So a couple of weeks ago, something quite extraordinary happened in London, and that was that the United States sent a group of half a dozen senior administration officials.

And I have to call them that because I met some of them, and I'm not allowed to say exactly who I met.

That's Dan Sabah. He's the defense and security editor for the British newspaper The Guardian.

And they came to London for a series of meetings, firstly with ministers and then extraordinarily

almost minutes later with a group of journalists, including myself.

The group of Americans was there to lobby the British government and then the press to

ban the Chinese telecom company Huawei from being part of Britain's new

5G network infrastructure. So the American sent over this, you know, last-minute delegation,

and they had all these sort of lurid warnings, one of which was, it was nothing short of

madness to allow Huawei into British 5G networks.

Madness, because the US, contends that Huawei is too close to the Chinese government.

Indeed, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to limit Huawei within the US.

Now, that might be a bit easier in the States, but the problem in Britain is that we've been big users of Huawei since 2003.

Companies are leading supplier in 3G, 4G networks.

And Britain was heading towards allowing Huawei into the future 5G as well.

Britain spy agencies have long been of the view that whatever the risks there are in Huawei, you know, the theoretical risk that the Chinese could engage in backdoor surveillance or get hold of

sensitive British data as some way, shape, or form through 5G.

Whatever the risks are, the British intelligence agencies have long believed that they

can be contained.

And so the Americans came up with some new technical information that delegation

claimed to have some new technical information. And a day later, the Brits said, we've seen that.

We worked that out already, guys. We'd already anticipated a kind of threat that the US material

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