Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method, Panetta said, was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.”

The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations during the Cold War, wrote of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. The most effective is an operation so complex one CIA plant is the initial information source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. At that point you can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.

Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like Embassy spokesmen to appear to inadvertently confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who discredit counter-narratives. The academics may never know where their money comes from, adding to their credibility.

From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all just a conspiracy theory. Of course the US would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. By its nature reporting on intelligence always requires one to work with limited information. Always give time a chance to explain.

Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets. Almost none have ever discussed their work publically. CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations. The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for about ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it. Such long term relationships are a powerful tool, so feeding a true big story to a young reporter to get him promoted is part of the game. Don’t forget the anonymous source who drove the Watergate story was an FBI official who through his actions made the careers of cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein went on to champion the Russiagate story. Woodward became a Washington hagiographer. Ken Dilanian, formerly with the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and now working for NBC, maintains a “collaborative relationship” with the CIA.

That’s the tradecraft and the history. The problem for America is once again the tools of war abroad have come home. The intelligence community is currently operating against the American people using established media.

Some of it can’t be more obvious. The CIA always planted stories in foreign media for American outlets to pick up. The Agency works directly with Hollywood to control movies about itself. Turn on any of the advocacy media outlets and you see panels of former CIA officials. Journalist Matt Taibbi even created a list (and since ex-‘s need agency clearance to speak, all are of the officially approved class.) None is more egregious than John Brennan, former Director CIA, who for years touted Russiagate when he knew from information gathered while he was still in office it was all a lie. The uber-lie that Trump was dirty with Russia was leaked to the press most likely by Brennan in January 2017 as the kick off event to the info op still running today.

Brennan’s role is more than speculation. John Durham, the US attorney leading the ongoing “how it happened” Russiagate investigation into the intelligence community, has requested Brennan’s emails and call logs from CIA. Durham is also examining whether Brennan changed his story between his public comments (not under oath, say anything) and his May 2017 testimony to Congress (under oath, watch out for perjury) about the dossier. Reporter Aaron Mate is less delicate, laying out the evidence Brennan was “a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.” Even blunter is Senator Rand Paul, who directly accuses Brennan of trying “to bring down a sitting president.”

Let’s see how that worked to understand how info ops intertwine with covert ops. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report shows the FBI unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign based on the root of the information op, the Dossier. Horowitz’s report shows it was a team effort among the 5 Eyes — Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his nation’s intel services, arranged a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos to set in motion FBI FISA surveillance. Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ. The op used CIA assets, the shadowy academics Mark Halper and Joseph Mifsud, as dangles. We see a honey trap run in classic style, with a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer. Dossier author and ex-British intel officer Christopher Steele created a textbook officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source.

It was all based on nothing but disinformation and the American press swallowed every bit of it, turning the op into a three year tantrum falsely convincing a vast number of citizens their nation was run by a Russian asset. Robert Mueller, whose investigation was supposed to propel all this nothing into impeachment hearings, ended up exercising one of the last bits of political courage Americans will ever see in walking right to the edge of essentially a coup and refusing to step off into the abyss.

The CIA is a learning institution, and recovered well from Russiagate. Details can be investigated. That’s where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn’t true. But the a-ha discovery was since you’ll never formally prosecute anyone, why bother with evidence. Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. The new paradigm included let the nature of the source — the brave lads of the intelligence agencies — legitimize the accusations this time, not facts. Go overt and use the new, unexpected prestige of the CIA as progressive heros to substantiate things.

So in December 2017 CNN reported Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and CBS both claimed independent confirmation. It was a complete lie, based on fabricated documents. How do you confirm a lie? Ask another liar.

In February 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee the Russians were election meddling again to favor Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefed Bernie Sanders the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries in his favor. Both briefings were leaked, the former to the New York Times to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, the latter to the Washington Post ahead of the Nevada caucuses to damage Sanders.

In June 2020 The New York Times stated CIA officials concluded the Russians “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.”  The story ran near another claiming Trump had spoken disrespectfully about fallen soldiers. Neither story was true. But they broke around the same time Trump announced his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, aimed at discouraging pro-military voters.

Earlier this month The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, claimed the FBI gave a defensive briefing to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine. Giuliani supposedly ignored the warning. The story was “independently confirmed” by both NBC and The New York Times. It was totally false.

The American system always envisioned an adversarial role for the media. One of the earliest challenges to freedom of the press was the Colonial-era Peter Zenger case, which established the right of the press to criticize politicians free from libel charges. At times when things really mattered and even as other journalists hid under their beds, men like Edward R. Murrow worked their craft to preserve democracy. Same for Walter Cronkite finally reaching his opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New York Times reporters weighing imprisonment to publish the Pentagon Papers.

In each of those instances the handful of reporters who risked everything to tell the truth were held up as heroes. Seeing the Times fighting for its life, the Washington Post co-published the Pentagon Papers to force the government to make its case not just against a rival newspaper, but the 1A itself.

Not today. Journalism is today devoted to eliminating practitioners unwilling to play the game. Few have been targeted more than Glenn Greenwald (with Matt Taibbi as runner up.) Greenwald exploded into a journalistic superhero for his reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA archive, founding The Intercept to serve as a platform for that work (Greenwald’s downfall parallels Julian Assange, who went from liberal hero for exposing the foundational lies of the Iraq War to zero when his Wikileaks was demonized for supposedly helping Donald Trump.)

Greenwald’s criticism of the media for accepting Deep State lies as truth, particularly concerning Russiagate, turned him into a villian for progressives. MSNBC banned him, and other media outlets ran stories critical of him. Then something very, very odd happened to make it appear The Intercept outed one of its own whistleblower sources. Evidence suggests the source was a patsy, set up by the intel community, and exposed via Matt Cole, one of The Intercept journalists on this story. Cole was also involved in the outing of source CIA officer John Kiriakou in connection with torture claims. Either way new whistleblowers will think twice before turning to The Intercept. Greenwald recently quit the site after it refused to publish his article on Hunter Biden’s ties to China unless he deleted portions critical of Joe Biden.

Greenwald seems to have figured out the intel community’s game, writing “the most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate… Every journalist, even the most honest and careful, will get things wrong sometimes, and trustworthy journalists issue prompt corrections when they do. That behavior should be trust-building. But when media outlets continue to use the same reckless and deceitful tactics — such as claiming to have ‘independently confirmed‘ one another’s false stories when they have merely served as stenographers for the same anonymous security state agents while ‘confirming’ nothing — that strongly suggests a complete indifference to the truth and, even more so, a willingness to serve as disinformation agents.”

Democracy has no meaning if people simply vote uninformed, as they are propagandized. It will be sport for future historians to mark the thing that most pushed America into decline. Seeing decades of success abroad in using info ops, the CIA and others turned those weapons inward. So seeing her Deep State meddle in presidential politics, simultaneously destroying (albeit mostly with their cooperation) the adversarial media, while crushing faith in both our leaders and in the process of electing them, will certainly be a top qualifier.

wemeantwell.com

By Mark CURTIS

A leading Guardian columnist wrote an article in February listing the world’s “bad guys.” “Across the world,” he asserted, “the bad guys are winning.” His list included Burma, China, Russia, North Korea, Syria and Ethiopia — but he didn’t mention the U.K. or the U.S.

A few months before, another influential columnist at the paper, Jonathan Freedland listed Assad of Syria, Orban of Hungary, Putin of Russia, Bolsonaro of Brazil, Modi of India, and Netanyahu of Israel as the world’s “bad guys.” He also listed Donald Trump, but again not the U.K.

These listings are telling and signify how The Guardian and its sister paper The Observer report on the world and the U.K.’s place within it: The U.K.  is one of the good guys.

To the editors of The Observer, postwar Britain has “always” championed a “rules-based international order.” But they claim that the “proud legacy of a consensual, rules-based world order” is now under threat from the likes of Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — again, leaders designated as enemies by the British government.

So when an Observer editorial in May last year covered the importance of the United Nations, it lamented only Russian, Chinese and Trump’s years of undermining the international organisation, but again didn’t mention Britain.

That Britain, too, is effectively a rogue state when it comes to upholding the rulings and values of the UN, and any supposedly “rules-based” world order, is not something that appears to trouble Guardian senior writers.

This is despite disastrous British wars in, for example, Iraq and Libya, and the U.K.’s support for most of the world’s repressive regimes, to name just two obvious aspects of the U.K.’s negative impact on the world.

Declassified has undertaken a content analysis of reporting by the The Guardian and the Observer on U.K. foreign policies, covering the two years from April 2019 to March 2021. Our research builds on two previous examinations of national press coverage of British foreign policy, which revealed a similar whitewashing of the realities.

Not all The Guardian’s outputs have been analysed since these are vast, consisting of thousands of articles. But by focusing on some key U.K.  foreign policies, the research identifies five clear trends.

Myths of Benign British & US Power 

To The Guardian the more the U.K.  does in the world, the better this might be. Thus Guardian editors lament the government’s recent cuts in aid partly since it means “we… throw away our claim to global leadership.” Observer editors similarly want to increase Britain’s “international influence.”

Other articles complain that “the U.K.  is missing from world leadership,” in contrast to Russia and China which use a “full spectrum of influence.” It follows that Guardian editors back a large military budget, writing in November last year that “the case for a spending upgrade is strong,” indeed a “national priority.”

The U.K.’s world role is routinely seen as benign, and only occasionally does a more accurate picture emerge. One columnist wrote in 2019 that “Across the Middle East, Britain is too often seen as in league with despots and murderers while its subservience to harmful American policies erodes its reputation.”

But the language softens the reality of British policy. Why is the U.K. only “seen” to be supporting dictators, when it routinely does? Meanwhile, the “reputation” Britain supposedly has is one largely manufactured by the U.K.  media itself. This routinely presents Britain as benign, and essentially as the “force for good” which the government also claims.

Guardian editors wrote in December last year that “chairing global summits provides an opportunity for the U.K.  to rehabilitate its reputation as a responsible player on the world stage.”

A reader of The Guardian and Observer would naturally get the impression Britain is a routine supporter of international law and human rights – that occasionally goes wayward. And this rose-tinted view, impervious to the available evidence, also applies to its coverage of the U.S., the U.K.’s key ally.

The Guardian was brutally critical of just about everything that President Donald Trump did or said. But, just as it regularly heaped praise on President Barack Obama, through his numerous wars, it now writes a stream of supportive, even obsequious articles about Joe Biden and “his offer of hope and light,” as Guardian editors put it last year.

The paper has shown itself to be largely a devotee of Anglo-American “liberal” power, with editors recently welcoming the “opportunity” for Boris Johnson to be Biden’s “military ally.”

When the new U.S. president took the oath of office in January 2021, columnist Jonathan Freedland exulted: “His speech was light on rhetorical splendour, but it matched the moment perfectly. It was like him: humane, decent, rooted.”

To The Guardian, Trump represented a big break with the past. “Washington once championed international law to manage global relations. It now [under Trump] promotes the law of the jungle,” editors claimed in January 2020.

To another columnist, Simon Tisdall, who calls the U.S. “the land of the free,” a difference with Trump was that he “routinely cosied up to ‘strongman’ leaders” such as Turkey’s [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, Egypt’s [Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi] Sisi and the “unelected Gulf autocrats” – yet this is something every post-war U.S. president has done as a matter of course.

The faith Observer editors are willing to place on Biden has been extraordinary, even by their standards. After his first foreign policy speech as president in February, they noted that “Biden’s way is the diplomatic way, not the way of war” and that his “recommitment to multilateralism” represented “longstanding American policy objectives after a four-year hiatus.”

Three weeks later, Biden bombed Syria, ordering airstrikes against Iranian-backed forces in the country.

Biden is praised despite signs of him backsliding almost immediately on a key campaign promise to stop selling arms for the war in Yemen. His administration has already allowed the U.S. Air Force to take part in a major training exercise with Saudi Arabia and he has restarted Trump’s huge arms deal with the United Arab Emirates, a key member of the coalition bombing Yemen.

Partial Picture

A second key issue in Guardian reporting is that it gives readers a partial picture of the U.K.’s true role in the world. Whole areas of key U.K.  foreign policy are excluded from coverage.

