By Kit KLARENBERG

Since its launch in July 2014, the self-styled open-source investigations website Bellingcat has cemented itself as a darling of mainstream Western media, with its dives into alleged Syrian government chemical weapon attacks and Russian intelligence operations showered with praise, puff pieces, and glitzy awards.

While vehemently insisting that it is independent of government influence, Bellingcat is funded by both the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy and the European Union. CIA officials have declared their “love” for Bellingcat, and there are unambiguous signs that the outlet has partnered closely with London and Washington to further the pair’s imperial objectives.

Now that the media consortium has obtained access to high-tech satellites capable of capturing 50cm resolution imagery of any place on Earth, it is time to place these connections under the microscope.

To explore the relationship between Bellingcat and centers of imperial power, look no further than its officially published financial accounts from 2019 to 2020. According to these records, Bellingcat has accepted enormous sums from Western intelligence contractors.

These war-profiteering firms have in turn provided direct support to Al Qaeda-allied jihadist groups in Syria – the same elements that have provided Bellingcat with “evidence” to convict Damascus in absentia on all manner of dubious charges.

From Bellingcat’s public financial accounts

Bellingcat’s cast of Western intelligence-connected funders is just the latest indication that its founder Eliot Higgins receives privileged, slanted information from extremist sources within Syria, and that his organization’s media operations have been conducted in concert with these elements.

Higgins’ recent history of promoting ISIS’ top Twitter propagandist raises further serious questions about Bellingcat’s reliance on Salafi-jihadist elements in Syria.

Funding from shady US and UK firms

Journalist and academic Alan MacLeod has exposed in detail Bellingcat’s deep and cohering ties to the Western national security state. The supposedly open-source operation has employed a staggering number of former military and intelligence operatives, deploying them to reinforce imperial narratives while reaping sponsorship from an array of governments and quasi-governmental bodies.

Nonetheless, mainstream reporters have continued to peddle the fiction that Bellingcat is “independent,” and not in receipt of funding from any state. The Times of London, for example, has falsely asserted the organization “wisely refuses money from governments.”

For its part, Bellingcat’s website states it doesn’t “solicit or accept funding directly [emphasis added] from any national government,” but “can solicit or accept contributions from international or intergovernmental institutions” and “funding that is distributed by a private foundation that accepts government funds.”

Given this duplicitous sleight of hand, Bellingcat’s most recent accounts make for fascinating reading.

The records indicate that Higgins and company raked in €100,000 from Zandstorm BV, a Dutch shell company established by Joseph Peeraer, the energy mogul who chairs Bellingcat’s supervisory board. Ironically, Peeraer’s Twitter biography describes him as “founder of a few failed ventures.”

Further, Bellingcat has received financial backing from several organizations heavily bankrolled by Western governments, and which serve as effective fronts for them, supporting Higgins’ activities on their financiers’ behalf.

In 2019 to 2020, Bellingcat received just over €5,000 from Washington-based contractor Chemonics. As The Grayzone has documented, this company conducts US government-funded intelligence and destabilization operations the world over.

In 1993, Chemonics’ founder openly admitted that he created the firm to “have [his] own CIA.” The contractor was the conduit through which US funds and equipment reached bogus humanitarian group Syria Civil Defense, providing it with the now famous – or infamous – white helmets that earned them their nickname, along with much more expensive communications and video gear.

More substantially, Bellingcat was allocated €160,000 by Zinc Network, a shadowy intelligence cutout that conducts information warfare operations on behalf of numerous UK government ministries, the US State Department, and USAID, a US intelligence front. It appears this cash injection was related to the Open Information Partnership, a Foreign Office-financed “troll factory” led by Zinc and dedicated to “weakening the Russian state’s influence” in Central and Eastern Europe.

As The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal has revealed, Bellingcat was dispatched under the Open Information Partnership’s auspices to North Macedonia, at the UK Foreign Office’s express request, to “respond” to the country’s 2019 elections, which pitted a pro-NATO, pro-EU candidate against a pro-Russian one.

A local media organization was provided “cyber security training, mentoring on digital forensics, open-source investigation and media ethics” by Bellingcat, and the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which Eliot Higgins helped create. The pro-NATO candidate comfortably prevailed in the second round, after the first produced a virtual tie, suggesting this state-directed meddling may have influenced the result.

Bellingcat also received just over $65,000 from Adam Smith International (ASI), which has reaped hundreds of millions from the UK government for conducting all manner of skulduggery overseas. It remains unclear what sort of activities were covered by this sum.

Bellingcat did not respond to a request for comment from this reporter. ASI, meanwhile, initially responded to a request for details on the payment to Bellingcat through its head of legal, ethics, and compliance, Nimisha Agarwal, who promised to “follow up internally” on the issue. Agarwal ultimately dropped off the radar, however, never following up or providing further information.

Given ASI’s sordid history, and direct connection to the proliferation of jihadism in Syria over the course of the country’s grisly, decade-long crisis, its financial relationship with Bellingcat further undercuts the media organization’s already risible claim to independence.

BBC documentary exposes massive ASI scandal in Syria

Adam Smith International brands itself as “a global advisory company that works locally to transform lives by making economies stronger, societies more stable, and governments more effective.”

In reality, ASI’s activities abroad have frequently placed it in extremely close collaboration with some of the most brutal human rights abusers on the planet, directly and indirectly resulting in death and destabilization on a massive scale.

ASI also has a deplorable track record of corruption and grift. In February 2017, the UK’s Department for International Development froze all future contracts with the company, after it was found to have committed numerous grave ethics breaches. For one, the firm hired a former department staffer who passed on sensitive internal government documents, which it then used to gain a competitive edge in contract bids.

ASI then sought to mislead a parliamentary inquiry investigating allegations it was engaged in “excessive profiteering,” by concocting bogus glowing testimonials from beneficiaries. A House of Commons international development committee report condemned the contractor’s “deplorable” and “entirely inappropriate” actions.

In response, four founding directors resigned without severance packages, and the contractor pledged to undertake internal reforms. Meanwhile, ASI continued to manage a large portfolio of projects for the Foreign Office. This included the NATO member state-backed Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) program, which funded, trained, and equipped the Free Syria Police (FSP), an unarmed civilian force set up in opposition-controlled areas of Syria such as Aleppo, Daraa, and Idlib.

ASI’s US partner on the project was the CIA cutout Creative Associates, which has reaped billions from overseas meddling in the interests of Washington. As The Grayzone’s Ben Norton has documented, Creative Associates has been one of USAID’s go-to contractors for organizing a renewed attempt to orchestrate insurrection against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The firm has also played a direct role in US intelligence efforts to foment destabilization in Cuba.

The Free Syrian Police project initially received fawning coverage in the Western media. A BBC article presented the group as a heroic band of volunteers committed to nonviolence, resolving local disputes through peaceful means, and working “closely” with the White Helmets in the aftermath of air raids to fight fires, rescue people from rubble, and provide them with medical assistance.

The British state broadcaster was nonetheless forced to acknowledge that the FSP’s ability to bring armed actors to justice was “limited.” The UK-backed police force was similarly unable to interfere in disputes involving extremist elements, although the media repeatedly emphasized that the force did not collaborate with jihadist groups.

In December 2017, the BBC’s own Panorama documentary, Jihadis You Pay For, blew that farcical notion out of the water. Relying on ASI whistleblowers as sources, it exposed how ASI had identified links between several FSP stations and Sharia courts run by Al-Nusra that carried out summary executions of citizens who violated its medieval legal codes. The intelligence contractor not only failed to cease funding these extremist elements; it allowed the Free Syrian Police to maintain the relationship.

In one instance, FSP officers in receipt of UK FCO funds delivered by ASI were present when women were stoned to death for violating Al-Nusra’s theocratic codes. They even closed the road to allow the brutal executions to take place. Al-Nusra was further reported to have handpicked FSP recruits at two stations in Idlib.

Internal ASI files featured in the documentary showed that officers in Aleppo had forked over cash to Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed militia linked to hideous atrocities, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016. One document from July of that year warned that 20% of all police salaries were being handed over “to pay for the military and security support that Zinki provides to the five FSP stations located areas under its control,” with FSP operatives moreover working with a Zinki court, “writing up warrants, delivering notices, and turning criminals over.”

UK funding for the project was eventually suspended, yet it resumed less than a month later following a confidential internal government review which concluded there was a “mitigating context” to all Panorama’s disturbing revelations, and the program “did not provide any information that was not already known to [the justice and security scheme known as] AJACS.”

Aid experts were outraged by the resumption of the program. The BBC’s Panorama, meanwhile, claimed it was never contacted about the probe, and no source material it uncovered was inspected by officials.

ASI tolerated human rights abuses, Al Qaeda militants in Syria program

Leaked UK Foreign Office files related to the effort made it abundantly clear that the Access to Justice and Community Security program was well-aware such hazards were likely.

One document forecasted a “medium” risk of equipment and money being lost to armed actors, noting jihadist groups have done just that in the past, and the practice was “likely to reoccur.”

The Free Syrian Police collaborating with extremists or committing human rights abuses was considered a medium risk. Meanwhile, the likelihood of jihadist activity producing a “reduced operating space” for AJACS was considered “high,” as the project was “known to attract the attention of extremist groups,” including Al-Nusra and ISIS affiliates, which could “inhibit our work, challenge our agenda, and threaten our staff and partners via kidnap, assault and theft of equipment.”

Proposed methods of dealing with these dangers typically amounted to simply tolerating them. Adam Smith International justified the central role of jihadist groups in its policing project on the grounds that they “don’t have the means or levers” to prevent their participation, and that such an effort would not have been “cost-effective.”

The project could only be “terminated,” according to ASI, if it was not possible to displace responsibility for any dangers or abuses to “a party that does have the means to treat it.” That appears to have been a reference to the Foreign Office, which was ultimately responsible for deciding whether a risk should be tolerated or terminated.

Moreover, ASI outright pledged to, “where feasible,” “present a challenge” to extremist groups for “control of a community,” and “not give ground” to these elements “unless forced to,” advocating the acceptance of a higher level of risk in order to “contest the influence and legitimacy” of armed actors. As such, the UK Foreign Office needed to accept “the potential for equipment losses to a reasonable degree.”

Clearly, loss of weapons, money and life was hardwired into the DNA of AJACS. And given the many millions invested by the British government into the project, the official appetite for accepting these calamities was as high as possible. Indeed, London was willing to pump public funds into the dangerous project because it formed just one strand of a wider attempt to create a series of “moderate,” Western-controlled quasi-states across Syria.

This objective is referenced in another leaked file in which ASI promised to “step up” the coordination of AJACS with other “stabilization and transition” programs in Syria. This included Tamkeen – a UK and EU financed project to “build the governance capacities of local communities” – and White Helmets parent company Mayday Rescue. If successful,  ASI noted, the effort could lead to “expansion into newly liberated territory.”

This investment also ensured a steady stream of mawkish human-interest stories and atrocity propaganda, produced by and featuring the Free Syria Police, White Helmets, and other Western-created and funded opposition actors on the ground for the mainstream media to lap up.

Bellingcat has long-been a prominent purveyor and legitimizer of these groups. There are moreover clear indications Bellingcat founder Higgins is party to privileged information from local sources, and his organization’s media operations are conducted in concert with them.

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the notorious April 2018 Douma “gas attack” incident, which Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblowers suggest was staged, Higgins tweeted an exclusive photo of one of the cylinders purportedly used in the strike.

Higgins’ post was abruptly deleted though, perhaps because the White Helmets subsequently also shared a photo of the same site, in which the same cylinder was in a different position – proof positive that the scene had been manipulated by those staging it.

#Douma #DoumaMassacre #DoumaProvocation
The tweet deleted by Eliot Higgins proves some serious manipulation of the chlorine cylinder. Probably this is the reason why he deleted it. Compare the deleted version to the later White Helmet version. pic.twitter.com/4JcyzIlFtm

— Michael Kobs (@MichaKobs) April 13, 2018

ASI bids for shady UK contract to train Syrian extremists

One component of Whitehall’s effort to destabilize Syria was the training of opposition groups and fighters. In 2016, the Foreign Office issued a tender for a program dubbed MAO B-FOR (Moderate Armed Opposition Border Force), to provide “training, equipment, and other forms of support” to the Free Syrian Army’s Southern Front coalition, in order to “foster a negotiated political transition” and “support moderate structures and groups in opposition held areas of Syria.” Up to 600 fighters were to be trained every year for three years, at a cost of almost $21 million.

The UK would provide the successful bidder with “dedicated training site” in Jordan “at no cost” to providers. The 600-acre site, situated 45 minutes from Amman, comprised “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving track, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage solutions.” Militants were to be trained in the effective use of AK-47s, machine guns, and pistols, with 175 able to be accommodated on-site at a time.

In response, the Bellingcat sponsor ASI submitted a pitch to the Foreign Office, pledging to lead a consortium of contractors, composed of GlenGulf, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR, nicknamed “Kill, Burn & Loot”), Oakas, and Pilgrims Group.

As with AJACS, ASI privately forecast that it would be highly probable that Al-Nusra and ISIS would interfere in the program. “[D]ue to perceptions of an ‘international political agenda’,” ASI wrote, extremists “may seek to prevent trainees from joining or inhibit them from fulfilling their functions once trained via kidnap, assault and theft of equipment.”

It was considered of medium probability that fighters trained under the program would join other groups and/or collaborate with extremist actors, and end up committing human rights abuses.

ASI’s solution was simple: it would “transfer” responsibility for “owning and managing” problems that arose to the Foreign Office, and the loss of equipment was to be “tolerated” to “a reasonable degree.” Strikingly, ASI stated that its “experience and knowledge” of running AJACS would be “leveraged” to ensure optimal delivery of B-FOR.

