The British Come Out of the Shadows

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this transcript]

The following is an edited transcript of Barbara Boyd’s prepared remarks for delivery on the Jan. 10 LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat.

I’m going to tell you a true crime story, which is made possible by two converging events: the House of Lords’ recent Report “U.K. Foreign Policy In a Shifting World Order,” delivered in November 2018, and the exposure of the Integrity Initiative, a British military information warfare outfit which, fortunately for us, had lots of its internal papers posted recently on the Internet. Think of the Lords as the purveyors of the actual policies of Empire, although they write in sanitized diplospeak. Think of the Integrity Initiative as the enforcers of this view, creating propaganda in order to excite martial instincts against their targets for war, especially war with Russia.

Looking at the overlaps in personnel between the Integrity Initiative and the British circles around Sir Richard Dearlove, the former MI6 chief, who was actually running Christopher Steele’s operation against Donald Trump, also allows us to look at the story told about the British and the 2016 campaign in a different light and recast it. That’s because the main fact about this story is that the British ran the operation, not some dark group at the Department of Justice or the Obama White House, or the crazy partisans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Yes, they too participated whole-heartedly, but that is not the story. The story is that the American public got royally jerked around by its age-old enemy. That’s the story.

The Congress and the partisans of Fox News are covering this up, and limiting your view because they themselves are compromised by the very same operation. Who owns Fox, my friends? It’s the Murdochs with all their Tory policies, against which we have warred for many years. The Lords’ Report claims that the U.S. Congress is mainly made up of raving Anglophiles who have been revved up to a near froth about Russia and China, and that they are expending large amounts of energy trying to put Donald Trump in the same suicidal box. There is nothing evident in Congressional behavior to put what the Lords say about them in doubt.

So, let’s get to it.

The House of Lords’ Report

First, the Lords’ Report. The Lords are looking at how the British adjust to Brexit. Don’t get me wrong. They are still incredibly freaked out that the event even occurred, and a big part of their Report is devoted to the idea that they can prevent any such exercise of democracy from ever happening again. That is one big part of their Report—how to control the Internet and people’s access to information. The second part of the report targets four nations—the United States, Russia, China, and India—as being the most important for the future of the British Empire. These are, of course the same four nations cited by Lyndon LaRouche as holding the potential for ending the British Empire once and for all and launching a true, new human Renaissance in the world.

According to the Lords, the economic collapse in 2008, the bailout, and the EU’s austerity regimes had nothing to do with the popular dissatisfaction expressed in the Brexit vote. That just caused economic anxiety among commoners. Instead, they say, the continuing populist insurgency is caused by “people’s access to information, boosted by instant connectivity on an unprecedented scale and speed. Governments are responding to short-term demands of their citizens, who have been empowered by their access to information and opinion.” This is the imperial line first promulgated by Samuel Huntington, author of the genocidal tract, “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993), and inventor of the term “Davos man” to celebrate globalization.

In his 1975 Crisis of Democracy report for the Trilateral Commission, Huntington proclaimed that democracies only work when large swaths of the population are apathetic, citing the empowerment of African-Americans by the civil rights movement as a clear and present danger to political stability.

Now, this over-broad access to information, they say, has led many in the “base,” or population, to believe in “conspiracy theories” rather than anything governments say. This meme is widespread now in the trans-Atlantic elites and has been a frequent line used by Barack Obama.

Conspiracy theorists, according to the Integrity Initiative, include those who say the Government’s explanation of 9/11 does not cut it, that the U.S. intervention in Syria and Libya openly supported terrorists, that the Ukraine coup, run by the British and the U.S. State Department, had a major neo-Nazi component, that Russia is not genetically predisposed to evil (both Sir Richard Dearlove and James Clapper have claimed Russians have evil in their genes), and other truths about very real Anglo-American genocides and foreign conspiracies. These offensive truths, the “conspiracy theories,” are readily available on the Internet, in Cyberspace—the realm which the Lords now seek to dominate and control.

Rolling Back the Global Mass Strike

The 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit vote represented wholesale political activation by the very people that the elites disdain, Trump’s “forgotten men and women,” using, ironically, the technology invented for social control purposes by Facebook and Twitter as major organizing tools. These were actual exercises of democracy. The Lords and the antics of their Integrity Initiative make it clear that they intend now to kill this activation. Censorship and counter propaganda or “cognitive infiltration,” as Barack Obama’s friend Cass Sunstein dubbed the required action, are now being massively deployed in the United States, Britain, and throughout Europe.

