On May 17, journalist Kit Klarenberg was arriving at Luton Airport on a visit to his home country of the United Kingdom when a group of British counterterrorism officers detained him and interrogated him for five hours. With the threat of arrest hanging over him if he didn’t comply, the officers fingerprinted him and took his DNA while seizing all of his electronic devices and forcing him to unlock them. They returned the devices after a week but held on to one of his SD cards.

Klarenberg has written copious articles critical of the British government’s foreign and national security policies for a variety of left-wing outlets: Electronic Intifada, MintPress News, the Cradle. But the British officers were interested in one outlet in particular: the Grayzone. According to Klarenberg’s account of the detention for that outlet, the officers questioned him about his pay from the news website, his contact with its editor, Max Blumenthal, and any hypothetical links between the Grayzone and the Russian government.

Over the last year, Klarenberg has written several major stories highly embarrassing for the British government based on leaked documents. One series of stories showed the plans of British intellectual Paul Mason — who has, since Keir Starmer’s right-wing takeover of UK Labour, positioned himself as the leading nominally leftist supporter of the Labour head — to collaborate with the UK government and UK intelligence contractors as part of an “information war” campaign against the British left. Another revealed an April 2022 proposal to British intelligence to help Ukrainian forces destroy the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, which Ukraine successfully suicide-bombed last October. Still another exposed British involvement in training Ukrainian soldiers for other attacks on the disputed territory.