Key Guardian foreign affairs writers hardly cover U.K.  foreign policy and reveal even less. They all write endlessly, however, about the U.S.

Israel illustrates The Guardian’s selective approach. Dozens of articles are published on Israel, regularly criticizing the illegal settlements in the occupied territories and calling for the U.K. to recognize a Palestinian state.

But coverage is remarkable for failing to reveal U.K. policies backing Israel. For example, we could find no mention at all of the U.K.’s considerable and increasing military cooperation, or of the U.K.’s obvious hypocrisy in formally opposing settlements while increasing trade and investment.

It’s a similar story with Egypt, on which the paper has published plenty of articles critical of the “relentless repression” under Sisi.

But while several articles mention the U.K.’s failure to condemn Sisi’s human rights abuses, none could be found in the past two years covering details of Britain’s support for the regime. The controversial deepening of military relations were not even mentioned in three editorials on the country.

This was even the case when the paper’s correspondent in Cairo was expelled from Egypt in March 2020. She did not appear to notice while in Egypt that the U.K.  was supporting the regime, beyond a passing mention in one article of £218-million worth of U.K. arms exports to the country.

Away from Israel and Egypt, the Gulf state of Oman might seem an obscure topic for the British general public but a media outlet serious about examining U.K. policies would report on it given it is the country’s closest military ally in the Middle East.

The Omani regime hosts dozens of U.K. military officers, three British intelligence bases and a major new U.K.  military port. Yet only 15 Guardian articles are tagged “Oman” in the past two years.

Worse, what little coverage there has been is largely puff pieces on Oman’s dictatorship. When absolute ruler Sultan Qaboos died in January 2020 after half a century in power, The Guardian responded with four articles glossing over his repressive rule.

Two of the articles failed to mention repression at all and one noted in passing that “he brooked no dissent.” The final piece assured readers that while the sultan prohibited political parties and public gatherings and was “an absolute monarch,” he was “albeit a relatively benevolent and popular one.”

Rarely Investigates UK Foreign Policy

The Guardian conducts few original investigations into U.K. foreign policies and gives no impression it wants to truly hold the government to account for its actions abroad. Very few foreign affairs articles appear to be based on freedom of information requests — an obvious way to expose government policies.

British Ministry of Defence. (Tagishsimon/Wikimedia Commons)

Of those that have drawn on such requests, it is often non-governmental organisations who have filed them rather than The Guardian’s own staff.

An outlet serious about examining U.K. intelligence and military policies would regularly investigate Britain’s key bases in Brunei, Belize, Kenya and Cyprus, for example. The Guardian does almost nothing on these.

It has published five articles on Belize in the past two years, none mentioning the U.K.  military role there. Declassified showed the Ministry Of Defence is allowed to use one-sixth of the country’s entire territory for jungle warfare training, using information already in the public domain for the story.

On the dictatorship in Brunei, there have been several articles critical of the sultan’s stance on stoning gay people, but no investigations into the U.K.  military forces there and how they keep the sultan in power.

One article, in 2019, did show that the British police had trained Bruneian officers, some of whom might be involved in imposing the laws punishing gay sex, but didn’t mention the U.K. military presence in the country.

Most astoundingly, despite 170 articles and videos tagged “Kenya” in the past two years, no mention could be found of the extensive U.K.  military presence in the country, which involves hundreds of troops and 13 separate training grounds.

The Guardian did not cover a recent wildfire sparked by British soldiers in Kenya, which burnt 12,000 acres (or 4,856,22 hectares), a debacle for which it is now being sued by a local environment group. In contrast, the fire was relatively well covered by tabloids such as the Sun and Daily Mail.

Critical Coverage Limited

Different to the right-wing U.K. press, The Guardian regularly covers and takes a critical line on issues such as arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other human rights abusers, on MI5/MI6 collusion in torture and on the U.K.’s dispossession of the Chagos Islanders.

The paper is also by far the most interested in the British press in covering U.K. tax havens and their role in global tax avoidance. Similarly, some major historical issues, like the British empire and slave trade, are also consistently covered critically.

This coverage probably explains why liberal readers value The Guardian and regard it as different to the overtly establishment, billionaire-owned media.

But there are limits to what the paper covers or reveals, even on these issues. There have been plenty of articles on the Yemen war and the British arms exports to Saudi Arabia fueling it, with editors mentioning the U.K. ’s “utter disregard for the lives of Yemenis.”

But the true extent of the U.K. role in facilitating the war, especially the activities of the RAF and arms corporation BAE Systems, has barely been covered. Ministers have been complicit in war crimes in Yemen since 2015, but have been let off the hook by The Guardian as much as by the rest of the media.

And what happened when a political leader came along who might have transformed U.K. policy towards Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

The Guardian and Observer devoted huge space during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in 2015-19 to undermine the prospect of a government led by him, as he posed the biggest ever challenge to establishment power, particularly on its ability to project its interests internationally.

The paper’s overtly hostile stance towards Corbyn was widely noted as it all but accused him of being anti-Semitic, while consistently demonizing the Labour leadership for allegedly failing to address anti-Semitism in the party.

Jonathan Cook, who used to work at The Guardian and now writes incisive analyses on the paper’s reporting, wrote that the paper was so opposed to Corbyn becoming prime minister that “it allowed itself, along with the rest of the corporate media, to be used as a channel for the Labour right’s disinformation.”

A study by the Media Reform Coalition found that Guardian reporting on anti-Semitism in Labour involved sourcing skewed in favor of certain factions, false statements or assertions of fact, and a systematic pattern of highly contentious claims by sources that were not duly challenged or qualified in news reports.

By contrast, The Guardian did not accuse Theresa May or Boris Johnson of anti-Semitism over their deep support of the Saudi regime, which is notoriously antisemitic.

This selective coverage of key issues to promote a political agenda is also illustrated in recent reporting on the U.K.’s new military strategies.

Last month, The Guardian’s defense and security editor Dan Sabbagh was, along with some other journalists trusted by the Ministry of Defence, given an advance copy of the government’s new military strategy set out in a Defence Command Paper.

Four days before the paper was published, Sabbagh wrote that “Britain’s military will unveil a shift towards more lethal, hi-tech and drone-enabled warfare… as ministers and chiefs attempt to stave off criticism of impending cuts in the size of the armed forces.”

Two other articles followed that focused heavily on supposed “cuts” to the size of the military that will put the army at “its lowest level since 1714” – and this marked the end of The Guardian’s coverage of the issue.

In fact, the U.K.’s new military strategy follows the government’s announcement of the biggest increase in military expenditure since the Cold War, giving the U.K. the fourth largest budget in the world, outspending the Kremlin.

Far from making the U.K. military less powerful, the declared new strategy and increased funds contain plans with potentially major impacts on other countries. The U.K. armed forces will be “more active around the world to combat threats of the future,” it states, adding that “the U.K.  will continue to adopt a forward presence around the world.”

Indeed, the U.K. armed forces will be “globally engaged, constantly campaigning”, the government declared.

Also remarkable was U.K.  Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s presentation of the paper to Parliament. He said the British military “will no longer be held as a force of last resort, but become [a] more present and active force around the world.”

This would involve “moving seamlessly from operating to warfighting.” But this emphasis on war-fighting was not reported by The Guardian. The paper only mentioned in passing in two articles another key government declaration — that it planned to increase the role of its military’s special forces, which operate behind a wall of official secrecy.

Boris Johnson’s government was explicitly outlining plans to fight more wars and deploy more military force across the world but these declarations were reported cursorily or not at all by the country’s leading liberal media outlet.

Platform for the Security State

While The Guardian publishes occasional articles which are mildly critical of Britain’s external intelligence agencies GCHQ and MI6, it just as frequently runs puff pieces on them.

GCHQ seems to hold a special place at The Guardian. Recent articles were headlined “GCHQ releases most ‘difficult prize ever’  in honour of Alan Turing” and “GCHQ aims to attract recruits with Science Museum spy exhibition,” for example.

It is noticeable that the paper conducts hardly any investigations into the role of the U.K.’s intelligence agencies abroad and criticism of them rarely appears in editorials.

Declassified previously revealed how The Guardian has been successfully targeted by the intelligence agencies to neutralize its reporting of the security state, especially after it revealed secret documents supplied by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

Indeed, nowadays, the paper regularly acts as a credulous amplifier of often unsubstantiated claims by British intelligence and military figures about the threat posed by Russia and China. It has published a massive 758 articles tagged “Russia” in the past year alone — a helpful focus on the British state’s number one official enemy.

It is not that Russia doesn’t deserve critical attention — clearly it does, especially in light of its illegal occupation of the Crimea, domestic authoritarianism and the likely role of the Kremlin in foreign assassinations, including in Britain.

But Whitehall has interests in exaggerating the threat posed to the U.K. by Moscow, and The Guardian, rather than seeking to expose this, appears more willing to act as a conduit for the state’s “media operations.”

The paper’s coverage of the war in Syria falls into the same category. Dozens of articles (rightly) condemn the Assad regime’s war crimes but few expose the nature of the largely jihadist opposition.

Moreover, The Guardian has recently all but excised the U.K.’s own role in Syria’s war: Declassified could find no mention in the past two years of Britain’s years-long operation to overthrow the Assad regime, together with its U.S. and Arab allies.

Evidence suggests that Britain began covert operations in Syria in late 2011 or early 2012. But The Guardian prefers a different line. Recent articles and editorials constantly lament that the U.K.  “failed to act” to stop Syria’s war, ignoring the fact that British covert action very likely helped prolong it.

Meanwhile, Observer editors have noted that “Britain joined a coalition to crush Isis [Islamic State],” without mentioning the U.K.  role in trying to overthrow Assad.

They have further written of “Western governments’ neglect of the eight-year war”, simply mentioning “outside meddling by Arab regimes” – and failing to note the massive U.S. covert action programme to arm and train Syrian rebels, costing at least $1-billion.

Columnist Simon Tisdall has been especially misleading. In 2019 he wrote that, “The US has largely stood aside from Syria, confining itself to anti-Isis counter-terrorism operations and occasional missile strikes. So too, for the most part, have Britain and Europe.”

This line comes despite the fact that The Guardian itself in the past uncovered some aspects of U.K.  covert action.

Tisdall wrote just last month that in countries such as Syria and Libya during the Arab Spring of 2011, “as events turned unpredictable and Islamists got involved, the west backed away.”

The reality is the opposite: it was then that Western intelligence agencies began working alongside Islamist forces seeking to overthrow Assad and Gadaffi in Libya, with horrendous human consequences in the region, and in Britain itself, serving to empower hardline and jihadist groups.

Much of The Guardian’s framing of issues simply amplifies the messaging Whitehall wants the public to receive. The new enemy is China and the number of articles across the British press demonizing the country is exponentially increasing. The correlation between state and media priorities is clear.

One piece written by Tisdall was sub-headed: “The fight for democracy in Hong Kong is the defining struggle of our age.” He wrote that this was “a contest between liberal, democratic laws-based governance” symbolised by Hong Kong and “authoritarian, nationalist-populist ‘strongman’ rule” represented by China.

The analysis has some merit but conveniently makes China, an official enemy, the great foe. Why not Egypt as the defining struggle of our age, where a U.K.-backed dictator is repressing human rights defenders and the media, or Bolivia, where a democratic progressive government is fending off U.K.  and U.S. interference?

It follows that The Guardian has run more pieces in the past two years on Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny than on imprisoned journalist and publisher Julian Assange. Yet the latter is incarcerated in a maximum security prison 22 kilometres from The Guardian’s head office in London.

The paper now publishes editorials and articles arguing strongly against extraditing Assange to the U.S. where he faces life in prison. Much of this has likely come from external pressure. Last October WISE Up, a solidarity group for Assange, staged a demonstration outside The Guardian’s office to protest against the paper’s failure to support Assange in the U.S. extradition case.

(Cartoon by Oisle)

The paper’s current support of Assange follows years of demonizing him. At least 44 articles since 2010 have negative headlines and an apparent campaign was conducted in 2018 falsely casting Assange as an agent of Russia. It culminated in a false front-page story which remains on The Guardian’s website.

“It’s not difficult to despise Julian Assange”, an Observer editorial in April 2019 began, just after Assange had been dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy. An opinion piece by columnist Hadley Freeman was published comparing Assange to a rotten fish that needed to be thrown out.

