MoD ‘mole’ Bettina Jordan-Barber jailed over Sun leaks | UK news

A “mole” at the Ministry of Defence who made £100,000 from leaking stories to the Sun has been jailed for 12 months, it can now be reported after verdicts were delivered in a related trial.

Bettina Jordan-Barber, 42, an MoD strategist who briefed ministers, was sent to prison in January after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. The charges related to scoops she gave to the Sun about army failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, disciplinary proceedings and sexual misconduct among officers.

Her sentencing can only be reported now after a jury returned verdicts on Friday in the trial of the Sun chief reporter John Kay, 71, and two editors, all of whom were cleared of plotting with Jordan-Barber.

In what is regarded as a blow to the Crown Prosecution Service, but a victory for its critics, who said the case would have a chilling effect on media investigations, Kay was acquitted after the jury was persuaded that the leaks were justified because they were in the public interest.

The Sun’s deputy editor, Geoff Webster, 55, and Fergus Shanahan, 60, who were accused of approving the payments, were also acquitted.

In a two-month trial, the jury heard that Kay had arranged 35 payments to Jordan-Barber for assistance and tips linked to 69 stories between 2004 and 2012.

The judge presiding over Jordan-Barber’s trial, Mr Justice Saunders, described the offence as “particularly serious” because of the amount of money and because of the “importance and nature of the position that she held in the Ministry of Defence”.

For some of the period of the indictment she was briefing ministers, he noted.

Mitigating for Jordan-Barber, Patrick Gibbs QC said she had never tried to “cloak herself” in public-interest arguments. He told the court that the money she received was incidental and she never negotiated or asked for more, but the financial consequences of the case were “calamitous”.

“She did not go looking for Mr Kay,” Gibbs said. “She met him socially. She was not the procurer, she was the procured. She thought of him as a friend. She would not have got into these sorts of conversations with someone she would not have thought of as a friend.”

Saunders said he did not buy the argument of her barrister that she was flattered by the contact with Kay or that “all the running” was made by the Sun chief reporter.

“While that might have been some of the reason for her offending, I am not able to accept that money did not play a significant part,” he said, adding that the offence was particularly serious because of the amount of money she obtained from the paper.

Her imprisonment was an ignominious end to a 16-year career in the civil service, in which she had the highest level of security clearance for work on the ministerial floor in Whitehall.

Her illicit tie-up with the paper lay undetected by those who conducted the “developed vetting”, despite records of more than 900 calls between her and Kay. All £100,000 was paid in cash by News International and picked up by Jordan-Barber at branches of Thomas Cook.

“If we were in a John Le Carré novel she would be called a mole,” Saunders said.

During the trial, the prosecutor Michael Parroy QC said: “The overall effect was that in many cases people were quite seriously and professionally damaged as a result of the evidence being revealed to the press at a wholly inappropriate stage.”

Gibbs said the case and publicity surrounding linked trials had taken a toll on Jordan-Barber’s health and resulted in a “stew reheated with a poisonous effect”.

One senior army officer who unexpectedly found himself the subject of a Sun front page said he had no sympathy for Jordan-Barber or Kay.

“I’m staggered that the Sun newspaper ran a covert intelligence source, undetected, at the heart of the British defence establishment for eight years,” retired colonel Bob Seddon said.

The court heard that while Seddon’s privacy may have been infringed, the public interest in the story, which exposed life-threatening weaknesses in the army, trumped that.

It was never suggested in court that the stories affected national security, but the leaks could be seen as “extremely damaging to morale and to break down trust among those who serve together”, Saunders said.

“The shock expressed in the testimonials from friends of Mrs Jordan-Barber in the military at her behaviour gives some idea as to how it must have been viewed by those who didn’t know her,” he said.

Seddon told the Guardian he had never met or heard of her before he found himself splashed all over the front page on 24 May 2010 in a story headlined: “Army bomb chief: I quit … Fears over ‘Hurt Locker’ cutbacks.”

“As a result of this article I was, not quite persona non grata, but it was quite clear I was being treated with disdain and contempt,” he said.

Having served for 27 years, he had decided to resign from the army after the death of Major Dan Read, a bomb disposal officer under his command, five months before the story was published. He had originally agreed with his superiors that he would leave in April 2011.

“I had reached the stage where I had seen a lot of, a number of, young people I knew being killed. I had spoken with my superiors so that my decision was not going to be a surprise; succession planning was in place,” he told the Guardian.

It emerged during the trial that the original tip for the Sun story about Seddon’s resignation was from producer Steve Anderson but that it was likely Jordan-Barber, who was paid for the story, had confirmed it using inside information enabling the paper to put it on its front page.

Seddon said he was effectively frozen out after the Sun article and instead of leaving on a high after an exemplary career “the depth of mistrust was so great they felt the need to mount a pro-active campaign against me to limit the damage”.

“It was quite clear that I was no longer trusted by many in the army and I was now unable to contribute to the counter-IED fight in Afghanistan, this at a time when the Taliban use of IED was killing and wounding many British, American and Danish soldiers operating in Helmand province.

“Having spent my entire working lifetime acquiring the skills, knowledge and counter-IED expertise that the army desperately needed, this was a bitter blow.

“A number of senior officers thought I was the source of this story. The adjutant general stood by me, but the major general who I worked for from this time on treated me with disdain and contempt.”

Most damaging, he said, was a leader article claiming he had spoken to the paper. Trust, he said, was everything, in the defence sector.

“The real problem for me was [that] the work I was doing was extraordinarily sensitive. Working with a number of national and international agencies on the counter-IED fight, as as soon as your loyalty is called into question that’s it.”

Jordan-Barber and her husband, a serving army officer Nigel Jordan-Barber, now face financial ruin.

They may have to sell or remortgage their home in Bulkington, Wiltshire, after being ordered to repay the “proceeds of crime” which, calculated with interest, are £113,000.

Jordan-Barber pleaded guilty in March 2013 but her plea and sentencing in January were kept under wraps until the conclusion of the trials of her co-accused Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the Sun, and Kay, who had emailed his boss asking her to approve payments to his “number one military source”.

Brooks was cleared of the related charge, testifying she did not know the identity of Kay’s source.

He corroborated her account during the trial, explaining he did not disclose her identity to anyone.

Kay, an award-winning journalist with a 50-year career, 41 of those at the Sun, was described as a Fleet Street legend during the trial. He mentored staff at the paper and commanded respect from some of the country’s most senior army figures.

He said he did not know the payments could be interpreted as a crime and that Jordan-Barber wanted to expose the army’s failures, “warts and all”, which would have otherwise been “suppressed” by the MoD.

“My biggest fear for her was that somehow the MoD would find out that she had been paid by us, and that would be a breach of her contract of employment and that she would be dismissed,” Kay said in evidence.

He told how he first met Jordan-Barber in 2003. She had phoned the news desk to inquire as to whether the paper was publishing a story about an affair between a naval officer and an army officer.

The call was passed to Kay by the news desk as a “specialist in military affairs”. He thought she was an “interesting source” and arranged to meet her at a wine bar near the paper’s offices the next day.

He said he did not ask what she did at the MoD because he did not want to “spook her”.

He told her he was not interested in “tittle tattle” but important and serious stories.

Jurors heard that Kay became friends with Jordan-Barber over time and his mobile number was logged in her phone as “Godfather J”.

Kay said her position at the MoD did not concern him. “All that mattered was the information that she was giving stacked up, stood up, that was the be all and end all of it,” he told jurors.

In sentencing, Saunders said he regarded Jordan-Barber’s conduct “as a breach of a high degree of trust” placed in her by the MoD.