Ex-RAF top gun has made a killing training China's fighter pilots

Ex-RAF top gun (call sign Hooligan) has made a killing training China’s fighter pilots – and helped recruit dozens of British airmen paid £250,000 a year by Beijing… so why has the MoD only just woken up to this outrage?

• British fighter pilots are being paid £250k to share vital knowledge with China
• They aren’t breaking current law but came under fire from armed forces minister 
• Ex-RAF top gun Keith Hartley is Chief Operating Officer for a Beijing company

His arm resting nonchalantly on the side of the cockpit and with the Tornado’s roof completely removed, dashing Keith Hartley turns to face the camera.

He looks every inch the national hero, risking life and limb during this 1988 test flight, which was conducted when Tornados and their pilots were on the front line of the Cold War.

Only when you take a second glance at this remarkable photograph do you realise that Hartley isn’t just flying without any overhead canopy: he has also removed his oxygen supply. That’s no mean feat at speeds exceeding 500mph.

Three decades on, the famous picture of the RAF’s ‘cabriolet’ testing programme, which the pilot autographed for posterity, still incites a certain awe, capturing the swagger and derring-do of the Top Gun era. Back then, Keith Hartley was the very Best of British. Known by the call-sign ‘Hooligan,’ his swashbuckling work played a key role in defending our realm.

Today, things are different. For while the former RAF officer remains gainfully employed in the aviation industry, his recent endeavours engender scorn, rather than envy. To former comrades, he’s no longer a hero.

Why so? Earlier this week the British government released a ‘threat alert’ about former British fighter pilots who are signing up to help train the Chinese equivalent of the RAF.

Former RAF top gun Keith Hartley has been at the centre of Beijing’s recruitment drive of British pilots

In an unprecedented move, officials warned that as many as 30 UK Top Guns have taken huge fees to moonlight for Beijing, potentially threatening our national security in the process.

Not only could their highly paid work give the Communist state a strategic advantage in any future conflict — it could lead to the death of Western troops. There are even fears that these former military men are teaching their counterparts how to shoot down Western fighter jets.

Keith Hartley has been at the centre of Beijing’s recruitment drive in his role as Chief Operating Officer at a firm called the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA). He has operated there and in China where, according to a TFASA company profile he was responsible for ‘teaching, contracts and developing business’.

Based at Oudtshoorn, a dusty town in Western Cape better known for its ostrich farms, TFASA was named and shamed in this week’s intelligence briefing for recruiting British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand pilots to work for China.

They are being lured by Beijing with promises of eye-watering salaries, school fees, luxury apartments and unlimited airline tickets to and from the repressive country.

As TFASA’s Chief Operating Officer, Mr Hartley is understood to have played a highly significant role in the recruitment of Royal Air Force and Royal Navy pilots.

TFASA has headhunted former officers who played key roles in some of the UK’s most sensitive defence projects, including development of the £2.8 billion F-35B Lightning stealth jet and Britain’s £7.6 billion aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

These officers have then shared their experience with the Chinese.

Test Pilot Keith Hartley conducted the ‘cockpit habitability trial’ in his open top Tornado XZ630 in 1988

Fears that the company’s work could lead to British secrets being shared, unwittingly or otherwise, with one of our most significant strategic adversaries are entirely legitimate. As the Daily Mail can reveal, the issue has been in the in-tray of the intelligence services for three years.

The company has said it was formed in 2003 with the South African government’s political backing to ‘pursue friendship and cooperation with China’. Nothing, it seems, spells friendship with China like ‘military operational flight training . . . to Nato standards’.

Details of TFASA’s management structure suggest Mr Hartley has been responsible for the academy’s ‘Military Operational Flight Training’ for both fixed wing and rotary aircraft.

Meanwhile, a company profile from 2019 said: ‘Keith has carried out complete weapons system programmes from initial design to flight testing and introduction to service. Keith has been a senior member of TFASA staff since 2005 and has been engaged in long and short-course teaching of test pilots in a variety of civil and military programmes’.

TFASA has also met China’s requirement for Royal Navy Wildcat and Merlin helicopter pilots, specifically those with experience of aircraft carrier operations. These officers were approached as China prepared to launch its latest aircraft carrier, the 984ft-long Fujian.

China already has the world’s biggest navy, of at least 360 vessels, but is playing catch up with the United States on carriers. The U.S. Navy has 11 and China has three — a disparity Beijing realises could prevent it achieving its primary strategic objective: control of the Pacific. So its requirement for naval aviation expertise was acute.

Hartley, who has doubtless been handsomely paid for his work on this project, seems well aware of its dubious nature.

Keith Hartley has been at the centre of Beijing’s recruitment drive in his role as Chief Operating Officer at a firm called the Test Flying Academy of South Africa

When the Daily Mail visited TFASA’s compound this week we were told he was not available for interview. Spokesmen also refused to divulge numbers of Chinese and British pilots involved in training there and to answer other questions about their roles.

The academy’s president, Jean Rossouw, did agree to speak. He sought to defend the Western pilots who have taken the Chinese shilling: along with Russia, the most significant international threat to British interests.

‘The Ministry of Defence has known for years what we do. We know they know because they have been talking to some of the British pilots involved throughout. Why have they done nothing until now?’ claimed Mr Rossouw. ‘No secrets have been leaked, because no matter what training we do there are very strong rules around handing over information. There are clear red lines and the smallest infraction means instant dismissal.’

Does Mr Rossouw have a valid point? Before this week’s sudden ‘alert’ did UK defence intelligence officials underestimate the threat to national security posed by the firm’s activities? Or to put things a different way, have Hartley and the men he recruits been blissfully unaware the British government may take a dim view of their antics?

