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Drip by drip, seeping out like the melting glaciers, are facts about the secret war for hearts and minds in the social media age. Every nation that can is doing it, and lying about it.

If governments were proud of being agents of change, surely they would admit it upfront and claim credit for their successes. The UK, for one, without being forced by leaks and Freedom of Information requests, would publicize the proud achievements of its military and former military people in bringing about ‘behavioral change’ across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Baltic.

Of course, for over a century, propaganda has been what our enemies did to change opinions and behavior, while what we did was publicity, information, advertising, and public relations. We had to use propaganda in wartime, but ours was ‘white’ – based on open sources and with noble intent. Theirs was ‘black’ – its sources hidden, its aims to deceive and confuse, and among its methods were torture and brainwashing. Now, nations meet in the universal ‘grey’ zone, using dubious means short of real war, like disinformation, false flag operations, and psychological techniques. These are for the ‘right’ ends, like undermining insurgencies, funding and arming proxy fighters, coercing or overthrowing governments. There’s no proof that they work.

In Syria for example, the UK- and US-backed White Helmets (a ‘civil defense’ group founded in 2014 by James Le Mesurier, a former British army intelligence officer) were active in a series of events reported by Western media as chemical weapons attacks on Syrian civilians. Reporters on the ground produced evidence of falsely-planted weapons and bodies, and children wailing at being hosed, not gassed. Claims about sarin and chlorine, intended by White Helmets to incite allied bombing, were shown by British investigators themselves to be false (Editor, Medialens, ‘Douma: Part 1 – deception in plain sight’, 25-6 April 2018. ‘Douma: Part 2 – It Just Doesn’t Ring True’, 26 April 2018. Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Piers Robinson, May 2019).

Long before Western leaders began accusing Russia and China of using the Internet and social media to influence their elections, every US president was an enthusiast for Information Warfare (IW) which did the same (Nafeez Ahmed, ‘How the CIA made Google’, 23 January 2015). John Bolton reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica $US1.2 million for psychographic messages before the 2014 and 2016 elections to support Republican Senate candidates. Before becoming Trump’s Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), he was chairman from 2013 to 2018 of the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, ‘dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report’ (Dexter Filkins, ‘On the warpath’, New Yorker, 6 May 2019: 32-45).

The instinct for secrecy, or some residual sense of guilt, seems to persist in the British Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Defence (MoD) which fund ‘grey’ operations, for they are no sooner discovered than denied. Their websites, certain details, and even people (like Sergei Skripal) disappear. Few have heard of the MoD’s Defence Cultural Specialist Unit, formed in 2010 after the UK took its forces out of Iraq. The Unit’s ‘senior officers’ mingled with UK regulars in Afghanistan, Kenya, Jordan, and Bosnia Herzegovina. Grayzone’s Ben Norton in early October found that the Unit’s ‘regime change activists’ are given seminars at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies by advocates of the invasion of Libya and Syria. One of the instructors is a researcher at Chatham House; another is attached to Integrity Initiative (II), whose website disappeared last December following leaks about its false address and ‘charity’ status.

Regime change agents in many countries have a mutually advantageous relationship with internet companies. Social media offer propagandists instant access to millions of hearts and minds. Facebook and Twitter respond to urging from the Deep State by taking down posts that inconvenience the authorities. In 2017, the US Senate told representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google that it was their responsibility to ‘quell information rebellions’ and prevent the ‘fomenting of discord’. The FBI pressed Apple in 2015-16 for a ‘backdoor’ to its clients, without success: then FBI devised its own. Pressure to allow access to encrypted sites like WhatsApp is now being applied by the US and Australia. Bloggers who challenge the authorities’ preferred line have found their Internet access cut off by censors in government or in social media (Caitlyn Johnstone, Medium, 10 September 2018).

In August, Facebook announced that it had shut down multiple accounts run by a company called New Waves, based in Cairo, and an Emirati firm, Newave, which together put out propaganda supporting the military leadership in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Sudan. Under false identities, the two reportedly used 361 compromised accounts, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising. The New York Times reported that New Waves was run by a retired Egyptian military officer described as an ‘Internet wars researcher’, while Newave operated from a government-run media complex in Abu Dhabi. Neither would comment. Twitter in September suspended hundreds of accounts in Spain, China, Ecuador and the Middle East citing ‘platform manipulation’ by state-affiliated operations.

