How One Spook-Run London College Department is Training the World’s Social Media Managers
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 22, 2022
Alan MacLeod
Staffed by NATO military officers and former government ministers and notorious for training the West’s top spies, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London is also providing the workforce for many of the largest social media companies. This includes Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Twitter.
A MintPress study of professional databases and employment websites reveals a wide network of War Studies alumni holding many of the most influential jobs in media, constituting a silent army of individuals who influence what the world sees (and does not see) in its social media feeds.
SPY SCHOOL
Set in an imposing building near the banks of the River Thames in Central London, the Department of War Studies is at the heart of the British establishment. Current staff includes the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and a host of military officers from NATO and NATO-aligned countries.
It is also a favored training ground for the secret services. A 2009 report published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that
“exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system,” also mentioning that the department’s faculty have “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.”
In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta gave a speech at the department. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” he said, adding that expansion into tech, surveillance, and cyberwarfare was of critical importance.
Last year, MintPress investigated the department’s intelligence links more deeply.
Moreover, the university has freely admitted to having entered into a number of secret funding agreements with the U.K. Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense. However, it has refused to elaborate on these contracts, telling investigative news outlet Declassified U.K. that doing so could undermine national security.
While the Department of War Studies plays a key role in producing the West’s intelligence operatives, it also trains many of the world’s top journalists, as well as social media managers, whose task it is to protect us from the misinformation put out by the others. As such, it is a central part of the new high-tech information war being waged between Russia and the West, in which the national security state is increasingly taking control over the means of communication under the guise of protecting us from the Kremlin.
FACEBOOK
At any one time, the department educates around 1,000 students, many of whom have gone on to become top military commanders, intelligence chiefs, and government officials, both in the West and in countries as disparate as Jordan, Nigeria, and Singapore. But increasingly, large numbers of War Studies graduates are finding employment in the most influential media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Silicon Valley.
Chief amongst the social media companies where War Studies graduates hold considerable sway is Facebook (now rebranded as Meta). For example, while working at senior levels in the U.K. government, Mark Smith pursued a Master’s at the department, completing it in 2009. Between 2007 and 2017, he worked for the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the National Security Secretariat. According to his own LinkedIn profile, he was deployed overseas three times as a political advisor to top NATO military commanders and was a key figure in strategizing responses to ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as working on the Ministry of Defense’s response to the Scottish independence question.
In 2017, Smith moved straight from the government to Meta, where he is now the Global Director of Global Content Management, giving him considerable power to dictate what is allowed and what is censored from the world’s biggest news and media platform.
Facebook’s Global Director of Strategic Response is also a former War Studies student. After graduating, Caitlin Baker worked on Middle Eastern counterterrorism policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington and as Director for Jordan and Lebanon at the National Security Council at the White House. Between 2015 and 2017, she was also VP Joe Biden’s Middle East Policy Advisor. During this time period, the administration rapidly expanded its drone program, coming to bomb seven countries simultaneously.
In October 2017, Baker moved seamlessly from the Defense Secretary’s office to work for Facebook’s strategic response team, rising to become a global director. The strategic response team decides how Facebook will react to global events like elections, wars and coups, determining what content will be permissible and which views will be banned or suppressed.
There are many more War Studies graduates in influential roles at Facebook, including:
Louis Babington-Reynolds, Public Policy Manager for Dangerous Organizations;
Monica Thurmond Allen, Director of Public Policy for Campaigns and Programs;
Claire Akkaoui, Intelligence Lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
Olivia Minor, Intelligence Analyst for Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
Évia Orlando, Imminent Risk Project Manager;
Fiona Moodie, Lead Regulatory Litigation Counsel;
Dane Roth, Design Program Manager;
Kettianne Cadet, Program Manager, People Experience.
While this is certainly not to say that all those mentioned are government plants, or even that they are anything but model employees, this connection does come at a time when Facebook has rapidly begun intertwining itself with the national security state. In 2018, the company announced that, in a bid to combat fake news, it was partnering with NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, in a deal that gave the latter significant influence on the platform’s content. Today, Facebook’s head of intelligence is NATO’s former press officer. And a MintPress study published last month detailed how the company has hired dozens of former CIA officials, many of whom now hold the most politically sensitive positions in the company and are in charge of deciding what billions of users see daily.