In an emailed statement to this journalist, ASI alleged that the company didn’t implement B-FOR, and “had no involvement in it at any stage beyond the formal submission of a bid.” ASI added a veiled, empty threat of legal action if the company or its staff were associated publicly with the project, in order to maintain its “good public record and professional reputation.”

This warning confirms the documents’ authenticity, while seemingly breaching the company’s non-disclosure agreement with the Foreign Office, compelling ASI to adhere to the draconian confidentiality requirements of the Official Secrets Act.

If ASI’s bid was not accepted, another contractor’s almost certainly was. A UK- and US-managed training site in Jordan is confirmed to have operated from the early days of the Syrian crisis. It remains unknown how many fighters were trained there over the years, how many went on to join jihadist groups, and how much equipment was “lost” and used to slaughter innocent civilians. The Foreign Office almost certainly has no idea either.

ASI has continued to conduct cloak-and-dagger work for Whitehall abroad ever since. In February 2018, the company was permitted to start applying again for Whitehall contracts. Its most recent accounts, for 2019, indicate turnover stood at £54.5 million. Over the first half of 2020, its Foreign Office receipts alone totaled £6 million.

Were the funds it provided to Bellingcat drawn from this sum?

‘Substantiated complaints’ about Bellingcat activities

An ever-growing number of rights groups and international bodies have “partnered” with Bellingcat. The organization’s website brags that its open-source investigations have informed the activities of the International Criminal Court’s Technology Advisory Board, as well as the UN’s newly-created International Independent and Impartial Mechanism on Syria.

Bellingcat has also listed the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as a “partner,” before abruptly removing the disclosure. Higgins implausibly claimed this entry was just a mistake resulting from a careless copy and paste.

While the National Endowment for Democracy, a US intelligence cut-out, has contributed extensively to Bellingcat, the extent to which the Foreign Office has partnered with the media organization cannot be ascertained.

A Freedom of Information request submitted to the department in January 2019 asked for all internal documents related to research on the Syrian crisis mentioning the organization, particularly those relating to the use of chemical weapons in the country, and “any documents that refer to the reliability of Bellingcat as a source when drafting research assessments.”

In response, the Foreign Office stated it could “neither confirm nor deny it holds information relevant to [the] request,” on the grounds of “safeguarding national security.”

Still, a leaked Foreign Office-commissioned appraisal of Bellingcat spells out in damning terms the department’s view of the organization’s “reliability.” Bellingcat was found to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Given Bellingcat’s intimate relationship with such devious players in the dirty war on Syria, it can only be considered extremely concerning that it boasts similarly intimate ties with the same official bodies charged with investigating alleged government crimes committed therein.

There are however indications that the wheels are coming off the Bellingcat bus. On August 9, the European Press Prize announced that it was retracting the laureate status bestowed on now-former Bellingcat staffer Daniel Romein for his work geolocating images related to child abuse in Eastern Europe, due to numerous “substantiated complaints.”

Perhaps the day will come too when Eliot Higgins and company outlive their usefulness to Western intelligence agencies.

thegrayzone.com

By Alan MACLEOD

In a previous investigation, MintPress News explored how one university department, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, functions as a school for spooks. Its teaching posts are filled with current or former NATO officials, army officers and intelligence operatives to churn out the next generation of spies and intelligence officers. However, we can now reveal an even more troubling product the department produces: journalists. An inordinate number of the world’s most influential reporters, producers and presenters, representing many of the most well-known and respected outlets — including The New York Times, CNN and the BBC — learned their craft in the classrooms of this London department, raising serious questions about the links between the fourth estate and the national security state.

National security school

Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background. A 2009 study published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that, “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”

The paper, written by two King’s College staffers, boasted that the department’s faculty has “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.” This was no exaggeration. Current Department of War Studies educators include the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and military officers from the U.K, U.S. and other NATO countries. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” said then-U.S. Secretary of Defense (and former CIA Director) Leon Panetta in a speech at the department in 2013.

King’s College London also admits to having a number of ongoing contracts with the British state, including with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), but refuses to divulge the details of those agreements.

American connections

Although a British university, King’s College markets itself heavily to American students. There are currently 1,265 Americans enrolled, making up about 4% of the student body. Many graduates of the Department of War Studies go on to attain powerful positions in major American media outlets. Andrew Carey, CNN’s Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, for example, completed a master’s there in 2012. Carey’s coverage of the latest Israeli attack on Gaza has presented the apartheid state as “responding” to Hamas rocket attacks, rather than being the instigator of violence. A leaked internal memo Carey sent to his staff last month at the height of the bombardment instructed them to always include the fact that the Gazan Ministry of Health is overseen by Hamas, lest readers begin to believe the well-documented Palestinian casualty figures brought on by days of bombing. “We need to be transparent about the fact that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. Consequently, when we cite latest casualty numbers and attribute to the health ministry in Gaza, we need to include the fact that it is Hamas run,” read his instructions.

King’s College alumnus turned CNN Jerusalem bureau chief Andrew Carey instructed reporters on how to cover Israel’s latest assault on Gaza

Once publicized, his comments elicited considerable pushback. “This is a page straight out of Israel’s playbook. It serves to justify the attack on civilians and medical facilities,” commented Al-Jazeera Senior Presenter and Producer Dena Takruri.

The New York Times, the United States’ most influential newspaper, has also employed Department of War Studies alumni. Christiaan Triebert (M.A., 2016), for example, is a journalist on their visual investigations team. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for “Revelations about Russia and Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions in countries including Syria and Europe.” Hiring students from the school for spooks to bash Russia appears to be a common Times tactic, as it also employed Lincoln Pigman between 2016 and 2018 at its Moscow bureau.

Josh Smith, senior correspondent for influential news agency Reuters and formerly its correspondent in Afghanistan, also graduated from the department in question, as did The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Ford.

Arguably the most influential media figure from the university, however, is Ruaridh Arrow. Arrow was a producer at many of the U.K.’s largest news channels, including Channel 4, Sky News and the BBC, where he was world duty editor and senior producer on Newsnight, the network’s flagship political show. In 2019, Arrow left the BBC to become an executive producer at NBC News.

The British invasion

Unsurprisingly for a university based in London, the primary journalistic destination for Department of War Studies graduates is the United Kingdom. Indeed, the BBC, the country’s powerful state broadcaster, is full of War Studies alumni. Arif Ansari, head of news at the BBC Asian Network, completed a masters analyzing the Syrian Civil War in 2017 and was soon selected for a leadership development scheme, placing him in charge of a team of 25 journalists who curate news primarily geared toward the substantial Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in Great Britain.

Many BBC employees begin studying at King’s years after their careers have already taken off, and balance their professional lives with pursuing new qualifications. Ahmed Zaki, Senior Broadcast Journalist at BBC Global News, began his master’s six years after he started at the BBC. Meanwhile, Ian MacWilliam — who spent ten years at BBC World Service, the country’s official news broadcast worldwide, specializing in sensitive regions like Russia, Afghanistan and Central Asia — decided to study at King’s more than 30 years after completing his first degree.

Another influential War Studies alumnus at the World Service is Aliaume Leroy, producer for its Africa Eye program. Well-known BBC News presenter Sophie Long also graduated from the department, working for Reuters and ITN before joining the state broadcaster.

“It’s an open secret that King’s College London Department of War Studies operates as the finishing school for Anglo-American securocrats. So it’s maybe not a surprise that graduates of its various military and intelligence courses also enter into a world of corporate journalism that exists to launder the messaging of these same ‘security’ agencies,” Matt Kennard — an investigative journalist for Declassified U.K. who has previously exposed the university’s connections to the British state — told MintPress. “It is, however, a real and present danger to democracy. The university imprimatur gives the department’s research the patina of independence while it works, in reality, as the unofficial research arm of the U.K. Ministry of Defence,” he added.

Israeli writer and King’s College alumnus Neri Zilber has bylines in many of the media’s most important outlets

The Department of War Studies also trains many international journalists and commentators, including Nicholas Stuart of the Canberra Times (Australia); Pakistani writer Ayesha Siddiqa, whose work can be found in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, The Hindu and many other outlets; and Israeli writer Neri Zilber, a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Politico.

What’s it all about?

Why are so many influential figures in our media being hothoused in a department well known for its connections to state power, for its faculty being active or former military or government officials, and for producing spies and operatives for various three-letter agencies? The point of this is not to allege that these journalists are all secretly card-carrying spooks: they are not. Rather, it is to highlight the alarmingly close links between the national security state and the fourth estate we rely on to be a check on their power and to hold them accountable.

Journalists trained in this sort of environment are far more likely to see the world in the same manner as their professors do. And perhaps they would be less likely to challenge state power when the officials they are scrutinizing were their classmates or teachers.

These sorts of questions abound when such a phenomenon exists: Why are so many journalists choosing to study at this particular department, and why do so many go on to be so influential? Are they being vetted by security agencies, with or without their knowledge? How independent are they? Will they just repeat British and American state talking points, as the Department of War Studies’ publications do?

On the question of vetting, the BBC admitted that, at least until the 1990s, it conspired with domestic spying agency MI5 to make sure that people with left-wing and/or anti-war leanings, or views critical of British foreign policy and empire were secretly blocked from being hired. When pressed on whether this policy is still ongoing, the broadcaster refused to comment, citing “security issues” — a response that is unlikely to reassure skeptics.

“While it strikes me as very interesting that a single academic institution could play such a major role in the recruitment of pro-establishment activist intellectuals and delivery of the same to the media, it is not so surprising,” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State’s School of Media and Communication and an expert in collusion between government and media, told MintPress, adding:

Elite institutions in the past and doubtless still today have been major playgrounds for intelligence services. The history of the modern nation-state generally, not just the USA, seems to suggest that national unity — and therefore elite safety — is regarded by elites as achievable only through careful management and often suppression or diversion of dissent. Far more resources are typically committed to this than many citizens, drilled in the propaganda of democracy, realize or care to concede.

The Bellingcat Boys

While the journalists cataloged above are not spooks, some other Department of War Studies figures working in journalism could possibly be described as such, particularly those around the influential and increasingly notorious investigative website Bellingcat.

Cameron Colquhoun, for instance, spent almost a decade at GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, where he was a senior analyst running cyber and counter-terrorism operations. He holds qualifications from both King’s College London and the State Department. This background is not disclosed in his Bellingcat profile, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world.

Bellingcat’s senior investigator Nick Waters spent four years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. After that, he joined the Department of War Studies and Bellingcat.

For the longest time, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgings dismissed charges that his organization was funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — a CIA cutout organization — as a ridiculous “conspiracy.” Yet by 2017, he was admitting that it was true. A year later, Higgins joined the Department of War Studies as a visiting research associate. Between 2016 and 2019 he was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the brains behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

i didn’t say it, your pals at the Daily Beast said it. @timkmak

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) February 6, 2017

Higgins appears to have used the university department as a recruiting ground, commissioning other War Studies graduates, such as Jacob Beeders and the aforementioned Christiaan Triebert and Aliaume Leroy, to write for his site.

Bellingcat is held in very high regard by the CIA. “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. Other officers explained that Bellingcat could be used to outsource and legitimize anti-Russia talking points. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.

Bellingcaught

A recent MintPress investigation explored how Bellingcat acts to launder national security state talking points into the mainstream under the guise of being neutral investigative journalists themselves.

Newly leaked documents show how Bellingcat, Reuters and the BBC were covertly cooperating with the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to undermine the Kremlin and promote regime change in Moscow. This included training journalists and promoting explicitly anti-Russian media across Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the FCO noted, Bellingcat had been “somewhat discredited,” as it constantly spread disinformation and was willing to produce reports for anyone with money.

Nevertheless, a new European Parliament proposal published last month recommends hiring Bellingcat to assist in producing reports that would lay the groundwork for sanctioning Russia, for throwing it out of international bodies, and to “assist Russia’s transformation into a democracy.” In other words, to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

An academic journalistic nexus

The Department of War Studies is also part of this pro-NATO, anti-Russia group. Quite apart from being staffed by soldiers, spooks and government officials, it puts out influential reports advising Western governments on foreign and defense policy. For instance, a study entitled “The future strategic direction of NATO” advises that member states must increase their military budgets and allow American nuclear weapons to be stored in their countries, thereby “shar[ing] the burden.” It also recommended that NATO must redouble its commitment to opposing Russia while warning that it needed urgently to form a “coherent policy” on the Chinese threat.

Other War Studies reports claim that Russia is carrying out “information-psychological warfare” through its state channels RT and Sputnik, and counsel that the West must use its technical means to prevent its citizens from consuming this foreign propaganda.

King’s College London academics have also proven crucial in keeping dissident publisher Julian Assange imprisoned. A psychiatrist who has worked with the War Studies department testified in court that the Australian was suffering only “moderate” depression and that his suicide risk was “manageable,” concluding that extraditing him to the United States “would not be unjust.” As Matt Kennard’s investigation found, the U.K. Ministry of Defence had provided £2.2 million ($3.1 million) in funding to the institute where he worked (although the psychiatrist in question claimed his work was not directly funded by the MoD).

King’s College London markets the War Studies department to both graduates and undergraduates as a stepping stone towards a career in journalism. In its “career prospects” section for its master’s course in war studies, it tells interested students that “graduates go on to work for NGOs, the FCO, the MoD, the Home Office, NATO, the UN or pursue careers in journalism, finance, academia, the diplomatic services, the armed forces and more.”

Likewise, undergraduates are told that:

You will gain an in-depth and sophisticated understanding of war and international relations, both as subjects worthy of study and as intellectual preparation for the widest possible range of career choices, including in government, journalism, research, and humanitarian and international organisations.