Actual experimental studies, conducted over many years, of the impact of propaganda, have demonstrated that it works when populations have no alternatives to look at, and are reacting constantly to the media bombardment of the 24-hour news cycle. It fails almost immediately when people are introduced to an alternative—such as the publicity surrounding the rapid economic development that China is now producing throughout the world, or being presented with the sudden and shocking realization that China is now exploring the far side of the Moon, specifically with the idea of using the Moon’s helium-3 as fuel for fusion power. The wonderful thing about human nature is that the imagination and desire for new frontiers and adventures, if provoked, can and will destroy years of tedious work in planning and implementing any fixed social control system, and that, as if in an instant.

With respect to the Four Powers, the Lords are quite explicit. They say openly that the U.S.-British “Special Relationship,” which exists in defense and intelligence relations and across many NGOs and civic organizations, and is particularly alive and well in the U.S. Congress, can handle and subvert Donald Trump for one term but not two. Sir Richard Dearlove, whose Henry Jackson Society played a major role in this Report, says in his private conversations not to worry about Trump. He says he will be a one-term President. Pretty shockingly open about it.

With respect to the Russians, the trick is to keep them a failing power, to make NATO a monster propaganda and military operation, and hopefully, as a result, there will be a change of regime in Russia. This is telegraphed even in the diplospeak of the Lords’ Report, but becomes quite evident when you see the boots on the ground in the form of the Integrity Initiative.

With respect to China, the British are participating in the Belt and Road and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and are confident that they can manipulate and subvert these initiatives to their own geopolitical ends. With respect to India, the Lords intend to increase their security relationships, and they make reference to the historic tensions between China and India, with the obvious intent to exploit them. I don’t mean to say that the British aren’t into a full military mode about China. The Lords, however, plan to use the United States and such British supported institutions as the Hudson Institute, and IISS fellow Mike Pillsbury to constantly inflame the U.S. population to that end.

So, that’s the imperative from the Lords’ Report: Destroy the potential of the Four Powers: Make people docile and crazy through propaganda and outright censorship.

The Integrity Initiative

Now let’s talk about the Integrity Initiative, the boots on the ground for implementing all of this, not only in Britain but also right here in the United States. On November 23, 2018, a group calling itself “Anonymous” began posting actual documents from the Integrity Initiative, identifying it as a rapid-response, black-propaganda, information-warfare operation targeting Russia, China, Western Europe, and the United States. Since that initial posting, there have been three other document dumps concerning the Initiative, the last on January 4.

The Integrity Initiative is run under the Institute for Statecraft, a British NGO which receives 95 percent of its funding from the British government, NATO, and the U.S. State Department. It is housed in London, right next to the International Institute for Strategic Relations, the British think tank that largely dictates imperial foreign policies. The building once housed the Knights Templar and was the London home of William Astor. Since Anonymous starting posting, the Institute has been visited by all sorts of interested reporters, who have been brusquely escorted off the premises. The “official” address of the Institute for Statecraft is actually a dilapidated and abandoned building in Scotland. It recently got a significant cash boost from Facebook, and it is going after tax exempt status, if you can believe it, in the United States.

Its current plan is to expand into and target major U.S. cities—not on the coasts—since the coasts, they say, are already taken care of. The plan is to concentrate in the presidential battleground states for the 2020 elections. Remember, as Dearlove and the Lords insist, Donald Trump cannot get a second term. The first document released by Anonymous brags that the Integrity Initiative managed to derail the nomination of Pedro Banos to head Spain’s Homeland Security Department, based on a two-hour smear campaign claiming he was too soft on Moscow.

The Initiative has what it calls “clusters”—contact groups of journalists, military and foreign office personnel, academics, and lobbyists, within almost every European country, the United States, and Canada, and is now looking to expand to the Middle East. These people get alerts, often through the medium of Initiative “contacts” in British embassies, to take action when the British Foreign Office perceives a need. The U.S. and British clusters are dominated by individuals from the Atlantic Council, the rabidly anti-Russian and anti-Chinese Jamestown Foundation, the Center for European Policy Analysis, and similar National Endowment for Democracy spinoffs.

Remember, the Atlantic Council premises in Washington were where the Lords convened for their U.S. visit. It is the flagship British think tank in the United States. It houses the Digital Research Lab, which is home to Dimitri Alperovitz, the guy who also leads CrowdStrike, the company that manufactured the fake story about Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta. It is also home to Ben Nimmo, who works both for the Integrity Initiative and the Atlantic Council, and who has written many of the provably fake claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s purported monster cyber capabilities. The Digital Research Lab was also recently hired by Facebook to police and censor its users.

