MI5 sought to recruit BBC leader as broadcaster investigated spy agency, leaks reveal

An exclusive Grayzone investigation exposes how Britain’s top spying agency secretly influences the country’s state broadcaster

Leaked emails reveal Britain’s domestic spying service attempted to recruit a high-ranking BBC board member as a key agent of influence, at a time when the British state broadcaster was embroiled in a bitter legal and journalistic battle with MI5.

By Kit Klarenberg

This June, British oligarch Damon Buffini stepped down as deputy chair of the BBC’s board, and chair of the broadcaster’s commercial board. His four year tenure was warmly praised by the BBC board’s chair for the “record profits” generated by the broadcaster’s commercial wings. While mainstream reports on Buffini’s time at the BBC reference his background at the upper echelons of private equity giant Permira, the multi-millionaire’s relationship with a much more consequential institution has gone unmentioned until now.

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that while overseeing the BBC’s board of directors, Buffini enjoyed a close relationship with the British MI5 intelligence service, and may have been recruited into the agency’s leadership. The emails raise grave questions about the extent to which senior MI5 officials exploited their relationship with him to suppress incriminating BBC productions, and to influence the broadcaster’s programming about the agency.

Buffini’s tenure overlaps precisely with the broadcast of an investigative documentary the British state and MI5 fought tooth and nail to suppress. Their campaign to stifle the production’s release involved costly court battles, and led MI5 Director General Ken McCallum to personally telephone BBC chief Tim Davie to urge him to drop the “inaccurate and reckless” story.

As McCallum battled the BBC’s editorial staff, July 2020 email exchanges show him and his predecessor as MI5 director general, Eliza Manningham-Buller, seeking to recruit the BBC’s Buffini to his spying agency as a “non-executive director.” The MI5 leader said he’d heard that Buffini was “potentially interested.”

In private communications, McCallum invited Manningham-Buller to personally vet Buffini for the role, believing the tycoon “would be a different voice for us.”

Manningham-Buller replied to McCallum with a ringing endorsement of Buffini, based on their time together on the board of the billionaire-backed biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust, which she chaired from 2015 to 2021. Manningham-Buller described Buffini as “sharp, fun and challenging,” proudly recalling that he “tried to shake it up” after joining the charity’s board.

“Recommend…[very good] ally for me and I should have liked him to succeed me,” she added. “Not always comfortable which is good. Values good despite being filthy rich.”

Less than an hour later, Manningham-Buller emailed McCallum again, declaring, “[the] more I reflect, grab him.” Grateful for the reference, MI5’s director general pledged he would “pursue” and “see what happens.”

The identities and functions of MI5’s non-executive directors are strictly confidential. What is known is that they contribute business experience to MI5, inform the agency’s “corporate culture,” and offer advice to the agency’s senior leadership.

By September 2020, the secret discussions between Buffini and MI5 about “his possible interest” in joining the agency seemed to be progressing. McCallum told Manningham-Buller that Buffini “would appreciate a private conversation with you” about working at MI5, having recently “had what sounds like a good chat” with the agency’s then-deputy director general Anne Keast-Butler, who now serves as GCHQ chief.

McCallum said he hoped “to talk to him soon,” adding, “you won’t be surprised to hear that Anne was impressed and positive.”

In order to convince Buffini to take the job, McCallum asked Keast-Butler to contact him and act as a “sounding board,” then covertly provide feedback on their conversation to the MI5 Director. As luck would have it, Buffini had already been in touch with Manningham-Buller.

“Will obviously let you know how I get on,” she told McCallum.

These exchanges were followed by a “long talk” with Buffini a week later, the contents of which Manningham-Buller hoped to relay directly to McCallum over telephone.

On October 21st 2020, Manningham-Buller emailed McCallum with an unexplained “quid pro quo” for Buffini, proposing Brooke Rogers, a behavioral science and security professor at London’s prestigious, spook-infested King’s College university.

