After
mobilizing a disinformation campaign across Europe,
documents show that the Integrity Initiative is now
infiltrating the US...
A bombshell domestic
spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after
hacked internal communications exposed a covert U.K. state
military-intelligence psychological warfare operation
targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied
NATO countries under the cover of fighting “Russian
disinformation.”
The
leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent
journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of a
group called “Integrity Initiative” to shape domestic
opinion—and to smear political opponents of the right-wing
Tory government, including the leader of the opposition Labour
Party, Jeremy Corbin.
Until
now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been
ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence
operation has already been activated in the U.S.. Hacked
documents reveal that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating
powerful allies inside the State Department, top D.C. think
tanks, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, where
it has gained access to Katharine
Gorka and her husband, the fascist-linked cable
news pundit Sebastian
Gorka.
The
Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its
network across the U.S., meddling in American politics and
recruiting “a new generation of Russia watchers” behind the
false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has
hired one of the most notorious American “perception
management” specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of
pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.
Back
in the U.K., Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has
clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative’s
abuse of public money.
The Integrity Initiative story is just growing and growing. Many are rightly outraged that this Tory government could fund a political smear unit.— Chris Williamson MP #GTTO (@DerbyChrisW) December 14, 2018
Questions need to be answered. Share this video on Facebook to make that happen. https://t.co/MGepaIEfGw
In
a recent
editorial, Williamson drew a direct parallel between the
group’s collaboration with journalists and surreptitious
payments the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
“These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool,” Williamson wrote.“They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public opinion in a particular way,” the Labour parliamentarian continued. “Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA’s old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic.”
Unmasking a Smear Machine
The
existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown
until this November, when the email servers of a previously
obscure British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft
were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When
the group’s internal documents appeared at a website hosted by
Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda
network seed-funded to the tune of over $2 million dollars by
the Tory-controlled U.K. Foreign Office, and run largely by
military-intelligence officers.
Through
a series of cash inducements, off-the-record briefings and
all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international
echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian
disinformation—and to defame politicians and journalists
critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid
for funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative
in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver
a “tougher stance on Russia” by arranging for “more
information published in the media on the threat of Russian
active measures.”
The
Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the
media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish
Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose
nomination was scuttled thanks to a media blitz it secretly
orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its media
cutouts painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a
Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its
closest media allies accused of
adopting “Kremlin messaging” for daring to protest the
official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy — the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a
white nationalist memoir, “View
From The Right.”
These
smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by
the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic
American political environment.
Aggressive Expansion
A
newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the
outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the U.S.
The
Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a
“simple office” in Washington, D.C., though it does not say
where. It also boasts of partnerships with top D.C. think
tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European
Policy Analysis, Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) and its close
relationships with U.S. officials.
A
major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State
Department’s Global Engagement Center, a de
facto U.S. government propaganda operation that
was established by President Barack Obama to battle online
ISIS recruitment, but which was rapidly repurposed to
counter Russian disinformation following the election of
Trump.
The
Integrity Initiative has also recruited
one of the most infamous American PR men to
organize its clusters of journalists and political
figures.
He
is John Rendon, best known as “The
Man Who Sold The War”— several wars, in fact, but most
notoriously the Iraq invasion.
Rendon was the self-described “information warrior”
who planted fake news in major U.S.-U.K. media about
non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other
military-intelligence agencies, his PR firm was paid $100
million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National
Congress. In 2002, The
New York Times exposed a
Pentagon program using Rendon to plant “disinformation” —
including “false stories” and “the blackest of black PR” — in
media outlets around the world, in order to shape public
opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John
Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa
Command Chief of Staff (US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James
Bamford outlined a catalogue of disinformation
feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying
“the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an
understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility
of specific relationships and sponsorships.” Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed
to “‘coerce’ foreign journalists and plant false information
overseas… [and] find ways to ‘punish’ those who convey the
‘wrong message.’”
These
tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the
Integrity Initiative, especially considering the
internal documents that reveal further Rendon-style plans to
produce reports and studies to be “fed
anonymously into local media.” (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative
internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily.)
Keeping up With the Gorkas
Sebastian
Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on
Election Night.
Internal
documents also refer to interactions between Integrity
Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials
such as Katharine
Gorka, a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland
Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who
earned right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump’s
White House.
The
latter Gorka is an open
supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a
proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during
its occupation of Hungary. Following Trump’s election victory
in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black
Vitezi Rend uniform.
