What's So Special About That Relationship?

How it's done in Merrye Olde England ...

A little less than a week ago, Mike Sylwester drew my attention to a series of posts at the Moon of Alabama blog. These blog posts deal with the role that British intelligence agencies and their proxies played in our Russia Hoax. While they don't offer any breakthrough factual discoveries, per se, they do offer a valuable look inside the world of state sponsored intelligence operations that target public opinion as well as tantalizing links to US based people and organizations.

A good way to work our way into this topic is a piece that appeared today at Zerohedge: The Not So Special US-UK Relationship. The author begins by discussing the general notion of the Special Relationship between the US and the UK:

The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ has been known to exist as a close alliance between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since the days of FDR and Churchill forged during the Second World War. It is called special because of the unique historical and cultural bonds of kinship that unite the American and British peoples through a perceived shared heritage, common political/social/economic values and language. Together over the course of 72 years it has been the White House with the support of 10 Downing Street as its principal strategic leading ally in Europe.

Of course, nowadays we also speak of the Five Eyes,

an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

Indeed, we've seen the significant role that Australian intel operatives also played in our 2016 Presidential election. Nevertheless, the Anglo-American relationship remains special, especially because of the role the UK's GCHQ plays in monitoring worldwide communications:

The so-called 'Special Relationship' is an unprecedented coming together and sharing of two nation states intelligence and national security infrastructures and spy-intelligence organisations. The US-UK relationship is highly integrated at an intelligence, defence, foreign policy and security level.

The victory of Donald Trump and his detailed knowledge of British "meddling" in US elections has affected all that:

Now, quite possibly the US-UK “special relationship” has suffered serious damage and could be at its lowest ebb ever, which will have tremendous consequences for the UK's position in the world going forward outside of the European Union. The relationship and alliance has always meant far more to London than to Washington DC. But in so heavily involving the British intelligence services in interfering in the 2016 US Presidential election directly working against the Republican candidate Donald Trump and in favour of the Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, the British State may just have crossed a red line to far in the mind of President Donald Trump.

With that in mind, let's turn to the Moon of Alabama, proceeding in chronological order.

In the first of the series, British Spies Infiltrated Bernie Sanders' Campaign? we learn that the British government has been running an operation it calls "The Integrity Initiative" ["Defending Democracy Against Disinformation"], a British pseudo-NGO tasked with running anti-Russian propaganda operation[s]." The Integrity Initiative is part of a far larger organization called The Institute for Statecraft:

The Initiative, and its parent organization the Institute for Statecraft, are registered as a Scottish charity at a disused Scottish mill. The mill is owned by one of the institutes directors, Daniel Lafayeedney, who was a member of an SAS Regiment and later of the British Military Intelligence.

The British government confirmed that it paid £2.2 million to the Initiative but it refused to disclose "the nature and purpose" of the funding citing "national security". It also confirmed that three of the employees of the Initiative are members of UK Forces.

It's the stuff of, well, spy novels! Naturally these revelations led to "questions being asked" in the UK, but we can skip the inside UK politics angle. For our purposes what's most interesting at this point is that an operative of the Institute for Statecraft, Simon Bracey-Lane, known in the UK for trolling far left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, infiltrated the Bernie Sanders campaign--working for free! And then after the election it was back to the UK for Bracey-Lane, and business as usual:

It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, “Corbyn and Sanders supporting” Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, “Cold War Then and Now”, for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.

Moving on, the Moon of Alabama has more--much more--to tell us about The Integrity Initiative and The Institute for Statecraft and some of its key operatives: The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The "Russian Threat". For example:

Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative. The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

And Donnelly has quite a background for this type of work:

From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly is a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Institute for Statecraft since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK’s Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).

In the interests of brevity I'll skip over the details of Donnelly's past activities, but to give a flavor for the type of work product that Donnelly's Integrity Initiative was putting out between December 2015 and March 2016, check this out:

• 17 March Atlantic Council: Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda, Ben Nimmo
• 21 March Newsweek: Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures, Ben Nimmo
• 22 March, UK House of Commons: Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality, Jonathan Eyal and Ben Nimmo
• Mid May: Atlantic Council: Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria. Ben Nimmo et al (Major study)
• Early May timeframe: Russian penetration in Germany, Harold Elletson, Ben Nimmo et al - 10,000 words
• June timeframe: Atlantic Council, major report on Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy, Ben Nimmo (potential launch events in London and / or Washington)
• End-June: Mapping Russia's whole influence machine, Ben Nimmo - 10,000 words

The idea seems to be clear: drum up anti-Russian hysteria. And here's a tidbit that should remind us of those infamous Russion bots that stole the election from Hillary:

In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads.

But here's where things get even more interesting, although the thread can be difficult to follow.