Courses such as “New Wars, New Media, New Journalism” fuse together journalism and intelligence and are overseen by War Studies academics.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the department has taught many influential politicians, including foreign heads of state and members of the British parliament. But at least there is considerable overlap between the fields of defense policy and politics. The fact that the very department that trains high state officials and agents of secretive three letter agencies is also the place that produces many of the journalists we rely on to stand up to those officials and keep them in check is seriously problematic.

An unhealthy respect for authority

Unfortunately, rather than challenging power, many modern media outlets amplify its message uncritically. State officials and intelligence officers are among the least trustworthy sources, journalistically speaking. Yet many of the biggest stories in recent years have been based on nothing except the hearsay of officials who would not even put their names to their claims.

The level of credulity modern journalists have for the powerful was summed up by former CNN White House Correspondent Michelle Kosinski, who last month stated that:

As an American journalist, you never expect:

1. 1. Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly
   2. Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know
   3. Your own govt to spy on your communications

Unfortunately, credulity stretches into outright collaboration with intelligence in some cases. Leaked emails show that the Los Angeles Times’ national security reporter Ken Dilanian sent his articles directly to the CIA to be edited before they were published. Far from hurting his career, however, Dilanian is now a correspondent covering national security issues for NBC News.

Boyd-Barrett said that governments are dependent on “the assistance of a penetrated, colluding and docile mainstream media which of late — and in the context of massive confusion over Internet disinformation campaigns, real and alleged — appear ever more problematic guardians of the public right to know.”

Meanwhile, in 2019, a senior Twitter executive for the Middle East region was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, its unit dedicated to psychological operations and online warfare. The most notable thing about this event was the almost complete lack of attention it received from the mainstream press. Coming at a time when foreign interference online was perhaps the number one story dominating the news cycle, only one major outlet, Newsweek, even mentioned it. Furthermore, the reporter who covered the story left his job just weeks later, citing stifling top-down censorship and a culture of deference to national security interests.

The purpose of this article is not to accuse any of those mentioned of being intelligence agency plants (although at least one person did actually work as an intel officer). The point is rather to highlight that we now have a media landscape where many of the West’s most influential journalists are being trained by exactly the same people in the same department as the next generation of national security operatives.

It is hardly a good look for a healthy, open democracy that so many spies, government officials, and journalists trusted to hold them accountable on our behalf are all being shot out of the very same cannon. Learning side by side has helped to create a situation where the fourth estate has become overwhelmingly deferential to the so-called deep state, where anonymous official’s words are taken as gospel. The Department of War Studies is just one part of this wider phenomenon.

mintpressnews.com

Britain is fomenting a diplomatic crisis between the European Union and Russia, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Evidence and precedent indicate Lavrov has his sight well-trained.

The British establishment’s notorious ability for machination and intrigue – hence the ancient moniker Perfidious Albion – can be seen as stirring the escalating row between the European Union and Russia in which diplomats are being expelled pell-mell.

This week, Russia ordered the withdrawal of representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. That came in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from those countries. Russia has also ordered home more diplomats from the Czech Republic. Poland and Italy have also been caught up in diplomatic antagonism with Moscow.

The row blew up last week when the Czech Republic accused Russian state agents of being responsible for twin explosions on its territory back in 2104. The blasts caused the deaths of two workers at an ammunition depot near the village of Vrbetice close to the border with Slovakia. Until recently, the Czech authorities had concluded that the explosions were an industrial accident.

What prompted the Czechs to revise their ideas and to now blame Russia for sabotage is the interpolation of Britain in providing “new information”. Specifically, it was the MI6-sponsored media group Bellingcat (a so-called private investigatory agency) which appears to have furnished the disinformation which purports to show the involvement of Russian military intelligence (GRU). Incredibly, the British claim their “evidence” shows that two of the GRU agents were also the same individuals who were alleged to have been involved in poisoning the Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. The British claim to have passport information to support their claims, but such methodology is rife with forgery – a black art that the British are all-too skilled at.

On leveling the accusation against Russia, the Czech Republic then ordered the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats. Moscow responded angrily, saying that the claims of sabotage were a “dirty fabrication” and pointing out that Prague did not provide any information for verification. Russia took swift reciprocal action by banishing 20 Czech diplomats from its territory.

However, the row continues to flare with the Baltic states entering the fray by banning Russian officials in “solidarity” with the Czech Republic. The move by the Baltic states is predictable as they are supercharged by anti-Russian political sentiment. It’s a case of any excuse for them to inflame relations.

The dispute comes at a fraught time when the European Union is discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia over wider concerns about the conflict in Ukraine, the imprisonment of blogger Alexei Navalny and a Russian security crackdown on Navalny’s shadowy Western-backed “opposition” network.

The skirmishing over diplomats is a convenient way to further damage relations between the EU and Russia, especially as the strategically important Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project nears completion – a project that Washington wants to eviscerate for its own selfish commercial reasons. Uncle Sam’s junior partner Britain may be obliging in that regard and thus trying to curry favor for garnering an American trade deal in the post-Brexit world.

Certainly, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov is clear about the stealthy British hand in recent events. In a media interview this week, Lavrov mentioned the United Kingdom in wary terms, saying: “As far as the relations between Russia and Europe are concerned, I still believe that the UK is playing an active and a very serious subversive role. It withdrew from the European Union, but we see no decrease in its activities on this track. On the contrary, they are trying to influence EU member states’ approaches to Russia to the maximum possible extent.”

It should be recalled that Britain has played a starring duplicitous role in demonizing Russia and poisoning international relations.

It was Bellingcat (MI6) that pushed the narrative that Russia was complicit in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine with the loss of nearly 300 lives. Based on British “evidence” (which has been debunked as fabrication), a Dutch investigation into the disaster has accused Russia. That affair has hardened European prejudices against Russia which has fomented the imposition of sanctions.

It was a former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele who was instrumental in promoting the Russiagate dossier around 2016 which destroyed bilateral relations between the United States and Russia, and which continues to fuel fabrications about Moscow’s interference in American and European politics (even those Steele’s “dirty dossier” is a risible load of rubbish and has been debunked).

And it was the Skripal saga in Salisbury in March 2018 which Britain hatched to further poison international relations with Russia. That saga – with no proof against Russia – has become a concocted “standard proof” for the subsequent saga of “poisoning” the blogger conman Alexei Navalny. Western governments and media refer to the “Kremlin plot” to kill Skripal as “evidence” for another “Kremlin plot” to assassinate Navalny. This is tantamount to one fiction being used to prove another fiction. The same saga is now feeding into the Czech explosion row. And it all comes back to the devious ingenuity of Perfidious Albion.

Foreign Minister Lavrov added a further incisive comment on the role of Britain. He said: “At the same time, you know, they send us signals, they propose establishing contacts. This means, they do not shy away from communication [with Russia], but try to discourage others. Again, probably [this can be explained by] their desire to have a monopoly of these contacts and again prove that they are superior to others.”

The British establishment likes to boast that they “punch above their weight” in terms of influence beyond their territorial size. It’s not hard to see how they manage such a feat. It’s called duplicity, intrigue, lies, and dividing and ruling. Perfidious Albion par excellence.

Last week, MintPress exposed how the supposedly independent investigative collective Bellingcat is, in fact, funded by a CIA cutout organization and filled with former spies and state intelligence operatives. However, one part of the story that has remained untold until now is Bellingcat’s close ties to the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, an institution with deep links to the British security state and one that trains a large number of British, American and European agents and defense analysts.

A prestigious university located in the heart of London, King’s College has, in its own words, “a number of contracts and agreements with various departments within government, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence.” Some of those contracts are up to 10 years long. The university has so far refused to elaborate on the agreements, telling investigative news outlet Declassified UK that doing so could undermine U.K. security services.

A 2009 study published by the CIA spoke approvingly of how beneficial it can be to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” noting that, “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.” The paper, written by two King’s College staffers, is essentially a request to the agency to send more of its recruits there, and boasts about how the department’s staff have “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience” and how their programs “offer a containing space in which analysts from every part of the community can explore with each other the interplay of ideas about their profession.”

In 2013, former CIA Director Leon Panetta took time out of his schedule as then-secretary of defense to visit the Department of War Studies, where he expressed his profound gratitude to the unit. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” he said, before adding that it was those young leaders who must ensure that NATO had the creativity, innovation and the commitment to develop and share capabilities in order to meet future security threats, citing the need to expand into tech, surveillance and cyberwarfare.

It was this department that Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins joined in 2018 as visiting research associate, with Bellingcat maintaining a close relationship with it to this day.

After studying their writers’ backgrounds, MintPress can confirm that no fewer than six Bellingcat employees or contributors — including Cameron Colquhoun, Jacob Beeders, Lincoln Pigman, Aliaume Leroy, Christiaan Triebert and senior investigator Nick Waters — all pursued postgraduate studies within the department, the most popular being the “Conflict, Security and Development” degree overseen by Professor Mats Berdal.

For 13 years, Professor Berdal was employed by the Norwegian Defence University College, Norway’s version of West Point. Berdal is one of a host of King’s College War Studies academics who previously taught there, including one who continues to be an officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces, serving in multiple NATO conflicts in the Middle East.

While many in the West picture Norway as a peaceful, enlightened nation, the country is actually a key driving force within NATO; former Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is the organization’s current secretary general. Sending troops and other assistance, it was the U.S.’ partner in attacks on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya. Norway has among the highest per capita military spending in Europe and is one of the minority of NATO members to exceed the defense spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.

A network of pro-war think tanks

Before joining King’s College, Professor Berdal was Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world’s most influential think tanks. Also situated in central London, the organization is directly funded by NATO and its member states, as well as by major weapons manufacturers such as Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing and Raytheon. In 2016, the IISS was the subject of a major scandal after it was found to have secretly accepted £25 million — around $34 million — from the government of Bahrain.

Founded in 1958, the IISS provided much of the intellectual basis behind the Cold War scaremongering around Soviet military capacity, thereby pushing NATO members to spend more on arms. On its advisory board are a former NATO secretary general, the former chief of defense intelligence for the Israeli Defense Forces, and, until recently, the CEO of Lockheed Martin. Today, the think tank is a major driver in the increasing hostility towards China, Russia and North Korea. A number of other current Department of War Studies academics have held positions at the IISS as well. Indeed, King’s College boasts that one of the “key benefits” of studying there is its “established links” with the IISS.

A second pro-war think tank with which King’s College prides itself on working closely is the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). RUSI’s funding comes from many of the same sources as the IISS’s. Its senior vice president is retired American General David Petraeus and its chairman is Lord Hague, Britain’s secretary of state from 2010 to 2015.

A host of King’s College academics — including Jack Spence, Benedict Wilkinson, Brian Holden-Reid, Walter Ladwig, Thomas Maguire and Neil Melvin — have also held positions at RUSI. Perhaps the most notable King’s College-RUSI crossover is Professor Sir David Omand, who was formerly the think tank’s vice president, as well as the head of GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA.

Bellingcat writer Dan Kaszeta is an associate fellow at the organization. Bellingcat, RUSI and King’s College often cite each other in papers and reports, providing something of a united front on controversial issues of statecraft.

One man who links the IISS and RUSI together is Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, a key member of the Department of War Studies who went on to become King College’s vice principal. A powerful figure in British politics, Freedman contributed to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1999 speech in which he established the Blair Doctrine, a maxim that NATO could and should militarily intervene anywhere in the world to stop human rights violations.

A rogues’ gallery

For an institution that prides itself on cultivating independent thought, there exists a remarkable overlap between the staff of the Department of War Studies and the innermost halls of power of the British state. Professor John Gearson, for example, was principal defence policy adviser to the Defense Select Committee at the House of Commons, a senior adviser to the Ministry of Defense, and taught terrorism and asymetric warfare to military officers at the U.K. Defense Academy.

Another professor, Michael Goodman, is a current British Army reservist and formerly the Official Historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee (a body that oversees Britain’s intelligence organizations).

Visiting professors include Paul Rimmer, who was deputy chief of defence intelligence until last year; Lord Robertson, who was secretary general of NATO at the time of the Afghanistan invasion; and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former minister of defense. The longtime cabinet member was the creator of the Rifkind Doctrine — the controversial British policy on nuclear weapons. Rifkind rejected the idea that the country should use atomic missiles only as a last resort after being attacked, insisting that he could also use them simply to “deliver an unmistakable message of Britain’s willingness to defend her vital interests.”

It is not just British officials who teach King’s College students, however. Christopher Kolenda, for instance, was commander of an 800-man strong U.S. task force in Afghanistan, where he “pioneered innovative approaches to counterinsurgency” according to his bio at the hawkish think tank the Center for New American Security (CNAS), where he is a senior fellow. CNAS recently released a report calling for more “innovative” use of what it called “coercive economic statecraft,” (i.e., sanctions) and continues to saber rattle against China and Russia.

Between 2009 and 2010, Kolenda was a strategic advisor to COMISAF, the Commander of International Security Assistance Force. In plain English, he provided some of the brains behind the occupation of Afghanistan. Before pursuing a role in academia, he was also a senior advisor to Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and three 4-star generals. Flournoy was President Joe Biden’s first choice to run the Pentagon.

The department also contains a number of Israeli academics, including Vera Michlin-Shapir, a former official in her country’s National Security Council who worked in the prime minister’s office. Meanwhile Ofer Fridman served as an officer in the IDF between 1999 and 2011, during which time it was carrying out some of its worst war crimes against Palestine and Lebanon. After leaving the IDF, Fridman became an arms dealer, becoming the head of non-lethal weapons at LHB Ltd., which describes itself as “the leading company in Israel for security and defense advanced solutions.” In 2016, King’s College also hosted a lecture by the former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police force.

The department has links to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well, with one senior research fellow, Nawaf Obaid, a former special advisor to the Saudi Ambassador in the U.K. and Ireland and a consultant at the Royal Court in Riyadh.