Gorka
was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for
Donnelly to Washington this Sept. 18 to 22. The itinerary
indicates that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered
a presentation on “Mapping Russian Influence Activities” at
the federally funded military research center, CNA.
According
to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon
officials such as Mara
Karlin,an up-and-coming
neoconservative cadre, and John McCain Institute
Executive Director Kurt
Volker, another neoconservative operative who also
serves as the U.S. special representative for Ukraine.
Numerous meetings with staffers inside the State Department’s
Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
Foreign Agent in State?
Of
all the State Department officials named in Integrity
Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently
was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department’s Global
Engagement Center, boasting of “20 years of countering
disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban
legends.” In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is
listed as a current team member:
Funded
to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian
disinformation with “counter-propaganda,” the State
Department’s Global Engagement Center has
refused to deny targeting American citizens with
information warfare of its own.
“My old job at the State Department was as chief
propagandist,” confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel.
“I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it and they
have to do it to their own population and I don’t
necessarily think it’s that awful.”
At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens - then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world pic.twitter.com/ClAT5POv7G— William Craddick (@williamcraddick) May 11, 2018
Like
so many of the media and political figures involved in the
Integrity Initiative’s international network, the Global
Engagement Center’s Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign
policy consensus. Leventhal appeared
in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on
Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take
down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in
the developing world. Rather than challenge the book’s
substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshal his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to
destroy the author’s reputation. His strategic vision was
clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and
destroy the messenger.
Integrity
Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid
$76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50 percent
contract.
While
those same documents claim he has retired from the State
Department, Leventhal’s own Linkedin
page lists him as a current
“Senior
Disinformation Advisor” to the State Department.
If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was
employing a de facto foreign agent.
As
a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry,
the Integrity Initiative’s work with current and former U.S.
officials and members of the media raises certain legal
questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has
registered under the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent
Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are
required to do.
Grants from Neocon Foundation
An
Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith
Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying
up funding for its U.S. network as soon as the group receives
501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided
it with about $56,000 for covert propaganda activities across
Europe.
The
Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the U.S.
intelligence community and controversial cold war influence
operations. According to reporter Russ
Bellant, the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical
right-wing “indoctrination campaigns for the American public
on Cold War and foreign policy issues”— programs that got the
attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned
then-President John F. Kennedy of their dangers.
At
one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson
Foundation director “told attendees that ‘it is within the
capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the
State of Georgia into a civil war college,’ in order to
overcome their opponents.”
Smith
Richardson has funded a who’s who of the neoconservative
movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the
American Enterprise Institute to the Institute for the Study
of War. “To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was
involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of
the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an
understatement,” wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides
Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its
intention to apply for grants from the State Department “to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and
outside of the USA.” This is yet another indicator that the
U.S. government is paying for propaganda targeting its own
citizens.
‘Main Event’ in Seattle
An
Integrity Initiative internal document argues
that because “DC is well served by existing US institutions,
such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft]
already collaborates,” the organization should “concentrate on
extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major
cities and key State capitals [sic] across the USA.”
This
Dec. 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its
“main event” in the U.S. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, under
the auspices of a data firm called Adventium Labs.
Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the
University of Minnesota, the Integrity Initiative listed
Adventium Labs as one of its “first partners outside DC.”
Adventium
is a Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has
reaped contracts from the U.S. military, including a recent
$5.4 million cyber-security grant from the
Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or
DARPA.
Inside
a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity
event began
with a speech by the Integrity Initiative’s Simon
Bracey-Lane. Two years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the
American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders’
2016 presidential primary run, earning media write-ups as
the “Brit
for Bernie.” Now, the young operator was back in
the U.S. as the advance man for a military-intelligence
cut-out that specialized in smearing left-wing political
figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded
as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane
opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative
director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back
home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that
offered a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset
the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through
their media and political allies.
According
to Donnelly’s comments, the West was no longer in a “peace
time, rules based environment.” From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the U.K.’s National Health
System, “the conclusion is that we have to look for people who
suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime.”
During
a Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that
“we have to change the definition of war to encompass
everything that war now encompasses,” referring vaguely to
various forms of “hybrid warfare.”
“There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people,” he continued. “When we mean being at war we don’t mean sending our boys off to fight. It’s right here in our homes.”
The
emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored
the disturbing thinking also on display in notes
of a private meeting between Donnelly and Gen.
Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers
decided that the British military should be removed from
democratic supervision and be able to operate as “an
independent body outside politics.”
While
Bracey-Lane’s presentation perfectly captured the military
mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that
followed him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the
concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But
one talk stood out from the rest — not because of its quality,
but because of its complete lack thereof.
Alexander
Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity
Initiative’s “main event” in Seattle.
Theorist of ‘Red-Brown’ Networks
The
presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a
half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated
spiderweb relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast
hidden network of “red-brown” (or fascist-communist) alliances
and “syncretic media” conspiracies controlled by puppeteers in
Moscow.
Ross
is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with
no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. But with a
book, “Against the Fascist Creep,” distributed by the
well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling
academic has tried to make his name as a maverick
analyst.
Before
the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a
military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a
small coterie of pundits and self-styled disinformation
experts that followed the
group’s Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even
retweeted his smear of War
Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In
a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last
year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War
theories to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone
from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine
publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University
professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden
shadow-fascists secretly controlled by the Kremlin.
The
articles ultimately generated
an embarrassing scandal and a series of
public retractions by
the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British
Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to
reanimate Ross as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before
the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a
rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist
alliance puppeteered by Russians: “The alt right takes from
both this ‘red-brown,’ it’s called, or like left-right
syncretic highly international national of nationalisms, and
from the United States’ own paleoconservative movement, and
it’s sort of percolated down through college organizing, um,
and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?”
In
a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity
Initiative’s Seattle event alongside Emmi
Bevensee, a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose
tagline, “a left market anarchist think-tank” expresses its
core aim of uniting far-left anarchists with free-market
right-libertarians.
Bevensee, a
PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and self-described
“Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto,”
concluded
her presentation by asserting a linkage between the
alternative news site, Zero Hedge, and the “physical
militarized presence in the borderlands” of anti-immigrant
vigilantes.
Like
Bevensee, Ross has written
for C4SS in the past.
The
irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the
“Center for a Stateless Society” auditioning before The
State – the most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for
more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and
journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But
closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony
into something much darker and more unsettling.
White Nationalist Associates
C4SS
was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed child
rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who
set the group up to promote “Market anarchism” to “replace
Marxism on the left.”
When
Spangler’s child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center
for Stateless Society founder was finally
drummed out by his colleagues.
There’s
more: Spangler’s understudy and deputy in
the C4SS, Kevin Carson — currently listed as the group’s “Karl
Hess Chair in Social Theory” — turned out to be a
longtime friend and defender of
white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston’s name is prominently
plastered on the back of Kevin Carson’s book, hailing the C4SS
man as “the
Proudhon of our time” — a loaded compliment, given
the unhinged anti-Semitism of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the influential 19thCentury French
anarchist.
Carson
only disowned Preston
in 2009, shortly before Preston helped white nationalist
leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine,
Alternative Right.
Kevin Carson defending his neo-Nazi bro Keith Preston https://t.co/qfV2y5orQ7 pic.twitter.com/AdzN2S09gM— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) January 13, 2016
The
C4SS group currently participates in
the annual Koch-backed International Students For Liberty
conference in Washington, D.C., LibertyCon, a
who’s who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party
semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and
Alan Dershowitz.
In
2013, C4SS’s Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that
four Jewish leftists—Mark Ames, co-author of this article;
Yasha Levine; Corey Robin, and Mark Potok — would die in a
plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok
was an executive editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center,
which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that
Alexander Reid Ross published with them and formally
apologized for having run them.
For
some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to
investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to
partner with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear
and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links
to the far-right—while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS
and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative —is the sort of
adaptive trait that MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find
useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross
did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement
with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As
it spans out across the U.S., the Integrity Initiative
has stated
its desire to “build a younger generation of
Russia watchers.”
Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of
elite journalists, think tank hacks, spooks and State
Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like
Ross.
Less
than 24 hours after Ross’s appearance at the Integrity
Initiative event in Seattle, he sent
a menacing email to the co-author of this article,
Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and
discredited smear against him and publish it in The
Daily Beast — a publication that appears to enjoy
a special
relationship with Integrity Initiative
personnel.
Despite
the threat of investigation in the U.K.,
the Integrity Initiative’s “network of networks” appears to
be escalating its covert, government-funded influence
operation, trashing the political left and
assailing anyone that gets in its way; all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
“We have to win this one,” Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly said, “because if we don’t, democracy will be undermined.”