Despite the implications for media freedom posed by the U.S. prosecution of Assange, and that The Guardian financially benefited from WikiLeaks’ previous exposures, the paper has done almost nothing to investigate the legal conflicts of interests in the case, which so obviously point to a stitch-up.

Limited Dissent

Professor Des Freedman of Goldsmiths, University of London, who is the editor of a new book on The Guardian, told Declassified: “While The Guardian claims to offer high-quality, independent journalism, its reporting and comment all too often dovetail with establishment agendas and interests. For all its welcome criticism of corruption and inequality, it repeatedly attacks left-wing voices aiming to provide a meaningful challenge to corruption and inequality.”

He added: “It condemns authoritarianism but regularly turns a blind eye to the British state’s role in arming and propping up authoritarian regimes. From its very origins 200 years ago, it embodies a kind of liberalism that considers itself progressive but is so steeped in elite networks of power that it fails to recognise its own complicity in maintaining things essentially just as they are.”

The media monitoring organisation Medialens has consistently exposed how The Guardian acts to limit dissent, performing an effective propaganda function for the state. It argues that the paper’s more progressive writers falsely convey the idea that “progressive change can be achieved by working within and for profit-maximising corporations that are precisely the cause of so many of our crises.”

Jonathan Cook similarly asserts that such journalists “are there to sharply delimit what the left is allowed to think, what it can imagine, what it may champion.”

Indeed, The Guardian is being subject to increasing analysis showing that while it sometimes exposes how the British establishment works, it acts largely in support of it – and that in recent years it has largely shredded the capacity it once had to do more independent, investigative reporting.

The paper’s political positioning, on the right wing of Labour and mainstream of the U.S. Democratic Party, always suggested it would act to stave off more fundamental change when the time came. With Corbyn, this was clearly borne out.

In this, The Guardian can be considered the media representative, and ideological pillar, of the liberal wing of the British establishment. In different ways, The Guardian is as much a defender of Anglo-American power projection as the right-wing establishment, being especially supportive of foreign wars and interventions and the global influence that it complains the U.K. has lost.

To millions of its readers The Guardian offers critical, independent reporting, and this is real on certain issues. But its limited dissent ensures that critical takes are within boundaries that do not reveal the true role of the government and state, and that protect it from proper scrutiny and challenge.

The paper provides a misleading picture of what the U.K. does in the world. Not only that, The Guardian’s role is just as pernicious as that of the right-wing media which are routinely slavish mouthpieces of the establishment.

The reason is that The Guardian co-opts liberal and “progressive”-minded people, who might like to think they are challenging the establishment, into thinking they are being told the truth.

Declassified UK

And what is that desired ‘mentality’? It is to embrace the transfiguration of American and European identity and way-of-life. The presumptive U.S. President Elect, the European élites, and top ‘woke’ élites moreover, are publicly committed to such “transformation”: “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world,” (Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, declared, celebrating Joe Biden’s ‘victory’); “Trump’s defeat can be the beginning of the end of the triumph of far-right populisms also in Europe”, claimed Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council.

In short, the ‘Iron Curtain’ descends when supposedly private enterprises (Big Digital) mutually inter-penetrate with – and then claim – the State: No longer the non-believer facing this coming metamorphosis is to be persuaded – he can be compelled. Regressive values held on identity, race and gender quickly slipped into a ‘heresy’ labelling. And as the BLM activists endlessly repeat: “Silence is no option: Silence is complicity”.

With the advent of Silicon Valley ideology’s ubiquitous ‘reach’, the diktat can be achieved through weaponising ‘Truth’ via AI, to achieve a ‘machine learning fairness’ that reflects only the values of the coming revolution – and through AI ‘learning’ mounting that version of binary ‘truth’, up and against an adversarial ‘non-truth’ (its polar opposite). How this inter-penetration came about is through a mix of early CIA start-up funding; connections and contracts with state agencies, particularly relating to defence; and in support for propaganda campaigns in service to ‘governmentalist’ narratives.

These U.S. Tech platforms have, for some time, become effectively fused into the ‘Blue State’ – particularly in the realms of intelligence and defence – to the extent that these CEOs no longer see themselves as state ‘partners’ or contractors, but rather, as some higher élite leadership, precisely shaping and directing the future of the U.S. Their objective however, is to advance beyond the American ‘sphere’, to a notion that such an élite oligarchy eventually would be directing a future ‘planetary governance’. One, in which their tech tools of AI, analytics, robotics and machine-learning, would become the mathematical and digital scaffold around whose structure, the globe in all its dimensions is administered. There would be no polity – only analytics.

The blatant attempt by Big Tech platforms and MSM to write the narrative of the 2020 Facebook and Twitter U.S. Election – coupled with their campaign to insist that dissent is either the intrusion of enemy disinformation, ‘lies’ coming from the U.S. President, or plain bullsh*t – is but the first step to re-defining ‘dissenters’ as security risks and enemies of the good.

The mention of ‘heresy and disinformation’ additionally plays the role of pushing attention away from the gulf of inequality between smug élites and skeptical swathes of ordinary citizenry. Party élites might be notoriously well-known for unfairly enriching themselves, but as fearless knights leading the faithful to battle, élites can become again objects of public and media veneration – heroes who can call believers ‘once more unto the breach!’.

The next step is already being prepared – as Whitney Webb notes:

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, GCHQ, which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda”, [and that] raise concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development – and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.

Similar efforts are underway in the U.S., with the military recently funding a CIA-backed firm … to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis, and the U.S. military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed …

The Times reported that GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so … The GCHQ cyber war will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda”, but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism … Similarly, a think tank tied to U.S. intelligence argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the U.S. ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

Just to be clear, it is not just the ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence Community at work – YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided this week to remove a Ludwig von Mises Institute video, with more than 1.5 million views, for challenging aspects of U.S. policy on the Coronavirus.

What on earth is going on? The Mises Institute as ‘extremist’, or purveyor of enemy disinformation? (Of course, there are countless other examples.)

Well, in a word, it is ‘China’. Maybe it is about fears that China will surpass the U.S. economically and in Tech quite shortly. It is no secret that the U.S., the UK and Europe, more generally, have botched their handling of Covid, and may stand at the brink of recession and financial crisis.

China, and Asia more generally, has Covid under much better control. Indeed, China may prove to be the one state likely to grow economically over the year ahead.

Here’s the rub: The pandemic persists. Western governments largely have eschewed full lockdowns, whilst hoping to toggle between partial social-distancing, and keeping the economy open – oscillating between turning the dials up or down on both. But they are achieving neither the one (pandemic under control), nor the other (saving themselves from looming economic breakdown). The only exit from this conundrum that the élites can see is to vaccinate everyone as soon as possible, so that they can go full-steam on the economy – and thus stop China stealing a march on the West.

But 40%-50% of Americans say they would refuse vaccination. They are concerned about the long term safety for humans of the new mRNA technique – concerns, it seems, that are destined to be rigorously de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

There is no evidence, yet, that either the Moderna or the Pfizer experimental vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. If there were, the public has not been told. There is no information about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist. There is no information about safety. Not surprisingly there is public caution, which GCHQ and Big Digital intend to squash.

The digital Iron Curtain is not just about America. U.S. algorithms, and social media, saturate Europe too. And Europe has its ‘populists’ and state ‘deplorables’ (currently Hungary and Poland), on which Brussels would like to see the digital ‘Curtain’ of denigration and political ostracism descend.

This month, Hungary and Poland vetoed the EU bloc’s €1.8 trillion budget and recovery package in retaliation for Brussel’s plan effectively to fine them for violating the EU’s ‘rule of law’ principles. As the Telegraph notes, “Many European businesses are depending on the cash and, given the ‘second wave’ of coronavirus hitting the continent, Brussels fears that the Visegrád Group allies” could hold a recovery hostage to their objections to the EU ‘rule-of-law’ ‘fines’).

What’s this all about? Well, Orbán’s justice minister has introduced a series of constitutional changes. Each of them triggering ‘rule-of-law’ disputes with the EU. The most contentious amendment is an anti-LGBT one, stating explicitly that the mother is a woman, the father is a man. It will add further restrictions for singles and gay couples adopting children, and it will confine gender transition to adults.

Orbán’s veto is yet more evidence of a new Iron Curtain descending down the spine of – this time – Europe. The ‘Curtain’ again is cultural, and has nothing to do with ‘law’. Brussels makes no secret of its displeasure that many Central and Eastern European member-states will not sign up to ‘progressive’ (i.e. woke) values. At its root lies the tension that “whilst Western Europe is de-Christianising, Europe’s central and eastern states are re-Christianising – the faith having been earlier a rallying point against communism”, and now serving as the well-spring to these states’ post-Cold War emerging identity. (It is not so dissimilar to some ‘Red’ American conservative constituencies that also are reaching back to their Christian roots, in the face of America’s political polarisation.)

These combined events point to a key point of inflection occurring in the western polity: A constellation of state and state-extended apparatuses has openly declared war on dissent (‘untruths’), foreign ‘disinformation’ and opinion unsupported by their own ‘fact-checking’.

It takes concrete form through Big Digital’s quiet sanctioning and punitive policing of online platforms, under the guise of tackling abuse; through nation-wide mandatory re-education and training programmes in anti-racism and critical social theory in schools and places of work; by embedding passive obedience and acquiescence amongst the public through casting anti-vaxxers as extremists, or as security risks; and finally, by mounting a series of public spectacles and theatre by ‘calling out’ and shaming sovereigntists and cultural ‘regressives’, who merit being ‘cancelled’.

In turn, it advances an entire canon of progressivism rooted in critical social theory, anti-racism and gender studies. It has too its own revisionist history (narratives such as the 1619 Project) and progressive jurisprudence for translation into concrete law.

But what if half of America rejects the next President? What if Brussels persists with imposing its separate progressive cannon? Then the Iron Curtain will descend with the ring of metal falling onto stone. Why? Precisely because those adhering to their transformative mission see ‘calling out’ transgressors as their path to power – a state in which dissent and cultural heresy can be met with enforcement (euphemistically called the ‘rule of law’ in Brussels). Its’ intent is to permanently keep dissenters passive, and on the defensive, fearing being labelled ‘extremist’, and through panicking fence-sitters into acquiescence.

Maintaining a unified western polity may no longer be possible under such conditions. Should the losers in this struggle (whomsoever that may be), come to fear being culturally overwhelmed by forces that see their way-of-being as a heresy which must be purged, we may witness a powerful turn towards political self-determination.

When political differences become irreconcilable, the only (non-violent) alternative might come to be seen to lie with the fissuring of political union.

Matt KENNARD and Mark CURTIS

Almost all of Britain’s former spy chiefs are personally profiting from working for cyber security and energy companies after retiring from the U.K.’s major intelligence agencies.

In May, Declassified UK revealed that since 2000, nine out of 10 former chiefs of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ have taken jobs in the cyber security industry, a sector they promoted while in office as key to defending the U.K. from the “Russian threat.”

The British government was told for over a decade that the “gravest risk” to the country is an influenza pandemic, which its National Security Strategy identifies as a “tier one priority risk.” Yet the security services largely ignored health threats, despite claiming they are guided by the U.K.’s security strategy.

The burgeoning and profitable cyber industry in the U.K., where former spy chiefs gain employment, is now worth over £8-billion. Sir Iain Lobban, who ran GCHQ from 2008 to 2014, has become director or adviser to 10 private cyber or data security companies since leaving office. His own consultancy, Cyberswift Limited, had over £1-million in assets by the end of 2018, four years after he left GCHQ.

The “revolving door” between government and industry is meant to be regulated for conflicts of interest by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA). However, Declassifiedcan find no evidence that an intelligence chief has ever had an ACOBA application rejected. This allows them to lobby their old agencies on behalf of their private interests after they leave office.

One former MI6 head, Sir John Scarlett, was given “unconditional approval” by ACOBA when he became an adviser to a major oil company in 2011, meaning he was immediately free to lobby his former colleagues in intelligence and parliament on behalf of the firm.

The last three heads of MI6 all joined oil or gas-producing companies, which are among the world’s largest contributors to climate change, after they left the service. Declassified can reveal that former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, has earned more than £2-million from his role on the board of American oil and gas company, Kosmos Energy, which was until 2018 registered in the tax haven of Bermuda.

