Navy commander steps down over claims of ‘unwanted' sexual behaviour
The commanding officer of a Royal Navy warship that tracks Russian submarines has stepped down after being accused of 'unacceptable sexual behaviour' with a subordinate.
Lt-Cdr Martyn Mayger, who commanded HMS Tyne, is under investigation following claims of 'unwanted' behaviour.
It comes just a week after Adml Sir Ben Key, the First Sea Lord, stepped down following allegations of a relationship with a female colleague under his command.
Lt-Cdr Mayger has stood down while the investigation takes place, The Times reported.
He assumed command of HMS Tyne in February.
Further details of the allegations, which are being investigated by the Defence Serious Crime Command, have not been disclosed.
The warship is responsible for patrolling the coasts of Britain and northern Europe, monitoring Russian task groups in the English Channel and protecting critical infrastructure such as undersea cables.
Last week it tracked a Russian submarine in the Channel as part of a Nato effort to monitor Moscow's activity in European waters.
It shadowed Kilo-class submarine Krasnodar as it made its surfaced journey back to Russia from the eastern Mediterranean.
HMS Tyne's executive officer has now been placed in temporary command.
Sir Ben remains under investigation in connection with separate allegations made against him.
The First Sea Lord, a married father-of-three, is alleged to have had a 'consensual' extramarital affair with a junior female colleague.
As a serving member of the military he is facing accusations that he has breached the Navy's 'service test', which prohibits relationships between commanders and their subordinates.
Sir Ben has been told to step back from all duties while the investigation is ongoing. Vice-Adml Sir Martin Connell, the Second Sea Lord, has taken temporary command in his place.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: 'We can confirm that a member of the Armed Forces is under investigation by the Defence Serious Crime Command in respect of these allegations.
'As the matter is subject to an ongoing investigation, it would be inappropriate to comment further.
'We have a zero-tolerance approach to criminal and inappropriate behaviour. Our people can be assured that should they raise any allegation, they will be fully supported, and the matter investigated, with appropriate action taken as required.'
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
37 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
With military strike his predecessors avoided, Trump takes a huge gamble
The prime target was the deeply buried enrichment center at Fordo, which Israel was incapable of reaching. Advertisement For Trump, the decision to attack the nuclear infrastructure of a hostile nation represents the biggest -- and potentially most dangerous -- gamble of his second term. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He is betting that the United States can repel whatever retaliation Iran's leadership orders against more than 40,000 U.S. troops spread over bases throughout the region. All are within range of Tehran's missile fleet, even after eight days of relentless attacks by Israel. And he is betting that he can deter a vastly debilitated Iran from using its familiar techniques -- terrorism, hostage-taking and cyberattacks -- as a more indirect line of attack to wreak revenge. Most importantly, he is betting that he has destroyed Iran's chances of ever reconstituting its nuclear program. That is an ambitious goal: Iran has made clear that, if attacked, it would exit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and take its vast program underground. That is why Trump focused so much attention on destroying Fordo, the facility Iran built in secret that was publicly exposed by President Barack Obama in 2009. That is where Iran was producing almost all of the near-bomb-grade fuel that most alarmed the United States and its allies. Advertisement Trump's aides were telling those allies Saturday night that Washington's sole mission was to destroy the nuclear program. They described the complex strike as a limited, contained operation akin to the special operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. 'They explicitly said this was not a declaration of war,' one senior European diplomat said late Saturday, describing his conversation with a high-ranking administration official. But, the diplomat added, bin Laden had killed 3,000 Americans. Iran had yet to build a bomb. In short, the administration is arguing that it was engaged in an act of preemption, seeking to terminate a threat, not the Iranian regime. But it is far from clear that the Iranians will perceive it that way. In a brief address from the White House on Saturday night, flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump threatened Iran with more destruction if it does not bend to his demands. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' he said. 'If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' 'There will be either peace,' he added, 'or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left.' He promised that if Iran did not relent, he would go after them 'with precision, speed and skill.' Advertisement In essence, Trump was threatening to broaden his military partnership with Israel, which has spent the last eight days systematically targeting Iran's top military and nuclear leadership, killing them in their beds, their laboratories and their bunkers. The United States initially separated itself from that operation. In the Trump administration's first public statement about those strikes, Rubio emphasized that Israel took 'unilateral action against Iran,' adding that the United States was 'not involved.' But then, a few days ago, Trump mused on his social media platform about the ability of the United States to kill Iran's 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, anytime he wanted. And Saturday night, he made clear that the United States was all in, and that contrary to Rubio's statement, the country was now deeply involved. Now, having set back Iran's enrichment capability, Trump is clearly hoping that he can seize on a remarkable moment of weakness -- the weakness that allowed the American B-2 bombers to fly in and out of Iranian territory with little resistance. After Israel's fierce retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks that killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians, Iran is suddenly bereft of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria's Bashar Assad, had to flee the country. And Russia and China, which formed a partnership of convenience with Iran, were nowhere to be seen after Israel attacked the country. That left only the nuclear program as Iran's ultimate defense. It was always more than just a scientific project -- it was the symbol of Iranian resistance to the West, and the core of the leadership's plan to hold on to power. Advertisement Along with the repression of dissent, the program had become the ultimate means of defense for the inheritors of the Iranian revolution that began in 1979. If the taking of 52 American hostages was Iran's way of standing up to a far larger, far more powerful adversary in 1979, the nuclear program has been the symbol of resistance for the last two decades. One day historians may well draw a line from those images of blindfolded Americans, who were held for 444 days, to the dropping of GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs on the mountainous redoubt called Fordo. They will likely ask whether the United States, its allies or the Iranians themselves could have played this differently. And they will almost certainly ask whether Trump's gamble paid off. His critics in Congress were already questioning his approach. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Trump had acted 'without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community' that Iran had made no decision to take the final steps to a bomb. If Iran finds itself unable to respond effectively, if the ayatollah's hold on power is now loosened, or if the country gives up its long-running nuclear ambitions, Trump will doubtless claim that only he was willing to use America's military reach to achieve a goal his last four predecessors deemed too risky. But there is another possibility. Iran could slowly recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground and the country could follow the pathway lit by North Korea, with a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons by some intelligence estimates, an arsenal that likely makes it too powerful to attack. Advertisement That, Iran may conclude, is the only pathway to keep larger, hostile powers at bay, and to prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out an operation like the one that lit up the Iranian skies Sunday morning. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
The real scandal isn't Signalgate — it's our easily compromised mobile network
'Signalgate' — the disclosure that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive war plans over the app Signal from a personal device — was one of the early defining storylines of the Trump administration. There was no shortage of (largely justified) outrage at the passing of high-stakes information over commercial cellular channels. But the reality is that people, including government officials, have adopted cell phones as their primary means of communication for everything today, from grocery lists to ground invasions. In Ukraine, in spite of the risks, both sides of the conflict have heavily used commercial cellular networks throughout the war, because nothing beats them in terms of availability and efficiency. In early June, Ukraine scored its biggest win in months by launching drone attacks at Russian airfields, and in the process it laid bare the asymmetric vulnerabilities that cellular networks present to a major military power like the United States. Ukrainian handlers operated the drones from thousands of miles away by connecting over Russian commercial cell networks. Because Russia cannot simply turn off its commercial cellular networks, given the enormous social and economic consequences, it was left scrambling for ways to mitigate the threat. There is a lesson in this for us. We cannot turn back time to a world where strategic, essential communication only happens in a sensitive, compartmentalized information facility, or over private, dedicated networks. Rather than doubling down on outdated protocols, we need to fix the broken network on which the world runs — commercial cellular. Every time your phone connects to a tower, it leaves behind metadata that adversaries can potentially exploit. Your movements can be tracked, your contacts mapped, your calls and texts intercepted using flaws in decades-old signaling protocols. Hackers can take over your number with SIM swaps and hijack sensitive accounts (like Signal). Our adversaries understand this, and they have been exploiting the weaknesses in our commercial networks as a result. Volt Typhoon, a China-backed hacking operation, was designed to burrow into U.S. telecom infrastructure to cripple it during a future crisis. Salt Typhoon, a sweeping Chinese espionage campaign, breached at least nine U.S. telecoms and monitored the communications of both the Trump and Harris campaigns. The FBI told Americans to stop using SMS messages. Congressmen called it the worst telecom hack in history. Yet, we're still carrying on like nothing happened. The core of the problem is that our telecom infrastructure is old, stagnant and too comfortable with monopoly rents. The U.S. once led the world in 2G, 3G and 4G cellular networks. Now, Huawei leads the world in 5G and is already laying tracks for 6G, thanks to enormous support and billions in subsidization by the Chinese government. Modernizing U.S. telecom is no small task — the industry has invested roughly $2 trillion in communications infrastructure since 1996. We can't rip and replace the plumbing of the digital world overnight, but we can innovate on top of it. The rise of cloud computing has allowed rapid innovation by software-first upstarts disrupting traditional sectors, from travel to taxis to taxes. Software-defined cellular networks, which my company utilizes, now make it possible for nimble newcomers to innovate on top of towers and fiber, using modern security protocols and scalable infrastructure. But only if they're allowed to. The federal government should support privacy-first, software-based mobile infrastructure in the same way it once supported privacy-first internet infrastructure. And as it does so often in these ambitious projects, the Department of Defense should lead the way. The Tor browser began as a Navy research project. It's now a global tool for journalists and dissidents. Today's equivalent is investing in modern telecom — starting with efforts like the Department of Defense's 5G initiative, which should look beyond private network-based prototypes and address making the public, commercial cellular that we all use more secure, resilient and dynamic. Another example is the Navy's Spiral 4 program office, responsible for procuring cellular communications for the force, and is perfectly positioned to hold the industry more accountable for innovation and improvements over the status quo. 'Signalgate' and Ukraine's Spiderweb operation are wake-up calls. Mobile phones and the cellular network are the way everyone communicates now, and it's unrealistic to expect people, even those doing high-consequence work, to abandon the efficiencies of mobile communication. Fixing this requires more than an app. We need to lead innovation on private and secure cellular infrastructure as a strategic imperative. John Doyle is CEO and co-founder of the privacy-first mobile carrier Cape.
