A Dangerous Scam

An Interview with Max Blumenthal

Recorded in January, 2019

Slava Zilber: You are the founder and editor of The Grayzone [Project]. You have written several books including [your upcoming work] "The Management of Savagery. How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, Isis, and Donald Trump." You host together with Ben Norton the podcast "Moderate Rebels." And you have with Dan Cohen produced the documentary "Killing Gaza."

Today, I would like to talk to you about the UK-based think tank "Instititute for Statecraft" and an associated organisation, The Integrity Initiative. Mr. Mohamed Elmaazi and you have covered it extensively in The Grayzone [Project]. On December 17, 2018, Mr. Elmaazi and you wrote the article "Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War." Then, on January 2, 2019, you and Mr. Norton discussed The Integrity Initiative on your podcast "Moderate Rebels" together with David Miller, professor of political sociology [at] the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. And your latest work, together with Mark Ames, on January 8, 2019, in The Grayzone [Project]: "New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics." Could you please talk about your latest article and summarise what you discuss there together with Mr. Ames.

Max Blumenthal: Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, Slava. This is one of the few forums we are going to get to talk about The Integrity Initiative and that is really telling. It says a lot about western media and the state of it. It is very different actually than when I was really young and was learning about journalism. And that has a lot to do with influence operations like The Integrity Initiative.

It has been touched on in the UK because you have a member of parliament, Chris Williamson, who is a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, who has been clamoring for an investigation and the Foreign Office has been forced to answer some questions. So British press has sort of been forced to acknowledge this candal. And you have also seen a lot of media by people who are apparently involved with The Integrity Initiative, journalists who are involved with it saying 'Nothing to see here. Move along. This is how things get done. This is normal.' And it's not normal in my view. It's certainly not ethical. But what has been taking place over the last few weeks is that those of us in the so-called alternative media realised that documents were being put online by a group called Anonymous Europe - we don't know what it is. It could for all I know be a bunch of Russian hackers - posting the internal commnications, in collated fashion, of The Integrity Initiative which was an initiative of a think tank that few of us have ever heard of before, called the Institute for Statecraft which is based in Scotland. And first we learnt that the institute did not actually exist at the location it said it did. It was hiding where it was and it was actually at Two Temple Place inside the former home of the Knights Templar in London and a really beautiful neo-gothic mansion. And it was there my co-author Mohamed Elmaazi came in because he actually was - although he was not the first to publish about it – he was the first reporter to get inside and find the location based on these hacked or leaked documents and was immediately thrown out when he identified himself as a journalist.

But you realise they were lying about their location. This is a covert operation. Then, we learnt through the documents that this think tank which said that it was an independent charity was actually a military intelligence cut-out. It was funded to the tune of 2 million pounds by the Foreign Office. The British Foreign Office oversees the two main arms of British foreign intelligence, GSHQ which is part of the Five Eyes and is the British version of the NSA and the MI6, you know James Bond although probably less dashing if you consider these characters. And we learnt that The Integrity Initiative is led by [an] entirely former intelligence and military officials, a cast of basically military officials who were very Strangelovian and militaristic in their outlook. According to one document, the director of The Institute for Statecraft who oversees and conceived The Integrity Initiative (Christopher Donnelly) called for, after the Ukraine Crisis erupted in 2014, mining the harbor of Sevastopol which would have meant a shooting war with Russia.

And other Integrity Initiative documents spell out what they call their deliverables, what they aim to deliver. And they all say 'war footing with Russia' in so many words. They want more conflict with Russia, they want the British public, the European public and the American public to understand the need to be in a new Cold War with Russia. And they want to treat things like the broadcasting of RT and Sputnik as acts of war, as hybrid warfare. So I think it's dangerous for normal citizens, but for them – it's payday. That's where their paychecks come in. That's how they justify higher military budgets.