Another former MI6 chief, Sir John Sawers, has earned £699,000 since 2015 as a board member of oil giant BP, in addition to possessing shares in the company worth £91,300.

Climate change has also been largely ignored by the security agencies, evidence suggests, despite the U.K. government last year recognizing it as a “security risk,” adding, “There is no doubt that climate-related security challenges are real. They are here. They are now.”

Russia and cyber attacks have been evoked as the pre-eminent threats to the U.K. public, alongside terrorism, in countless public interventions by intelligence chiefs. Russia engages in offensive cyber operations, as do Britain and its allies, but the constant evocation of a threat from Russia, often without real evidence and amplified in the media, has helped U.K. security agencies accrue permissive investigatory powers and larger budgets, directly benefiting the private cyber and arms industry.

A senior U.K. military commander, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, said in 2013 that the threat posed to the U.K.’s security by climate change is just as grave as that posed by cyber attacks and terrorism.

Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6, receives “unconditional approval” from the British government to lobby his former employers on behalf of oil giant Statoil. (Twelfth Annual Report 2010-2011: Advisory Committee on Business Appointments)

Badly Prepared for Coronavirus

UK Declassified’s revelations last May came amid rising public anger at how it could be that the U.K. was so badly prepared to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

The British government had been widely criticized for its slow response and its failure to warn the public early about the level of risk posed by coronavirus, prompting calls for a reconsideration of what constitutes “security.”

The failure to address major threats to the public was striking in light of the substantial expenditure on the security services. Spending on the Single Intelligence Account – which covers MI5, MI6, and GCHQ – is predicted by the government to be £2.48-billion in 2020-2021. This works out at around £400 for every Briton.

It appears that no intelligence chief has ever made money working on the security threats posed by climate change or health pandemics. None also appears to have ever mentioned these threats while in office or after. Public warnings from intelligence chiefs which highlight the security threat from climate change would be likely to adversely impact the profitability of fossil fuel companies.

Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University, told Declassified: “The revolving door and its impact in the defence sector are fairly well known but this new investigation of its extent in the intelligence industry is a real eye-opener.” Rogers, who is also an honorary fellow at the U.K. military’s Joint Services Command and Staff College, added: “It does much to explain why the pandemic and climate change threats have been so widely discounted in the British security services.”

MI5 is Britain’s domestic security agency, while MI6 gathers intelligence externally. GCHQ, the largest of the UK’s spy agencies, collects signals intelligence.

Where Are They Now?

Nine of the 10 former heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ since 2000 have gone on to work for companies in the cyber and data security sector. Since 1992 – the first year after the end of the cold war – 13 of the 16 heads of agencies have done the same. The term “cyber security” is often used as a euphemism for offensive and surveillance products.

Sir Jonathan Evans led MI5 from 2007 until 2013 and within five months of leaving office became a member of the advisory board of Darktrace, a cybersecurity company created by the UK intelligence establishment. He also became an adviser on digital security to Luminance Technologies, an artificial intelligence platform, and chair of the advisory board of Blackdot Solutions, an internet intelligence company. Evans’ remuneration in these roles is not known.

In 2012, the year before he left MI5, Evans made his first public speech in two years in which he claimed there were “industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state-sponsored cyber espionage and organised cyber crime”. He added: “Vulnerabilities in the internet are being exploited aggressively not just by criminals but also by states,” before concluding, “The extent of what is going on is astonishing.”

To the astonishment of even the Times newspaper, Jonathan Evans was in 2018 appointed to chair the government’s Committee on Standards in Public Life. He had six other paid jobs at the time.

In July 2015, Evans joined the board of Ark Data Centres, a company which offers “highly secure” data storage centres in the UK. In that role, Evans replaced his predecessor at MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

Manningham-Buller, who headed MI5 from 2002 to 2007, had in 2012 become a director of Ark, whose other staff include former UK military personnel and is based in Corsham in Wiltshire, where the Ministry of Defence (MOD) runs the British government’s new £40-million Cyber Security Operations Centre.

In March 2015, Ark won a £700-million outsourcing deal with the Cabinet Office to supply the government’s entire data centre estate. Two months later, Manningham-Buller stepped down from her position as a director of the company.

The year after she joined Ark, Manningham-Buller told a conference that, “It seems to me that a lot of people don’t want to recognise the threat” from possible cyber attacks. She added, “They want IT systems, they want connectivity, they want ease of access, they want business efficiency, and they choose quite often to ignore substantial threats.”

Sir Stephen Lander, head of MI5 from 1996 to 2002, became director of two companies in 2004: Streamshield Networks, which produces cybersecurity products, and Northgate Information Solutions, which develops IT software for police services and government.

Sir Jonathan Evans, head of MI5 from 2007-2013, gives his thoughts on the “cyber threat landscape” to Darktrace, a private cybersecurity company whose advisory board he joined in 2013, the same year he left service. Darktrace was valued at £1.65bn in 2018.

MI6 likewise has seen its former heads make significant sums in private cyber-related companies.

Sir John Sawers, head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, created his own “political risk” consultancy in 2018, Newbridge Advisory, to help businesses and investors “understand” the threat of “cyber attacks, terrorism, political upheaval”, among other areas. Sawers charges up to $75,000 (£65,000) to speak on “cyber security”. “He looks at the current cyber threats, the policy of cyber security, the likelihood of a wide scale attack, and what organisations can do to protect themselves,” Sawers’ agency website notes.

Sawers’ predecessor, Sir John Scarlett – who headed MI6 from 2004 to 2009 – joined the board of advisors at the Chertoff Group, a US-based corporation which “delivers security and cybersecurity risk management”, soon after he left the service. General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, is currently a principal at the firm. Scarlett also charges up to $55,000 (£48,000) to speak on “cyber threats”, specifically the question: “How vulnerable is our infrastructure to cyber attack and what should we do about it?”

Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004 – overseeing the intelligence controversies which led to the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003– later became director  of Crossword Cybersecurity, a technology company focusing exclusively on the cybersecurity sector. He serves in the firm alongside Lord Nick Houghton, former Chief of the Defence Staff of the UK military, who is on its advisory board.

MI6 chiefs have all raised the spectre of the Russian cyber threat as they have taken jobs in the cyber security sector. In 2015, the year after he left MI6, Sawers publicly flagged the risk of Russian cyber attacks. Dearlove said in 2019 that “It’s deeply embedded in Russia’s DNA to use the capabilities that it has to disrupt our nations.”

Similarly, in 2018, Scarlett publicly proclaimed the “normal practice” of Russian “interference” in elections before the 2016 cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee.

Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove’s personal page on the website of Crossword Cybersecurity, where he was appointed a director in 2016.

The heads of GCHQ, the U.K. government’s signal intelligence agency, have also found lucrative positions in the private cyber sector after leaving the service.

Robert Hannigan was GCHQ’s director from 2014 to 2017, establishing the National Cyber Security Centre as part of GCHQ in 2016, while being responsible for the U.K.’s first cyber strategy in 2009. Three months after he stepped down from GCHQ, in July 2017, Hannigan publicly warned that “a disproportionate amount of mayhem in cyber-space” was coming from Russia, and called for “pushback”.

The following month, Hannigan became chair of the European advisory board of BlueVoyant, a cybersecurity firm producing products to protect businesses against “sophisticated cyber attackers”, including nation state actors. In 2018, Hannigan became chair of BlueVoyant International.

Hannigan also set up his own consultancy, Tunny Associates, about which little is known, although the Tunny was the name given by British spies to a Nazi cipher machine cracked by Bletchley Park, the UK’s wartime code-breaking centre.

Hannigan’s predecessor, Sir Iain Lobban, who ran GCHQ from 2008 to 2014, has joined or advised no less than 10 cyber or data security companies since leaving office, including Hakluyt Cyber, Prevalent AI, and C5 Capital.

A biography on the C5 website states that Lobban “set new direction in cyber security for innovative partnerships internationally, with the private sector and with academia,” adding, “Sir Iain now focuses on the advocacy and demystification of cyber security, providing strategic advice and personal perspective, nationally and internationally, to governments and businesses.” The biography ends with the line, “He is also active in entrepreneurship, in the broadest sense of the word.”

In a 2011 article in the Times, Lobban argued that “the volume of e-crime and attacks on government and industry systems continues to be disturbing” and concluded that the “UK’s continued economic well-being” was under threat from cyber attacks.

Biography of Sir Iain Lobban, who was director of GCHQ from 2008-2014, on the website of C5 Capital, an investment firm focused on cybersecurity, which he joined in 2015, the year he left GCHQ. He says he is “active in entrepreneurship, in the broadest sense of the word.”

Before Lobban, GCHQ’s director was Sir David Pepper, who managed the agency from 2003 to 2008. After leaving GCHQ, Pepper joined the advisory board of Thales, an arms and cyber security company, and became a strategic adviser to Defence Strategy and Solutions, which helps arms firms secure government contracts.

Pepper’s predecessor was Sir Francis Richards who directed GCHQ from 1998-2003. In 2007, Richards became chairman of the National Security Inspectorate, a certification body that approves security providers. Richards is the only head of MI5, MI6 or GCHQ since 1992 who does not appear to have personally benefited from working in the private cyber or energy sector after leaving office. (Former MI6 chief, Sir David Spedding, died two years after he retired in 1999.)

Richards’ three immediate predecessors all joined cyber or data security companies. Sir Kevin Tebbitt and Sir David Omand became board members of Leonardo, the Italian weapons manufacturer that specializes in cybersecurity. Omand also joined the board of Babcock International, another arms company with a long line in cybersecurity products, while Sir John Adye, GCHQ director from 1989-1996, joined the board of two companies – Identity Assurance Systems and Opera Limited – focused on data and cyber security.

Earning from Fossil Fuel Corporations

The three former heads of MI6 since 2000 have all taken jobs with energy companies after leaving office – despite climate change being recognized as a major threat to the UK.

Sir Richard Dearlove has been on the board of Kosmos Energy – an oil and gas exploration company based in Texas – since 2012, where he also sits on the compensation committee. In the seven years from 2013 to 2019, Dearlove earned more than $2.5-million (£2-million) in fees from the company, having attended an average of 12 meetings a year. In 2018, Dearlove was Kosmos’ best compensated director. US filings show that on appointment Dearlove was also awarded restricted shares worth $140,000 (£113,400).

Dearlove has also been an adviser to a variety of consultancies that give advice on energy and extractives, while he charges up to £20,000 as a speaking fee where “the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan” are touted as conversation topics.

Dearlove made widely-covered public interventions during the 2017 and 2019 UK election campaigns warning that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was a “danger” and “threat” to Britain’s national security. Labour’s manifesto in 2017 promised “strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories, including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners for all companies and trusts.”

Kosmos Energy was until 2018 registered in the British overseas territory and tax haven of Bermuda. Since 2006, Dearlove has also been the non-executive chairman of Ascot Group – an insurance business domiciled in Bermuda.

In 2011, Sir John Scarlett became chair of the Strategy Advisory Committee at Norwegian oil giant, Statoil (now named Equinor). Scarlett’s name does not appear in the company’s annual reports or on its website and it is not known how much he has been paid in this role.

There are also two consultancies – SC Strategy and J&G Consulting – which Scarlett has started whose operations and clients are so secretive it is impossible to know if they involve cybersecurity or energy. It has been reported he earned £400,000 over three years from one of these.

Sir John Sawers was appointed a director of oil company BP in 2015, the year after he left MI6. “His management of reform at MI6,” BP wrote in its 2015 annual report, “complements BP’s focus on value and simplification.”

It appears that upon appointment, Sawers was awarded restricted shares worth over £90,000. Declassified can also reveal that in the four and a half years to 2019, Sawers earned £699,000 in fees and benefits from BP.

“BP will benefit from his extensive experience of the Middle East’s hotspots while a career diplomat, and his influential roles in formulating foreign policy,” wrote  TheFinancial Times. Sawers was a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair and was appointed Britain’s special representative to Iraq in 2003. BP returned to Iraq in 2009 after a 35-year absence. The BP annual reports refer often to Sawers’ experience in the Middle East as a particular boon for the company and note that he has been at meetings which discuss “developments in the Middle East.”