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
With military strike his predecessors avoided, Trump takes a huge gamble
(News Analysis) Over the past two decades, the United States has used sanctions, sabotage, cyberattacks and diplomatic negotiations to try to slow Iran's long march to a nuclear weapon. At roughly 2:30 a.m. Sunday in Iran, President Donald Trump unleashed a show of raw military might that each of his last four predecessors had deliberately avoided, for fear of plunging the United States into war in the Middle East. After days of declaring that he could not take the risk that the mullahs and generals of Tehran who had survived Israel's strikes would make a final leap to a nuclear weapon, he ordered a fleet of B-2 bombers halfway around the world to drop the most powerful conventional bombs on the most critical sites in Iran's vast nuclear complexes. The prime target was the deeply buried enrichment center at Fordo, which Israel was incapable of reaching. For Trump, the decision to attack the nuclear infrastructure of a hostile nation represents the biggest -- and potentially most dangerous -- gamble of his second term. He is betting that the United States can repel whatever retaliation Iran's leadership orders against more than 40,000 U.S. troops spread over bases throughout the region. All are within range of Tehran's missile fleet, even after eight days of relentless attacks by Israel. And he is betting that he can deter a vastly debilitated Iran from using its familiar techniques -- terrorism, hostage-taking and cyberattacks -- as a more indirect line of attack to wreak revenge. Most importantly, he is betting that he has destroyed Iran's chances of ever reconstituting its nuclear program. That is an ambitious goal: Iran has made clear that, if attacked, it would exit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and take its vast program underground. That is why Trump focused so much attention on destroying Fordo, the facility Iran built in secret in the mid-2000s that was publicly exposed by President Barack Obama in 2009. That is where Iran was producing almost all of the near-bomb-grade fuel that most alarmed the United States and its allies. Trump's aides were telling those allies Saturday night that Washington's sole mission was to destroy the nuclear program. They described the complex strike as a limited, contained operation akin to the special operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. 'They explicitly said this was not a declaration of war,' one senior European diplomat said late Saturday, describing his conversation with a high-ranking administration official. But, the diplomat added, bin Laden had killed 3,000 Americans. Iran had yet to build a bomb. In short, the administration is arguing that it was engaged in an act of preemption, seeking to terminate a threat, not the Iranian regime. But it is far from clear that the Iranians will perceive it that way. In a brief address from the White House on Saturday night, flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump threatened Iran with more destruction if it does not bend to his demands. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' he said. 'If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' 'There will be either peace,' he added, 'or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left.' He promised that if Iran did not relent, he would go after them 'with precision, speed and skill.' In essence, Trump was threatening to broaden his military partnership with Israel, which has spent the last eight days systematically targeting Iran's top military and nuclear leadership, killing them in their beds, their laboratories and their bunkers. The United States initially separated itself from that operation. In the Trump administration's first public statement about those strikes, Rubio emphasized that Israel took 'unilateral action against Iran,' adding that the United States was 'not involved.' But then, a few days ago, Trump mused on his social media platform about the ability of the United States to kill Iran's 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, anytime he wanted. And Saturday night, he made clear that the United States was all in, and that contrary to Rubio's statement, the country was now deeply involved. Now, having set back Iran's enrichment capability, Trump is clearly hoping that he can seize on a remarkable moment of weakness -- the weakness that allowed the American B-2 bombers to fly in and out of Iranian territory with little resistance. After Israel's fierce retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks that killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians, Iran is suddenly bereft of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria's Bashar Assad, had to flee the country. And Russia and China, which formed a partnership of convenience with Iran, were nowhere to be seen after Israel attacked the country. That left only the nuclear program as Iran's ultimate defense. It was always more than just a scientific project -- it was the symbol of Iranian resistance to the West, and the core of the leadership's plan to hold on to power. Along with the repression of dissent, the program had become the ultimate means of defense for the inheritors of the Iranian revolution that began in 1979. If the taking of 52 American hostages was Iran's way of standing up to a far larger, far more powerful adversary in 1979, the nuclear program has been the symbol of resistance for the last two decades. One day historians may well draw a line from those images of blindfolded Americans, who were held for 444 days, to the dropping of GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs on the mountainous redoubt called Fordo. They will likely ask whether the United States, its allies or the Iranians themselves could have played this differently. And they will almost certainly ask whether Trump's gamble paid off. His critics in Congress were already questioning his approach. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Trump had acted 'without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community' that Iran had made no decision to take the final steps to a bomb. If Iran finds itself unable to respond effectively, if the ayatollah's hold on power is now loosened, or if the country gives up its long-running nuclear ambitions, Trump will doubtless claim that only he was willing to use America's military reach to achieve a goal his last four predecessors deemed too risky. But there is another possibility. Iran could slowly recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground and the country could follow the pathway lit by North Korea, with a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons by some intelligence estimates, an arsenal that likely makes it too powerful to attack. That, Iran may conclude, is the only pathway to keep larger, hostile powers at bay, and to prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out an operation like the one that lit up the Iranian skies Sunday morning. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
