A serving member of the Royal Navy has been charged with spying for a foreign power that the British government has, so far, declined to name. Teddy Young, 24, faces two offences under the National Security Act — allegedly obtaining protected information and preparing to transfer it for the benefit of that unnamed power — following an investigation by counterterrorism police, Al Jazeera reported.
According to the BBC, Young, from Bedfordshire, was arrested at his home on Tuesday, remanded into custody and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday. The alleged conduct ran from November 2024 to May 2025, per the CBC’s account of the charges: one count covering the obtaining, copying, recording or retaining of protected information for the benefit of a foreign power, the other covering preparations to disclose it. Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, called them “very serious charges against a serving member of the armed forces.”
The conspicuous detail in the charge sheet is the missing name. “An unnamed foreign power” is a very particular formulation. It does not mean the authorities don’t know — you cannot charge someone with helping a state you haven’t identified. It means they know and are choosing not to say, whether to protect the investigation, to spare a diplomatic relationship, or because naming the country would itself be the foreign-policy incident. The reader is invited to guess, and the police are presumably guessing the reader will guess.
Police also volunteered what this case is not. It is not, they stressed, connected to the ongoing investigations around RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire airbase where, according to Counter Terrorism Policing, five UK nationals were arrested on September 27 after reports of suspicious vehicles heading toward the base, followed days later by the arrest of a 25-year-old dual UK-Iranian man, with a further arrest in that investigation as recently as Tuesday. When the authorities pre-emptively announce which case your case isn’t part of, they are quietly telling you which theory has been going around the briefing rooms.
Young has been charged, not convicted, and the evidence against him is not public. What is public is the outline: a junior service member, some quantity of protected information, and a customer in another capital whose name is, for now, classified. The foreign power presumably knows who it is.