In February 2015, Sawers also became a director of Macro Advisory Partners, a consultancy whose clients include the world’s leading energy institutions. Michael Daly, BP’s former global exploration chief, was also added to the board four months before Sawers.

The true extent of security services personnel profiting after service is unclear as the names of nearly all intelligence personnel are highly classified. But it has been revealed that former MI6 head of counterterrorism, Sir Mark Allen, also joined BP after leaving service, helping the company to negotiate a £15-billion oil drilling contract with Muammar Gaddafi, the then Libyan dictator. Allen had developed a relationship with the Gaddafi regime while in MI6 and was investigated for his role in the snatching and transfer of a Libyan couple to the north African country in 2004.

Chiefs of MI5 and GCHQ have also gained from oil and gas companies. Former GCHQ director Sir Iain Lobban became an advisor to Shell. Dame Stella Rimington, who was director-general of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, joined the board of BG Group – the oil and gas multinational – in 1997, the year after she left service.

She stepped down from the board in 2005 when the company was bought by Shell for £47-billion. Rimington was a company shareholder as well as earning £57,500 in fees from BG Group in 2004, her last full year on the board.

Adjusting the Dials?

Although the U.K. spends significant sums on its “security services,” there is no evidence that any of the British intelligence agencies has significantly prepared for health pandemics or have substantial expertise to work on the issue, as Declassified UK has revealed. Recent heads of MI5 and MI6 were promoted after working in counter terrorism.

The incoming head of MI5, Ken McCallum, has worked for the intelligence service for 25 years, but appears to specialize in cyber security and to have no health or climate expertise. At one point, he appears to have been seconded to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and became the department’s cyber security head. McCallum is also said to have headed MI5’s cyber activities around a decade ago.

Sources have said McCallum wants to “work more closely with the private sector in harnessing artificial intelligence” and “to be clearer about the threat posed by China – particularly in terms of industrial espionage and cyberwarfare”.

MI5 states that the “cyber” threat is one of its four main focus areas, but it does not mention health security issues despite claiming to be guided by the U.K.’s national security strategy which highlights an “influenza pandemic” as a tier one threat.

In contrast to the U.K., the CIA has a dedicated unit for health issues, while the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has a National Center for Medical Intelligence which undertakes “collection, evaluation, and all-source analysis of worldwide health threats and issues.”

The outgoing head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has recently intimated that the government needs to recalibrate its security priorities. He said earlier this month: “There is no doubt at all that, having lived through the worst pandemic in a century, the government is bound to think differently about how to configure against that risk and adjust the dials accordingly across public spending, I’m sure. But all of those decisions are yet to be taken.”

According to Parker, some doctors and nurses who usually work at MI5 have been released back to the NHS so they can serve on the frontline, while MI5 has also been providing protective security to the design and construction of the new temporary care ‘Nightingale’ hospitals, but which have been revealed to be so badly staffed they have turned away patients.

GCHQ has made several public interventions since the coronavirus crisis began – all on the cyber threat posed by the pandemic, such as warning that criminals are using the coronavirus outbreak to launch online attacks.

Britain’s Cyber Industry

A recent government report states that the U.K. cyber security sector is worth £8.3-billion and includes over 1,200 companies, a number which has increased by 44 percent from 2017 to 2019. This growth is the equivalent to a new cyber security business setting up in the U.K. every week.

The government is allocating large amounts of money to cyber security. In 2016, it announced a National Cyber Security Strategy involving spending of £1.9-billion. A further £250-million is expected to be spent on a new joint MOD-GCHQ cyber force to combat “the rising cyber threat from nations such as Russia and Iran, as well as terrorist groups like ISIS.” With 2,000 personnel, it will have experts from the military, security services, and the cyber security industry.

The government has also allocated £23-million to building a “cyber business park” near GCHQ’s headquarters in Cheltenham, southwest England, and established a £135-million National Security Strategic Investment Fund so that British intelligence agencies can nurture start-ups developing technology seen as supporting the country’s national security priorities.

Alex Chalk, the Conservative MP for Cheltenham, has been a big supporter of the U.K. government’s cyber strategy in his constituency. “The thing that struck me was that we had an asset in GCHQ, which was absorbing a growing amount of public money, billions of pounds, and yet its impact… was quite limited,” he told Declassified. “I read around the subject and saw what the Israelis had done in a place called Beersheba in Israel, where they’ve got their equivalent of GCHQ.” In 2014, the Israeli government passed a resolution designating the city of Beersheba the country’s cyber capital, and it is now referred to as a “cybertech oasis.”

It is not just intelligence agency chiefs who have moved into the lucrative world of cyber technology. The most successful British cybersecurity firm is Darktrace, which works on artificial intelligence-based cybersecurity and was incorporated four days after the first of the revelations by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden was published by The Guardian in June 2013.

Darktrace has been valued at £1.65bn. Company material openly mentions “the UK intelligence officials who founded Darktrace”. Among its team are “senior members of the UK’s and US’s intelligence agencies including the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Security Service (MI5) and the NSA.”

One co-founder was Stephen Huxter, a senior figure in MI5’s “cyber defence team” who became Darktrace’s managing director. Huxter then hired 30-year GCHQ veteran Andrew France as the company’s chief executive. France, like Huxter, had been involved in dealing with “cyber threats”, rising to the position of deputy director of cyber defence operations at GCHQ, where he was charged with “protecting government data” from cyber threats.

Darktrace later appointed Dave Palmer, who had worked at MI5 and GCHQ, as its director of technology, while John Richardson OBE, its director of security, had a long career in “UK government security and intelligence” working on “cyber defence”. Darktrace staff have also included ex-MI6 officials. Poppy Gustafsson, co-founder, has said that her work left her feeling like she was “living in a story by the novelist John le Carré”.

Declassified contacted Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir John Sawers for comment, but neither responded. Sir Iain Lobban declined to comment.

consortiumnews.com

The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

“This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD.

The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its stated purpose is to “prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations”. It can issue “notices” to the media to encourage them not to publish certain information.

The committee is currently chaired by the MOD’s director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was previously director of security and intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describes himself as an “accomplished, senior ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership”.

The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary, placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.

Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: “The Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code.” The minutes add: “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.”

‘Considerable efforts’

These “considerable efforts” included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel”. It was marked “private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media”.

Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing blog Guido Fawkes made it public.

At the time, according to the committee minutes, the “intelligence agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out”. Such D-Notices were clearly seen by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden revelations.

One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee’s then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance “made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before telling the world”, according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.

Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.

“I don’t want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures,” he said in a statement to MPs. “I think it’s much better to appeal to newspapers’ sense of social responsibility. But if they don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act.”

The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported at the time that “The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] … and the Telegraph published only a short”. It continued by noting that only The Independent “followed up the substantive allegations”. It added, “The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story.”

The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.

According to the committee minutes, the fact The Guardian would not stop publishing “undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system’s future usefulness”. If the D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ’s most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?

It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.

GCHQ and laptops

The security services ratcheted up their “considerable efforts” to deal with the exposures.

On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian’s offices at King’s Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published.

At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.

The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper’s reporters, brought “angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks”. The reporter added, “The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment, a ‘degausser’, which destroys magnetic fields and erases data.”

Johnson claims that the destruction of the computers was “purely a symbolic act”, adding that “the government and GCHQ knew, because we had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn’t changed anything.”

Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee minutes for November 2013 outlined: “Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving.”

The British security services had carried out more than a “symbolic act”. It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.

The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper’s laptops “engagement… with The Guardian had continued to strengthen”.

Moreover, he added, there were now “regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists”. Rusbridger later testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself “collaborated” in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even “been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters”.

But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that “the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member”.

At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper’s computers under the watchful gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in May 2014 and was to remain on it until October 2018.

The Guardian’s deputy editor went directly from the corporation’s basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.

A new editor

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued to publish some stories critical of the security services.

But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another candidate to be Rusbridger’s successor).

Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was launched just two weeks before the first Snowden revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.

This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.

In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented “exclusive” with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. The article noted that this was the “first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service’s 107-year history”. It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.

The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an “increasingly aggressive” Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, “Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files.”

Parker told the two reporters, “We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk about our work and explain it.”

Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian published another unprecedented “exclusive”, this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian’s investigations editor, Nick Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.

The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball.   Titled “MI6 returns to ‘tapping up’ in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers”, it focused almost entirely on the intelligence service’s stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.

“Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain,” Younger told Hopkins. “Every community from every part of Britain should feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status.”

Just two weeks before the interview with MI6’s chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would “hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to charge MI6’s former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004”.

None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig would qualify for the intelligence service. “He would not get into MI6,” Younger told Hopkins.

More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu’s “first major interview since taking up his post” the previous year and resulted in a three-part series of articles, one of which was entitled “Met police examine Vladimir Putin’s role in Salisbury attack”.

The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these “exclusives” as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden’s. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again.

What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD’s Dominic Wilson, praised Johnson who, he said, had been “instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian”.

Decline in critical reporting

Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian’s celebrated investigative team, whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.

One well-placed source told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team “have not felt backed by senior editors over the last year”, and that “some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period”.

In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues, notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, started at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.

“It seems they’ve got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way,” one current Guardian journalist told us.

Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger’s editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6 on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.

“Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies — epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories — appears to have been abandoned,” a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it “sometimes seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks.”

A second former Guardian journalist added: “The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not always to be trusted.”

While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its “scoops” increasingly focus on issues more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.

The Guardian has, by contrast, published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin, his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.

In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian’s front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security service tips focused on the “Russia threat”, and was titled “Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin”.

Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records” although he insists that “the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage”.

There was a much bigger story in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who “ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork”.

We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin’s friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.

Getting Julian Assange

The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.

One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian’s sister paper The Observer, titled “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange”. This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy in March 2017, organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage’s producer at LBC accompanied Farage at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.

Rather, she posited that this meeting was “potentially … a channel of communication” between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump, who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a “political alignment” and that “WikiLeaks is, in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything”.

Yet Cadwalladr’s one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a “highly placed contact with links to US intelligence”, who told her, “When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information in ways and places that cannot be monitored.”

It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine Assange.

In 2018, however, The Guardian’s attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on 18 May 2018 with one alleging Assange’s “long-standing relationship with RT”, the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.

One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding, claimed that “Russian diplomats held secret talks in London … with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned”. The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such “escape plot” involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.

This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page splash, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

This “scoop” failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was manufactured and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian, however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.

The “exclusive” appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for “re-establishing links” between The Guardian and the security services.

The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped create the conditions for a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.

Acting for the establishment

Another major focus of The Guardian’s energies under Viner’s editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected Labour leader, the Sunday Times reported a serving general warning that “there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister”. The source told the newspaper: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was fed the story that “MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA”. It formed part of a Telegraph investigation claiming to reveal “Mr Corbyn’s full links to the IRA” and was sourced to an individual “close to” the MI5 investigation, who said “a file had been opened on him by the early nineties”.

The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.

Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: “Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation. At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn’t clear the security vetting.”

Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources told The Times that Corbyn had been “summoned” for a “‘facts of life’ talk on terror” by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.

Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail reported another leak, this time revealing that “Jeremy Corbyn’s most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin’s ‘global propaganda network’.”

The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn’s office for a year but had still not received a security pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called “a senior parliamentary source”, that Murray’s application had encountered “vetting problems”.

Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. “Call me sceptical if you must, but I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail’s sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security service],” he wrote in the New Statesman. He added, “Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?”

Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. “However,” he added, “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there who I could trust.”

The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and the paper’s clearly hostile stance has been widely noted.

Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular, its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears carried in the media.

The Guardian and The Observer have published hundreds of articles on “Labour anti-Semitism” and, since the beginning of this year, carried over 50 such articles with headlines clearly negative to Corbyn. Typical headlines have included “The Observer view: Labour leadership is complicit in anti-Semitism”, “Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to anti-Semitism – or he just doesn’t care”, and “Labour‘s anti-Semitism problem is institutional. It needs investigation”.

The Guardian’s coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically.

While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts.

In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party “is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law.”

Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017, shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn’s tenure and that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.

Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.