TIKTOK
War Studies alumni also hold or held several influential positions on the video platform TikTok. These include Haniyyah Rahman-Shepherd, an intelligence analyst who works on threat detection and identifying hate speech, extremism, and mis- and disinformation; Michelle Caley, content strategy leader; Manish Gohil, a former risk analyst for TikTok; Alexandra Dinca, investigations lead; Jeanne Sun, safety program manager; and Tom Dudley, head of physical security.
Scott O’Brien, meanwhile, worked for both Facebook and TikTok, first as an intelligence analyst for Facebook, where he specialized in “human rights investigations” in “at-risk countries,” according to his LinkedIn. He is now an influence operations intelligence and discovery analyst at TikTok. Before that, he worked for the infamous intelligence agency, Pinkerton.
In recent times, TikTok has been the recipient of significant amounts of government attention. From the Trump administration’s threats to ban the platform altogether to the news that President Biden was briefing TikTok stars on how they should cover the war in Ukraine, the U.S. government, it appears, performed a 180-degree turn on the app. This occurred at the same time as the company began employing large numbers of state functionaries in key positions, including individuals from NATO, the White House, and the CIA. A MintPress investigation detailing all this described it as a “NATO to TikTok pipeline.”
TWITTER AND GOOGLE
Twitter has comparatively fewer War Studies alumni. But some are in important positions. For instance, Global Program Manager Sean Ryan describes his role as “lead[ing] a global program team that drives a holistic understanding of Twitter’s dynamic risk and threat landscape while working across the cyber, physical, information, platform, policy, health, and reputation domains.” He notes that his analysis, “informs the decision-making of strategic leadership while supporting key policies across multiple teams.”
Twitter’s director of insider risk and investigations, Bruce A., is also a former KCL man. Bruce A. spent 23 years in the FBI, becoming a supervisory special agent, leaving the bureau in 2020 to directly transfer to Twitter.
Bruce is one of just dozens of FBI agents and analysts that Twitter has hired in the past few years – the majority of whom have been parachuted into highly politically sensitive fields, such as security, content moderation and trust and safety, thus effectively giving the bureau considerable influence over the platform’s content and outlook.
Google, too, employs a number of War Studies graduates, among them Asia-Pacific Information Policy Lead Jean-Jacques Sahel, Policy Advisor Grant Hurst, and Global Threat Analyst Jessica O.
JOURNALISM
For a single department in one college of a university, it is remarkable the impact that the Department of War Studies has had on the field of journalism as well. The department punches vastly above its weight, with alumni in most of the world’s top media outlets, including CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a host of individuals populating the ranks of the British state broadcaster, the BBC. Indeed, it appears that if breaking into the field of journalism is the goal, then a degree from the Department of War Studies is more helpful than one from King’s College London’s Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, its de facto journalism school.
Some of these journalists cut their teeth at investigative outlets Bellingcat and Graphika, both of whom are funded by the U.S. government and both of whom put out questionable reports demonizing official enemy nations. No fewer than six Bellingcat employees or contributors — including Cameron Colquhoun, Jacob Beeders, Lincoln Pigman, Aliaume Leroy, Christiaan Triebert and senior investigator Nick Waters — all pursued postgraduate studies within the department. Indeed, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins joined the Department of War Studies in 2018 as a visiting research associate.
Graphika, meanwhile, is also inordinately staffed by KCL War Studies graduates. Together, these two groups pump out highly-publicized “intelligence” reports warning of nefarious actions committed by Russia or other official enemy states, all while quietly being funded by the U.S. national security state themselves.
STATE-BACKED NEXUS
The Department of War Studies publishes similar work to Graphika. Indeed, its faculty was crucial in propagating the idea of Russian interference in American elections, being the source of many of the most far-reaching claims about Moscow’s influence in American society. Reports published by the department accuse Russia of carrying out a campaign of “information-psychological warfare” and advise that military spending should be increased and that NATO must re-up its commitment to countering Russia. Professor Thomas Rid even testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “dark art” of Russian meddling and condemned WikiLeaks and alternative media journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation.
Many of the organizations detailed above were also identified as proposed members of a Western government-aligned “counter”-propaganda nexus hoping to be established by the EXPOSE Network. EXPOSE was allegedly a secret U.K.-government-funded initiative that would have brought together journalists and state operatives in an alliance to shape public discourse in a manner more conducive to the priorities of Western governments.