Among the Institute for Statecraft documents that were leaked were "the names and email addresses of a number of military, government and think tank people": i.e., contacts of Donnelly. And among those contacts was one Pablo Miller, who just happens to be

the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was "novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,

And Pablo Miller provides a direct link to none other than Christopher Steele:

Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

It seems highly likely that Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft are well acquainted with Christopher Steele--and vice versa. I won't attempt to follow Moon of Alabama into speculation that Skripal was a "source" for Steele's "dossier." However, given what we already know about the involvement of the British Intelligence Services in the Russia Hoax--and now also of their infiltration of the Sanders campaign--Moon's closing question seems warranted:

After two years the Muller investigation found zero evidence for the alleged 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this endeavor?

... and back in the USA

At this point you're probably thinking to yourselves, Wow, it's a good thing we don't have any shadowy government funded organizations disinforming us, like they have in the UK!

Well, not so fast. The same day Mike sent me the links to Moon of Alabama, the following piece showed up at Zerohedge: The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts". Please indulge me while I quote at a bit of length:

A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name. Described by the New York Times as a group of “tech specialists who lean Democratic,” New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S. military and the intelligence agencies.

The CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the U.S. military’s advanced research agency known for horrific ideas on how to control humanity. Morgan’s partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the NSA (National Security Agency) who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of authoritarian investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone, according to a report by RT. 

Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the “Russiagate” scheme, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also worth mentioning, that Dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development). 

It is worth noting that the 600 “Russia-linked” Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Timesstory revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.

Politicians, Deep State operatives, lots of money--OK, that would be bad enough, but Glenn Greenwald, tweeting from Brazil, wants us to look a bit further:

@ggreenwald 

With an open mind, please read @MZHemingway on how the US media's mindless, shocking acceptance of every claim from "Hamilton68" - a group formed by Bill Kristol, CIA officials & various neocons - has deceived millions w/false stories. It's a scandal
6:24 AM - 22 Feb 2018

@ggreenwald 

From the way it was formed to the secrecy of its "methods" to the blatantly false assumptions on which its claims rest, "Hamilton68" is probably the single most successful media fraud & US propaganda campaign I've seen since I've been writing about politics. It's truly shocking.6:25 AM - 22 Feb 2018

Well, I have an open mind, so I read Mollie Hemingway's article, How The Media Enable Rep. Adam Schiff’s Russian Bot Conspiracy Theories: For more than a year, Adam Schiff has been hopping to all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between President Trump and Russia, and what I found out confirmed Greenwald's characterization of Schiff's disinformation operation as "probably the single most successful media fraud & US propaganda campaign" ever. I won't attempt to duplicate Hemingway's detailed account--do yourself a favor and read it. But here's a passage that really got my attention:

Natasha Bertrand, a reporter who facilitates messages from Fusion GPS, the group that authored the infamous Russia dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign, wrote a piece headlined “Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks.” 

Her story and many others uncritically accept and promote a secretive group’s unverified claim of a Russian conspiracy. The Alliance for Securing Democracy runs an operation called Hamilton 68 that it claims tracks Russian bots, though it’s impossible to assess the claim because of the group’s methodology. The advisory council for the alliance includes NeverTrump stalwarts such as Bill Kristol and David Kramer, the man Sen. John McCain sent to London to pick up the discredited Russian dossier from Christopher Steele. 

Hamilton 68’s claim — later refuted by Twitter and Facebook — formed the entire basis of Schiff’s theory that it was Russian bots, not real Americans, who wanted to learn about FISA abuse by the FBI. Asked to respond to Hamilton 68’s claim, Twitter responded, “Because the Hamilton Dashboard’s account list is not available to the public, we are unable to offer any specific context on the accounts it includes.” 

So let's wrap this thing up by extracting some items of particular interest. 

Natasha Bertrand--she facilitates messages from Fusion GPS. Yes, that Fusion GPS, the one that hired Christopher Steele, who wrote the "dossier." And that's the same Christopher Steele who seems connected to Donnelly's neoconnish Institute for Statecraft.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy--who's that? Hemingway is right about the Alliance's Advisory Council. It contains many of the usual Neocon and NeverTrump suspects. Including David Kramer who went to London to get the "dossier" from Christopher Steele--the same Christopher Steele who seems connected to Donnelly's Institute for Statecraft. Did he meet anyone else there? Did he and McCain have any other contacts there? 

There are other interesting names on that Advisory Council--in fact, it's a regular Deep State rogues' gallery, even including John Podesta. But for me one name that really jumps out is: Mike Rogers. Yes, that would be the former GOP Congressman, former head of the Intel Committee, and former national security adviser to the Trump campaign. I devoted a blog post to him alone: The Spy In The Trump Campaign. 

Hopefully there are enterprising investigative journalists out there tracking down some of these tantalizing links.