At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn’s critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.

In July 2016, one of this article’s authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.

A reliable publication?

On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been “developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees”.

This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.

A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: “It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian.”

The Times published its scoop under a strong headline, “Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy”. However, before the article was published, the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations by telling its side of the story.

The Guardian posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: “MoD says revised torture guidance does not lower standards”.

Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD’s position: “The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly disinformation.

The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go?

truepublica.org.uk

As the story goes, Meng Wanzhou was arrested at the Vancouver (Canada) airport Dec 1, 2018, on her way from Hong Kong to Mexico City and ultimately Buenos Aires. Her arrest was based off of the accusation that she had lied to the HSBC executive at a 2013 meeting meant to reassure the bank that Huawei was not violating US sanctions against Iran. Meng Wanzhou CFO and Ren Zhengfei CEO of Huawei have maintained that Huawei was not in breach of any sanction, stating that the Iranian company Skycom was a local partner in Tehran and not a Huawei subsidiary. In addition, they have maintained that they have evidence in email correspondences with HSBC, that it was aware from the very start the nature of Huawei’s relationship to Skycom, and therefore the accusation by HSBC that the bank was deceived is completely unfounded. Though none of the transactions allegedly occurred in the US, it is being claimed that the US has jurisdiction due to money allegedly passing through the US banking system.

This case has proved to be odd for a number of reasons.

It is the first time in history that a non-US person is being charged for violation of US sanctions and the first time a non-US person has been criminally charged solely for having ‘caused’ another non-US entity, in this case a bank, to violate US sanctions. In addition, when charges of this sort, having to do with sanctions, are made it is typically done against the institution and not an individual. The thought that Meng Wanzhou’s arrest is meant to be used as leverage over the trade war and Huawei’s future business dealings is thus not unfounded.

According to HSBC, its hand was forced into providing ‘intel’ for Meng Wanzhou’s arrest, since its holdings were being monitored by the DOJ. HSBC, who is far removed from innocence in its personal practices, was under this monitorship for the very fact that it had been found guilty of consistent shady dealings which included several of their high level staff being charged with criminal activity. In 2016 Mark Johnson, a senior British banker of HSBC, was arrested at a New York City airport for currency benchmark rigging. Stuart Scott, also a senior British banker and former head of the HSBC foreign exchange cash trading for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was also charged. HSBC was fined $6 billion in 2015 over this scandal. In 2018, former director at HSBC Private Bank Suisse in Geneva was found guilty and fined $229,000 for money laundering in a Paris drug case. Also in 2018, HSBC was being investigated for tax evasion and money laundering and had actually publicly released that it had a provision of $632 million ready for a future fine and that they were cooperating fully. No need to waste anyone’s time with denial hmm?

However, nothing beats the 2012 allegations against HSBC itself of allowing terrorists to move money around the financial system  and for which it had to pay a record $1.9 billion, with no form of regulated control on the bank afterwards but rather an agreement with the DOJ that the bank itself would install a 5 year independent monitor. HSBC managed to avoid being criminally prosecuted, a move that could have stopped the bank from operating in the US.  Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general at the time, stated:

“ HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight – and worse…that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries.”

This just scratches the surface, and makes you rather wonder why Meng Wanzhou is being given such a hard time when actual support of terrorist funding is merely fined in the case of HSBC.

HSBC in a “challenging global environment”

Since providing ‘intel’ against Meng Wanzhou, HSBC has been busily working to repair its relationship with the Chinese government. In early August, its chief executive John Flint of the HSBC headquarters in London was asked to step down due to a change in leadership needed to address a “challenging global environment”. Shortly after, its Greater China Chief Helen Wong also stepped down. It is no surprise that HSBC is feeling rather nervous since China is preparing a widely anticipated “unreliable entity list” of companies that have undermined China’s national interests, which was initiated as a response to the US crackdown on Chinese tech companies but also includes those who ignore or challenge the one-China principle. This would include supporting arms sales to Taiwan, and supporting violent protesters in Hong Kong.

HSBC has a lot to lose if its relationship to the Chinese government falters.

In 2017, the first joint venture securities company majority owned by a foreign bank, HSBC Qianhai Securities Limited, was formally opened for business in China. Though this was a great achievement by HSBC, its foreign majority ownership is a mere 51%, which could be easily taken away if they were considered at any point to be unfit for that level of responsibility.  Recently, HSBC has also carried out the first transaction in yuan-denominated blockchain letters of credit. HSBC’s position at the forefront of facilitating blockchain trade in the yuan promises a way into a major market, with China-related trade producing an estimated 1.2 million letters of credit worth $750 billion last year.

Thus at first glance, it seems rather believable that HSBC was indeed forced in its dealing with the US Department of Justice and was not guilty in trying to undermine China in its 5G endeavours with Huawei, since not only was HSBC being monitored by the DOJ but they had only a great deal to lose and seemingly nothing to gain.

This is where knowing the history of the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation is absolutely vital.

Where HSBC’s true allegiance lies

For the sake of brevity the story starts with the First Opium War (1839-42). In short, the British Empire had made a move towards a free trade system in the 1840s, modelled off of Adam Smith’s ‘A Wealth of Nations’. In this new system of trade it was believed that if there is a demand for a product, a country has no right to intervene in its transaction. Protectionism, which had been practiced by Britain up until that point, had now been deemed unfit by…Britain, and all other countries were naturally to follow along according to the “new rules” chosen for them.

In the case of China, the trade of opium was ultimately banned by the Chinese, and severe punishments were to be delivered to those involved in smuggling the product into the country, which included British merchants. The British Empire considered this a direct threat to its ‘security’ and its new enforcement of free trade, thus when China did not back down, the First Opium war was waged. The result was the forced signing of the Nanking Treaty in 1842. This treaty, known as the first of the unequal treatises, ceded the territory of Hong Kong to Britain and allowed British merchants to not only trade at Guangzhou but were now also permitted to trade with five additional “treaty ports” and with whomever they pleased.

Created in 1600 with a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I, the East India Company was from its inception indistinguishable from the British Empire itself, rising to account for half of the world’s trade. As is aptly said by Lord Macaulay in his speech to the House of Commons in July 1833, since the beginning, the East India Company had always been involved in both trade and politics, just as its French and Dutch counterparts had been. In other words, the East India Company was to facilitate the geopolitical chess game that the British Empire wished to see played out. Not only the trade contracts it received but whole colonised territories won by the British Empire were handed over to this company to manage, along with a large sized private military, all under the decree of the Crown. This would be most evidently seen in the freedom it was given to control opium production in British India and to then facilitate its trade within Hong Kong and other colonised parts of Southeast Asia.

China was deemed uncooperative to the conditions signed under the Nanking Treaty and a Second Opium war was declared on them by the British Empire, lasting from 1856-60.

HSBC was founded in 1865. A British-friendly bank needed to be created to facilitate trade in the region, connecting the Empire’s newly acquired treasures Shanghai and Hong Kong with its British India (the major world producer of opium) along with the rest of the British Empire and Europe. This bank was not only meant to facilitate foreign trade within China in however it deemed fit, but in addition was created namely to trade in the product of opium. It is important to note that although the founder of HSBC is credited as Thomas Sutherland of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a Scottish merchant who wanted the bank to operate under “sound Scottish banking principles”, the bank had been created from the start to facilitate trade on behalf of the British Empire.

Hong Kong was only returned back to China in 1997, and HSBC up until that point had always been run under British economic policy. This is not to be brushed over! Though HSBC claims to have its base in Hong Kong and Shanghai, it always has up until this date had its headquarters in London, England as a banking institution. Not only this, but despite their attempts to claim that their banking practices have long since moved away from opium trade to healthier prospects, as earlier listed in this paper, HSBC clearly deals presently with not only drug money laundering but is also tied to money laundering for the use of terrorist activity.

So what are we to make of this mess?

Well the question needed to be asked is, “Is this all simply about profit?” And if the answer is clearly no, then what is it about? After all, isn’t it true that the British Empire no longer exists?

So what is the real nature of the game?

If it is not just about profit, why were two opium wars ultimately waged against China?

Well, simply put, China was considered a threat by the very autonomy of its existence. For all the effort made to convolute the obvious, it was never just about money at the end of the day but rather geopolitical control. And China has, up until very recently, been maintained in a position of subservient head bowing, even being put in the humiliating position of having to answer to and convince Britain that their handling of Hong Kong since its return to China is satisfactorily democratic. It is thought by the ridiculous, that China somehow needs to answer to Britain as the overseer of what is democratic and civil, when Britain had violently taken the region while waging war to push opium on its people. But the problem actually runs much deeper.

HSBC can be regarded for all intents and purposes as a British entity operating for British interests under the guise of a Chinese bank. However, anyone who has a little sense can see that HSBC could never be considered a Chinese bank with its history and its headquarters in London. But even if this may be already recognised by the Chinese, HSBC is very much embedded in the economic structure of Hong Kong, and it cannot simply be removed being one of the largest derivatives-holding banks in the world, with obvious dire consequences to the world economy if it should crash. In addition, HSBC is operating as one of only three banks that are allowed to print Hong Kong banknotes. By just this alone, Hong Kong’s economy is tied into the world drug trade. Something I am sure its foreign controllers do not want to lose.

Then there is the whole affair with the Hong Kong protests occurring, suspiciously close to the 70^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on October 1^st and very clearly pushing for a Tiananmen Square-like debacle. This has not only been tied to American Intelligence but also British Intelligence, with the latter actually being the one in the driver’s seat.

In response to the British Foreign Office threatening ‘severe consequences if a fully independent investigation’ into the so-called police brutality in Hong Kong does not occur, the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded saying “the UK has no sovereign jurisdiction or right of supervision over Hong Kong…it is simply wrong for the British Government to exert pressure. The Chinese side seriously urges the UK to stop its interference in China’s internal affairs and stop making random and inflammatory accusations on Hong Kong.”

It is of great interest to anyone who is paying attention that Britain has been showing its hand in broad daylight lately, which can only mean that the walls must really be closing in. The so-called “second player” to the US has actually been implicated in some rather large-scale meddling on the world stage that would indicate that Britain does not perceive itself as second player to anyone. This has been namely the exposure of GCHQ in orchestrating Russia Gate in an ongoing attempt to destabilise the US from within and its very direct role in the still bizarre-as-ever Skripal case as the pretext to start WWIII with Russia.

It is no surprise to anyone that the 5G network controlled by Huawei poses a great threat to western hegemony over intelligence gathering, and it is no mystery why British Intelligence is very much concerned over its bleak future. The Five Eyes are clearly under British control with four of the five members acting directly under the British Crown. While US Intelligence may once have been American, the British coup which destroyed the OSS soon after FDR’s untimely death put an end to that. British Intelligence and the CIA alike answer to the Crown.

It’s ironic is it not that the Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, so close to the security services should get caught by the very surveillance services the state has been denying any knowledge of. Craig Murray, former UK ambassador makes an excellent point when it comes to Williamson’s downfall, that America did not want Britain to build 5G infrastructure using Huawei technology – and got its way, irrespective. As for Britain – unable to make even basic decisions without controversy is just another indication of the sheer ineptitude of government the nation is suffering from. Nothing like taking back control eh!

By Craig Murray: Theresa May almost certainly sacked Gavin Williamson not just on the basis of a telephone billing record showing he had a phone call with a Telegraph journalist, but on the basis of a recording of the conversation itself. It astonishes me that still, after Snowden and his PRISM revelations, after Wikileaks Vault 7 releases, and after numerous other sources including my own humble contribution, people still manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance that goes with really understanding how much we are surveilled and listened to. Even Cabinet Ministers manage to pretend to themselves it is not happening.

The budget of the NSA, which does nothing else but communications intercept, is US $14.2 billion this year. Think about that enormous sum, devoted to just communications surveillance, and what it can achieve. The budget of the UK equivalent, GCHQ, is £1.2 billion, of which about 10% is paid by the NSA. Domestic surveillance in the UK has been vastly expanded and many taboos broken. But the bedrock of the system with regard to domestic intercepts is still that legal restrictions are dodged, as the USA’s NSA spies on UK citizens while the UK’s GCHQ spies on US citizens, and then the information is swapped. It was thus probably the NSA that harvested Williamson’s phone call, passing the details on. Given official US opposition to the UK employing Huawei technology, Williamson’s call would have been a “legitimate” NSA target.