A chart showing the leadership structure of the EXPOSE network published as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak 7
The Department of War Studies’ Dr. Neville Bolt was on the organization’s preliminary advisory panel, alongside Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s think tank) and Ben Nimmo, former NATO press officer, and ex-director of investigations for Graphika, and Facebook’s current head of intelligence. Training support, meanwhile, would be provided by individuals from Bellingcat.
In the past year, MintPress has been detailing how much of the public sphere, from social media organizations like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok to big search engines such as Google, to think tanks and fact-checking organizations, are quietly much more closely linked to the national security state than first meets the eye. The Department of War Studies at King’s College London is an important part of this state-backed nexus. It is a one-stop shop for training many of the spies, think tank employees, journalists, and supposedly independent intelligence investigators who have been at the forefront of the new information war.
Put simply, one department staffed by former and current military officers is training the people producing the news (journalists), the ones manipulating it (intelligence officials), and the ones who are in charge of sorting fact from fiction and pinpointing disinformation (social media managers). It is quite the system. All the while, they continually warn of the threat of (foreign) state-backed influence operations.
To be clear, Kremlin propaganda is real, but its reach is decidedly minor in comparison to the massive disinformation campaigns being launched by the Western national security state. And the Department of War Studies is a key part of this information war.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... -managers/
BBC Assault on Antiwar Academics Was Apparent Product of UK Intel Plot
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 21, 2022
Kit Klarenberg
Leaked emails expose the fingerprints of UK intelligence all over a factually challenged BBC special that aimed to deprive antiwar academics of their jobs and destroy their reputations.
On May 31, BBC Radio initiated an embarrassing imbroglio when it broadcast a factually challenged, overtly propagandistic documentary special called Ukraine: The Disinformation War.
Fronted by a British state information warrior named Chloe Hadjimatheou, the program professed to investigate “where the new red lines are being drawn in an age of disinformation,” and how “academics, journalists and celebrities have shared misinformation” by attempting to “raise questions about the official narrative” of the conflict in Ukraine. In reality, the show amounted to a malicious state propaganda assault on academics who questioned the dominant narrative of the war.
The program took aim at Tim Hayward of Edinburgh university and Justin Schlosberg of Birkbeck in London, singling the academics out for challenging official claims about Russia’s invasion. BBC’s Hadjimatheou portrayed the two as pawns of the Kremlin who personally posed a direct threat to democracy, world peace and the “international rules based order.”
It was clear the goal of the program was to end the careers of Hayward and Schlosberg, and intimidate any other credentialed academic who might consider dissenting against British foreign policy.
What might have been less apparent to casual listeners was that the BBC’s smear-job was coated with the fingerprints of British intelligence.
British state broadcaster frames targets with wild distortions, innuendo
Among Hayward and Schlosberg’s most unforgivable sins, according to the BBC special’s producer, Chloe Hadjimateou, was publicly urging their Twitter followers to question the declarations of Western officials and mainstream media outlets about April’s still-dubious Bucha incident, in which Russian troops allegedly massacred scores of military-aged men.
Yet neither academic had cast doubt on whether something terrible had actually taken place in Bucha. What’s more, Schlosberg has been an outspoken critic of Russian state-backed media who has condemned Moscow’s invasion many times, even stating that Russia may well have carried out a “civilian massacre” in the Ukrainian city, “on top of other heinous war crimes.”
However, such sentiments did not fit the program’s preordained agenda. So it was necessary for Schlosberg’s views to be grossly distorted to the point of libel, via omission, manipulation and selective editing.
Three weeks after broadcasting its defamatory attack on dissenting academics, the BBC was forced to issue a clarification and formal apology, acknowledging that Hadjimatheou had ascribed perspectives to Schlosberg he did not express, while nonetheless failing to address the most egregious misrepresentations in which she engaged. A further correction was published on August 5. These rare admissions of fault were prompted by Schlosberg filing formal complaints.
The BBC has published a correction and apology for their treatment of me in the recent @BBCradio4 documentary on Ukraine, the Disinformation War..https://t.co/Pp6sSUljuZ
— Justin Schlosberg (@jrschlosberg) June 23, 2022
In attacking Hayward, the British state broadcaster took a more aggressive approach than it did in its attack on Schlosberg. BBC producers contacted an indeterminate number of Hayward’s students, including through their private cellphones, hoping to dig up dirt on the academic and identify individuals willing to publicly condemn him, his courses, and political positions.
