UK spread anti Russian propaganda while accusing Moscow of the very same thing

Leaked documents expose how major news outlets like the BBC and Reuters were contracted by the British government to push an anti Russia narrative and further British interests, inside Russia, and in its neighboring countries.

Many of these materials were marked confidential by Her Majesty's Government, hoping they'd never see the light of day, and then no one would publicly scrutinize them. Well that's exactly what we're going to do.

For several years now we've constantly heard allegations in the media of how Russia has been spreading fake news and disinformation and manipulating social media sites and running troll farms and even journalists to meddle in the political affairs of the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies.

Well, it has now come to light that the United Kingdom has been doing precisely that to Russia.

Diplomacy of hypocrisy

In a package of leaked documents posted online by the hacker collective, Anonymous, we learned how Britain's foreign ministry the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or FCO sought to spread anti Russian propaganda and promote narratives that were favourable to Britain, and its allies.

Under the FCO's Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme the British government issued an invitation to tender offering millions of pounds for contractors to allegedly develop a "network of NGOs exposing disinformation" stated as part of the program's broader goal is the intent to weaken Russian influence in neighboring countries.

One of the parties that responded with a bid is the Zinc Network, a collective which includes organizations like Bellingcat and the Institute for Statecraft.

Bellingcat had previously denied receiving any funding or information from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, yet, here we see Bellingcat bidding for a contract from none other than the FCO.

And, in 2018, they push this narrative, which the UK, France and the US used as a pretext, as justification to go and bomb Syria. How bizarre.

These leaked documents also go on to show how BBC Media Action and the Reuters Thomson Foundation, which are supposed to be the nonprofit charities of BBC and Reuters respectively, were also awarded contracts by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Despite the original announcement by the FCO stating that the programme is supposedly open and no attempt should be made to disguise activity, the contract with Reuters, for example, clearly says otherwise and is marked confidential, as are many other documents, which seems a bit odd if you're allegedly trying to promote journalistic standards and ethics, to be participating in a secret programme with the British government.

These documents show how all these various outlets were telling the FCO about the thousands of journalists and contacts that they possess across the world, as if they're somehow boasting how far they can spread propaganda on behalf of Her Majesty's Government.

This propaganda is a spider’s web, frankly, of synthetic media groups and fronts for British intelligence, and you may recall some of these names, some of these groups like Albany or perhaps The Integrity Initiative, which were also implicated in the British government's propaganda network against Syria, aiming to promote regime change through all these fronts like Arc and InCoStrat, who are also running the White Helmets.

Yes, it's a lot to digest and it's done that way on purpose so that no one knows what's going on and everything remains obfuscated. These news outlets like Reuters and the BBC claim to have an independent editorial board and to be transparent and objective.

You know when it comes to their supposed nonprofits there's nothing ethical going on here, it is incontrovertible that none of these shady practices have anything to do with upholding journalistic standards, to say the least.

It's interesting to see how the British government is doing exactly what it's been accusing Russia of doing for years. Russophobia has always been an effective political tool, you know, accusing someone of working for the Russians or being a communist in order to smear them.

This goes back to the days of the Cold War and the Red Scare and McCarthyism. However, ever since the 2016 US presidential elections when Donald Trump beat the DC establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton, we've heard nonstop whining from the media and politicians in the United States about this made up Russian interference, Russiagate.

And after Trump won the election exorbitant amounts of time and resources were wasted on trying to prove that there was some kind of link between his campaign in Russia, with the Muller report and various other congressional reports that amounted to absolutely nothing.

And this is not just in the United States, of course, this is also something that transpired, and was carried over into the UK on the other side of the pond. This craze of supposedly Russian meddling and disinformation also took root there. And it's no surprise, wherever the United States goes, the UK follows.

We saw former Prime Minister Theresa May decry alleged Russian interference in Britain's elections; they claimed the Russians interfered in Brexit. They claimed the Russians interfered in Britain's general elections, in the Scottish referendum even.

And, just like in the United States, the British government went and started various inquiries, providing an official stamp of approval on its conspiracy theory to blame Russia.

The document dump

Max Blumenthal published an article on the investigative journalism website, The Greyzone, unpacking the contents of these leaked documents, which detailed the stated purposes, goals and actors involved in these anti Russian propaganda networks that were cooked up by the British government.