Similarly active in cyber-manipulation is the British Army’s 77th Brigade. No sooner did Ian Cobain reveal in Middle East Eye that Gordon MacMillan, a reserve officer, also works for Twitter, than his military connection was taken down from Linked-In. Despite Gordon MacMillan’s day job, an army spokesperson denied ‘any relationship or agreement between 77th Brigade and Twitter’ other than for communication.

The 77th was set up in 2015 to develop ‘non-lethal’ ways of waging ‘information warfare’, using podcasts and social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and to do data analysis and audience research. The head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, says the Brigade provides ‘the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level’. Its operations, much like the defunct Cambridge Analytica’s, are intended to shape perceptions of conflict and to change the behavior of ‘target audiences’.

The Brigade’s ‘Information Warfare Teams’ are reportedly concentrated in Bosnia, France, Kenya, Albania, Jordan, and other un-named countries in the Middle East. Cobain says journalists have recently been approached to join the Brigade’s ‘Facebook Warriors’, a proposed corps of 1500, as reserve officers. However, the Brigade’s Twitter account has been locked since it was hacked earlier this year, with the result that only approved followers can read its tweets.

Info-war is neither new, nor secret.

In 2018 a leak revealed that since 2015 Britain, the US, NATO and others including Facebook had secretly funded Integrity Initiative (II) in the UK. II employed ‘clusters’ of politicians, journalists, academics and social media habitués in ten EU countries and 20 others in the Middle East, North Africa and North America, Turkey and Ukraine, to put out false facts about Russia in an effort to ‘correct’ anti-Western reports. Anonymous leaks in January 2019 revealed that the Institute for Statecraft (IfS), also UK government-funded, was founded in 2015 to target Russia and Russian-speaking communities to ‘cement the UK’s influence in North America and in Europe post-Brexit’. This was candidly confirmed by James Ball, a Guardian journalist associated with II, the IfS subsidiary, whose £2 million budget (in 2018) came from the UK, NATO, the State Department, Lithuania, Facebook, and several private sources.

The spokesman for II, Christopher Donnelly, was an honorary colonel in military intelligence (George Galloway, ‘A very British coup: The spies who went out to the cold’, 12 December 2018). He was a ‘Security and Justice Senior Mentor’ of the UK’s Stabilisation Unit, whose task is destabilizing other countries. Before the II website was closed down, Donnelly endorsed its psy-ops efforts as

a new kind of warfare, a new kind of conflict, a new kind of competition, in which everything becomes a weapon: information, energy supplies, cyber-attack which everyone is aware of, corruption itself, financial investment – all of these things are now weapons in modern conflict between states, and between states and sub-state actors like Daesh [IS]. And disinformation is the issue which unites all the other weapons of this conflict and which gives them a third dimension (Youtube, ‘Chris Donnelly speaks on Disinformation, for the Institute for Statecraft’: Tony Kevin transcript, made 4 January 2019).

At a meeting in October 2016, II’s Donnelly and retired General Sir Richard Barrons agreed that the UK should double its military expenditure ‘to deal with Russia and China’. They suggested the need for a catastrophic event that would generate agreement to spending £7 billion more per year on war. This echoed Robert Kagan’s call in September 2000 for a catastrophe to trigger revolutionary change, which was followed exactly a year later by 9/11. Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century, which advocated multiple wars to consolidate US hegemony. It ceased to function in 2006 and was replaced by Foreign Policy Initiative in 2009, the same year as IfS began in Britain, followed by II in 2015. The links of name, date, and purpose may not be coincidental.

Several counterpart American organizations were also using the Internet for psy-ops and propaganda, aimed at inciting extremist factions to destabilize and overthrow governments. Foreign Policy Initiative from 2009 to 2017 sought ‘to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel’, and New Knowledge, founded in 2015, used similar techniques. New Knowledge admitted it ran a ‘false flag’ operation in the 2018 Alabama Senate election (David McIlwain, ‘The Two Eyes Phase Two’, American Herald Tribune, 11 January 2019).

A precursor, Highland Forum, was conceived in the Pentagon in late 1990s as an ‘influence bridge’ to a network of private contractors, for mutual benefit. The Forum, which like IfS and II included people in government, the military, media, and academia, developed a mechanism of mass surveillance intended to dominate information on a global scale, targeting enemies, supporting allies, and co-opting the public. In collaboration, the shadowy Singapore Island Forum involved Australians from the military/industrial/security complex, three of whom appear in II’s contact list.