In the end, the BBC obtained statements from two Edinburgh University students willing to snitch on Hayward. The first, Kvitka Perehinets, was a Ukrainian native Hayward had never taught or met, but who had many negative things to say about his tweets on Bucha, and Russia’s alleged bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol.
The BBC emphasized that “many” of Perehinets’ relatives remained in Ukraine, with “some of them fighting.” Yet the broadcaster completely omitted the fact that the student was a prolific contributor to Kyiv Independent, a propaganda operation funded by Western governments and intelligence cutouts, which disingenuously claims to be supported entirely by reader donations and “commercial activities.”
In @BBCWorld‘s latest hit piece against @Tim_Hayward_ describe @kvitkanadiia as a ‘student’ without disclosing her state funding. She’s an author at @KyivIndependent. Which uncritically amplifies Ukrainian govt disinfo and was set up with seed money from the US/CAN govts & EEfD. pic.twitter.com/kOEHynH74l
— Michael Martin (@MichaelNo2War) June 2, 2022
The second student had been taught by Hayward but only during a course during the Fall semester of 2021 which was completely unrelated to the Ukrainian conflict. Her criticism centered on Hayward’s invocation of the OPCW’s coverup of the April 2018 Douma false flag in a single lecture, as part of a critical thinking exercise, about which no official complaint was ever lodged.
Hayward was not apprised of the students’ comments at any point prior to broadcast, including during his lengthy interview with Hadjimatheou, or even when he approached her and her colleagues after learning of their fishing expedition.
Further, neither he nor Schlosberg were offered any opportunity to respond to the assorted charges leveled at them by a rogues’ gallery of establishment pundits featured in the program, which furthered its misleading, specious narrative.
Among those called in to denounce the academics was Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “specialist disinformation reporter” – an un-ironic although inadvertently accurate title, given her own predilection for perpetuating fake news. Spring branded Schlosberg’s comments on Bucha a demonstration of “how disinformation and misinformation operates – through omission.”
“It might not be your intention…[but] if you have a decent following, profession or a title that means people are likely to trust what you’re saying, you play a part, and you can’t pretend you aren’t a weapon in this war, if you do that on social media,” the pseudo-expert Spring alleged.
Journeyman journalist and British intelligence collaborator Paul Mason chimed in to reinforce the BBC pundit’s points. The Grayzone has exposed Mason’s involvement in a clandestine effort coordinated with, if not directed by, a British intelligence official named Andy Pryce. In a series of email exchanges obtained and published by this site, Mason and Pryce plotted to disrupt and destabilize the anti-war, anti-imperialist left in the UK and abroad.
In his comments to the BBC, Mason accused Hayward, Schlosberg, and others like them, of “actively promoting the talking points of the Kremlin,” even when they “condemn the invasion” of Ukraine.
“The degradation of facts into maybes is really important,” Mason said. “All that Russia needs is for [a] false fact to embed itself in a commonly accepted view. The persistent dissemination of small lies adds up to a big false picture of history. It goes from newspapers to academia. It goes from academia into diplomacy.”
These talking points were echoed by James Roscoe, a longtime British state propagandist whose CV includes stints as chief press officer to Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Queen’s communications secretary, and multiple Foreign Office roles, including in Iraq and on counter-terrorism, suggesting an intelligence background.
In an unintentionally revealing comment, Roscoe revealed the true motives behind the West’s counter-disinformation push. When those like Hayward and Schlosberg challenge prevailing narratives around controversial events, he said, “what [people] hear is, ‘this fact is disputed’, and that’s the critical thing.”
Questioning the official line is entirely unacceptable from Roscoe’s perspective, particularly with regard to international bodies. As he remarked, “[states] are not in a position to make a decision one way or another, and the way that feeds into the UN, is that they’re stuck in the middle.”
Neither Roscoe nor the BBC acknowledged that he has continually attempted to sway opinion within the United Nations Security Council while serving as London’s Acting Deputy Permanent Representative to the organization.
On May 4, for example, Roscoe branded Kremlin claims about the existence of US-funded biolabs on Ukrainian soil as “discounted and patent nonsense.” The US Department of Defense has since admitted the biolabs did indeed exist.