As if the contents weren't explosive enough, the article garnered even more attention after Twitter put a warning label underneath when reposted, stating that it may contain hacked materials, as if to say that it were somehow hazardous and to disincentivize people from reading it. This was, obviously, another clear attempt at censorship just because the article the story doesn't suit the narratives of Western governments, and is hardly surprising.

Now that hypocrisy, frankly, couldn't be clearer, you know, one need only look at other news stories involving leaked documents from other governments, particularly in countries the UK and the US do not like, which received no warning label from Twitter. You can go and post them right now; there will be no warning on them.

For example, The Intercept published a story recently, which supposedly included leaked documents from the Chinese government, there's no warning label on their tweet when they share the article.

We don't even know if these documents are real. It doesn't matter. They can post them without any form of censorship or impediment.

The Intercept has also published alleged documents containing hacked cables from Iran. Is there any so called fact checking to check if they're real or if they are real was there any warning label on them about hacked materials? Of course there was not.

Big tech and social media double standards

It's so evident that these big tech and social media giants were a main source of news for many Americans and Westerners.

They want to enjoy the privilege of being treated as a platform so that they cannot be held accountable for anything people post there, while also performing the activities of a publisher, who picks and chooses what to release. And not only that, they also apply another double standard towards news stories that are adversarial to governments that the West is at odds with while limiting and censoring journalists that question Western narratives and imperialism.

Journalist and founder of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal, unpacked the contents of these latest FCO leaks, showing how the British government contracted media outlets to sow anti Russian dissent and pro NATO sentiment.

For years we have been led to believe that it's Russia who is meddling in other countries and in western democracies and their affairs and you look at these FCO documents and it turns out everything they accused Russia of, they're doing, what exactly are these documents?

Yeah, you said it perfectly. The British state, which really is acting as this sort of frontline proxy for Washington here in the new Cold War's containment strategy against Russia, is doing everything that it accuses Russia of doing. This is all confirmed, we have the hard details and this is only a scintilla of what it's probably doing this is just what we know.

And there are hundreds of documents here, I focused on the ones that revealed Reuters, through its charitable nonprofit on the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the BBC, through its nonprofit arm BBC Media Action, as well as smaller self styled independent outlets, like Bellingcat and Medusa, as essentially intelligence contractors for the British Foreign Office.

And you know, if you look at the whole scope of the documents, they are all focused on trying to counter and squelch Russian media that support the national interests of the Russian government and the Russian state, and they're focused not only internally inside Russia, but also in Russia's near abroad[sic] in the Baltics, Ukraine, Central Asia.

They're using not only smaller media outlets, and these major media organisations like Reuters which is the largest media organisation in the world, they are also creating family oriented theatrical events in public parks in the Baltics or soap opera TV dramas, all sorts of programming to weaponize their media prowess, funded all by the British Foreign Office, to basically hack the brains of the Russian speaking population within Russia's sphere of influence and affect attitudinal changes, we constantly saw these these phrases in the documents, "attitudinal changes", to make them more pro NATO.

So what Reuters focused on was Russian journalists and bringing Russian journalists over to the UK, funded by the British Foreign Office through tours and it was all kind of covert. The contracts that I published with The Grayzone, they're marked secret, confidential, classified.

Max Blumenthal, Journalist and Founder of The Grayzone 

They are engaging in secrecy, there's a covert element to what they're doing, they're trying to hide what's going on. Isn't that a bit odd considering they're allegedly promoting unbiased journalism and ethics?

Well in the 60s and 70s, Reuters ran a programme for the MI6, British Foreign Intelligence, to produce anti Soviet media in Latin America, and to brand it as kind of independent.

It was exposed because the documents were declassified and Reuters came out and said we don't do this anymore This was all in the past it was a Cold War thing. We refer you to our trust principles which pledge independence and editorial integrity, and what these documents show here is that they are doing the same exact thing, the same programme is in play, and that they've lied.

So they have worked to keep these programs secret. One document reveals Thomson Reuters, in its bid to the British Foreign Office, describing how well it kept secret a delegation of Russian journalists to the UK during the Sergei Skripal poisoning intrigue, and they said, Reuters said we were coordinating constantly with the British Embassy in Moscow to keep this under wraps.

 And as I mentioned the contracts between Reuters and the British Foreign Office are marked private and confidential. So they obviously didn't want the British public to know that they're doing this, they certainly don't want the Russian government or Russian public to know about this and they boast about creating a network of 400 journalists inside Russia and … this is just the tip of the iceberg of what these documents reveal.

