A British man who was charged with spying for China has told the BBC he was a “convenient fall guy” for UK police and security services who wanted to put espionage threats by foreign states “on the map”.
Chris Cash, a former parliamentary researcher, has shared more than 6,000 messages with us revealing how a Chinese official sought information about sensitive political matters in the UK – including the 2022 Tory leadership battle to decide the next prime minister.
The messages show how Cash’s friend in China, Chris Berry – with whom he had been sharing information – dramatically described a “secret” meeting between Berry and a high-ranking Chinese official.
Berry said he had been told that China was concerned about how a British MP it had sanctioned might be promoted to a cabinet role.
In his first interview since his acquittal, which sparked a political row over the government’s failure to designate China as a “threat”, Cash says he would “never do anything” to harm UK national security.
But he admits he was “unprofessional and naive” to send “gossiping” texts to his friend, whom he met in 2018 when they both taught English in a school in China.
Although the trove of messages shows him discussing sensitive topics, there is no evidence in them that Cash was paid by, or sympathetic to, the Chinese Communist Party.
Chris CashWith the government having previously said that Chinese spies were targeting UK officials across the political, defence and business sectors with increasingly sophisticated espionage operations, Cash believes his case was pursued as a warning to others.
Berry declined to comment on this story, but at the time of his acquittal said he denied any wrongdoing and that he had been “unfairly subjected to a trial by media”.
He said he had provided reports to a Chinese company, which he believed had clients seeking to develop trading links with the UK, and those reports contained no classified information and relied on public sources.
Cash returned to the UK in 2019, saying in his resignation message for his job in China that he felt “guilty sitting back and participating in a system that I am uncomfortable with”.
He later became the director of a small policy group run by China-sceptic Conservative MPs in Westminster.
Meanwhile, Berry stayed in China writing reports for a large consultancy which, like many Chinese companies, has links to the government.
UK security services alleged that information from the men’s messages, sent on the encrypted messaging app Signal between January 2022 and March 2023, had been passed to people linked to the Chinese state.
Both men were charged with espionage but consistently maintained their innocence.
England and Wales’ top prosecutor said the case had collapsed last autumn because government officials could not say China had been classed as an “enemy” at the time.
This prompted accusations of UK political interference to placate the Chinese government.
China has previously called the allegations of spying “pure fabrication and malicious slander”.
‘A psychological game of chess’
The most striking section of the messages handed to the BBC concerns Berry’s account of his meeting in summer 2022 with a senior Chinese official who wanted to have “a more detailed co-operation”.
In voice notes Berry describes how, beforehand, work colleagues had told him the official’s interest had been piqued by reports Berry had written, which included details of the UK’s foreign policy approach to China.
In the voice notes, Berry says he was initially aghast, but then decided: “I thought it would be interesting to go anyway… not really intending to do anything.”
Berry tells Cash he was driven to a government-owned villa in a grand compound.
The experience “felt like a psychological game of chess” and “like a test”, Berry says.
He kept his hands under the table as tea was served: “I didn’t want it to be obvious if I was nervous. I tested to see if my hands were shaking first, then drank the tea.”
Berry describes the senior Chinese official asking via an interpreter “about the situation in the UK at the moment, about the Tory leadership thing”.
At that time, Boris Johnson had just resigned as the UK’s prime minister, and a Conservative leadership battle was taking place, which Liz Truss would go on to win.
Berry says he jokingly tried to ask his host which candidate China wanted, but the interpreter did not translate his question.
“And then the main guy just shakes my hand like it’s time to go,” Berry tells Cash.
After receiving the voice notes, Cash replies via text the next day: “You, my friend, have just been elite captured” before adding: “You’re in spy territory now”.
In many media reports these particular messages, previously released in a government witness statement, have been presented as a smoking gun – evidence that Cash knew his friend was passing on information to the Chinese state.
But Cash insists it was a “tongue-in-cheek joke” because he knew his friend to be “a staunch critic of the Chinese Communist Party”.
The next morning, he made a joke about Berry spying for the UK and getting in trouble with the Chinese authorities, he says. Cash texted: “Keep him sweet… We may have a use for you yet”.