Mass surveillance works on electronic harvesting. Targeted phone numbers apart, millions of essentially random calls are listened to electronically using voice recognition technology and certain key words trigger an escalation of the call. Williamson’s call discussing Huawei, China, the intelligence services, and backdoors would certainly have triggered recording and been marked up to a human listener, even if his phone was not specifically targeted by the Americans – which it almost certainly was.

Williamson, of course, is relying on the security services’ secrecy about their methods to maintain his protests of innocence, secure in the knowledge that the recording of him would not be produced. The existence of the recording – of which I am extremely confident – is the only possible explanation for May’s degree of certainty and swift action against one of her very few loyal allies.

All of which of course throws into stark relief the stunning hypocrisy of those who are worried that Huawei will be used for electronic eavesdropping when they are up to their ears in electronic eavesdropping themselves. One of my heroes is the great Richard Stallman, who put it this way six years ago:

RMS: Well, it’s perfectly reasonable suspicion to me. I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

RSS: I was just going to bring this up exactly, so I was saying that the NSA recently received notifications about the zero-day holes in advance and [incomprehensible] the NSA and the CIA to just crack PCs abroad for espionage purposes.

RMS: Now, [incomprehensible] that this proves my point, which is that you have to be nuts if you were some other country and using Windows on your computers. But, you know, given that Windows has a universal back door in it, Microsoft would hardly need to tell the NSA about any bugs, it can tell the NSA about the mal-feature of the universal back door and that would be enough for the NSA to attack any computer running Windows, which unfortunately is a large fraction of them.

All the major western tech companies cooperate with the western security services. In Murder in Samarkand I gave the first public revelation that the government can and does listen through your mobile phone microphone even when the phone is ostensibly switched off, a fact that got almost no traction until Edward Snowden released documents confirming it six years later. China is full of western devices with backdoors that are exploited by western intelligence. That the tables turn as Chinese technology advances is scarcely surprising.

Personally, I do not want the Chinese, Americans, Russians or British eavesdropping on me, or on each other, and I wish that they would stop. The spy games will, of course, continue, as they make money for a lot of well-connected people. But for any side to claim moral superiority in all of this is just nonsense.

truepublica.org.uk

A few weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration he blasted the US National Security Agency (NSA), falsely claiming the signals intelligence agency leaked classified information to the media. In February 2017, Trump tweeted: “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?) . . . Just like Russia.” It was Trump’s second public attack on NSA. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Trump accused NSA of withholding intercepted copies of his opponent Hillary Clinton’s emails.” Trump ranted, “Obviously they [NSA] don’t want to get them… they’re protecting her, they’re coddling her.”

Trump displayed for the world to see his ignorance about the role and mission of the NSA. Even after the agency’s intra-Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance warts were publicly exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks, Trump was making wild accusations about NSA that have only been the fodder for Hollywood movies like “Enemy Of The State.” “Mercury Rising,” “Sneakers,” and “Good Will Hunting.”

The recently-released heavily-redacted report by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller on foreign involvement in the 2016 presidential election contains a startling revelation: not since the Nixon administration has a US president flagrantly attempted to use the NSA to involve itself in a domestic law enforcement matter in pursuit of an Oval Office cover-up. According to Volume II of the “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, President Trump attempted to involve the NSA in the FBI’s then-ongoing investigation into Trump’s campaign and his possible illegal activities as president.

Trump’s actions to misuse a US intelligence agency to protect him from criminal liability is an impeachable offense. The precedence was decided by the US House of Representatives in Article II of its impeachment resolution against Richard Nixon. The House found that, in the case of Nixon, he abused his office by misusing federal agencies in violation of their regulations. The article states that Nixon “repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposes of these agencies.”

Mueller’s investigation uncovered Trump’s possible use of NSA to assist him in stymying the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign. The report states: “the President reached out to the Director of National Intelligence and the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)” to involve them in his goal of suppressing the FBI’s investigation of him and his campaign.

The Mueller Report states, “On March 26, 2017, the day after the President called Coats [Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats], the President called NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers. The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying it made relations with the Russians difficult.” Mueller’s investigation did not commence until May 17, 2017, so the investigation was still being handled by the Justice Department and FBI.

The Mueller Report continues: “The President told Rogers “the thing with the Russians [wa]s messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia. The President also said that the news stories linking him with Russia were not true and asked Rogers if he could do anything to refute the stories. Deputy Director of the NSA Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it was the most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service. After the call concluded, Ledgett prepared a memorandum that he and Rogers both signed documenting the content of the conversation and the President’s request, and they placed the memorandum in a safe.”

Considering the fact that Ledgett revealed to Mueller’s investigators that he had never experienced anything like Trump’s request in 40 years of government service, it can be assumed that if Ledgett began his service in 1977 in the US Army in a signals intelligence-related role, followed by his joining the NSA in 1988, his 40 years of NSA or NSA-connected service was during the post-Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) era.

The FISA of 1978 was specifically enacted to prohibit the abuse of NSA or any other intelligence community agency for warrantless political purposes not approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Between 1952 and 1974, using classified eavesdropping programs with codenames like SHAMROCK and MINARET, the NSA compiled files on 75,000 Americans, including civil rights and anti-war activists, members of Congress, journalists, and others. In 1970, Nixon submitted to the directors of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NSA his infamous Huston Plan. The plan called for US intelligence agencies to engage in illegal surveillance of “radicals.” Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, later referred to the Huston Plan as “White House horrors.” Enactment of the FISA was a direct result of Nixon’s threatened Huston Plan. Did Trump ask Rogers and Ledgett to return to the “status quo ante” and illegally collect compromising information on his perceived enemies in Congress, the press – which he refers to as the “enemy of the people,” and others? Answering that question should be one of the top priorities of the House oversight committees.

The NSA director who implemented FISA throughout the US Signals Intelligence system was the no-nonsense Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. In only a few cases since Inman’s tenure has any NSA director veered from a commitment to the laws and regulations implementing FISA and constraining NSA’s authorization to eavesdrop on US citizens. George W. Bush’s operation STELLAR WIND, permitting warrantless surveillance, which was strenuously opposed by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his deputy, James Comey, is one notable exception.

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA program codenamed PRISM may have whetted Trump’s appetite for the type of private communications NSA could harvest without abiding by current laws and regulations. Digging up compromising information on his enemies was Nixon’s most earnest desire when he developed his infamous “enemies’ list.”

Considering that Ledgett said he had never experienced anything like Trump’s request in his 40-years of Army and NSA service and felt compelled to commit the request to a memorandum and, with Rogers, sign it and place it in a safe in one of the most-secure facilities on the planet, Rogers’s insistence that Trump’s request was not “illegal, immoral, unethical, or inappropriate” does not hold logical water. Ledgett’s sudden decision to retire from government service on February 3, 2017, a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, is also germane. So, too, is Trump’s initial reluctance to award the National Security Medal to Ledgett after his retirement from NSA. Trump was forced to award the medal to Ledgett after pressure was brought by then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and DNI Coats.

Shortly after his election in November 2016, Trump summoned Rogers to Trump Tower for a meeting. Apparently, Rogers never informed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper or anyone in the Obama administration about the Trump-requested meeting. While, it is true that the Obama administration was never happy with Rogers’s overall performance at NSA, there is no indication that he was to be fired during a lame-duck Obama administration. Whatever Trump asked Rogers, the admiral never revealed it prior to the end of his directorship on May 4, 2018. There are unconfirmed reports that Trump considered replacing Clapper as DNI. However, Trump chose Coats and Rogers retired in 2018 to go to work for the Israeli intelligence firm, Team8.

The Rogers-Ledgett Memorandum of March 26, 2017 may be one of the most important “smoking gun” evidentiary documents in the Trump scandal. Of the tapes of 64 Oval Office conversations of Nixon in Watergate, it was one particular tape – that of a conversation six days after the 1972 Watergate break-in – that sped up Nixon’s resignation from office. That tape, recorded on June 23, 1972, contained a conversation between Nixon and White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that revealed Nixon’s desire to use US intelligence agencies to cover-up the Watergate break-in. On the tape was “prima facie” evidence that Nixon decided that his White House officials should approach Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, and Vernon A. Walters, CIA deputy director, and convince them to contact L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI, and compel him to halt the bureau’s investigation of the Watergate burglary on “national security” grounds. Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who replaced Archibald Cox – fired in the October 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” purge of the Justice Department leadership by Nixon, believed that the President, by involving the CIA in the FBI’s investigation, initiated a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The exposure of the June 23, 1972 tape sank the Nixon presidency, just as the March 26, 2017 NSA memo could be striking enough in its actual content to show blatant obstruction of justice by Trump. Ledgett claims he never experienced anything like Trump’s request of NSA in his 40 years of government service. There is little chance that the memo merely concerns Trump’s request for the NSA to state publicly that Trump was innocent of any election campaign “collusion” with Russia. For Ledgett to memorialize the conversation in a memo points to Trump making a request that was violative of the law. The memo was written seven days after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a wild accusation, based on a flimsy Fox News report, that President Obama had asked Britain’s NSA counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to spy on the Trump campaign. GCHQ and Rogers rejected the Fox report as nonsense. Past NSA directors and deputy directors have made comments supporting a president’s initiatives, for example, NSA’s public endorsement of President Bill Clinton’s cryptographic key escrow initiatives.

Donald Trump’s knowledge of NSA, as with other agencies of government, is extremely shallow and indicative of a school boy’s appreciation for the roles and responsibilities of agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI. Trump, a denizen of and product of pop culture, likely only knows about NSA from the movies and television shows that illustrate the signals intelligence agency as an eavesdropper of private telephone calls and email exchanges. Trump has no appreciation for US Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID 18), which implements the FISA and stipulates that all surveillance and intercepts of the communications of “US Persons” must be pursuant to a legitimate court order – under a FISA or Title III law enforcement predicate – or a compelling “ticking bomb” national security matter.

Trump may only know about NSA from his friend Jon Voight’s portrayal of Thomas Reynolds, a law-breaking renegade Deputy Director of the NSA, in the 1998 film “Enemy of the State.” Trump may have believed that Rogers and Ledgett were in positions to collect dirt on his political enemies. It would be hard to believe that Ledgett, a 40-year career NSA professional, would commit to written form a conversation between the two top NSA chiefs and the President unless the subject of Trump’s requests were in clear violation of FISA, USSID 18, and the Constitution. In other words, the Rogers-Ledgett Memo may be smoking gun evidence of obstruction by Trump on par with the June 23, 1972 Nixon tape.

By former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon: Just after midnight on 16 August, I was called by LBC in London for a comment on a breaking story on the front page of The Daily Telegraph about British spies hacking the EU. Even though I had just retired to bed, the story was just too irresistible, but a radio interview is always too short to do justice to such a convoluted tale. Here are some longer thoughts.

For those who cannot get past the Telegraph paywall, the gist is that that the EU has accused the British intelligence agencies of hacking the EU’s side of the negotiations. Apparently, some highly sensitive and negative slides about the British Prime Minister’s plan for Brexit, the Chequers Plan, had landed in the lap of the British government, which then lobbied the EU to suppress publication.

Of course, this could be a genuine leak from the Brussels sieve, as British sources are claiming (well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?). However, it is plausible that this is the work of the spies, either by recruiting a paid-up agent well-placed within the Brussels bureaucracy or through electronic surveillance.

Before dismissing the latter option as a conspiracy theory, the British spies do have form. In the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, the USA and UK were desperate to get a UN Security Council resolution to invade Iraq, thus providing a fig leaf of apparent legitimacy to the illegal war. However, some countries within the UN had their doubts and the USA asked Britain’s listening post, GCHQ, to step up its surveillance game. Forewarned is forearmed in delicate international negotiations.

How do we know this? A brave GCHQ whistleblower called Katherine Gun leaked the information to The Observer. For her pains, she was threatened with prosecution under the draconian terms of the UK’s 1989 Official Secrets Act and faced two years in prison. The case was only dropped three weeks before her trial was due to begin, partly because of the feared public outcry, but mainly because her lawyers threatened to use the legal defence of “necessity” – a defence won only three years before during the case of the MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler. Tangentially, a film is this year being made about Gun’s story.