Weapons spending good, Russia bad.

While the department’s staff are concerning enough, much of King’s College academic output is even more troubling, and appears to be completely in line with that of NATO and weapons contractors. One study named “A benefit, not a burden: The security, economic and strategic value of Britain’s defence industry,” for instance, reads like a press release from Raytheon, extolling how many people the industry employs. The report claimed that remaining one of the world’s top arms manufacturers was crucial in “build[ing] a secure and resilient U.K. and to help shape a stable world.” “Without a vibrant and thriving domestic defence industrial base,” it warned, “there is a risk that the U.K. will jeopardise its freedom to act in an unstable, fast-changing world,” concluding that the government should protect or “ideally expand” its defense spending budget.

A report from last August also lobbied the government to invest in making the United Kingdom a “leading nation for space.” “Investment in space surveillance capacity is key to seizing the commercial and diplomatic opportunities offered by space while defending U.K. economic and security interests,” it concludes. Surprisingly, the report insists that it would take only a “modest investment” from the government to turn Great Britain into a leading force in a rapidly expanding market.

King’s College also published a study, titled “The future strategic direction of NATO,” advising that the organization “urgently needs a coherent policy on China” and that it must re-up its commitment to countering Russia. It recommends that the majority of member states increase their military budgets and that they must “share the burden of responsibility on nuclear weapons” by allowing the U.S. to store missiles inside their territories.

Meanwhile, their 2018 report “Weaponizing news: RT, Sputnik and targeted disinformation” analyzes Russian state-backed media outlets and accuses them of carrying out a campaign of “information-psychological warfare” over its coverage of contentious events such as the alleged Skripal poisoning and the wars in Ukraine and Syria. The report claims Russian media is turning news into a weapon by projecting an image of strength and stability while highlighting flaws in Western democracies. While praising the work of Bellingcat and disinfo outlet “Prop or Not,” it concludes by advising that the West must “use technical means to prevent propaganda.”

These technical solutions, we now know, have largely entailed NATO indirectly taking control of social media. In 2018, Facebook announced that NATO’s cutout organization, the Atlantic Council, was becoming its “eyes and ears,” giving it significant control over curating its news feed, supposedly in an attempt to limit disinformation. Yet many of the most lurid stories around RussiaGate were started by the Council itself, which pumped out report after report accusing virtually every political movement in Europe outside the establishment beltway as being the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.”

King’s College staff have also been crucial in propagating the idea of Russian interference in American politics, with Professor Thomas Rid testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “dark art” of Russian meddling, and condemning WikiLeaks and alternative media journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation. Rid previously described 2016 as the “biggest election hack in U.S. history.”

Earlier this year, Facebook also hired former NATO press officer and Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Ben Nimmo as head of its intelligence team. Meanwhile Reddit appointed former Atlantic Council Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy Jessica Ashooh as its head of policy. And Eliot Higgins, of course, was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council as well. In recent years, social media giants like Facebook and Google have radically altered their algorithms, demoting content from adversarial nations, but also attacking alternative media that challenge the power of NATO and the national security state.

Today, the Department of War Studies hosted an online seminar with two senior NATO officials who discussed what they saw as Russia and China’s increasingly aggressive actions, as well as new ways in which NATO can secure its control over the internet.

A military-academic-journalistic nexus

What is being described is a network of military, think-tank and media units all working towards furthering the goals of the national security state. Bellingcat regularly holds seminars and courses at King’s College, teaching the next generation of state officials how to use big-data and surveillance tools.

While King’s College provides an academic veneer for the national security state, Bellingcat provides a journalistic one. This cluster of think tanks, academic reports, and newsy investigative articles all cite one another as credible, independent sources when, in reality, they are all part of the same network furthering an agenda. It should be noted that this was an investigation into just one department in one school in one college of the University of London. The links to the highest levels of power were so profound and so manifold that it often seemed harder to find someone in the department who was not linked to military or intelligence communities. Thus, one could be forgiven for mistaking the Department of War Studies for a department of war mongers.

mintpressnews.com

By Alan MACLEOD

 Investigative site Bellingcat is the toast of the popular press. In the past month alone, it has been described as “an intelligence agency for the people” (ABC Australia), a “transparent” and “innovative” (New Yorker) “independent news collective,” “transforming investigative journalism” (Big Think), and an unequivocal “force for good” (South China Morning Post). Indeed, outside of a few alternative news sites, it is very hard to hear a negative word against Bellingcat, such is the gushing praise for the outlet founded in 2014.

This is troubling, because the evidence compiled in this investigation suggests Bellingcat is far from independent and neutral, as it is funded by Western governments, staffed with former military and state intelligence officers, repeats official narratives against enemy states, and serves as a key part in what could be called a “spook to Bellingcat to corporate media propaganda pipeline,” presenting Western government narratives as independent research.

Citizen journalism staffed with spies and soldiers

An alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds. Senior Investigator Nick Waters, for example, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. Shortly after leaving the service, he was hired by Bellingcat to provide supposedly bias-free investigations into the Middle East.

Former contributor Cameron Colquhoun’s past is even more suspect. Colquhoun spent a decade in a senior position in GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA), where he ran cyber and Middle Eastern terror operations. The Scot specializes in Middle Eastern security and also holds a qualification from the U.S. State Department. None of this, however, is disclosed by Bellingcat, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world — thus depriving readers of key information they need to make informed judgments on what they are reading.

Bellingcat fails to inform its readers of even the most glaring conflicts of interest

There are plenty of former American spooks on Bellingcat’s roster as well. Former contributor Chris Biggers, who penned more than 60 articles for the site between 2014 and 2017, previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — a combat support unit that works under the Department of Defense and the broader Intelligence Community. Biggers is now the director of an intelligence company headquartered in Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington (close to other semi-private contractor groups like Booz Allen Hamilton), that boasts of having retired Army and Air Force generals on its board. Again, none of this is disclosed by Bellingcat, where Biggers’s bio states only that he is a “public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.”

For six years, Dan Kaszeta was a U.S. Secret Service agent specializing in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and for six more he worked as program manager for the White House Military Office. At Bellingcat, he would provide some of the intellectual ammunition for Western accusations about chemical weapons use in Syria and Russia’s alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal.

Kaszeta is also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank funded by a host of Western governments as well as weapons contractors such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Its president is a British field marshal (the highest attainable military rank) and its senior vice president is retired American General David Petraeus. Its chairman is Lord Hague, the U.K.’s secretary of state between 2010 and 2015.

A Bellingcat article covering the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a story covered heavily by the organization. Alexander Zemlianichenko | AP

All of this matters if a group is presenting itself as independent when, in reality, their views align almost perfectly with the governments funding them. But yet again, Bellingcat fails to follow basic journalism ethics and inform readers of these glaring conflict of interests, describing Kaszeta as merely the managing director of a security company and someone with 27 years of experience in security and antiterrorism. This means that unless readers are willing to do a research project they will be none the wiser.

Other Bellingcat contributors have similar pasts. Nour Bakr previously worked for the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office while Karl Morand proudly served two separate tours in Iraq with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

Government and intelligence officials are the opposite of journalists. The former exist to promote the interests of power (often against those of the public) while the latter are supposed to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the people. That is why it is so inappropriate that Bellingcat has had so many former spooks on their books. It could be said that ex-officials who have renounced their past or blown the whistle, such as Daniel Ellsberg or John Kiriakou, have utility as journalists. But those who have simply made the transition into media without any change in positions usually serve only the powerful.

Who pays the piper?

Just as startling as its spooky staff is Bellingcat’s source of funding. In 2016 its founder, Eliot Higgins, dismissed the idea that his organization got money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Yet, by the next year, he openly admitted the thing he had laughed off for so long was, in fact, true (Bellingcat’s latest available financial report confirms that they continue to receive financial assistance from the NED). As many MintPress readers will know, the NED was explicitly set up by the Reagan administration as a front for the CIA’s regime-change operations. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” said the organization’s co-founder Allen Weinstein, proudly.

Higgins himself was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s quasi-official think tank, from 2016 to 2019. The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of state power, from war planners like Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to retired generals such as James “Mad Dog” Mattis and H.R. McMaster. It also features no fewer than seven former CIA directors. How Higgins could possibly see taking a paid position at an organization like this while he was still the face of a supposedly open and independent intelligence collective as being at all consistent is unclear.

Bana Alabed, an outsoken anti-Assad child activist, promotes Bellingcat at an Atlantic Council event. Photo | Twitter

Other questionable sources of income include the Human Rights Foundation, an international organization set up by Venezuelan activist Thor Halvorssen Mendoza. Halvorssen is the son of a former government official accused of being a CIA informant and a gunrunner for the agency’s dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s and the cousin of convicted terrorist Leopoldo Lopez. Lopez in turn was a leader in a U.S.-backed coup in 2002 and a wave of political terror in 2014 that killed at least 43 people and caused an estimated $15 billion worth of property damage. A major figure on the right-wing of Venezuelan politics, Lopez told journalists that he wants the United States to formally rule the country once President Nicolas Maduro is overthrown. With the help of the Spanish government, Lopez escaped from jail and fled to Spain last year.

Imagine, for one second, the opposite scenario: an “independent” Russian investigative website staffed partially with ex-KGB officials, funded by the Kremlin, with most of their research focused on the nefarious deeds of the U.S., U.K. and NATO. Would anyone take it seriously? And yet Bellingcat is consistently presented in corporate media as a liberatory organization; the Information Age’s gift to the people.

The Bellingcat to journalism pipeline

The corporate press itself already has a disturbingly close relationship with the national security state, as does social media. In 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit. Coming at a time when foreign interference in politics and society was the primary issue in U.S. politics, the story was, astoundingly, almost completely ignored in the mainstream press. Only one U.S. outlet of any note picked it up, and that journalist was forced out of the profession weeks later.

Increasingly, it seems, Bellingcat is serving as a training ground for those looking for a job in the West’s most prestigious media outlets. For instance, former Bellingcat contributor Brenna Smith — who was recently the subject of a media storm after she successfully pressured a number of online payment companies to stop allowing the crowdfunding of the Capitol Building insurrectionists — announced last month she would be leaving USA Today and joining The New York Times. There she will meet up with former Bellingcat senior investigator Christiaan Triebert, who joined the Times’ visual investigations team in 2019.

The Times, commonly thought of as the United States’ most influential media outlet, has also collaborated with Bellingcat writers for individual pieces before. In 2018, it commissioned Giancarlo Fiorella and Aliaume Leroy to publish an op-ed strongly insinuating that the Venezuelan state murdered Oscar Perez. After he stole a military helicopter and used it to bomb government buildings in downtown Caracas while trying to ignite a civil war, Perez became the darling of the Western press, being described as a “patriot” (The Guardian), a “rebel” (Miami Herald), an “action hero” (The Times of London), and a “liberator” (Task and Purpose).

Until 2020, Fiorella ran an opposition blog called “In Venezuela” despite living in Canada. Leroy is now a full-time producer and investigator for the U.K.-government network, the BBC.

Bad news from Bellingcat

What we are uncovering here is a network of military, state, think-tank and media units all working together, of which Bellingcat is a central fixture. This would be bad enough, but much of its own research is extremely poor. It strongly pushed the now increasingly discredited idea of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, attacking the members of the OPCW who came forward to expose the coverup and making some bizarre claims along the way. For years, Higgins and other members of the Bellingcat team also signal-boosted a Twitter account purporting to be an ISIS official, only for an investigation to expose the account as belonging to a young Indian troll in Bangalore. A leaked U.K. Foreign Office document lamented that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University and an expert in the connections between the deep state and the fourth estate, told MintPress that “the role of Bellingcat is to provide spurious legitimacy to U.S./NATO pretexts for war and conflict.” In far more positive words, the CIA actually appears to agree with him.

“I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference [Bellingcat’s] work.” Polymeropoulos recently attempted to blame his headache problems on a heretofore unknown Russian microwave weapon, a claim that remarkably became an international scandal. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.

Bellingcat certainly seems to pay particular attention to the crimes of official enemies. As investigative journalist Matt Kennard noted, it has only published five stories on the United Kingdom, 17 on Saudi Arabia, 19 on the U.S. (most of which are about foreign interference in American society or far-right/QAnon cults). Yet it has 144 on Russia and 244 under its Syria tag.

In his new book “We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People,” the outlet’s boss Higgins writes: “We have no agenda but we do have a credo: evidence exists and falsehoods exist, and people still care about the difference.” Yet exploring the backgrounds of its journalists and its sources of funding quickly reveals this to be a badly spun piece of PR.

Bellingcat looks far more like a bunch of spooks masquerading as citizen journalists than a people-centered organization taking on power and lies wherever it sees them. Unfortunately, with many of its proteges travelling through the pipeline into influential media outlets, it seems that there might be quite a few masquerading as reporters as well.

mintpressnews.com

After publishing fraudulent claims in a bid to smear OPCW whistleblowers, Bellingcat has been caught in another subterfuge that contradicts its stated allegiance to “transparency and accountability”: a hidden, external author writing its material.

The website Bellingcat promotes itself as a collective of digital sleuths who “pledge allegiance to truth and evidence and abide by the principles of transparency and accountability.” Its self-described “groundbreaking investigations,” especially those aimed at Russia and Syria, have led to fawning Western media endorsements of its claim to be an “intelligence agency for the people.”

But Bellingcat’s carefully crafted public image as an “open source” outlet is belied by its extensive NATO government ties and a conspicuous pattern of conduct in line with its state sponsors’ interests. Bellingcat has hauled in grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded CIA cutout. Leaked documents reported by The Grayzone revealed that Bellingcat has collaborated with a UK Foreign Office operation that aims to “weaken Russia.”