The Initiative’s U.S. cluster has Evelyn Farkas, who formerly had the Russia and Eurasia desk at the Defense Department under Obama. She famously mouthed off, on an episode of “Morning Joe,” about the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” and leaks of classified information to Congress in order to derail the Trump presidency. The UK cluster includes Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, Ed Lucas of the Center for European Policy Analysis, Bill Browder and Vadim Kleiner from Browder’s operations, and, not surprisingly, Sir Andrew Wood, of Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm founded by Christopher Steele. All of these people have been up to their necks in the operations against Trump.

The War Party

At the center of the Institute’s very military operations is the use of propaganda directed at both the government and the general population, at the same time. Institute personnel lobby governments on behalf of war party policies against Russia and China, for example, in their disguise as private parties, while the Institute itself is being paid, as a think tank, by the very same government. At the same time, the Institute’s media contacts echo the entirely concocted government “debate” to the general population. This circular churning of the media sphere is what Obama’s former security advisor, Ben Rhodes, called creating a public opinion “echo chamber.” Rhodes cut his national security chops by helping with the production of the fraud known as the 9/11 Commission Report.

This methodology, fully implemented in the British propaganda and regime change operation against Putin—which began with the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning in 2006 and dramatically escalated in 2014—has created an astounding and deranged war fever against Putin in Britain and throughout Europe.

The Integrity Institute is led by Christopher Donnelly, a very well-placed British military intelligence officer with an impressive career in NATO, the Ministry of Defence, and in military destabilization operations. Donnelly is obsessed with and paranoid about Russia. He laments that Britain and NATO are not equipped for war with Russia and proposes to change that by hyping the “Russia threat” both to governments and populations. Like an ever-more-deranged Doctor Strangelove, Donnelly’s prescriptions for responding to the “annexation” of Crimea in 2014, included mining Sevastopol harbor, attacking Russian satellites, and destruction of Russian fighter jets—all such actions being, of course, acts of war.

Donnelly argues that the British government needs a long term “vision” that will inspire people to fight a war, something which most sane people, of course, given the existence of nuclear weapons, are more than a little hesitant about. Institute papers in October of 2016 feature a discussion between Donnelly and Sir Gen. Richard Barrons, in which we find Donnelly wishing for some shocking, horrendous event to wake people up to the Russian threat.

The purloined documents posted by Anonymous show that Initiative personnel have targeted British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in a huge smear campaign, as well as the Scottish Nationalist Party and other domestic opponents of the powers-that-be in Britain. They also show that Simon Bracey-Lane, a young Institute fellow, infiltrated the Bernie Sanders campaign in Iowa in 2016, gathering information which, in all probability, was reported back to the Clinton campaign. The Institute also claimed that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a Russian pawn, a claim echoed by Hillary Clinton.

Building for War in the U.S.

In the United States, according to Max Blumenthal’s terrific reporting, the Institute aims to create a new generation of “information warriors.” It has hired John Rendon, known as the “man who sold the Iraq War,” to train its “perception management” specialists. Rendon handled the publicity for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, along with other Washington PR firms. BuzzFeed, which infamously published the Christopher Steele dirty dossier on Donald Trump, is listed as a friendly media source. An itinerary for Chris Donnelly’s visit to the United States noted that Sebastian Gorka, Steve Bannon’s buddy who served with him at the White House, was scheduled for a breakfast meeting with Donnelly. Gorka’s wife, Katherine, who works for Homeland Security, is listed as an Institute contact. Gorka openly supports Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian of fascist pedigree.

Donnelly was shepherded around Washington by Anne Bader, a former Vice-President of the Atlantic Council, whose own intelligence pedigree is completely British. He visited the Center for Naval Analysis, a key contributor to the Lords’ Report, and the John McCain Institute’s Executive Director Kurt Volker, a rabid neo-con who serves as U.S. Special Representative to Ukraine. He also spent a lot of time at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, where Todd Leventhal double dips as an employee while also serving the Institute.

At its first event in Seattle, Washington, U.S. Institute spokesman Simon Bracey-Lane, the same guy who infiltrated the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, read remarks from Chris Donnelly, noting that:

the West was no longer in a “peace time, rules-based environment. . . .” The conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime.