Delighted to meet with James Roscoe @jmsroscoe, who recently joined @UKinUSA as Deputy Head of Mission. Looking forward to working with you James. pic.twitter.com/0PbIAXy0wX
— NI Bureau (@NI_Bureau) August 16, 2022
Holding the BBC to account for “McCarthy-style atmosphere around dissenting views”
The British state broadcaster’s effort to ruin the reputations of a pair of antiwar academics contained an ‘”offline” component too.
Not long after Schlosberg’s interview with Hadjmatheou was completed, the BBC put a number of loaded questions to his employers at Birkbeck based on extremely damaging misrepresentations and outright falsifications of his public statements, political and academic positions, social media activity, and teaching approaches.
The exercise may well have been intended to compel Birkbeck to publicly condemn Schlosberg, if not terminate his employment. Instead, Hadjimatheou’s slanderous queries were forwarded to her target. Schlosberg responded with a withering and extensive rebuttal to each smear. While Hadjimatheou acknowledged receipt of the response prior to broadcast, none of his ripostes were cited in the program.
Schlosberg’s rebuttal appears in full below:
Schlosberg’s intervention nonetheless influenced the content of Ukraine: The Disinformation War, in unseen ways. Before transmission, a purported academic expert on disinformation named Emma Briant published several frenzied tweets accusing him of having her scheduled appearance in the documentary canceled. The posts indicated Schlosberg’s responses to the BBC’s bad faith attacks had been shared with her, a puzzling and deeply unprofessional move for a producer to make.
Even more curiously, Schlosberg’s complaint did not reference Briant, nor was she mentioned in his interview with Hadjimatheou. So why did she believe he had played any role in her omission from the program?
One explanation could be that it was originally intended for Briant to reinforce the malicious dog-piling and defamation of the academics featured by Mason, Spring, and Roscoe, but Schlosberg’s robust pre-broadcast critique generated interference from higher level producers concerned that the program had become so wildly prejudiced its credibility was hopelessly and undeniably compromised.
As such, it may have been necessary to cut Briant from the show to maintain the vaguest semblance of “balance” and basic journalistic standards, and provide a modicum of insulation against potential legal action. This could have prompted Hadjimatheou to furnish Briant with Schlosberg’s responses to explain why she was excluded from the program, which then led the disinformation warrior to erroneously conclude he was personally responsible.
Nonetheless, Briant seems to have played a significant behind-the-scenes role in the making of Ukraine: The Disinformation War. As The Grayzone exclusively revealed June 21, she has collaborated closely with Paul Mason in a secret war on “rogue” academics that challenge pro-war orthodoxy.
The disgraceful genesis of a BBC smear job
As part of this covert collaboration, Emma Briant privately introduced Paul Mason to researchers and scholars this April in order to equip him with professional tools to pinpoint “who in Britain denies the Bucha massacre/reflects the Russian line.”
Among the academics with whom Mason was put in touch, Huw Davies at Edinburgh University, specifically cited Tim Hayward as one such “rogue.” He also offered to provide software to assist the journalist’s quest – a resource that could have flagged social media postings by Schlosberg, given his well-shared tweets on Bucha.
In her emails with Mason, Briant also fingered Greg Simons, an academic at Sweden’s Uppsala University, accusing him of enjoying “DIRECT RUSSIAN STATE CONTACT [emphasis in original].” The basis of this bombastic charge was Simons’ receipt of an anodyne survey by Andrey Kovalev, an academic at a university in Moscow, and then forwarding it to a listserv in which both he and Briant participated.
Briant boasted of her access to that mailing list, bizarrely suggesting Simons’ routine email communication represented a clear example of the Kremlin’s sinister “techniques of recruitment.” She argued it should be publicized to “educate and raise awareness” of the Kremlin’s “grooming” of academics and others in the Western world. However, her feverish analysis overlooked Kovalev’s well-established record as a reformist liberal linked to a UK-based charity documenting human rights abuses in Russia.
Briant also failed to mention the revealing requests she issued to that same listserv. In one instance in 2015, she solicited contributions to Defence Strategic Communications, the in-house psyops journal of NATO whose editorial board she occupied. Would the self-styled “maven of persuasion” consider this to amount to direct Western state contact?
Briant furnishes BBC with false claim of academic’s Russia ties
This May, as an apparent result of Briant’s rumor-mongering, BBC correspondent Anna Meisel invited Simons to be interviewed by her colleague, Chloe Hadjimatheou, duplicitously framing the program as an open-minded examination of whether “there is a McCarthy-style atmosphere around dissenting views.”