“I didn’t believe he was knowingly spying on the UK through me,” says Cash. “I trusted my friend… I wish I had seen the danger earlier, spotted it and cut off all contact.”
‘Bigger deal than I thought’
So who was the mystery official Berry had met?
“I found out who this guy is,” Berry text-messaged Cash a few hours later. “Bigger deal than I thought.”
Berry posted a link to the Wikipedia page of Cai Qi, who at the time was one of China’s most influential politicians and is now, in effect, President Xi Jinping’s chief of staff.
AFP via Getty ImagesWhether Berry correctly identified his host remains unclear. He has since disputed the suggestion that he met someone as senior as Cai Qi.
What is beyond dispute is that he believed he may have met someone highly placed within the Chinese political system.
For Chris Cash, this unusual encounter did not prompt alarm bells. Asked why not, Cash tells the BBC: “Because I didn’t think anything of the meeting, really.”
We ask Cash why his friend might have been asked to such a meeting. “Strange things happen in China… you know we would often brush shoulders with sort of quite senior members of the Chinese communist party,” he tells us.
Challenged about whether he had read the Wikipedia link at the time, Cash says he had “skimmed it”, adding that it described him as a judge and a provincial-level official. “I just thought it was a weird meeting with a guy who’d taken an interest,” he says.
Six months later, Berry said in text messages that “off the record” he had it “on pretty good authority” that China was considering dropping sanctions against Tom Tugendhat, one of the Conservative MPs in the China Research Group, where Cash worked.
Berry wrote that this would happen as long as the West “continued to show signals that they are willing to work together”.
The Chinese believed it would be “extremely embarrassing” if Tugendhat became prime minister or foreign secretary while under Chinese sanctions, Berry said.
At the time of the meeting in summer 2022, China-sceptic Tugendhat was seen as a possible contender to succeed Boris Johnson, or become UK foreign secretary.
He was actually appointed as security minister by Liz Truss, and Beijing lifted sanctions on him in January 2026.
Was Cash concerned that Berry appeared to be passing information to him about Chinese foreign policy?
Cash says he assumed Berry had heard this “through the grapevine at his company” which was doing business with the UK.
He says he never doubted his friend’s trustworthiness, to the extent he even named Berry as a reference on his application for a security pass for the Palace of Westminster.
The pass was granted and, a fortnight before their arrests in early 2023, Cash invited Berry to Parliament for lunch.
It was to be their final face-to-face conversation.
‘Complete shock’
Cash was in bed at quarter to six on a March morning when he was woken by car doors being shut, he says. Within seconds, four UK counter-terrorism officers had barged into his bedroom at his parents’ home in Edinburgh.
“They told me to sit up and not touch anything and then said I was under arrest for breaching the Official Secrets Act,” Cash says.
“I was in complete shock… quivering… My mum was hysterical.”
It remains unclear how, when and why British security services became interested in the exchanges between the two friends.
But they are likely to have found out far more about their relationship when Berry was stopped and questioned by counter-terror officers at Heathrow Airport.
His laptop and phone were taken – this may have enabled his Signal chats to be downloaded.
Berry later messaged Cash about it.
Cash says he had not been alarmed by this: “I thought it was just standard… for a guy who’d been in China.”
As the investigation progressed, it became clear the authorities believed Cash and Berry had been involved in an informal, but dangerous, exchange of information that was “prejudicial to the safety and interests of the UK”.
The allegations were based on 6,273 messages between the pair – the same ones Cash has now shared with the BBC. Cash’s solicitor has told the BBC they are genuine.
They cover a period when Cash had joined the China Research Group (CRG), founded by Tugendhat and fellow Tory MP Alicia Kearns, and when Berry was working for a Chinese company called Strong, where part of his work involved writing political and economic reports for clients.
According to court documents, Berry was said to have compiled 34 reports for a man linked to the Chinese state spy agency, relaying information passed on to him by Cash. Strong did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
The CRG’s office was across the Thames from Westminster, but Cash regularly had meetings in Parliament. Cash did not have government security clearance and there is no evidence he had access to classified documents.