Blumenthal reports that active recruitment in the United States of such warriors is targeted on the alt-right formations in the circles of Bannon and Gorka, and young Trump supporters more generally, who entertain a positive view of Putin and Russia, as well as the general public.

How to Detect a ‘Putin Sympathizer’

The Institute recently opened major operations targeting Germany, seeking to smear and defame existing German networks who are urging peace with Russia, while attempting to build the same war fever they have created in Washington and London. According to Sputnik’s Kit Klarenberg, the Institute’s lead agent for Germany is Harold Elletson, who was exposed by the Observer as an MI6 agent in 1996. Klarenberg writes:

One can spot a “cultivated” Russlandversteher, [Russia sympathizer] Elletson suggests, when they make statements in accordance with one the Kremlin’s 21 alleged “key messages.”

These include: Germany and Russia had a “special relationship” and should return to it; Russia has legitimate interests and the West should respect them; the West deceived Russia over NATO expansion; “Wikileaks” and Snowden show the West has not been open in its dealings with Germany; the Georgian crisis was the result of Georgian aggression; Russia has a legitimate claim to Crimea; the Ukrainian revolution was actually a coup d’état; sanctions against Russia are counter-productive and will damage the German economy; the Syrian crisis cannot be solved without Russian support, which has been instrumental in stopping the spread of ISIS [Daesh].

In essence, any German who is remotely critical of NATO, the West, or prevailing Western global political narratives, or indeed government policy anywhere in the world negatively impacting Russia in any way—or who simply doesn’t view Russia as invariably villainous—is a stooge of Putin.

The Institute’s now-public documents include a proposal by the French company Lexfo, seeking funding for an offensive online influence campaign and includes a proposal for “counter-activism,” through “negative PR, legal actions, ethical hack back, etc.” It states that it can launch hundreds of news pieces a day and offers to “edit” Wikipedia articles.

Manipulating the Electorate

The French company’s proposal is of a piece with the recent scandal enveloping the cyber-warriors at New Knowledge, a U.S. corporation run by former Obama staffers, who were caught openly meddling in Alabama candidate Roy Moore’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. New Knowledge had been endorsed as certifiable experts on Russian disinformation activities in the 2016 U.S. elections by none other than the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. Just when Mark Warner and his brother-in-crime Richard Burr were hotly trotting out their nonsense about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S elections recently, the New York Times published internal New Knowledge documents about actual election interference, not by Russia, but by New Knowledge!

Among the things these guys did in Alabama was to manufacture “a link between Roy Moore’s campaign and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of Roy Moore’s twitter followers were Russian bots.” The Internal Report cited by the Times contained the admission, “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.” New Knowledge also performed lots of other dirty tricks to swing the election against Moore.

One of the New Knowledge “experts” is Jonathan Morgan, once a special advisor to the Obama White House and State Department and currently a contractor for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Post-election, he ran his mouth off incessantly about how the Russians had engineered Hillary Clinton’s defeat. He told television viewers in Austin, Texas, that,

feelings of discontent were telltale signs of being duped by Russian disinformation. . . . If it makes you feel too angry or really provokes that type of almost tribal response, then it may be designed to manipulate you. . . . People should be concerned about things that encourage them to change their behavior.

The tranche of documents released by Anonymous on January 4 included a contract with Harod Associates to monitor social media and media response internationally to the Sergei Skripal poisoning and the British government response. The Institute labeled this and related activity, Operation Iris.

A previous Anonymous release of Institute documents included the name of Christopher Steele’s business associate and Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, on Christopher Donnelly’s general contact list. On this list are the political handler of Porton Down, the UK’s chemical weapon facility, Pablo Miller, the BBC, and representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the U.S. Embassy.

The Institute’s media campaign about the Skripal poisoning was designed to create “popular demand” for even harsher actions against Russia by the British government, while planting articles all over the world blaming Putin for the Skripal poisoning. “Journalists” paid by the Institute published multiple articles in the British press supporting the “Putin did it, and it should be War” line promulgated by Operation Iris. The Initiative characterized the official British response as “weak.”

Now, the blogger “Moon of Alabama” points out that Ben Nimmo appears to be double-billing the Institute and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Lab for his various raves about the Russian threat. Nimmo is the author of the stunningly preposterous claim that Putin has weaponized jokes. He also authored a 2017 Guardian piece, with reporter Carole Cadwalladr, claiming that Russia influenced the Brexit decision through Facebook ads. Both appear to have been paid by the Initiative for their nonsense, even after Facebook revealed that Russia-linked accounts had spent a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads.

