raid as “the latest massacre!”Other documents revealed a secret investigation into a series of sudden killings by the SAS of men allegedly carrying guns or grenades.
Other official documents released to the committee show that shortly after Mr Wallace took over as defence secretary in July 2019 he was asked to approve the early termination of Operation Northmoor ahead of the Panorama investigation.
The memo said the Panorama programme was likely to be “highly critical” of its treatment of “historic alleged crimes” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was advised that it would be “advantageous for the Ministry of Defence” to close North Moor before it went on air, but Mr Wallace said he rejected the advice.
A few months later, the MP for veterans' affairs, Johnny Mercer, told Mr Wallace he was concerned he had misled the House of Commons by denying that the SAS was running “death squads” in Afghanistan during a recess debate in January 2020. Mr Mercer said he wanted to correct the record.
Mr Wallace told the inquiry he had advised Mr Mercer that it was a “very difficult word to correct” because “if you don't correct it, it becomes true”. He said the purpose of the hearing was to find out whether there was “evidence to substantiate this allegation”, and at the end of his testimony he called for anyone with direct knowledge of what happened in Afghanistan to come forward.