Bellingcat has also been a regular source of interventionist material on Syria, the target of a decade-long, multi-billion dollar proxy war waged by the US, UK, and their allies. This includes participating in a nearly two-year campaign to whitewash a scandal at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — one of the most shocking and well-documented pro-war deceptions since the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A series of leaks has exposed how top OPCW officials censored findings which undermined US-led allegations of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Together with its NATO state sponsors, Bellingcat has worked to bury the cover-up and denigrate two OPCW whistleblowers who challenged it from the inside.

Bellingcat’s disinformation efforts resulted in an embarrassing debacle late last year, when the outlet was caught publishing fraudulent material about one of the dissenting OPCW scientists.

Now, emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that Bellingcat has engaged in more subterfuge than was previously known.

Messages sent months before the “Bellingcat Investigation Team” released its bogus article show that Bellingcat was not the sole author of the now-discredited piece published in its name. It also was not the first one.

The communications show that someone outside the Bellingcat organization composed portions of the fraudulent material that ultimately appeared on Bellingcat’s website. An external author even drafted questions that Bellingcat sent to multiple recipients. Bellingcat’s duplicitous conduct took place in the midst of a poorly coordinated effort involving HuffPost UK and the BBC – two outlets that also enjoy close ties to the British state.

The target of the Bellingcat-led smear campaign is Dr. Brendan Whelan, a 16-year OPCW veteran and member of the mission that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

The Douma team failed to find any evidence of chemical weapons use, shattering the pretext for the US, UK, and French airstrikes on Damascus that same month. But the investigators’ original report was doctored and suppressed, an act of censorship that Whelan protested in an email which was subsequently leaked along with other damning internal OPCW documents.

The leaks also revealed how the Douma inspectors were sidelined from the probe following Whelan’s protest, leading to a final report that excluded their critical findings. That report, released in March 2019, reached the unsupported conclusion that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that chlorine gas was used in Douma, aligning with the US-led narrative of Syrian government culpability.

Last October, over a year after the cover-up became public, Bellingcat claimed to have obtained a “draft version” of an OPCW letter sent to Whelan that disproved all of his concerns. The Grayzone quickly demonstrated that Bellingcat’s “letter” was a sham.

When The Grayzone obtained the real OPCW letter sent to Whelan, it contained none of Bellingcat’s distorted text. The Bellingcat letter claimed that new scientific “methods” had found “chlorinated pinene compounds” in Douma wood samples that proved chlorine gas use. It also stated that Russia and Syria had secretly accepted the OPCW’s conclusions. However, the OPCW’s own published documents undermined both assertions.

Bellingcat has refused to explain the fraud that it perpetrated. Nick Waters, a Bellingcat staffer who was directly involved in producing the anonymously bylined story, deleted embarrassing tweets in which he gloated about his fake scoop. Since then, Waters has ignored queries from The Grayzone.

Now that @Bellingcat has admitted that it published disinformation (https://t.co/B7WiqyvBJZ), let’s look at those who tried to accuse others of doing what Bellingcat in fact did themselves, and even gloated that the falsely premised article was some kind of vindication.

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 29, 2020

Bellingcat has now been caught in another act of deception.

Identical typos reveal Bellingcat’s hidden author

Emails obtained by The Grayzone show that at least eight months before Bellingcat published its fraudulent article impugning the OPCW whistleblower, a staffer for HuffPost UK pursued the same story. He is Chris York, a writer responsible for a consistent stream of attacks on prominent critics of the official story of Syrian government responsibility for a chemical attack in Douma – an odd niche for a reporter who scarcely mentioned Syria before 2017.

Chris York writes for the Huffington Post UK. © Chris York/Twitter

In one such email, York claimed to be on the verge of publication. Then, for some reason, he pulled back.

Bellingcat not only published the story that York claimed he was about to release, but used text that was identical to his in their final product.

In its October 2020 article, Bellingcat quoted the letter that it claimed the OPCW had leaked. A side-by-side comparison of Bellingcat’s transcription of the letter in its article to the screenshot of the letter that it also published reveals two errors: a typographical error, and an omission of one definite article that appears in the original screenshot.

These errors were not made by Bellingcat. Instead, three months earlier, on July 27, Chris York of HuffPostUK sent an email to Wikileaks containing the same two errors in otherwise identical text. This can be seen by comparing York and Bellingcat’s text to Bellingcat’s screenshot:

• Bellingcat’s screenshot says “developed methods for analysing wood”; by comparison, Bellingcat’s article, like York’s email, says “developed methods or analysing wood.”
• Bellingcat’s screenshot says “different types of wood in the signatures of the chlorinated compounds produced”; by comparison, Bellingcat’s article, like York’s email, says “different types of wood in the signatures of chlorinated compounds produced.”

HuffPost UK Chris York Bellingcat OPCW email

Left: Chris York’s July 27 2020 email to Wikileaks erroneously quotes the purported OPCW document. York’s typos are highlighted.

Right: Bellingcat’s October 26 2020 article repeats Chris York’s typos, instead of accurately quoting the screenshot that it published in its article. (The screenshot is in the first table above, as well as here: https://archive.is/1O3Du)

The typos are beyond any possible coincidence, and not the only overlap. Nick Waters of Bellingcat not only published Chris York’s errors, but also copied questions that York had sent months earlier.

Bellingcat “investigator” asks someone else’s questions

In emailing queries to Wikileaks, Whelan, and me, Bellingcat’s Nick Waters once again used text originally sent by Chris York of HuffPost UK. A comparison shows that Waters’ queries in October are near carbon copies of queries that York sent in July.

York’s and Waters’ questions to Wikileaks contain virtually identical structure and verbiage across multiple paragraphs. (Waters also used the same language in emails that he sent to me and to Whelan).

Bellingcat Huffpost UK Chris York emails OPCW

Given that Bellingcat copied someone else’s text and did not write its own questions, the question that now arises is how and where Bellingcat’s material originated.

One option is that Waters received York’s material and copied his entire set of questions, slightly changing the wording in a lazy effort to disguise the copying job. That would raise the question of how Bellingcat ended up with another outlet’s question: did York pass his questions to Waters? Or did someone else?

Another option is that neither Waters nor York wrote their overlapping questions or text to begin with, and received them instead from a mutual source.

What is indisputable is that Bellingcat’s Nick Waters did not write the questions that he presented as his own.

The Grayzone sent multiple queries to Waters and Bellingcat about the overlap between their material and HuffPost UK’s. They have not responded.

“I can’t hold off publishing much longer”: How did Bellingcat get HuffPost UK’s leftovers?

The fact that Bellingcat had its text circulated by another outlet months before raises serious questions about what role Bellingcat played in its “investigation.”

The chain of events began in early 2020, when Chris York of HuffPost UK first referenced the “document” that Bellingcat would later base its story on.

York wrote Dr. Brendan Whelan in February 2020, shortly after the OPCW released an internal inquiry baselessly maligning two whistleblowers it identified as Inspectors A and B. Just days before the inquiry’s findings were announced, the British journalist Brian Whittaker doxed Whelan, whose name he said had been leaked by someone with “access to sensitive OPCW information.” That same month, Bellingcat published an attack piece that identified Whelan as Inspector B.

In light of those attacks, the timing and nature of York’s outreach to Whelan suggests that it may have been a part of a coordinated effort to impugn him.

“I was hoping to speak to you about some documents that Wikileaks do not appear to have released yet,” York wrote to Whelan on February 26, 2020. Whelan did not reply. York followed up again on March 7th, which Whelan also ignored.

Four months later, York sent Whelan a final message claiming that publication was imminent. “I’ll soon be publishing an article on the Wikileaks Douma leaks, specifically on a document that wasn’t publicly released but appears to contradict some of the points Wikileaks and yourself have put forward,” York wrote on July 16.

During this same period, York also reached out to Wikileaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson. In one email, York shared with Hrafnsson the same error-laden transcription of part of the text of the OPCW draft letter that would later surface at Bellingcat. Just as Bellingcat would do months later, York additionally accused Wikileaks of hiding the document. Releasing it, York alleged on August 17, “would have completely contradicted the narrative you put forward that the Douma attack was staged.”

York was so confident in his false belief that the document disproved the whistleblower – and that others beyond him had actually received it – that he chided Wikileaks for failing to issue a public correction in response. “[A]fter HuffPost UK discovered the existence of this document and questioned Wikileaks about it,” York scolded, “you have done nothing to correct the record and have instead let the disputed narrative about a ‘staged’ chemical attack go unchecked.”

The fact that York claimed to have “discovered” the document suggests that it was only passed to Bellingcat after HuffPost UK dropped the story. Bellingcat’s omission of HuffPost UK’s original role – while simultaneously copying the fraudulent content of its text – demonstrates a flagrant disregard for transparency that stands at odds with Bellingcat’s professed fidelity to “open source,” “verifiable” evidence.

Just as he did with Whelan, York informed Wikileaks that he was on the verge of publishing his story. “I’ll be publishing the article at the weekend so a response before then would be appreciated,” York wrote Hrafnsson on July 22. On August 4th, York followed-up with one final plea: “Could I please get a response to this, I can’t hold off publishing much longer.”

York’s article never appeared at the HuffPost UK.

In a brief phone conservation with me on October 27th, the day after his story surfaced at Bellingcat, York said that he would read the Bellingcat article before responding to my questions. He has since gone quiet and failed to respond to multiple emailed queries from The Grayzone. His editors at HuffPost UK have kept mum as well.

Converging disinformation from Bellingcat and BBC

Although the identity Bellingcat-HuffPost UK’s dodgy source is unknown, the participation of a third outlet in this story – the UK state broadcaster BBC — offers a strong candidate.

Just weeks after Bellingcat’s debunked story appeared, the BBC released a podcast that attempted to advance the same bogus line. Mayday host Chloe Hadjimatheou repeated the Bellingcat letter’s falsehoods about the wood samples and the secret Syria-Russian acceptance of the OPCW’s final report. In yet another uncanny crossover, Hadjimatheou also falsely suggested that one of the OPCW whistleblowers received a payment from Wikileaks. In emails to Wikileaks and Whelan one month before Mayday was aired, Bellingcat’s Nick Waters made the same insinuation.

While her uncritical promotion of the Bellingcat-HuffPost UK letter’s debunked assertions was nothing new, Hadjimatheou did offer one significant contribution. To make her case against the whistleblowers, Hadjimatheou interviewed someone whom she claimed was an anonymous OPCW official operating behind the pseudonym, “Leon.” Hadjimatheou did not specify what role, if any, Leon played in the Douma investigation. The anonymous official also offered nothing of substance beyond what was already claimed in the bogus OPCW letter released by Bellingcat.

It is possible, therefore, that Leon was the real source of the fraudulent information provided to Bellingcat and HuffPost UK. If the BBC is correct that Leon is an actual OPCW official, then the implications are serious. It means that alongside the OPCW’s refusal to account for the Douma cover-up, an OPCW staffer is spreading disinformation about former employees who challenged it.

The OPCW did not respond to The Grayzone’s questions about whether it is investigating the “draft letter,” or Leon’s comments to the BBC. If the OPCW is not probing this defamatory conduct, its inaction could be read as a tacit endorsement.

The Grayzone also asked the BBC’s Hadjimatheou about her recycling of Bellingcat’s debunked claims, Leon’s qualifications to comment on the Douma investigation, and other major lapses in her reporting. Hadjimatheou initially said that she would reply to me in writing. After receiving my questions, she backtracked on that pledge and declined to offer any responses.

In the absence of any explanation from these three outlets – BBC, Bellingcat, and HuffPost UK – on how they have targeted OPCW whistleblowers with identical false material repeated by an unidentified OPCW source, another common denominator might help fill in the silence. Just like the BBC, Bellingcat and HuffPost UK have formal British government ties of their own.

The editor of HuffPost UK, Jess Brammar, has helmed the outlet while simultaneously serving as a member of the UK government’s Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, which censors journalism on behalf of “UK military and intelligence operations,” in the name of “national security.”

For its part, Bellingcat is a founding “partner” in a UK government propaganda operation, the Open Information Partnership (OIP), funded with $13.7 million in taxpayer money. Bellingcat was enlisted in the OIP even though its UK state partners have privately doubted its credibility. A leaked internal assessment produced for the OIP concluded that:

“Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Whoever is behind the attacks on veteran OPCW scientists, Bellingcat’s role in the smear campaign is absolutely clear. While marketing itself publicly as an “open source” collective of crime-solving digital sleuths, Bellingcat has been used as a proxy in a disinformation campaign to whitewash a major global deception and defame the whistleblowers who challenged it. It is duplicitous enough to let someone else write its material, and sloppy enough to get caught.

thegrayzone.com

By Max BLUMENTHAL

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.

The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”

Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.

“The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,” Williamson continued, “but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation spokesperson Jenny Vereker implicitly confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents in an emailed response to questions from The Grayzone. However, she contended, “The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.”

The tranche of leaked files closely resemble UK FCO-related documented released between 2018 and 2020 by a hacking collective calling itself Anonymous. The same source has claimed credit for obtaining the latest round of documents.

The Grayzone reported in October 2020 on leaked materials released by Anonymous which exposed a massive propaganda campaign funded by the UK FCO to cultivate support for regime change in Syria. Soon after, the Foreign Office claimed its computer systems had been penetrated by hackers, thus confirming their authenticity.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”

Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.

In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.

The UK FCO projects were carried out covertly, and in partnership with purportedly independent, high-profile online media outfits including Bellingcat, Meduza, and the Pussy Riot-founded Mediazona. Bellingcat’s participation apparently included a UK FCO intervention in North Macedonia’s 2019 elections on behalf of the pro-NATO candidate.