These absurd claims, of course, parallel those of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee about how a few thousand dollars in Russian Facebook ads—most of which occurred after the election, had little to say about Trump or Clinton, and a full quarter of which were seen by no one—swung the American election for Trump.

Back in 2013, another Institute “expert,” Mark Galeotti, invented a whole Russian military doctrine of hybrid cyber warfare out of thin air, attributing it to a paper written that year by Russian General Valery Gerasimov. After years as an article of faith, requiring expenditures of untold millions of defense dollars to defend against it, Galeotti himself finally retracted his invention in March 2018, following an earlier shredding of his claims by the U.S. Army’s Military Review journal.

The Larger Hybrid Warfare Apparatus

The now-exposed “Integrity Initiative” is only a small part of the massive British-spawned hybrid warfare apparatus targeting Russia, China, and dissident voices in target populations. This apparat received a new lease on life following the Ukraine coup in 2014 and the initial popular rumblings in Britain itself about Brexit. As Hillary Clinton herself observed, the British and the U.S. utterly failed to sell their coup in Ukraine as a triumph of democracy. Clinton attributed this to superior Russian social media and disinformation regimes. Reality would say, however, that the employment of Neo-Nazis as the coup’s mercenaries by the British and their American friends, led by Sen. John McCain and Victoria Nuland, had a major impact on the applause meter.

It is not incidental that one Christopher Steele served as a prominent adviser to Nuland and the Obama Administration concerning this coup, delivering over one hundred missives to the State Department relating to its operations.

In 2008, faced with managing the financial collapse and the revolt of the American population, the Obama Administration proposed to attack “conspiracy theories,” namely anything interrupting its preferred depiction to the American population of reality. Samantha Power’s husband, Cass Sunstein, memorialized these discussions in January 2008 Harvard and University of Chicago law school publications. He largely focused on debunking what he called fake conspiracy theories about 9/11. Citing the arch British agent, and godfather of George Soros, Sir Karl Popper, Sunstein advocated direct government intervention in Internet chat rooms in the form of “cognitive infiltration,” suggesting that the resulting cognitive dissonance would render any political danger from conspiracy theories politically impotent. Sunstein proposed that private individuals fed with government information systematically intervene in Internet conspiracy forums.

The recent fake narratives produced by Q Anon and the targeting of Trump supporters just before the midterms, in the form of Pokémon video game-type clues about the coup, such as the fake claim that Robert Mueller is really on Trump’s side, are a vivid example of such “cognitive infiltration.”

British ‘Warfare of the Mind’

I will now report on how the present propaganda kingdom came about, beginning in 2009 when Obama and the British engaged NATO to set up a mechanism to control opinion in the trans-Atlantic community—the NATO Centre for Strategic Communications, which kicked into high gear after the Ukraine coup. The Integrity Initiative came into existence in 2015 as a result. This escalated even further, of course, when Trump got elected, and the British and their American toadies went crazy.

Now, with funding spigots turned on for this in the billions of dollars on both sides of the Atlantic, it is possible to name 60 organizations dedicated to information psyops against the population of the United States. That’s just the public side. Reporter Max Blumenthal compares it to Operation Mockingbird, the collaboration of intelligence agencies, compromised politicians, and the national news media which employed over 400 American journalists in the service of the CIA during the Cold War, and he’s right about that.

The Steele Dossier and the Integrity Institute involve the same British intelligence networks revolving around Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. Dr. Victor Madeira, one of the key staffers at the Integrity Institute used to work directly for Dearlove and Sir Christopher Andrew at the Cambridge Intelligence Forum.

Sir Andrew Wood, the former UK Ambassador to Russia, Dearlove friend, and advisor to Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence Company, is listed as a Specialist Team Member of the Integrity Initiative. Drew Foxall of the Henry Jackson Society, where Dearlove is the leading light, is listed as “inner core” of the Initiative.

Both the Integrity Initiative and Christopher Steele traffic in intelligence lies targeted at Russia, and employ media echo chambers to legitimate these lies through media retainers and witting government accomplices. Among the specializations which have been listed, at one point or another, as special skills of Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence are “creating public opinion groundswells,” and “delivering targeted political campaigns.” Richard Dearlove is an old hand at such operations. While leading MI6, Dearlove infamously vouched for the doctored dossier which said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, collaborating with then CIA Director George Tenet on one of the 20th century’s most deadly intelligence lies.