Now, how do they deliver that? This is I think the most important part of the conversation. They deliver it by organising clusters of pundits, pseudo-experts, politicians and journalists, especially journalists. And these documents outlined who the journalists were. Many in the UK cluster which is the largest cluster are centered around The Times of London which is the favorite paper of the MI5, the domestic intelligence agency of the UK. And these are people who had been smearing our colleagues in UK academia who are doing critical work on pro-war Syria propaganda and other critical initiatives. And it really appeared that their smears were happening in a coordinated fashion. And they were attending meetings with figures from the Integrity Initiative. There was a big conference at the Frontline Club, I think, on November 2 that wasn't listed on Frontline Club's events page. The Frontline Clb – I have spoken there – it's like sort of center for foreign correspondents and war reporters in London. And this – they got together who is who of people who report on Russiagate. Carole Cadwalladr is one of them who is always blaming Russian bots for Brexit, won all these awards for this bunk reporting. And she was a participant in it. And they have all of their partners in the think tanks that we are familiar with that are spelled out in these cluster documents like the Atlantic Council, Center for European Policy Analysis. Ed Lukas who is the former chief correspondent in Moscow for The Economist is the head of that think tank (Senior Vice President) and pretty much [...] coordinating with The Integrity Initiative. And then you see in the document called I think the Moncola Project (referring to ''Operation Moncloa") how The Integrity Initiative through its Spanish cluster, through the center-left publication El Pais smeared and basically destroyed the appointment of Pedro Baños who was going to be appointed to the Spanish National Security Council because he was considered insufficiently hostile to Russia. They've actually succeeded in waging a smear campaign and took credit for it. And, of course, as I've mentioned before, they've been smearing the crap out of Jeremy Corbyn.

It's all signifant because these are all NATO member states or it's the UK itself. And the money is coming from the British government which is controlled by the Tories. And this whole onslaught is being funded by British taxpayers. So I think it is really significant. Those of us in the US who have been living through Russiagate in the last two years though might not find it significant - I don't know – either because we've been fooled by the narrative which has been constructed largely by the national security state and farmed out through sympathetic figures in the media or because we know how it works and that means that we understand that there are as many as 50 influence operations going on in think tanks and government agencies like the State Department Global Engagement Center to convince the public that we need to be on an extreme war-footing with Russia, a country which I believe does not pose a threat to the citizens of the United States.

So that's where we are at with The Integrity Initiative. I've been covering it and Mark and I did this article that came out yesterday on how it's influencing American politics because I think it's the first time we've been able to see really cold, hard evidence of an influence operation plying supposedly independent journalists to push a narrative of Russiagate and a new Cold War.

Slava Zilber: In your article, you write: "But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US." Moreover, you use such expressions as 'cut-outs.' I have contacted Prof. Joachim Krause, Director for the Institute for Security Policy at the Kiel University. He was mentioned in the documents regarding the German cluster. And he sent me a document which he allowed me to publish if I wanted to. He says that the institute is not cooperating with them [The Integrity Initiative]. Moreover, he rejects the description of this as some kind of intelligence operation. And he says that they just were asked if they would like to contribute or that they considered just contributing to this research on Russian disinformation. And in an article published on October 10, 1977, Carl Bernstein, in The Rolling Stone, wrote about the CIA and the media. When the New York Times journalist Cy Sulzberger was asked about [the] allegation he had worked for the CIA, he said "Sulzberger claims that he was never formally “tasked” by the Agency and that he “would never get caught near the spook business. My relations were totally informal—I had a goodmany friends,” he said. “I’m sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. [...]"

So what would you say? That this is just people networking, this is more or less business as usual in the centers of power. And, as you pointed out, the media in the West, the mainstream media, is not reporting on it. So it's just what would have happened anyway according to Manufacturing Consent and the propaganda model. The media either way sides with its own state and denigrates official enemies. And the use of terms like 'activated' and 'cut-out' is unwarrented. How would you respond?

Max Blumenthal: Yes, this is what we have been accustomed to hearing from a lot of journalists and academics that participate in these programs. And for them, it really is just business as usual. If I were doing this with Russian officials or Iranian officials, just having meetings with them and they were providing me with talking points for coverage or helping influence my research on Western propaganda, if I were doing that, it would be a gigantic scandal. So, basically, they are saying they don't receive marching orders. Some of them don't receive money. Many of them maybe don't receive money. That is not what we are alleging.

When you ... what you mentioned with this Carl Bernstein stories about Operation Mockingbird, when in the 1970s the commission initiated by Senator Frank Church revealed that the CIA was making covert payments to hundreds of members of the media during the height of the Cold War. There is evidence of some payments to some figures in these Integrity Initiative documents and I can talk about that.