It is therefore likely that Mason’s machinations triggered Lowkey’s invitation to appear in Ukraine: The Disinformation War. In fact, Mason emailed Pryce, the UK intelligence officer, the day after that invite was sent, informing him that Hadjimatheou was “doing an investigation into Stop The War’s disinfo tactics.” He added that he’d “contributed some critical soundbites,” and expected his targets to “go mad and claim it’s all state harassement [sic].”
For her part, Hadjimatheou appears to be a go-to when state-linked operatives require the reputations of dissenting voices to be destroyed. A typically obscure figure, she has an eerie habit of surfacing at intermittent intervals to front lavish multi-part apologias for groups and individuals tied to British intelligence.
In April 2016, for example, Hadjimatheou produced the elaborate Islamic State’s Most Wanted, which glorified the work of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, an ostensible citizen journalist collective reporting on abuses by ISIS in the Syrian city it claimed as its de facto capital, and made heroes of its activists.
In truth, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently was an astroturf operation created by a Foreign Office contractor called ARK, which was itself headed by the probable MI6 operative Alistair Harris. The endeavor appears to have achieved little beyond enraging local residents and ensuring many of its contributors were brutally killed by ISIS.
.@chloehadj‘s first major BBC project on Syria was the product of a “national security-directed bankrolling bonanza.” Her second one was an assault on critics of the UK-funded White Helmets’ founder, who killed himself after his corruption came to light. https://t.co/5jQLGbWaUG
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 2, 2022
Hadjimatheou was also placed in charge of an extensive cleanup of the mess left by the mysterious November 2019 death of James Le Mesurier, the former UK military intelligence officer who founded the US and British-funded Syrian White Helmets organization. After Dutch mainstream media published a report exposing the corrupt financial practices that likely led to Le Mesurier falling from a balcony to his death – a probable suicide – Hadjimatheou snapped into action to produce a 15-part BBC radio series called Mayday.
Confirming what was already abundantly clear, adjudicators agreed that the White Helmets propaganda show by BBC hack @chloehadj failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims. https://t.co/ljVxPdbfaJ
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 5, 2021
Airing throughout October 2020, the program elevated its protagonist to the status of secular saint, libeled and defamed critics including Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, whitewashed the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) coverup of the false flag attack in Douma, Syria, and denigrated courageous OPCW whistleblowers to such an extent the BBC was forced to acknowledge major flaws in the serial.
BBC’s Hadjimatheou named as prospective collaborator in leaked intel emails
While obviously designed to shut down scrutiny of Le Mesurier and the bogus, human rights-violating humanitarian group he created, Hadjimatheou’s series raised more questions than it answered – particularly on the nature of her relationship with British intelligence, via ARK. Mason’s leaked emails now place her in close proximity to his Foreign Office “friend,” Andy Pryce.
Pryce’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development is funded by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, the mechanism by which British intelligence bankrolls cutout organizations. These beneficiaries include ARK and Le Mesurier’s Mayday Rescue.
The most recently available official program summary for CDMD states that Pryce’s unit seeks to “protect UK national security by reducing the harm to democracy and the rules-based international order caused by Russia’s information operations.” Its work is said to include “mentoring with UK media organisations; consultancy on programming; funded media co-productions.”
If that excerpt was not sufficient to raise obvious concerns about the circumstances in which Islamic State’s Most Wanted, Mayday and Ukraine: The Disinformation War came about, consider that during the latter’s production, Mason was cooking up plans to take down The Grayzone in coordination with many of the individuals connected to the program.
This May, an intelligence contractor named Amil Khan proposed to Mason that they construct a coalition of individuals who had “been target [sic]” by The Grayzone, in order to collate evidence that could be submitted to a British government body or regulator, thus crippling this outlet financially, and ensure its “relentless de-platforming.”
Mason recommended inviting the state-funded “open source” media outlet Bellingcat to ensure “intel service input by proxy.” He also proposed including Briant, Hadjimatheou, and his “Foreign Office friend”, a euphemism for Pryce.
Khan concurred and suggested adding Marianna Spring, the BBC disinformation pseudo-specialist, to the mix. Though it is unclear how far this effort progressed, Hadjimatheou repeatedly mentioned The Grayzone in her interviews with Hayward and Schlosberg.
Was this outlet also a prospective target of the BBC’s credibility-strained documentary?
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... ntel-plot/