BBC refers The Grayzone to MI5 for comment

The context in which the “quid pro quo” was being discussed remains unclear, as does whether Buffini or Manningham-Buller proposed the transaction, or why. Nonetheless, it appears Buffini’s hiring by MI5 was somehow contingent on Rogers also receiving a post. In 2025, she was appointed chief scientific adviser at the Home Office, of which MI5 is an arm’s-length body.

Whatever the details of the arrangement might have been, the discussions of Buffini’s MI5 recruitment between McCallum and an ostensibly retired senior spy and intimate mutual acquaintance – all conducted outside formal agency channels – raise serious questions about conflicts of interest. At minimum, such conduct runs contrary to official guidelines on email usage by British government officials, who are strongly discouraged from using private accounts to conduct state affairs.

Whether Buffini ultimately accepted McCallum’s eager advances to become an MI5 non-executive director remains unknown. When The Grayzone emailed the BBC for clarification, a press officer cryptically informed this outlet, “you would need to speak to MI5 for more information on its leadership and structure.” However, Britain’s domestic spying agency does not operate a formal press office, and offers no public mechanism for the submission of such queries.

MI5 seeks to suppress BBC production exposing agency scandal

Buffini’s role as deputy chair of the BBC board overlapped with a long-running scandal which threw the British state broadcaster and MI5 into an intense conflict. The clash erupted when BBC reporters discovered the spy agency had been employing a violent neo-Nazi – known as “Agent X” – and protecting him from police investigation after he savagely attacked his girlfriend with a machete. MI5 was well-aware of the Nazi’s history of criminal activity and vicious misogyny, but turned a blind eye.

In December 2021, as the BBC prepared to broadcast a documentary on the scandal, UK Attorney General Suella Braverman applied for a sweeping High Court injunction on MI5’s behalf, attempting to block the broadcaster from reporting the story. The Court ruled the following year that reporting the scandal was in the public interest, but that the real name of Agent X and other identifying details should remain concealed, as demanded by the government.

Days later, the undercover agent’s girlfriend, known as “Beth,” launched a human rights claim against MI5 before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, charging the agency knowingly failed to protect her from a violent operative.

The airing of the documentary represented a serious black eye for MI5, igniting a massive public backlash and forcing the spy agency to issue a formal apology for the distress its neo-Nazi agent caused to “Beth.”

As a BBC board member tasked with content promotion, Buffini held substantial influence over the state broadcaster’s output and would have been well positioned to alter its reporting. However, no concrete evidence has surfaced to demonstrate that Buffini interfered in any way on MI5’s behalf.

Requests for comment sent by The Grayzone to Buffini’s family foundation were not answered.

MI5 chief and predecessor discuss BBC collaboration, media PR efforts

While the MI5 officers implicated in the scandal could now face prosecution for lying to the High Court about their knowledge of the violent Nazi they had recruited as a confidential asset, the current MI5 director’s position appears safe. But it is clear from McCallum’s private correspondence with Manningham-Buller that the case was a source of considerable stress.

On March 11, 2026, Manningham-Buller emailed McCallum to tell him she was “thinking of you,” and hoped “the pressure [was] not too hellish.” McCallum thanked his friend and predecessor, and lamented that a “combination of world events, live operations and continuing cocktail of litigation/inquiry grief is keeping me fully occupied.”

Six days later, McCallum issued a historic formal public apology to “Beth,” promising substantial compensation for her abuse at the hands of an MI5-sponsored neo-Nazi. His failure to get the documentary pulled from the air was hardly the only instance of the agency attempting to influence BBC programming, or to suppress media coverage of spying scandals.

Under Buffini’s stewardship, the commercial entity BBC Studios became a £2 billion business and Britain’s “most awarded producer.” The surge in revenue took place as the BBC produced several documentaries in apparent collaboration with MI5.

Among them was a slick four-part “factual reconstruction” named 7/7: The London Bombings, which was broadcast in commemoration of the incident’s 20th anniversary.

