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A PR guru who helped spread stories of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is linked to a Government-funded infowars unit exposed by the Sunday Mail.

Fife-based “charity” the Institute for Statecraft have been paid £2million by the Foreign Office to counter Russian fake news through their Integrity Initiative project.

The programme is run by a team of military intelligence specialists who have set up secretive “clusters” of academics, politicians and journalists across Europe in a bid to disseminate anti-Kremlin messages.

It has now emerged that the Integrity Initiative has connections to American military PR guru John Rendon.

(Image: David Furst-Pool/Getty Images)

His Rendon Group were hired by the CIA in the 90s to run a public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein.

He is understood to have helped set up and publicise the Iraqi National Congress in the Middle East in the run-up to the war.

The organisation – who were later found to have had little support – were behind many of the stories of weapons of mass destruction, which later proved to be unfounded.

Hacked documents reveal Rendon, who calls himself an “information warrior” and “perception manager”, was a speaker at a £45,000 seminar to “educate core team and clusters” for the Integrity Initiative.

Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: “The tale of the Integrity Initiative gets murkier and murkier – now we see it exposed that they have been tutored by someone who was behind some of the worst fake news circulating during the disaster in Iraq.

“The UK Parliament and Scotland’s charity regulator OSCR must now take a serious look at the activities and funding of this so-called charity, who appear to be nothing more than a propaganda front.”

Labour MP Chris Williamson said: “One of the most worrying aspects of the Integrity Initiative’s activities is this seemingly covert effort to move the country on to a war footing.

“The involvement of someone like John Rendon is extremely concerning as this seems to be exactly the sort of thing that he specialises in.

“A lot of the focus has been on Brexit over the last few weeks but this isn’t an issue that the Labour Party are willing to let go of.

“We will be asking for more debate in Parliament and more answers from the Foreign Office in order to find out exactly what has been going on here.”

Institute for Statecraft director Chris Donnelly is an honorary colonel in military intelligence who once headed the British Army’s Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst.

Fellow board member Dan Lafayeedney was an SAS soldier in 1978, while Stephen Dalziel spent time in the military and working in military intelligence. Another director, Harry Hart, was the inspiration for a secret agent in the hit Kingsman movies.

While the organisation are registered as a charity at the Gateside Mill in Fife, nobody there is aware of their work.

We revealed how the organisation’s official Twitter account was being used to attack the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, with one piece suggesting he was a “useful idiot” for Vladimir Putin.

There is also evidence that the organisation mounted a social media campaign that saw Spaniard Pedro Banos rejected for a job as his country’s national security director.