Max Blumenthal, Journalist and Founder of The Grayzone 

In 2020 YouTube said it's going to be banning videos that contain hacked materials and, as you know, Twitter cited their hacked materials policy when they censored the Hunter Biden story by the New York Post and locked their account. Once again the term “hacked materials” resurfaces as a label under the article if posted.

Well just straight up censorship, with the Twitter label, what so many young people saw, who are ideologically unmoored, was that somebody who just simply went out and told the truth got soft censored.

And what they see with Julian Assange if they learn about that is that someone who simply went out and published true facts, was tortured and disappeared.

So the idea that we have this liberal society where the truth can prevail and that the society can still be resilient enough and maintain its own national security and advance its national interests while there is a free discourse and citizens are able to criticize their government, that whole veneer has been completely ripped off by these episodes and It's like an onion that just keeps getting peeled away and peeled away until we reach the core, which is just this rotten festering orb of cynicism and crude raw power. And I think we're very close to that core right now.

Max Blumenthal, Journalist and Founder of The Grayzone 

Labor party targeted

Chris Williamson, former Member of Parliament and close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, attempted to scrutinize these very same programs, particularly The Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative, after it targeted Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party at the time, smearing him as a "useful idiot from Moscow".

As a member of parliament he submitted a question to Alan Duncan, who at the time was the deputy to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Williamson was inquiring about the nature of these very same programs, but was stonewalled repeatedly on grounds of national security.

Russia was vilified by the media as running all these disinformation campaigns and meddling in US and UK affairs, yet it seems now from these FCO leaks that London is doing it in other countries, specifically Russia. This seems very hypocritical.

Very hypocritical and I think the political class of the establishment in Britain are guilty of hypocrisy and hyperbole in equal measure and, you know, Russia may very well be seeking to promote its interests through engaging in an information war; I don't know.

There's as I say a lot of hyperbole about it, but what is absolutely certain is that we know that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are engaged in a very significant information war effort, aided and abetted by the so called independent British Broadcasting Corporation and of course, Reuters, the biggest media organization anywhere in the world and, you know, this goes against the kind of whole ethos, allegedly of Reuters, who when they were exposed after papers were revealed under the kind of 30 year rule when cabinet papers are put into the public domain and it came out that they've been working hand in glove with the British state to, you know, engage in a propaganda offensive against the former Soviet Union, they were very apologetic about that and regretful and said, you know, this goes against our ethos and we certainly don't do anything like that today, and yet, we now know from this latest revelations that's precisely what they are doing. And it's pretty shocking really and, you know, just sort of shows the real double standards that are applied here.

Chris Williamson, former MP ally of Jeremy Corbyn

There is a video of Chris Williamson in 2019, when he was trying to uncover what was going on and actually confronted the Institute for Statecraft at their headquarters in London, and even went to Scotland.

This is what he found out about the Institute for Statecraft and their Integrity Initiative whilst the government was essentially trying to stonewall him and block him from finding out what was going on.

When the hacktivist group, Anonymous, put a lot of documents into the public domain, which expose the activities of the Institute for Statecraft and one of their projects called the Integrity Initiative, I started asking questions because within those papers it was revealed that they were engaged in a propaganda offensive against the leader of the Labour Party and some of the key figures.

At a senior level inside the party, which at that time, of course, was promoting a socialist programme at home, and an anti imperialist agenda in terms of its foreign policy and of course this was unconscionable to the establishment, to the military industrial complex, to the Zionist lobby and so there were a lot of powerful forces obviously ranged against it and so I started to ask some questions because it became apparent from these papers that they were attacking Jeremy Corbyn, smearing him using social media platforms to do that and discovered through a series of parliamentary questions that the Foreign Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence had awarded the Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative, in the previous 18 months alone, in excess of 2 million pounds.

When I sought to get further information about their activities they clammed up and said that this would undermine the effectiveness of the programme, citing national security and all manner of other ridiculous excuses.

So I then took it upon myself to try and find out a little bit more information directly from the organization and went to Scotland to their Registered Office, only to find that it's a semi derelict former paper mill at the end of a half mile dirt track. I mean, you couldn't make it up, really.

They do have offices in London and, as you mentioned, I did go and try to seek some information from the people there, and a chap who, one of the founders of the Institute of Statecraft... opened the door to me, and when I introduced myself and said I was Chris Williamson, MP for Darby North, I've got some questions about their activities; he unceremoniously slammed the door in my face. I did try to shout a few questions through the closed door.

