A public call to ban The Grayzone by a UK Foreign Office veteran and psy-ops specialist confirms the malign intentions of British intelligence.

The Arvamusfestival (Opinion Festival) convened this August by the Estonian Foreign Ministry featured as its centerpiece an English-language panel on “how to deal with misinformation…in the interests of curbing its propagation.” 

 

BY KIT KLARENBERG

 

During the discussion, a British state operative named Ross Burley descended into a rant about The Grayzone, demanding it be banned from YouTube on the baseless grounds that it is a “Russian propaganda outfit.”

Chaired by a local journalist, the panel was comprised of Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab representative Lukas Andriukaitis, Ivo Juurvee of Estonian think tank the International Centre for Defence and Security, Elīna Lange-Ionatamishvili of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, and Burley, the co-founder & Executive Director of something called the Centre for Information Resilience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the assorted guests clamored in complete lockstep for state censorship, counter-propaganda campaigns, and for private citizens to engage in grassroots information warfare to curb the spread of supposed “misinformation.” 

On the latter point, panelists hailed the pro-NATO troll farm known as the Lithuanian Elves as heroes. They likened the Elves to NAFO, or the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, a more recently created troll farm which harasses public figures contradicting official Western messaging about the proxy war in Ukraine, and which encourages citizens to mimic their information warfare tactics.

Both NAFO and the Elves are ostensibly informal collectives that claim to be concerned with rebutting Russian “fake news.” They have earned praise from mainstream media and endorsements by Western government officials. NAFO has been so frequently accused of being sponsored or directed by intelligence actors, its members – identifiable by “doge” profile photos – have transformed charges to that effect into an in-joke meme.

Towards the end of an otherwise stultifyingly dull conversation, Burley blurted out a revealing comment.

Clad in dark clothes, shades and sporting a salt-and-pepper beard, the professional information warrior asserted that social media companies such as YouTube had a “responsibility” to remove content published by individuals like Patrick Lancaster, an independent American journalist embedded with Russian and allied forces, and Graham Philips, a British citizen recently sanctioned by his own government, in an utterly unprecedented development. (The state has seized his property and assets, and frozen his bank accounts).

“I saw Russell Brand, who has a huge following on YouTube, was interviewing a journalist called Aaron Maté on his channel. Aaron Maté works for The Grayzone,” Burley continued. “The Grayzone is a Russian propaganda outfit, so it’s incredibly irresponsible for YouTube and other social media companies to continue to host these people.”

The Grayzone is not a “Russian propaganda outfit,” however, and any suggestion that it is would qualify as straight up defamation. Still, while Burley could not pronounce Aaron Maté’s surname correctly, his belief this outlet is Kremlin-backed cannot be attributed purely to ignorance and ineptitude.

Indeed, Burley’s demand that The Grayzone and anyone hosting its contributors be banned from major social media networks suggests his participation in an active campaign by British intelligence. 

So who is Burley, and what does he want?

A UK state psy-ops specialist cultivates Nina Jankowicz, sponsors NATO troll farms

Burley is the founder of the Centre for Information Resilience, ostensibly a“non-profit social enterprise building a global coalition to identify, counter and expose disinformation and influence operations,” founded in June 2020. A section on the Centre’s website indicates Burley and other spokespeople have served as talking heads in seemingly countless mainstream media reports on the scourge of disinformation.

Not one of these articles though has seemingly acknowledged Burley’s lengthy period of employment at the British Foreign Office, or ongoing role as “Civilian Deployable Expert” in Whitehall’s Stabilisation Unit, which he has occupied since March 2017.

Under the auspices of this post, Burley spent nearly three years in senior positions at Zinc Network, a highly suspect UK Home and Foreign Office psy-ops contractor whose activities are almost completely hidden from public view by the draconian Official Secrets Act. 

That Burley remains tied to the Stabilisation Unit today raises the obvious question of whether his Centre is, in fact, a British government cutout, conducting info-war operations at arm’s length from the state. It may be significant that Centre for Information Resilience “Director of Special Projects” Tom Southern is a Zinc Network veteran as well.

Whatever the truth of the matter, a NATO Stratcom Centre of Excellence profile boasts that during the period Burley was involved with Zinc Network, he “designed, implemented, and led several of the UK Government’s counter disinformation programmes,” including Open Information Partnership (OIP). 

Burley has also played a pivotal role in supporting the career of perhaps the most infamous character to emerge from the novel counter-disinformation industry. Nina Jankowicz, the disgraced former director of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board once sat on the advisory board of Burley’s Centre for Information Resilience, and was or still is an advisor to his shadowy OIP. An official financial disclosure form indicates Jankowicz received thousands of dollars from both entities in 2021.

Launched in early 2019 by Zinc Network, NATO propaganda offshoot The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Western state-funded investigative collective Bellingcat, and funded wholly by the Foreign Office, OIP’s sparse official website concisely frames the enterprise as “a diverse network of organisations and individuals united in our determination to counter and expose disinformation.”

In reality, the OIP is one of many Foreign Office information warfare initiatives that seeks to manipulate citizens at home and abroad, by maligning alternative viewpoints and suppressing evidence which British officials and spooks want kept out of the public domain. 

As The Grayzone revealed, the OIP is the “flagship” component of a multi-million-pound effort by Whitehall to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” in countries comprising the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. A classified “theory of change” for the project circulated to implementing contractors redacts its ultimate intended objective. In other words, the OIP’s agenda is so sensitive, even its participants are forbidden from knowing the overriding goal their activities serve.

Throughout Moscow’s “near abroad,” OIP constructed a vast, covert nexus of Russian-speaking social media personalities, providing them with extensive support, including “innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models,” in order to create and promote slick British state propaganda, masquerading as citizen journalism. 

 

These relationships were so intimate, they necessitated “daily management.” The “compelling content” churned out by those influencers allegedly reached “millions of people.”

Other OIP documents contain remarkable admissions. For example, one states openly that a key barrier to combating Russian “disinformation” is that “certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true [emphasis added].”

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A lengthy Foreign Office-funded appraisal of 56 prospective OIP network members is also extraordinarily candid. Bellingcat, a founding member of the OIP, was judged to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Far harsher words were reserved for Propastop, a supposed fact-checking and counter-disinformation initiative which received funding by the Estonian Ministry of Defense, and was endorsed by the EU, NATO, Western think tanks, and the media. 

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The Foreign Office assessment concluded Propastop was linked to “neo-fascist groups,” and had incited violence against Estonia’s Russophone minority: “Its reporting is widely considered to lack credibility and they have published a number of intentionally false and defamatory articles about Russian media outlets.” As a result, the Foreign Office argued that Propastop should be “removed from consideration for inclusion in the network.”

The much-vaunted Lithuanian Elves were similarly accused of “fomenting anti-Russian prejudice and spreading falsehoods” in the same document. Yet the group became a dedicated OIP member alongside the Nazi-affiliated Propastop. Content produced by the latter has been widely shared on social media since February 24th, while the Elves have received much fawning media coverage. 

 

READ MORE:

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/08/24/intelligence-british-govt-grayzone/

 

SEE ALSO THE PLAN: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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