We also have confirmation from one of the early 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures that GCHQ had hacked its way into the Belgacom network – the national telecommunications supplier in Belgium. Even back then there was an outcry from the EU bodies, worried that the UK (and by extension its closest intelligence buddy the USA), would gain leverage with stolen knowledge.

So, yes, it is perfectly feasible that the UK could have done this, even though it was illegal back in the day. GCHQ’s incestuous relationship with America’s NSA gives it massively greater capabilities than other European intelligence agencies, and the EU knows this well, which is why it is concerned to retain access to the UK’s defence and security powers post-Brexit, and also why it has jumped to these conclusions about hacking.

But that was then and this is now. On 1^st January 2017 the UK government finally signed a law called the Investigatory Powers Act, governing the legal framework for GCHQ to snoop.The IPA gave GCHQ the most draconian and invasive powers of any western democracy. Otherwise known in the British media as the “snoopers’ charter”, it had been defeated in Parliament for years, but Theresa May, then Home Secretary, pushed it through in the teeth of legal and civil society opposition.

This year the High Court ordered the UK government to redraft the IPA as it is incompatible with European law.

The IPA legalised what GCHQ had previously been doing illegally post-9/11, including bulk metadata collection, bulk data hacking, and bulk hacking of electronic devices.

It also notionally gave the government greater oversight of the spies’ actions, but these measures remain weak and offer no protection if the spies choose to keep quiet about what they are doing. So if GCHQ did indeed hack the EU, it is feasible that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister remained ignorant of what was going on, despite being legally required to sign off on such operations. In which case the spies would be running amok.

It is also feasible that they were indeed fully briefed and an argument could be made that they would be correct to do so. GCHQ and the other spy agencies are required to protect “national security and the economic well-being” of Great Britain, and I can certainly see a strong argument could be made that they were doing precisely that, provided they had prior written permission for such a sensitive operation, if they tried to get advance intelligence about the EU’s Brexit strategy.

This argument becomes even more powerful when you consider the problems around the fraught issue of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, an issue about which the EU is being particularly intransigent. If a deal is not made then the 1998 Good Friday Agreement could be under threat and civil war might again break out in Northern Ireland. You cannot get much more “national security” than that and GCHQ would be justified in this work, provided it has acquired the necessary legal sign-offs from its political masters.

However, these arguments will do nothing to appease the enraged EU officials. No doubt the UK government will continue to state that this was a leak from a Brussels insider and oil will, publicly at least, be seen to have been poured on troubled diplomatic waters.

However, behind the scenes this will multiply the mutual suspicion,and will no doubt unleash a witch hunt through the corridors of EU power, with top civil servant Martin Selmayr (aka The Monster) cast as Witchfinder General. With him on your heels, you would have to be a very brave leaker, whistleblower, or even paid-up agent working for the Brits to take such a risk.

So, perhaps this is indeed a GCHQ hack. However justifiable this might be under the legally nebulous concept of “national security”, this will poison further the already toxic Brexit negotiations.

As Angela Merkel famously if disingenuously said after the Snowden revelation that the USA had hacked her mobile phone: “no spying among friends”. But perhaps this is an outdated concept – nor has the EU exactly been entirely friendly to Brexit Britain.

I am just waiting for the first hysterical claim that it was the Russians instead or, failing them, former Trump strategist-in-chief, Steve Bannon, reportedly currently on a mission to build a divisive Alt-Right Movement across Europe…

truepublica.org.uk

A barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77^th Brigade. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77^th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating “attitude and sentiment awareness” from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant.

Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers", “reach", “traction". You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. But the skinny jeans and wax moustaches were here replaced by the crisply ironed shirts and light patterned camouflage of the British Army. Their surroundings were equally incongruous – the 77^th’s headquarters were a mix of linoleum flooring, long corridors and swinging fire doors. More Grange Hill than Menlo Park. Next to a digital design studio, soldiers were having a tea break, a packet of digestives lying open on top of a green metallic ammo box. Another sign on the wall declared, “Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. What on Earth was happening?

“If you track where UK manpower is deployed, you can take a good guess at where this kind of ‘influence’ activity happens,” an information warfare officer (not affiliated with the 77^th) told me later, under condition of anonymity. “A document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.” He explains that each military campaign now also has – or rather is – a marketing campaign too.

Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.

Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn't have to look like it came from the military and doesn't have to necessarily tell the truth.

I saw no evidence that the 77^th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.

According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.

JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.

They had operational targets across the globe: Iran, Africa, North Korea, Russia and the UK. Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations. Operation Quito was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. A slide explained “this will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation”. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party.

Walking through the headquarters of the 77^th, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. We’ve all heard a lot about “cyberwarfare” – about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets. But that wasn’t what was going on here. Emerging here in the 77^th Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media. An engagement now doesn’t just happen on the battlefield, but also in the media and online. A victory is won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies on the battlefield. Warfare in the information age is a warfare over information itself.

Propaganda published on Facebook by Russian PR firms in an attempt to affect the 2016 US presidential election

Over a decade ago, and a world away from the 77^th Brigade, there were people who already knew that the internet was a potent new tool of influence. They didn’t call what they did “information warfare”, media operations, influence activities, online action, or any of the military vernacular that it would become. Members of the simmering online subcultures that clustered around hacker forums, in IRCs, and on imageboards like 4chan, they might have called it “attention hacking”. Or simply lulz.

In 2008, Oprah Winfrey warned her millions of viewers that a known paedophile network “has over 9,000 penises and they’re all raping children.” That was a 4chan Dragon Ball-themed in-joke someone had posted on the show’s messageboard. One year later, Time magazine ran an online poll for its readers to vote on the world’s 100 most influential people, and 4chan used scripts to rig the vote so that its founder – then-21-year-old Christopher Poole, commonly known as “moot” – came first. They built bots and “sockpuppets” – fake social media accounts to make topics trend and appear more popular than they were – and swarmed together to overwhelm their targets. They started to reach through computers to change what people saw, and perhaps even what people thought. They celebrated each of their victories with a deluge of memes.

The lulz were quickly seized upon by others for the money. Throughout the 2000s, small PR firms, political communications consultancies, and darknet markets all began to peddle the tactics and techniques pioneered on 4chan. “Digital media-savvy merchants are weaponising their knowledge of commercial social media manipulation services,” a cybersecurity researcher who tracks this kind of illicit commercial activity tells me on condition of anonymity.

“It’s like an assembly line,” he continues. “They prepare the campaign, penetrate the target audience, maintain the operation, and then they strategically disengage. It is only going to get bigger.”

A range of websites started selling fake accounts, described, categorised and priced almost like wine: from cheap plonk all the way to seasoned vintages. The “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK”, available for just $3 on the darknet, allowed you to build your own bot army across hundreds of social media platforms. There were services for manipulating search engine results. You could buy Wikipedia edits. You could rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts came from all over the world. And at the top of the market were “legend farms”, firms running tens of thousands of unique identities, each one with multiple accounts on social media, a unique IP address, its own internet address, even its own personality, interests and writing style. The lulz had transmogrified into a business model.

Inside the base of the 77^th, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, work units installed; desks – empty of possessions – formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since.

In 2014, a year before the 77^th was established, a memo entitled “Warfare in the Information Age” flashed across the British military. “We are now in the foothills of the Information Age” the memo announced. It argued that the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that “will have information at its core”. The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, “in the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth, countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.”

Then the business of lulz turned into geopolitics. Around the world, militaries had come to exactly the same realisation as the British, and often more quickly. “There is an increased reliance on, and desire for, information,” Nato’s Allied Joint Doctrine for Information Operations, published in 2009, began. And it reached the same conclusion as the British military memo: wars needed to have an “increased attention on Info Ops”. Simply put, information operations should be used to target an enemy’s will. “For example, by questioning the legitimacy of leadership and cause, information activities may undermine their moral power base, separating leadership from supporters, political, military and public, thus weakening their desire to continue and affecting their actions,” the document explains.

Russia, too, was in on the act. The Arab Spring, the revolutions in several post-Soviet states, Nato’s enlargement – each of those had chipped away at the crumbling edifice of Russian power. Russia had a large conventional army but that seemed to matter less than in the past. The Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, began to rethink what a military needed to do. Warfare, he argued in an article for Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier (The Military Industry Journal), was now “hybrid” – blurring the lines between war and peace, civilian and military, state and non-state. And there was another blurring too: between force and ideas. “Moral-psychological-cognitive-informational struggle”, as Gerasimov put it, was now central to how conflicts should be fought.

We now know what Russian information warfare looks like. Moscow has built an apparatus that stretches from mainstream media to the backwaters of the blogosphere, from the President of the Russian Federation to the humble bot. Just like the early attention hackers, their techniques are a mixture of the very visible and very secret – but at a vastly greater scale.

Far less visible to Western eyes, however, were the outbreak of other theatres of information warfare outside of the English language. Gerasimov was right: each was a case of blurred boundaries. It was information warfare, but not always just carried out by militaries. It came from the state, but sometimes included plenty of non-state actors too. Primarily, it was done by autocracies, and was often directed internally, at the country’s own inhabitants.

A Harvard paper published in 2017 estimated that the Chinese government employs two million people to write 448 million social media posts a year. Their primary purpose is to keep online discussion away from sensitive political topics. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, exposed thousands of fake Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia, “lionising the Saudi government or Saudi foreign policy”. In Bahrain, evidence emerged of spam-like operations, aiming to stop dissidents finding each other or debating politically dangerous topics online. In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 automated accounts are known locally as Peñabots, after President Enrique Peña Nieto, flooding protest hashtags with irrelevant, annoying noise burying any useful information.

Disinformation and deception have been a part of warfare for thousands of years, but across the world, something new was starting to happen. Information has long been used to support combat operations, but now combat was seen to taking place primarily, sometimes exclusively, through it. From being a tool of warfare, each military began to realise that the struggle with, over and through information was what war itself actually was about. And it wasn’t confined to Russia, China or anyone else. A global informational struggle has broken out. Dozens of countries are already doing it. And these are just the campaigns that we know about.

On their shoulders, the soldiers of the 77^th Brigade wear a small, round patch of blue encircling a snarling golden creature that looks like a lion. Called an A Chinthe, it’s a mythical Burmese beast first worn by the the Chindits, a British and Indian guerrilla force created during the Second World War to protect Burma against the advancing Japanese Army. An army of irregulars, the Chindits infiltrated deep behind enemy lines in unpredictable sorties, destroying supply depots and severing transport links, aiming to spread confusion as much as destruction.

It’s no accident that the 77^th wear the Chinthe on their shoulder. Like the Chindits, they are a new kind of force. An unorthodox one, but in the eyes of the British Army also a necessary innovation; simply reflecting the world in which we all now live and the new kind of warfare that happens within it.

This new warfare poses a problem that neither the 77^th Brigade, the military, or any democratic state has come close to answering yet. It is easy to work out how to deceive foreign publics, but far, far harder to know how to protect our own. Whether it is Russia’s involvement in the US elections, over Brexit, during the novichok poisoning or the dozens of other instances that we already know about, the cases are piling up. In information warfare, offence beats defence almost by design. It’s far easier to put out lies than convince everyone that they’re lies. Disinformation is cheap; debunking it is expensive and difficult.

Even worse, this kind of warfare benefits authoritarian states more than liberal democratic ones. For states and militaries, manipulating the internet is trivially cheap and easy to do. The limiting factor isn’t technical, it’s legal. And whatever the overreaches of Western intelligence, they still do operate in legal environments that tend to more greatly constrain where, and how widely, information warfare can be deployed. China and Russia have no such legal hindrances.

Equipping us all with the skills to protect ourselves from information warfare is, perhaps, the only true solution to the problem. But it takes time. And what could be taught would never keep up with what can be done. Technological possibility, as things stand, easily outpaces public understanding.

The Chinthe was often built at the entrances of pagodas, temples and other sacred sites to guard them from the menaces and dangers lurking outside. Today, that sacred site is the internet itself. From the lulz, to spam, to information warfare, the threats against it have become far better funded and more potent. The age of information war is just getting started.

wired.co.uk

Photo: YouTube