The intelligence contractors that oversaw that operation, the Zinc Network, boasted of establishing “a network of YouTubers in Russia and Central Asia” while “supporting participants [to] make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding.” The firm also touted its ability to “activate a range of content” to support anti-government protests inside Russia.

The new documents provide critical background on the role of NATO member states like the UK in influencing the color revolution-style protests waged in Belarus in 2020, and raise unsettling questions about the intrigue and unrest surrounding jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Further, the materials cast serious doubt on the independence of two of the world’s largest and most prestigious media organizations, revealing Reuters and the BBC as apparent intelligence cut-outs feasting at the trough of a British national security state that their news operations are increasingly averse to scrutinizing.

Reuters solicits secret British Foreign Office contract to infiltrate Russian media

A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

The revelation prompted a Reuters spokesman to declare that “the arrangement in 1969 [with the MI6] was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”

The Trust Principles outline a mission of “preserving [Reuters’] independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”

In its own statement of values, the BBC proclaims, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest.”

However, the newly leaked documents analyzed by The Grayzone appear to reveal that both Reuters and the BBC are engaged yet again in a non-transparent relationship with the UK’s foreign ministry to counter and undermine Russia.

In 2017, the non-profit arm of the Reuters media empire, the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), delivered a formal tender offering to “enter into a Contract with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as represented by the British Embassy Moscow, for the provision of a project ‘Capacity Building in Russian Media.’” The letter was signed by Reuters CEO Monique Ville on July 31, 2017.

Reuters’ tender was a response to a call for bids by the FCO, which sought help in implementing “a programme of themed tours to the UK by Russian journalists and online influencers.”

Working through the British Embassy in Moscow, the FCO sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

In 2019, the FCO put forward a similar initiative, this time articulating a more aggressive plan to “counter the Russian government’s narrative and domination of the media and information space.” In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK.

Reuters responded to both calls by the FCO with detailed tenders. In its first bid, the media giant boasted of establishing a global network of 15,000 journalists and bloggers through “capacity building interventions.” In Russia, it claimed at least 400 journalists had been cultivated through its training programs.

Reuters claimed to have performed 10 previous training tours for 80 Russian journalists on behalf of the British embassy in Moscow. It proposed eight more, promising to promote “UK cultural and political values” and “create a network of journalists across Russia” bonded together by a shared “interest in British affairs.”

Reuters’ tender highlighted the institutional prejudices and interventionist agenda that underlined its training programs. Detailing a series of UK FCO-funded programs dedicated to “countering Russian state-funded propaganda,” Reuters conflated Russian government narratives with extremism. Ironically, it referred to its own efforts at weakening them as “unbiased journalism.”

At the same time, Reuters appeared to recognize that its covert collaboration with the British Embassy in Moscow was highly provocative and potentially destructive to diplomatic relations. Recounting a UK FCO-funded tour it ran for Russian journalists in the midst of the Sergei Skripal affair, after the British government accused Moscow of poisoning a turncoat Russian intelligence officer who spied for Britain, the tender stated, “[Thomson Reuters Foundation] was in constant communication with the British Embassy in Moscow, to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.”

The mention by Reuters of the Belarusian TV Station Belsat, and its particular relevance “to the UK Government Strategy’s capacity to detect and counter the spread of Russian information” was notable. While describing itself as “the first independent television channel in Belarus,” Belsat is, as the Reuters tender makes clear, a vehicle of NATO influence.

Based in Poland and funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and other EU governments, Belsat played an influential role in promoting the color revolution-style protests that erupted in May 2020 to demand the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Ultimately, Reuters’ bid appears to have been successful, as it received a July 2019 contract with the FCO’s Conflict, Stability & Security Fund (CSSF). But neither entity seemed to want the public to know about their collaboration on a project designed to counter Russia. The contract was marked “Strictly Confidential.”

“Weaken the Russian state’s influence”

The programs exposed through the latest leak of documents operate under the auspices of a shadowy division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office called Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD). Led by an intelligence operative named Andy Pryce, the program has shrouded in secrecy.

Indeed, the British government has denied freedom of information requests about the division’s budget and stonewalled members of parliament like Chris Williamson who sought data about its budget and agenda, citing national security to block their demands for information.

“When I tried to probe further,” former MP Williamson told The Grayzone, “ministers refused to let me have access to any documents or correspondence relating to this organization’s activities.  I was told that releasing this information could ‘disrupt and undermine the program’s effectiveness.’”

During a meeting convened in London on June 26, 2018, Pryce outlined a new FCO program “to weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbors.” He solicited a consortium of firms to assist the British state in establishing new and seemingly independent media outlets to counter Russian government-backed media in Moscow’s immediate sphere of influence, and to amplify the messaging of NATO-aligned governments.

Justified on the basis of Russia’s supposed intention to “sow disunity and course[sic] disruption to democratic processes,” the campaign Pryce laid out was more aggressive and far-reaching than anything Russia has been caught doing in the West.

Pryce emphasized that secrecy was of the essence, warning that “some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO.”

A year later, the FCO’s CDMD division outlined a program to run through 2022 at a cost of $8.3 million to the British taxpayer. It aimed to establish new outlets and support preexisting media operations “to counter Russia’s efforts to sow disunity” and “increase resilience to hostile Kremlin messaging in the Baltic states.”

Thus the British government set out with an array of intelligence contractors to dominate Baltic media with pro-NATO messaging – and perhaps sow some disunity of its own.

As seen below, the BBC placed an apparently successful bid to participate in the covert Baltic program through its non-profit arm, known as BBC Media Action.

The BBC also proposed to participate in a separate UK FCO media propaganda program in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It named Reuters and a now-defunct intelligence contractor called Aktis Strategy, which participated in previous FCO CDMD programs, as key allies in its consortium.

The BBC identified local partners like Hromadske, a Kiev-based broadcast network born in the midst of the so-called Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that relied on ultra-nationalist muscle to remove an elected president and install a pro-NATO regime. Hromadske materialized almost overnight with seed money and logistical support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and billionaire media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Network Fund.

BBC Media Action proposed working through Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where a proxy war has raged since 2014 between the Western-backed Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. It was textbook information warfare, weaponizing broadcast media to turn the tide of battle in a protracted, grinding conflict.

The UK FCO propaganda campaign warned that “Kremlin-affiliated structures” could undermine the project if it was exposed. For a media organization that claims to place trust at the heart of its charter of values, the BBC was certainly operating under a high degree of secrecy.

The UK FCO’s meddling in Eastern Europe and the Baltics created a feeding frenzy among contractors seeking to provide “capacity building” and media development assistance on Russia’s periphery. Among the bidders were Reuters and veteran FCO contractors that had participated in an array of information warfare campaigns from Syria to the British home front.

The Consortium

Among the intelligence contractors bidding to participate in the UK FCO-funded Consortium were the Zinc Network and Albany Communications. As journalist Kit Klarenberg noted in a February 18 report on the recent FCO leaks, these firms “boast staff possessed of [security] clearances, individuals who previously served at the highest levels of government, the military and security services. They furthermore have extensive experience in conducting information warfare operations on London’s behalf the world over.”

Previously known as Breakthrough, Zinc has contracted for the UK Home Office to covertly implement media projects propagandizing British Muslims under the auspices of the Prevent de-radicalization initiative. In Australia, Zinc was caught running a clandestine program to promote support for government policies among Muslims.

Ben Norton reported for The Grayzone on Albany’s record of “secur[ing] the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance Western regime-change goals in Syria, while conducting public relations services on behalf of extremist Syrian militias funded by NATO member states and Gulf monarchies to destabilize the country.

In its bid for the UK FCO media program in the Baltic region, Albany proposed a series of satirical “interactive games” like “Putin Bingo” to encourage opposition to the Russian government and exploit “frustrations experienced by Russians in the EU.”

Albany pitched a Latvia-based outlet called Meduza as “a leading proponent of these games.” A top website among Russian opposition supporters, Meduza has received financial support from the Swedish government and several billionaire-backed pro-NATO foundations.

As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot.

One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokno, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolonko trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”

Besides delivering “targeting support” for “independent” outlets pushing the right line against the Kremlin, Zinc proposed leveraging UK FCO funding into a program of direct payments and gaming Google search results in their favor. The intelligence cut-out was explicit about its desire to reduce the search visibility of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT.com.

The UK covertly funded and managed a network of Russian YouTubers and “activated” anti-government protest content

In a document marked “private and confidential,” Zinc revealed the Consortium’s role in setting up a “YouTuber network” in Russia and Central Asia designed to propagate the message of the UK and its NATO allies.

According to Zinc, the Consortium was “supporting participants mak[ing] and receiv[ing] international payments without being registered as external sources of funding,” presumably to circumvent Russian registration requirements for foreign-funded media outfits.

Zinc also helped the YouTube influencers “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages” while working “to keep their involvement confidential.” And it carried out its entire program of covert propaganda in the name of “promoting media integrity and democratic values.”

Perhaps the most prominent Russian YouTube influencer is Alexei Navalny, a previously marginal nationalist opposition figure who was nominated for a Nobel Prize after becoming the target of a high-profile poisoning incident that brought relations between Russia and the West to its post-Cold War nadir.

The Russian government’s sentencing of Navalny to a 2.5-year prison term for evading parole has inspired the largest wave of anti-government protests since 2018, when Navalny helped sponsor national demonstrations against the banning of the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

In its bid for a UK FCO contract, Zinc revealed that it played a behind-the-scenes role “to activate a range of content within 12 hours of the recent telegram protests.” Whether those activities involved Navalny or his immediate network was unclear, but the private disclosure by Zinc appeared confirm that British intelligence played a role in amplifying the 2018 protests.

Russian intelligence services have released sting video footage showing Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Navalny’s FBK anti-corruption organization, meeting in 2013 with a suspected British MI6 agent named James William Thomas Ford, who was operating out of the British embassy in Moscow. During the rendezvous, Ashurkov can be heard asking for 10 to 20 million dollars to generate “quite a different picture” of the political landscape.

In 2018, Ashurkov’s name appeared in leaked documents exposing a covert, UK FCO influence network called the Integrity Initiative. As The Grayzone reported, the Integrity Initiative operated behind the cover of a think tank called the Institute for Statecraft, which concealed its own location through a fake office in Scotland.

Run by a group of military intelligence officers, the secret propaganda group worked through clusters of media and political influencers to escalate tensions between the West and Russia. Listed among the London cluster of anti-Russian influencers was Ashurkov.

The Integrity Initiative’s military directors outlined their agenda in stark, unequivocal terms. As the leaked memo below illustrates, they aimed to exploit the media, think tanks and their influence network to stir up as much hysteria about Russia’s supposedly malign influence as possible. Since they embarked on their covert campaign, nearly all their wishes have come true.

Bellingcat joins the Zinc Network, allegedly meddles in Moldova’s elections

After Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, he collaborated with the UK-based “open source” journalism outfit Bellingcat to pin the crime on Russia’s FSB intelligence services. Though it is well established that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government entity that supports regime-change operations around the globe, the fact has never appeared in the reams of fawning profiles that corporate media outlets, including Reuters, have published about the organization.

Bellingcat’s role as a partner in the Zinc Network’s UK FCO-funded EXPOSE Consortium may add an additional layer of suspicion about the outlet’s claim to independence.

Indeed, Bellingcat was listed in leaked 2018 documents as a key member of Zinc’s “Network of NGOs.” Among the members in the network was the Institute for Statecraft, the front for the Integrity Initiative.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has vehemently denied accepting funding from the UK FCO or collaborating with it. But after Zinc documents leaked in early 2019, Higgins disclosed that some version of the Zinc proposal had received the green light from the Foreign Office.

Christian Triebbert, a Bellingcat staff member who was named as a potential trainer by the Zinc documents, and who now heads the New York Times’ video investigations unit, claimed the program consisted of benign workshops on “digital research and verification skills.”

What he and Higgins did not mention, however, was that Bellingcat had apparently been dispatched by the Zinc Network to “respond” to the 2019 parliamentary elections in North Macedonia. Stakes were high as the elections were likely to determine whether the tiny country would enter NATO and join the EU. The pro-NATO candidate triumphed, and not without a little help from the British Foreign Office and its allies.

According to the Zinc proposal, Bellingcat provided training to the Most Network, a Macedonian media outlet. It was joined by DFR Lab, a project of the NATO- and US government-funded Atlantic Council in Washington, DC.

After apparently participating in the covert UK FCO-funded intervention in North Macedonia, Bellingcat published an article ahead of the country’s 2020 parliamentary elections entitled, “Russia’s interference in North Macedonia.”

Several Zinc Network documents list Reuters as a member of the UK FCO-funded Consortium media intervention in the Baltic states.

Asked by The Grayzone how Reuters’ participation in UK FCO-funded programs aimed at countering Russia conformed to the news organization’s Trust Principles, spokesperson Jenny Vereker stated, “This funding supports our independent work to assist journalists and journalism all over the world, as part of our mission to strengthen a free and vibrant global media ecosystem to support a plurality of voices and preserve the flow of accurate and independent information. This is because accurate and balanced news coverage is a crucial pillar of any free, fair and informed society.”

In recent years, the BBC and Reuters have played an increasingly aggressive part in demonizing the governments of countries where London and Washington are seeking regime change. Meanwhile, high-profile online investigative outlets like Bellingcat have sprouted up seemingly overnight to assist these efforts.

With the release of the UK FCO documents, questions must be raised about whether these esteemed news organizations are truly the independent and ethical journalistic entities they claim to be. While they hammer away at “authoritarian” states and malign Russian activities, they have little to say about the machinations of the powerful Western governments in their immediate midst. Perhaps they are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

thegrayzone.com

By Aaron MATÉ

Western media outlets have failed to disclose that Bellingcat is funded by NATO member states, including the US via the National Endowment for Democracy, and that Bellingcat has a dubious record. In a leaked assessment, the UK government’s Integrity Initiative wrote: “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

And few have paid attention to reporting by the New York Times that shortly after Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment, “representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service provided members of the German government with details about the poisoning, including the identities of the Federal Security Service officers involved, that directly implicated the Russian government.”

thegrayzone.com

The simple facts are that Aleksey Navalny fell sick on an internal flight in Russia on 20 August, the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was taken to hospital, a couple of days later he was flown to a hospital in Germany – at Putin’s urging, we are told – from which he has been released apparently in good health.