The evidence suggests not. For the Mail has learned that in 2019 a former RAF pilot, who was then working for British Aerospace, approached UK intelligence officials to ask if he could hold onto his security clearances — which granted him access to classified information — should he take up a training position with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Seemingly shocked that a former RAF pilot would even make such a request, they informed him, bluntly, his chances were nil and that they would ensure everyone in the UK government’s vetting department was aware of his activities.

Despite the warning, the former pilot decided the wages offered by Beijing — around £250,000 plus expenses, relocation allowances and other perks — justified the security downgrade whenever he returned to Britain. That year, five other pilots, all working in the civilian aerospace sector having left the RAF, reached the same conclusion. Their departure, and the mechanisms behind their recruitment, attracted the attention of staff at Thames House, the London home of MI5.

This year China has enlisted as many as 24 RAF and Royal Navy officers, again on promises of enormous wages and lengthy contracts

Although there were no ‘legal levers’ to curtail their activities, officials communicated their displeasure. Those who took the jobs decided to carry on regardless.

Then came the pandemic. As Covid spread and lockdowns were ordered, China’s headhunting of international pilots — and British ones in particular — effectively ceased. Recruitment resumed in earnest this year, only this time it was more brazen and the risk to national security was greater.

Indeed, using TFASA and other companies as intermediaries, China targeted serving RAF staff, regulars and reservists, those in uniform with direct access to the latest, closely guarded, defence initiatives.

This year China has enlisted as many as 24 RAF and Royal Navy officers, again on promises of enormous wages and lengthy contracts. These personnel, all expensively trained by the taxpayer, proceeded directly from serving the Queen to serving President Xi.

Without any legislation to freeze the pilots’ assets, UK intelligence and defence chiefs remained in a quandary as to how to block the brain-drain to Beijing. And while it was not entirely a British problem — as Commonwealth, French and even United States members of the armed forces were also being targeted — UK pilots and other personnel comprised the bulk of those relocating to Asia.

The Mail has been told that one important factor behind the trend has been the presence of Mr Hartley and other Britons in the TFASA hierarchy, as well as UK-based companies advertising online for test pilots to be based in China.

RAF pilots who help China are enticed with large salaries and offers to fly their fifth generation fighter jet the J-20

As all the members of Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing network comprising the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States — were affected by the scandal, a joint strategy was required to deal with it, with every state agreeing the same measures.

The Mail has learned the intelligence services have been providing a deterrent to headhunting by the People’s Liberation Army. Earlier this year, the security agency sensationally outed a Chinese agent working in the House of Commons. She was Christine Lee, a parliamentary researcher for the Labour MP Barry Gardiner.

The operation, which saw journalists receiving detailed briefings from spooks, successfully highlighted threats to UK security and disrupted Chinese intelligence-gathering. Effectively, it named and shamed the culprits.

It was this that led the intelligence services to conclude so-called ‘outing activity’ could be effective in preventing the People’s Liberation Army gaining any more Western expertise.

This week’s briefings to newspapers about the role of TFASA gained huge media traction and have already led to an increase in reporting from within the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy about approaches made to pilots by recruitment agencies representing China, the Daily Mail has learned.

It’s not all good news, though. While the strategy may have dealt a blow to the Chinese, it could endanger those Westerners currently training the PLA. So far, Chinese efforts to extract information from them seem to have come in the form of carrots rather than sticks: salaries, sports cars and the opportunity to fly their fast jets, including China’s fifth generation fighter jet the J-20.

In theory this could produce a possible intelligence kickback for the West, were those pilots to return home and brief intelligence officials.

What, however, would happen if China responded to this week’s controversy by adopting more coercive methods to gain Western intelligence?

Nobody benefits if Beijing copies the tactics of the regime in Iran and treats the pilots as political pawns. The Mail understands there are genuine concerns Beijing could start acting more like Iran, in an effort to make the British pilots the next Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who spent years in prison on fatuous accusations she was a spy.

UK officials indicated the Chinese had been unsuccessful in their attempts to lure anyone with expertise in Britain’s state-of-the-art F-35B Lightning jet (pictured)

Then there are fears about how many secrets may already have been betrayed.

Earlier this week, UK officials indicated the Chinese had been unsuccessful in their attempts to lure anyone with expertise in Britain’s state-of-the-art F-35B Lightning jet. But, sadly, this may not be the case.

The Mail found a former Royal Navy pilot, Stephen Crockatt, who knows more than most about the stealth fighter. From 2017 to 2019 he was ‘UK Team Lead’ on the F-35B Integrated Test Force.

On his LinkedIn profile he provides more details of the role, saying he ‘led the ITF developmental team to deliver the evidence required to support the UK F-35 operating capability and ensure support to U.S./UK interoperability goals’. He also boasts that he became TFASA’s ‘Deputy Chief Test Pilot Instructor’.

Mr Crockatt turns out to have recently worked in Beijing, in exchange for a large cheque.

‘Yes, I did go to China with TFASA, a lot of people did,’ he admitted. ‘But I cannot fly an F-35. I work in flight test training. I told the Chinese how to set up a flight test school, making sure people are there on time and the safety is in place. The MoD are fully aware. I did nothing tactical for TFASA — but they got involved with other things with the Chinese.’

Other pilots, speaking on condition of anonymity, have suggested the training of PLA pilots by British officers has been going on far longer, perhaps for as long as 20 years.

One said: ‘It would make your eyes water, it’s been happening for that long, clandestinely. At first I thought it was a two-way thing, with us getting as much information from the Chinese as we were passing to them. But I don’t think so any more. It is just about money and there is nothing in place to stop it.’

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