In a March 31 2024 email, McCallum emailed Manningham-Buller expressing “heartfelt thanks for all the effort you put in to [sic] doing the 7/7 documentaries.”

Manningham-Buller featured prominently in the documentary, which was widely praised by mainstream reviewers. The BBC program conveniently glossed over the fact that MI5 had been tracking the bombers for years before the incident. The July 7th perpetrators’ intimate, longstanding proximity to multiple known Anglo-American double agents was also left unmentioned.

“Hope I don’t let you down in interviews,” Manningham-Buller responded to McCallum, referring to efforts to promote the BBC documentary. The MI5 director general said he was “sure you won’t… and that you are the best possible person to have shouldered them.” He looked ahead – “barring accidents” – to “[stepping] forward in a few years’ time to start shouldering my own fair share” of MI5 apologia responsibility in post-retirement interviews.

McCallum added he’d enjoyed Manningham-Buller’s recent appearance on the podcast, The Rest Is Politics, hosted by ex-MI6 officer Rory Stewart and the Blairite spin doctor and Iraq war salesman Alastair Campbell.

Other aspects of the publicity push were not going as planned, however. In the email to Manningham-Buller, McCallum complained that former MI6 chief John Sawers “occasionally could usefully say a bit less” when he appeared in broadcast interviews.

Manningham-Buller confessed to having “felt queasy about his Yemen agent story” – a reference to a controversial case reported in 2012 in which MI5 recruited an agent who was inserted into Al Qaeda by the CIA and MI6.

To the chagrin of MI5, US media broke the story in May 2012. Britain’s domestic spying agency apparently feared the agent’s public identification might jeopardize its future operations. Given that MI5 was under scrutiny for running yet another agent within a dangerous criminal group – who was subsequently “burned” in broad daylight – it’s understandable that Manningham-Buller would be uncomfortable about Sawers referencing a similar incident.

Highlighting her sensitivity to critical media coverage, Manningham-Buller wrote to an MI5 press apparatchik in mid-April 2025 to express concern that a recent Daily Telegraph article had apparently accused her and McCallum of being “both liars.” Apparently unable to employ her veteran spy skills to identify the offending piece herself, Manningham-Buller asked her agency media contact for a copy. He reassured her she had little to worry about.

The article in question covered recent revelations in the scandal of “Stakeknife”, an MI5 spy who ran the IRA’s counter-intelligence division, and murdered several informants and infiltrators within the Republican militia. MI5 had for years stuck to the line it had no direct involvement with Stakeknife. Manningham-Buller publicly claimed in March 2024 that Stakeknife only came to her attention in the late 1990s when he was seeking witness protection. But subsequent disclosures proved the agency was indeed “closely involved” with Stakeknife’s handling and tasking for decades prior.

When the MI5 press operative replied to Manningham-Buller, he boasted that the agency had forced revisions to the Telegraph article, removing references not only to MI5’s involvement with Stakeknife, but also the spy agency’s modern day deceptions regarding Agent X.

“We managed to get them to change the headline, remove a line saying [Stakeknife] was run by ‘intelligence service operatives’ and change the section on Agent X where they said we were ‘found to have lied’,” the MI5 press operative wrote.

“We didn’t get approached in advance on this,” the press operative complained, adding that it was “very poor form” of journalists at The Telegraph not to run its reporting by MI5 prior to publication.

Before publishing potentially controversial reporting on the country’s spies, British news outlets typically consult with the government’s intelligence agencies – or, at the very least, with the UK’s secretive Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, as The Grayzone revealed in 2025.

While none of the email communications by MI5 directors confirm that former BBC deputy chair Buffini was recruited into an agency leadership role, the BBC raised more questions than it answered by referring The Grayzone to the MI5 when queried about the relationship. As MI5 plotted to manage a series of media scandals, including one involving a BBC documentary, Buffini’s real role at the network demands urgent clarification.