And the Gadarene swine of the West rushed straight for the cliff. Poisoned by tea, or was it a water bottle? maybe his clothing. Cancel last! – cocktail the night before. Ignore all rumours about coke or diabetic shock – it’s gotta be Putin’s poison du jour, novichok (has he run out of polonium, mercury and dioxin?) and, what is more, by a variant “more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family”. Russian doctors found no poison – but who would believe a Russian? Russia gave “no credible explanation” to the accusations. But how could any Russian ever say anything “credible” as Canada’s Globe and Mail wondered: “The Kremlin, predictably, says it didn’t poison Alexey Navalny. So what can the West do?” The West in general, and the European Union in particular, likes to boast about values among which is that “Everyone who has been charged shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.” But not if you’re Russia. Russia must answer questions demands UK, Europeans on OPCW, Merkel, NATO, When Russia was unable to prove its innocence, the EU sanctioned “guilty” Russian officials as did most of the West. That the story was the usual slipshod assemblage of orphic assertions was revealed when the opposition party Alternative für Deutschland forced German government spokesmen to answer its questions: it was “not aware” of many things.

And sillier still: Anders Åslund called Merkel and Navalny “the two leaders of the free world” and, not to be outdone, John Brennan tweeted “Imagine prospects for world peace, prosperity, & security if Joe Biden were President of the United States & Alexei Navalny the President of Russia”.

Paul Robinson took the trouble to go through the Sunday Times story and discovered that only 100 words of 4,000 mentioned the second attack and they were erected on a flimsy foundation: “the underpants story is just what a single Russian scientist, unconnected to the case, happens to think“. But we can add unnamed scientist to the “unnamed intelligence sources”. Amusingly, the scriptwriters didn’t coordinate this latest twist with the hero of the story and Navalny himself was quoted as calling the Sunday Times story “very strange”, adding that he was “really surprised” to hear it. On his side of the tale he was busy naming his attackers and Bellingcat, that reliable investigator who uncovers what Western intelligence agencies cannot, assured us that Navalny had been tailed. But, having caught Bellingcat out on this howler three years ago, I don’t waste my time on him either – falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

In short, it’s all the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again – Bellingcat, unnamed intelligence sources, evidence we can’t show you, changing facts, weird inconsistencies, amazing coincidences. I’ve been at this business for some time and I remember when Putin poisoned Karinna Moskalenko and I also remember when he didn’t; my trust in these stories departed a long time ago. And that is where the word “stupid” comes in. These stories invite considerations of stupidity. But who are the stupid ones? Putin & Co? The consumers of the stories? Or the story-makers themselves?

The first possibility is that Putin and his team are stupid. They decide to assassinate Navalny (but why? He’s probably peaked in his effect – in the latest Levada poll he scores a couple of percentage points; a rating little changed in six years; in short, his ratings have never been much above the polling error.) And why now? Anyway, we’re supposed to believe that they decide that now is the moment and, rather than using something simple – a mugging or a car accident – they use novichok. Despite the fact that, as the western media has repeatedly told us, it had already failed in one assassination attempt. To make matters even stupider, the Germans solemnly told us this was a “a variant that the world did not know until this attack, but which is said to be more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family… The fact that he is still alive… is only due to a chain of happy circumstances“, “Harder” was another word used. “Harder” than the Salisbury version; but, apparently, not “hard” enough to require decontamination teams, hazmat suits or even to make Navalny sicker. But back to the story; after it had failed to kill him, rather than sending a couple of hitmen to the hospital with a pillow, they tried again with the same stuff. Some “expert” stupidly tweeted that it’s a “false narrative” to argue that if the Russian authorities had wanted to kill him he would be dead because the “false narrators” are wrongly assuming that Russian assassins are “omnipotent”. No, not “omnipotent”, just normally competent – and do remember that the people who buy the Navalny poisoning story also believe that Putin has been routinely killing people and therefore ought to be pretty good at it. Anyway, we’re supposed to believe that when the second attempt failed – that’s three failures out of three – Putin let him go to Germany where all this could be revealed to the western media by “unnamed intelligence sources”. Are Putin and his team really that stupid? You would have to be pretty stupid to think that they are.

Which smoothly leads us to the second possibility which is that the purveyors of western news stories (emphasis should probably be put on the second word) think their customers are stupid enough to think that Putin & co are that stupid. The customers are supposed to swallow the notion that Putin wanted Navalny dead, used something that would immediately be blamed on him, failed, tried again with the same thing, failed again and then said, ah… whatever… and let him go. Are the readers that stupid? Only very stupid people would think they were.

Which leads to the third possibility – it’s not Putin & Co who are stupid, it’s not the readers who are stupid, it’s the rather small number of people who control the western media who are so stupid that they think they can get away with this obviously idiotic story.

But, at that level, it’s probably not stupidity, although there is surely the stupidity engendered by arrogance enfolded in sycophancy. It’s probably really about power and control. What better proof of power can there be than to tell a lie and have everyone, knowing that it is a lie, repeat it? Washington had the MH17 shootdown on film, but don’t ask to see it. Russia invades Ukraine regularly, but the invaders can’t get past Donetsk airport. Brexit was a Russian plot until somebody sued and demanded to see the evidence. The Panama Papers were about Putin except that they didn’t mention him and therefore they must have been by Putin. Russia is simultaneously all-powerful and about to fall apart. Russian threatens the NATO border.

We’re actually seeing the process happening right in front of us now while we watch: with a straight face CNN told us that US elections were dangerously insecure in 2006, compromised in 2016 but watertight in 2020. Any moment we can expect the headline: “Putin’s election hackers spread conspiracy theories about election hacking”.

Most of these stories are dictated by “Western intelligence sources who cannot be identified” or by organisations with opaque ownership and that, rather than stupidity, gives us the clue about the purpose of these idiotic stories. It’s not the details that matter in propaganda, it’s the lasting impression. Long after the details – Litvinenko, Yushchenko, Skripal, Navalny – are forgotten, people will remember that Putin poisons people he doesn’t like. Orwell knew: “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth”. Or we can take Captain Jedburgh’s point of view and make things so complicated that everyone has a theory but no one has the facts.

But that also works best with a helpful push from stupidity.

Aaron MATÉ

Bellingcat, the NATO member state-funded website that has participated in a propaganda effort to accuse Syria of a chemical weapons attack in April 2018 and justify the US-led bombing that followed, has published a new falsehood-ridden attack on an OPCW whistleblower whose suppressed findings exposed the pro-war deception.

According to Bellingcat, a leak that it has obtained not only “proves that a chemical attack did occur,” in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2018, but also, “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false.”

Contrary to Bellingcat’s account, the website has only added a new chapter to the OPCW cover-up scandal by publishing an article beset with multiple demonstrable falsehoods and outlandish or unsupported claims. It also features a malicious effort to dox and discredit a veteran, highly-regarded OPCW inspector who challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation.

The anonymously authored Bellingcat article’s problems begin with its very premise, which turns out to be a blatant falsehood. The article is based on excerpts of a leaked draft letter that, Bellingcat claims, was sent in June 2019 by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias to Brendan Whelan, a member of the OPCW’s Douma team.

However, The Grayzone can reveal that the text that Bellingcat published was never actually sent to Whelan. Indeed, the text of the letter featured by Bellingcat was actually an unsent draft that Whelan never received. This fact dismantles the heart of the NATO state-backed website’s argument.

Dr. Whelan, a 16-year OPCW veteran, first challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation in June 2018, weeks after the OPCW team returned from Syria. A series of leaks show that Whelan and the other OPCW inspectors who deployed to Syria found evidence that undermined allegations of a chemical attack in Douma. Yet their data was suppressed, and, when the censorship was challenged, the inspectors were removed from their own investigation.

The cover-up coincided with pressure on the OPCW from the U.S. government, which had bombed Syria, along with the UK and France, in April 2018 based on the pretext that the Syrian government was culpable. The OPCW’s final report in March 2019 omitted the suppressed findings and strongly implied Syrian government guilt.

According to Bellingcat, the purported letter from Director General Arias to Whelan is a silver bullet that absolved its initial findings and resolved all the questions surrounding the Douma investigation in one fell swoop. The letter “proves that a chemical attack did occur,” Bellingcat claims, and also “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false and confirms that the organisation acted exactly as it was mandated to.”

In addition, Bellingcat tries to suggest that Whelan, Wikileaks, and several media outlets including The Grayzone have somehow engaged in reckless malpractice, or even a conspiracy, by withholding the damning letter that the band of NATO state-funded digital sherlocks have managed to expose.

That would be an extraordinary feat for any set of leaks, let alone one that amounts to a grand total of just five paragraphs. But Bellingcat’s sweeping declarations are, in reality, based on a series of falsehoods — starting with the premise of the article itself.

Bellingcat’s “letter” is actually an unsent draft

According to Bellingcat, the letter was “drafted by several members of the OPCW in June 2019 and then sent by the director general of the organisation, Fernando Arias, in reply to” Dr. Whelan.

This claim is completely false. Arias did send a letter to Whelan in June 2019, but it is not the one Bellingcat published. Arias’ actual letter does not contain any of Bellingcat’s text – not even a single sentence. The Grayzone has obtained the actual letter that Arias sent to Whelan and has made it available in full here.

The actual letter that Arias sent to Whelan is easily distinguishable from the screenshot that Bellingcat published – and falsely claimed was sent by Arias.

Bellingcat did not publish its draft letter in full. In an email, and in multiple Twitter posts after the email went unanswered, The Grayzone asked Bellingcat whether or not it attempted to verify with the OPCW that the content of the letter it published was actually sent by Arias to Whelan. Bellingcat did not respond. (It did however, quietly correct an error that The Grayzone pointed out on a separate claim that falsely characterized Whelan’s expressed views). The OPCW Public Affairs office also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Ironically, after the initial publication of its article, Bellingcat staffers took to Twitter to boastfully proclaim that journalists who have reported on the OPCW leaks were either “played” by their sources, or worse, deliberately chose to withhold the supposed damning OPCW draft letter that Bellingcat got its hands on.

“The reply from the OPCW DG was never published: either Whelan never leaked it, or those who published these leaks, such as @Wikileaks, chose not to,” Bellingcat wrote. “In either case this decision deliberately excluded a vital part of the story that clearly demonstrates Whelan’s claims were wrong.”

Last year documents were leaked from the OPCW accompanied by claims from a former OPCW employee “Alex”, that the OPCWs Douma report was “doctored”.

We’ve obtained correspondence which proves Alex’s claims are wrong and that no such “doctoring” took place.https://t.co/K1evl95lRh

— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) October 26, 2020

“This letter shows there was a clear attempt to obscure the truth of what happened in Douma on 7th April 2018. The only question that remains is whether @wikileaks, @couragefound, @ClarkeMicah, @aaronjmate et al were fooled, or whether they participated in obscuring this truth,” Bellingcat added.

Last year documents were leaked from the OPCW accompanied by claims from a former OPCW employee “Alex”, that the OPCWs Douma report was “doctored”.

We’ve obtained correspondence which proves Alex’s claims are wrong and that no such “doctoring” took place.https://t.co/K1evl95lRh

— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) October 26, 2020

“Aaron Mate of @TheGrayzoneNews confirms he DID NOT receive a crucial email exchange from his source for the Douma OPCW Leaks that would have completely debunked the claims he’s been making for the last two years, even speaking about it at the UN,” Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins wrote in a tweet that he pinned to his profile page. The Grayzone’s journalists, Higgins alleged, “fail to publish key pieces of correspondence that run counter to the narrative they’re trying to push, that’s all.”

Aaron Mate of @TheGrayzoneNews confirms he DID NOT receive a crucial email exchange from his source for the Douma OPCW Leaks that would have completely debunked the claims he’s been making for the last two years, even speaking about it at the UN. https://t.co/AFxIyocfZF

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) October 26, 2020

Grayzone is the far-left version of Fox News, OANN & Breitbart.

— Woon Cing Hsian (@CingHsian) October 26, 2020

“The people and orgs mentioned in the piece, Peter Hitchens, Aaron Mate, Robert Fisk, Wikileaks, the Courage Foundation and others have been caught red handed either practicing ‘journalism’ of the most shoddy kind, or participating in a cover-up of a chemical attack,” Bellingcat’s Nick Waters wrote. “Mr Maté got played by his source because he didn’t do proper due diligence,” Waters added.

So we know the answer from one. Mr Maté got played by his source because he didn’t do proper due diligence. pic.twitter.com/meWkflM16l

— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) October 26, 2020

In the end, the Bellingcat staffers’ attempt at mockery backfired in embarrassing fashion. The website erroneously claimed that the letter it published was sent to Whelan, and then tried to scold Whelan and journalists based on that false premise. The Bellingcat article notes that its published text is based on a “draft version of a letter.” Bellingcat mistakenly believed that the “draft” it obtained was actually sent.

In other words, Bellingcat was played by its source, did not do proper due diligence, or both.

A new attempt to cover up the cover-up

The fact that Arias did not actually send Whelan the draft text that Bellingcat published raises a series of possibilities. Given that it was drafted but never sent, one is that Arias’ office did not have confidence in the draft text’s assertions about the Douma probe.