Despite being thousands of miles apart, the two friends remained in close contact, often messaging daily.
The messages reviewed by the BBC show them discussing topics including sanctions on China, the tech company Huawei, human rights, Hong Kong, Taiwan and British foreign policy.
Cash says he used the Signal app for almost all his contacts with people in China – “more for their protection” – as he says discussing the government “could land someone… in trouble”. He and Berry did not use the app’s “disappearing messages” function.
Much of the information they discussed was publicly available, says Cash – who has given the BBC a detailed spreadsheet with links and references in an attempt to prove it.
But sometimes he did share with Berry his impressions from meetings and private discussions in Westminster. On 12 occasions in the messages, he labelled information “off the record” or “very off the record” before passing it on.
Cash says this was “just me excitedly sharing things that I was doing with him at work”.
One message recounted views allegedly expressed in private by Britain’s then-ambassador to China, Dame Caroline Wilson, during a discussion with the CRG about its work on China’s influence on UK universities.
Cash also messaged Berry sharing unverified rumours about the sex lives of two UK cabinet ministers. There is no evidence Berry passed this to his Chinese colleagues.
Cash says he regarded such exchanges as routine political discussion. “We weren’t working with classified information,” he says.
Acquitted and ‘traduced’
Cash was told by his solicitor the police investigation would blow over after six months and he would soon be able to return to normal life.
But in September 2023 – six months after the arrests – the case became public when the Sunday Times broke the story of an unnamed “spy” who had been arrested in Parliament.
Cash recalls travelling on a train while, around him, fellow passengers read the newspaper’s front page story: “Commons ‘Chinese spy’ arrested”. He says: “I wanted the world to eat me up.”
Within 24 hours he was named and pictured in the press, and both men were later charged with espionage.
In September the following year, just weeks before their trial was due to begin, Cash received an unexpected call from his solicitor.
“Are you sitting down?” he asked Cash. “They’ve dropped all the charges.”
His lawyers requested a court hearing for the prosecution to formally acknowledge that they would offer no evidence, but at the Old Bailey the newly-innocent Cash struggled to find anyone interested in his story.
At every previous court appearance he had been mobbed, but the press had not been informed about this hearing.
Eventually his team found a lone BBC journalist. “I said my piece outside the Old Bailey. And that was a real high point. I felt that I could start to move on with my life.”
It wouldn’t be that simple.
Across the city, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle was seething. “It is this Parliament that has been spied on,” he declared. “It is MPs’ offices that have been infiltrated.”
There would be days of political debate and a raucous prime minister’s questions where Tory leader Kemi Badenoch would claim: “This all stinks of a cover-up.”
“I’d been acquitted by law, but then I was traduced in Parliament,” Cash says. “It was almost like I was convicted in the court of public opinion again, by people who I had worked with and trusted and that felt horrible.”
Today Cash’s life is almost unrecognisable. He has lost his dream job, his relationship, and his closest friend from university.
“We talked about being each other’s best men,” Cash says. Instead, when the friend got married last year, Cash was not even invited.
He is also no longer in contact with Berry.
“I’ve been applying for basic admin jobs and having trouble recently,” Cash says.
“I’m angry and upset with how everything played out, and I do feel let down.”
But when asked, Cash stops short of saying he feels Berry betrayed him. Does he think his friend was spying for the Chinese government?
“He would have to have his time in court to defend himself,” Cash answers. “I think it’d be wrong of me to speculate and hypocritical given the speculation that I’ve been subject to. But we’re no longer friends.”
Berry declined to comment on this story, but at the time of his acquittal said his reports “concerned economic and commercial issues widely discussed in the UK at the time and drew on information freely in the public domain”.
Like his former friend, Chris Cash is innocent in the eyes of the law, but his reputation has undoubtedly been trashed.
Many in Parliament still think they were spies. And with more of the messages between these former friends now revealed, the debate over their actions could be reignited.
“It was a gruelling ordeal,” Cash says. “But I’m a fundamentally positive person… I’m positive about what the future holds.”
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