But what is going on is a much more sophisticated version of Mockingbird where journalists don't need to be paid by the state or the so-called deep state to do what they want because many of them, first of all, agree with the agenda and are deeply hostile to Russia in an almost irrational way. These are largely if you look at the clusters in the UK, in the US, these are the elite, sort of centrist journalists who have favored the who neoliberal program since the 1990s and that is where their hostility to Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders and figures like that come in. They see The Integrity initiative, the Atlantic Council which funded by NATO and the Gulf States as just the good guys. So who cares if their government influence operations, who cares if they are meeting with military intelligence officials who then go back and write documents about deliverables where they say that through this conference and through these meetings with this journalist we are aiming to deliver a more hostile policy towards a nuclear-armed country. I mean who cares about it. That's what they also want.

Where they are uncomfortable is when they feel their independence and their ethics are being challenged by outsiders like us. And so they get a little bit defensive. We have seen them actually downplay their relationship and then new documents come out that show that the relationship is much more intimate than we thought.

One figure I am thinking of is David Leisk who is a chief correspondent for The Herald in Scotland. David Leask had attacked a member of parliament in Scotland, Neil Findlay. When Andriy Parubiy, the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, was brought in to Scotland on an official state visit and was welcomed in the Scottish Parliament to give a speech, and Findley protested and said Andriy Parubiy is actually the founder of two neo-nazi parties, he himself is a[n] admirer of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and this absolutely not someone we should welcome in the Scottish Parliament. David Leask from The Herald comes out and attacks him, quotes The Integrity Initiative attacking him. Nobody had heard of The Integrity Initiative at that point. And then David Leask is asked about his relationship with The Integrity Initiative when the scandal hits. And he said: 'So what, I am a journalist. So what if I had a cheese sandwich with someone in a think tank. That's what journalists do.' We then learn in the next release, new trench of documents that Leask was actually briefing The Integrity Initiative in a semi-official way and he was briefing a staffer who was a former member of the MI6 or current member of the MI6, I can't remember. And they were basically producing notes based on Leask's briefings on how to target and politcally assault the Scottish independence movement, NGOs connected to it as well as Sputnik, the Russian broadcaster. So here you have a journalist who is actually working openly as a kind of asset of a military intelligence cut-out. There are so many different levels of participation of journalists in this and some are more open about it than others.

You have Ben Nimmo. [...] And he'll come up in article after article in all the mainstream publications as a real expert, someone who you would assume is a data specialist, some who has been in tech, who has studied the phenomenon of Russian bots. And he really helped shape this narratve of Russian bots driving all of these different narratives straight into the cerebellum of western media consumers. And it turns out that Ben Nimmo, number one, we learn from these documents, was on the payroll of The Institute for Statecraft and was a major figure in The Integrity Initiative, number two, has no background in data, in tech, really has no background in journalism. He tried to write fantasy fiction novels for a while and then was a travel journalist. Then he became a press officer for NATO. And then he gets involved with The Integrity Initiative which is as I said [a] military intelligence cut-out. And so he is shaping this narrative which clearly fits the drive for a new Cold War, the desire to drive a new Cold War. It's unprovable. I have actually done several article showing how it's actually a gigantic hustle before we knew about this. But most importantly: He is quoted in the mainstream media simply as a fellow of the Atlantic Council, not even the Institute for Statecraft, but the Atlantic Council where he also has a fellowship. And that makes it seem to Americans: 'Oh the Atlantic Council, that sounds really legit, it sounds like a think tank where thinking takes place.' And as I always say, no, it's actually about, it's all about tanks and not about thinking. All tank, no think. And he is not an expert. He is just a guy that they've decided to put out there.

So this is the real scam behind The Integrity Initiative and it's a dangerous scam because it is aiming to bring us back to nuclear brink[s]manship. I think that the narrative that these fake think tanks which are cut-outs have generated and pumped into the consciousness of an element of the public, the most elite element of the general western public, is partially responsible for the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Intermediate(-Range) Nuclear Forces Treaty which highlights the danger – I mean this was such an important treaty between the US and the Soviet Union and now the US and Russia. And Trump does this kind of thing partly because his people are in bed with the military-industrial complex, the usual thing, but also to show that he is tough on Russia, there is no collusion there, he is not part of this ..., he is not really friendly to Putin. And that's dangerous for the survival of humanity. And I think that could give you a window into why I focused heavily on these kinds of stories because I see it going to a very dangerous place.

Photo: London, Two Temple Place