However, although the Director General decided not to send the text to Whelan, it can at least be assumed that it does have the backing of the “several members of the OPCW” that Bellingcat claims drafted it, along with the “OPCW scientists” who provided “input.”

Whatever the case, the draft text in no way supports the grandiose conclusions that Bellingcat draws from it.

According to Bellingcat, the text “proves that a chemical attack did occur,” in Douma and also “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false and confirms that the organisation acted exactly as it was mandated to.” Even if all of the draft text’s new assertions were somehow correct, they still could not possibly support such a sweeping interpretation.

In regards to a cover-up, the Bellingcat draft text does not address, let alone challenge, a single concern that the inspectors have raised about the manipulation of their investigation.

According to the inspectors, and as documented in the leaks from the OPCW, the Douma team’s initial report was doctored and kept from the public; key evidence was suppressed; key conclusions were re-written to suggest that Syria was guilty of an attack; a US delegation tried to influence them; and – after the censorship came under protest – all of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) members who conducted the investigation in Syria (except for one paramedic) were sidelined and replaced by a so-called “core team.”

The Bellingcat draft letter excerpt does not address any of these revelations. It is illogical then for Bellingcat to claim that the draft text “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false and confirms that the organisation acted exactly as it was mandated to.” Not only was the draft text never sent, it does not address a single allegation about the many ways in which the investigation was compromised.

Whelan outlined his concerns about the compromise of his investigation and the flaws in the OPCW’s final report in two letters, sent in March and April 2019. It was these letters that Arias’ actual letter to Whelan came in response to. Whelan’s letters are nearly identical, with the April letter excluding some information unrelated to any scientific concerns. The Grayzone is publishing Whelan’s April 2019 letter for the first time. It can be accessed here.

Comparing the OPCW’s response to Whelan — both in the letter that Arias actually sent to Whelan and in the draft text that Bellingcat falsely claimed Arias sent to Whelan — shows that none of Whelan’s concerns about the manipulation of his probe were addressed.

A desperate doxxing

If anything, the Bellingcat draft only adds weight to allegations of an official cover-up. What’s more, the malicious tactics deployed by a site founded by a self-described video game expert fond of telling critics lewd insults reflects a mounting sense of desperation.

In an explicit and deliberate violation of Whelan’s privacy and confidentiality, Bellingcat not only named him but identified him as “Alex”, the whistleblower who privately shared his concerns about the cover-up with a panel convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019.

During his tenure, Whelan was considered the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry. He played such a senior role in the Douma investigation that he led the probe’s scientific component and authored its initial report. In a presentation to the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction at the OPCW shortly after returning from Syria, it was Whelan — not the nominal Douma team leader — who briefed the Member States about the mission, The Grayzone can reveal.

Bellingcat not only violated Whelan’s privacy by publishing his name, but lodged a demonstrably false accusation that he may have concealed “evidence.” As this article shows, Whelan never received the draft letter text that Bellingcat published.

Given that Bellingcat’s source was clearly someone with access to draft OPCW documents, it is fair to conclude that an official from within the organization has used Bellingcat as a public relations tool to malign Whelan and intimidate other OPCW inspectors.

Vindicating the dissenting inspector and further invalidating the final report

While the draft text published by Bellingcat does not address the OPCW’s cover-up, it does address a few scientific concerns that Whelan expressed about the Douma probe’s final report – albeit briefly, in just three paragraphs.

Based on this, Bellingcat drew the risible conclusion that this brief excerpt of an unsent draft letter “proves that a chemical attack did occur” and “established that a chemical weapon was used.”

It is an outrageous claim for a number of reasons. First, the unsent draft letter text addressed only a fraction of the dissenting inspectors’ scientific concerns. Second, if proof of a chemical attack existed, it would not have appeared for the first time in an unsent draft letter from the Director General to a dissenting inspector, and months after the final report was issued. It would or should have been documented in the Final Report itself – and in fact, it was not.

Further, the draft letter’s scientific claims contain an illogical and incoherent rationale.

According to the draft text, after Whelan left the OPCW for good in September 2018, an OPCW designated lab developed “techniques that allowed the OPCW to conclude chlorine gas had been released in the building in which the Syrian civilians died.”

Although no details are given of what these purported new techniques consisted of, the letter claimed that they were based on detecting so-called “chlorinated pinene compounds that have been shown to form in certain types of wood that have been exposed to chlorine gas.” As a result, “This laboratory’s analysis of wood samples taken from Douma indicated that the wood indeed had been exposed to chlorine gas.” (emphasis added)

What makes this argument so confusing and absurd is that no wood samples were ever analyzed after Whelan left the OPCW – or for that matter, after the Interim Report was published in July 2018. (This can be verified, for anyone wishing to check, by comparing Annex 3 of the Interim Report with Annex 5 of the Final Report, entries 6,8, 9, 12,18 and 7,12, 14, 22, 30 respectively).

Therefore, regardless of if a new technique was developed after Whelan’s departure, it was never used to analyse further wood samples, and could not have added anything new to the evidence since the Interim Report.

In reality, a technique for detecting chlorinated pinene compounds (specifically bornyl chloride) in wood had already been developed by May 2018 when the first batch of analysis results were received by the OPCW, and before Whelan was sidelined. The original suppressed report, which Whelan authored, and the published Initial Report of July 2018 demonstrate this. The reports also show that bornyl chloride was detected in one wood sample from the basement of Location 2 (an apartment where one of the gas cylinders was found, and where scores of dead bodies were filmed) by one of the Designated Labs (source: Original suppressed report, Annex 5, entry 8; Interim Report, Annex 3, entry 8).

In neither of these reports is the presence of chlorinated pinene (bornyl chloride) considered a definite indicator of exposure of the wood to chlorine gas. According to the original report, it merely indicates that the wood was exposed to hydrogen chloride, which can come from chlorine gas but can also come from other benign sources.

No consideration was given in the final report to alternative possible sources of hydrogen chloride apart from chlorine gas. The failure to consider alternate hypotheses is one of the many concerns that Whelan’s letter raised to Arias about scientifically flawed, if not fraudulent, methods evident in the final report. It is also the very reason that the Original report states that: “The exact identity of the active chlorine-containing compound was not determined,” and why the published Interim Report concludes that work to establish the significance of finding various chlorinated chemicals at Locations 2 and 4 “is ongoing.”

In fact, the final report also acknowledged the uncertainty about what the wood samples were exposed to: “Based on these findings alone, it cannot be unequivocally stated that the wood was exposed to chlorine gas, rather than to hydrogen chloride or hydrochloric acid.” (paragraph 8.10) This is inconsistent with the claim made in Bellingcat’s draft OPCW text that “the wood samples taken from Douma indicated that the wood indeed had been exposed to chlorine gas.”

The Grayzone can also reveal that Whelan, despite being sidelined from the investigation, undertook further work on the source of the chlorinated chemicals after the Interim report was issued.

Whelan reported his findings at an open presentation to OPCW Inspectorate and Verification staff, including the Director of Inspectorate, in July 2018. In his presentation, Whelan demonstrated that chlorinated compounds found in the Douma samples are commonly present in the environment in such media as chlorinated water and wood preservatives. One of the key chemicals, trichlorophenol, which had been considered a “smoking gun” chemical that had been detected in some wood samples was now shown to be a common-place chemical found in such commodities as wood preservatives.

The FFM “core” team ignored this information and continued to claim it was a “signature” chemical in their final report. “The presence of chlorine-reactive species is based primarily on the detection of bornyl chloride and/or trichlorophenol,” the final report states. (para 8.9) Whelan protested this point in his letter to the Director General in April 2019.

Remarkably, the draft text published by Bellingcat acknowledges that Whelan’s objection was correct. The draft text stated: “Your letter further refers to 2,4,6-trichlorophenol as being used erroneously as an indicator of chlorine exposure, and you rightly point out that this chemical can be present for a variety of reasons that do not require chlorine gas exposure.” Assuming that the OPCW Director General stands behind this unsent claim, then the OPCW has now conceded one of Whelan’s objections to the final report.

Bellingcat’s draft OPCW text contains another revealing statement. In his April 2019 letter, Whelan pointed out that “that no background samples were analysed to put the detection of the chlorine-containing compounds in context.” The draft text attempts to rebut Whelan by stating: “Whether background samples were analysed or not has no bearing on this very clear evidence.”

This astonishing claim is based on the false premise that it could be assumed that there were no chlorinated organic chemicals in the background in Douma. This was despite the explicit acknowledgement in the Final Report itself that because many chlorinated organic chemicals existed in the natural background, “it was important to gather control samples.” (Annex 4, paragraph 7) If it was so important to gather control samples, why would one not bother to analyze them?

An imaginary Syrian-Russian confession

After misinterpreting the draft text and drawing a sweeping interpretation without subjecting it to any scientific (or rational) scrutiny, Bellingcat went on to suggest an equally absurd conclusion. According to Bellingcat, their OPCW leak “also reveals that at a diplomatic level behind closed doors, the Russian and Syrian governments have both agreed with the conclusions of the OPCW report.”

It is worth considering the implications of this statement. Is Bellingcat – which has vigorously challenged Russia and Syria’s denials of Syrian government culpability in Douma – now actually asserting that these same governments secretly declared themselves guilty of a murderous chemical attack? Why then, one might wonder, hasn’t anybody revealed this shocking admission of guilt in the more than two years that the alleged Douma attack has been fought over in public?

To support this outlandish claim, Bellingcat shared the final two of the five draft paragraphs that it obtained. The draft text – written in Arias’ voice, but never actually sent by him to Whelan — stated:

I would further like to point out that the conclusion of the final Douma report is not in question. No State Party has questioned the conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a toxic chemical was used as a weapon in Douma.

This includes the Syrian Arab Republic and the Russian Federation, which in recent weeks have each sent us comments and questions on the final Douma report in notes verbale in which they themselves have indicated their agreement with the conclusion of the final report. These notes verbale, as well as our replies to them, have been made available to State Parties.

In convincing themselves that this vague, unsent text somehow proves an admission of guilt on Russia and Syria’s part, Bellingcat has also failed to understand that both government’s views have not been confined to “a diplomatic level behind closed doors,” but have instead been made public in the notes verbal (a formal diplomatic communication) that the draft text refers to, and that anyone can access.

Russia and Syria’s notes verbal, available on the OPCW’s website, do not challenge the claim that there is a possible presence of molecular chlorine in the cylinders found in Douma. But the documents also raise a number of other objections, including to a point that Bellingcat believes Russia admitted to. According to the note verbale, Russia told the OPCW that “the factual material contained in the report does not allow us to draw a conclusion as to the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon.”

Moreover, suppose in Bellingcat’s fantasy world that Russia and Syria have suddenly declared themselves guilty of a chemical attack in Douma: what would that have to do with claims by the inspectors that their allegation was covered up? The inspectors wrote their initial report, and protested its censorship, well before the notes verbal and an unsent draft letter that Bellingcat ludicrously spun as a confession of guilt from the Russian and Syrian governments.

Believing that they have caught Russia and Syria admitting to a crime, Bellingcat then suggested that their imaginary confessions raised doubts about a recent UN Security Council session where this reporter testified. The two draft paragraphs cited above, Bellingcat states, “further casts the UN event at which [Aaron] Mate spoke as a public relations charade designed by the Russians as a disinformation exercise.”

With a staggering array of errors in just a single article – starting with a false premise and culminating in a delusional claim that Syria and Russia have issued secret confessions of guilt – it is the NATO-state funded outlet Bellingcat that has committed one of its biggest disinformation exercises to date.

“Bellingcat was somewhat discredited”

That Bellingcat published falsehoods and unsupported, outlandish claims is not out of character. Although it portrays itself as an “open-source” investigative website, Bellingcat is in fact a Western government-backed outfit that frequently publishes factually challenged articles about designated NATO adversaries, including Russia and Syria.

Bellingcat’s financial backers include the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government organization founded by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief, Bill Casey. (“A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA,” the NED’s first director, Allen Weinstein, told the Washington Post in 1991). It is unclear how much money Bellingcat has received from the NED, as both organizations refuse to disclose it. Bellingcat takes in an even far greater sum from other Western governments and cut outs, including the Dutch Postcode Lottery. Bellingcat describes itself as a partner in the Open Information Partnership (OIP), a program of the UK government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO. It is unclear what this partnership entails, and whether it involves funding.

Even Bellingcat’s own partners have privately raised doubts about its credibility. A leaked document from the Integrity Initiative, an intelligence operation also under the umbrella of the FCO, concluded that: “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has also been caught in a potential lie about another partnership with the OPCW itself. As of at least September 2019, Bellingcat claimed on its website that the OPCW was one of its “partners.” However in February 2020, Higgins suddenly announced on Twitter that Bellingcat’s claim of an OPCW partnership was wrong, and the result of a “copy & paste” error. Bellingcat, Higgins claimed, had mistakenly “copy and pasted the list of names from another document and didn’t mean to leave it in… We’ve not collaborated with the OPCW, apologies for the confusion, totally my fault.”

I just want to nip this silly claim the chemical weapon truthers are spreading in the bud, Bellingcat had nothing to do with the OPCW FFM report on Douma, and we certainly weren’t one of the ballistic experts cited in the report. Stop making up stories to impress your followers.

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) February 12, 2020

Yet when Bellingcat published the “corrected” list, only one organization was now missing: the OPCW.

Higgins has never explained what the supposed “another document” was, nor how it could be that every one of the groups that Bellingcat said was a “partner” in September 2019 was still a partner in February 2020 — except for one organization, the OPCW. Higgins’ “correction” happened to come one day after Bellingcat published an attack on the OPCW whistleblowers that identified Whelan by name.

Now Bellingcat has once again attacked Whelan, with an error-ridden screed distinguished only by the magnitude of its falsehoods, and embarrassment.

thegrayzone.com