Highland Forum’s Information Warfare (IW) strategy, devised by a US Navy cryptologist in 1989, influences adversaries to believe they are vulnerable; potential partners to ‘perceive the cause [of war] as just’; and civilian populations and political leaders to ‘perceive the cost as worth the effort’. The Forum’s purpose in deploying mass surveillance and IW is to achieve global dominance, including through Google. In 2003, in collaboration with the NSA, it consolidated a Total Information Awareness (TIA) program of warrantless electronic surveillance, to keep ‘track of individuals’ and understand ‘how they fit into models’ through risk profiles, both of American citizens and foreigners. TIA integrated individuals’ finance, travel, medical, educational, and other records into a ‘virtual, centralized grand database’.

Among the journalists associated with IfS and II was the BBC’s Mark Urban, who wrote a book on ‘black ops’ counter-terrorism in Iraq, and followed that with another about chemical weapons, espionage, and Sergei Skripal, who had been recruited as a double agent by MI6’s Pablo Miller in the early 1990s (Mark Urban, The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy, Macmillan, 2018). In July 2018 Miller joined Howard Body, a senior executive at Porton Down, and representatives of White Helmets at a meeting at the London headquarters of II. Before working as a journalist in several Middle Eastern countries, Urban had been an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment (RTR) based in Wiltshire near Porton Down, with which it shares responsibility for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials. Some speculated that RTR had become a training establishment for SIS agents. Urban and Miller (both from the Tank Regiment), were associated in April 2016 with Jaysh al-Islam, which admitted using chlorine gas against Kurdish fighters in Aleppo (Clive Williams, ‘History of chemical warfare has been foul indeed’, Australian, 16 April 2018: 12). Miller and other RTR alumni were also among II’s associates: people from the Foreign Office, MoD, the US Embassy, the BBC, Chatham House, and Porton Down.

Integrity Initiative didn’t distinguish the UK domestic agenda from the foreign opinions it sought to influence. It included among its disinformation successes allegations about Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, reports that WikiLeaks had instigated the Catalonian uprising in 2017, and articles about the Skripal poisoning. The loose ends to Salisbury and Syria were joined in II. In sum, wrote Tom Secker,

We have a group that called for a ratcheting up of sanctions and actions against Russia, then called for a ‘catastrophe to wake people up and demand a response’, who in effect are plotting a military takeover of the British foreign policy establishment, who work closely with both scientific and non-scientific officials at Porton Down, and have some association with Skripal’s handler, and were for a time engaged in information warfare on the Skripal case (Tom Secker, ‘Was the Integrity Initiative behind the Salisbury Poisoning? Documents implicate British government thinktank in Skripal drama,’ Medium, 5 January 2019).

Together, an American scholar observes, the US and the UK are engaged in an unprecedented and dangerous campaign of disinformation and vilification against Russia, backed by ex-military and intelligence people and the MSM (Stephen Cohen, War with Russia? 2018). The campaign continues: after the IfS and II websites closed down, the Open Information Partnership emerged in a tweet from Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins in February 2019. Higgins, already a mouthpiece for UK intelligence on Russia and Syria, became a ‘non-resident senior fellow’ at the digital Forensic Research Lab, a creation of the conservative Atlantic Council, running the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, which sounded much like its predecessors. Minister of State Sir Alan Duncan on 3 April 2019 referred to an organization of ‘European Non-Governmental Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’ which aimed to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia. The Partnership in effect proposed that anyone who has doubts that the ‘White Helmets’ is a benevolent humanitarian organization, or that the Russians poisoned the Skripals and shot down MH17, has been misled by fake news, which will be countered by more of it (Sic Semper Tyrannis, 4 April 2019).

It is no surprise that many governments do propaganda, info-war, and psy-ops. What is puzzling is that the operations of Higgins, Donnelly, Macmillan and their masters are discussed in the US and UK, but not in Australia. Given the shared agenda of the ‘Five Eyes’ partners, II may well have ‘clusters’ in New Zealand and Australia. Only three Australian names appear in the leaked documents: an academic, a prominent journalist, and a former diplomat. There’s a lot more we need to know, but the MSM aren’t interested.

*(Top image courtesy of warfare.today)