And the thing about the Institute of Statecraft is that they have a range of what they refer to as clusters, journalists train journalists and academics, not just in Britain but throughout Europe and around the world, and their alleged aim is to counter, you know, Russian disinformation.

But it is interesting that, you know, this outfit is getting that level of support and the involvement of the BBC and as I've said Reuters. It seems very, very, troubling, and it's just the double standard which gets me, that, you know, Russia is held up as this bogeyman and yet the UK is engaged in far more intense sorts of information war activities, than anything that Russia has ever done and I just think that's really worrying.

Chris Williamson, former MP ally of Jeremy Corbyn

So, these government programs are not just for foreign affairs in Russia and its neighboring countries or in Syria, but also at home in the UK because, if they were smearing Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and leader of the opposition, that means they're going after dissidents, opponents, people that they don't like, or people who are considered perhaps as being anti establishment inside the UK.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, certainly that was one of the main reasons why, of course, I started to ask questions about what are our activities because they were using public money to attack the leader of the Official Opposition in the UK, and you know that is an attack on our democracy, it seems to me.

And that's why I was calling for a public inquiry, but of course you see the agenda that Jeremy Corbyn was spearheading was one which threatened the status quo, you know, it threatened the huge profits that were being made from the military industry, the defence industry in this country, and of course it threatened the sort of foreign policy of Britain, the kind of consensus that there's been amongst parties, both parties, really, ever since the war in terms of its attitude towards Israel, but we had in Jeremy Corbyn somebody who was a very strong anti imperialist, somebody who was a big supporter of the Palestinian cause, somebody who had, you know, criticized the Israeli state, the Israeli regime, demanded that they comply with their international law obligations.

And therefore, he was, it seems to me, seen as a legitimate target because that would have indeed called into question the UK's role in supporting Israel and supporting the hugely profitable arms industry in this regime.

That obviously was something that they weren't prepared to countenance and of course it went further than that because Jeremy was somebody, and the agenda that he was putting forward, of course, gave us hope that we could turn the page on the neoliberal consensus that has caused so much despair and created so much poverty in Britain.

The fifth biggest economy in the world where we have 14 million people living in poverty and had the opportunity, I think, you know, over time the Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn would have indeed done that. And that's why I think they targeted him and they targeted him because of his domestic policy and, obviously, his foreign policy.

These were things which were, you know, these very powerful vested interests that couldn't be allowed to stand and they did everything they could therefore to stop them, including, using public money to go after, as I say, the leader of the Official Opposition in the country.

As I say, this goes to the root, it goes to the core of what our democracy is supposed to be about, you know, it's almost incredible. If  you read it in a screenplay before these documents came into the public domain you'd say well that's all very interesting that would never happen in real life, but of course you know often truth is stranger than fiction and here's a case in point.

Chris Williamson, former MP ally of Jeremy Corbyn

The hypocrisy of the British government, and these supposed NGOs and news outlets that they've cooperated with, is quite stunning. They claim to be fighting disinformation while spreading disinformation themselves. It's just plain old fashioned propaganda and it is coming from establishments like the BBC and Reuters, and others, who claim to be morally and ethically superior and to uphold journalistic standards, no less.

For years we've heard nothing but anti Russian propaganda from these very same outlets and fear mongering about Russian interference from lawmakers on both sides of the pond and virtually every mainstream media outlet reporting that as fact.

Yet now, when we have a story of the exact same caliber with official government documents proving that the United Kingdom has been doing the exact same thing, there is complete silence.

The media can't even be bothered to report on these explosive revelations of the United Kingdom meddling in the affairs of foreign countries and major news outlets cooperating with them abdicating their journalistic ethics and standards, as if they ever had any to begin with.

 Moreover, we see clearly once again, how Silicon Valley, how all these tech giants and social media companies are just an extension of the government, and a tool used to manipulate public opinion and control reporting that is adversarial to interests of the West, it's an extension of the national security state.

Is it deplorable? Absolutely. Are we surprised? Not really.

We know that these practices have been going on for decades since the Cold War, regime change and propaganda; these are Britain's strong suits and habits that they can't seem to kick.

The UK continues these cold war practices while pointing the finger at Russia and accusing Russia of the very same things that they decry, an irrefutable case of the pot calling the kettle black.

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