Steele’s History

Christopher Steele has the same, albeit less developed, pedigree. He was the case officer in MI6 for Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector who worked for the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and who took up residence in Britain. In 2006, Litvinenko was murdered, using polonium poison. Steele immediately blamed Litvenenko’s murder on Putin, although his employer, Berezovsky’s organized crime networks, were much more likely the killers. Litvinenko’s death-bed statement blaming Putin was broadcast throughout the world after being massaged by Bell, Pottinger—the disgraced British public relations firm famous for such contracts as its $540 million effort for the CIA, making fake al-Qaeda propaganda films for the war in Iraq.

The British government didn’t bite on Steele’s claims originally, and instead indicted a sole Russian for the crime, not the Russian state. In the wake of the Ukraine coup, the Litvinenko case was revived, for propaganda purposes. The new British review lasted two years, ending in January 2016, and charged that Russia and Putin were “probably” responsible for the murder. The report used the word “probably” 35 times with respect to its major findings. Litvinenko’s father blames organized crime associates of Berezovsky for the murder. Berezovsky himself was suicided in 2013.

Dearlove mentored Steele in Orbis’ operations and specifically worked with him on the Trump dossier operation, vouching for and hyping Steele’s claims throughout the Five Eyes intelligence community. Dearlove is also associated with the British intelligence firm Hakluyt & Company. Stefan Halper, the MI6/CIA asset deployed to entrap Trump campaign volunteers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page in London, is an advisor to Hakluyt and a long-time professional colleague of Steele. Alexander Downer, the Australian Ambassador—the guy who tried to entrap George Papadopoulos—also was on Hakluyt’s Board. Luke Harding, who wrote the book Collusion to salvage Steele’s reputation and recently got caught completely fabricating a story in the Guardian about Julian Assange and Paul Manafort, works for both Hakluyt and Orbis. Similarly, Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergei Skripal, has worked with Steele since their days at MI6 and also worked with Hakluyt.

Finally, the mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, whose job was to flip Papadopoulos by giving him a job in London and then, through him, offer the Trump Campaign “access to Putin’s inner circle,” runs in the very same intelligence networks. Claire Smith, the member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee famously photographed with and working with Mifsud, reportedly worked with Chris Steele in Afghanistan.

The Actual ‘Get Trump’ Operation

With all that in mind, how should we be looking at the extraordinary operation the British ran to defeat the U.S. political candidate Donald Trump? And that is what it was.

The first point to be made is that all of the chronologies of this operation that you have been presented with are off, by months.

According to the way you have frequently heard it reported, the FBI opened an investigation in July 2016, at the same time that Christopher Steele began working with Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS was working with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, after it was hired in April by the Democratic National Committee. Fusion had previously worked for the Republicans against Trump. The dirty and corrupt Justice Department got a FISA warrant against Carter Page by lying to the FISA court in October. All the time, two FBI agents, one an attorney the other the case agent on the Trump Russia organization, who were engaged in a hot extramarital affair, were communicating over their cell phones that they hated Trump and were collaborating on an insurance policy to prevent his election. After the election, the Steele dossier was made public by some weird operation involving BuzzFeed, James Clapper, James Comey, and John McCain.

Isn’t that kind of the basic scenario you have heard endlessly reported?

That is only a minuscule part of the actual story. Christopher Steele and Dearlove had pre-written, in many respects, what became the Trump dossier in something called Project Charlemagne, a dossier about how the Russians had manipulated the June 2016 Brexit vote. Steele was listed as a paid FBI informant as of February 2016. As of March 2016, over at CIA headquarters, John Brennan convened a task force—questionable under U.S. law—and was receiving intelligence from the British about Trump, screening it, and then forwarding it to the FBI.

You can read my report revising the chronology based on what we can now put together. Some of it involves the hacked emails of State Department official Robert Otto, considered to be the U.S.’s biggest current expert on Russia, who was communicating throughout 2016 with British intelligence and key actors in the coup, including John McCain’s friend David Kramer, who leaked the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed in coordination with British intelligence, James Clapper and Jim Comey.

Most of the operation against Trump, as former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes has emphasized, came out of the State Department, and was particularly overseen by John Winer and Victoria Nuland. The State Department is the center of British operations in the United States. In October 2016, one month before the election, Christopher Steele held a full-scale briefing at State, handing out stuff to select journalists and others present. You can read the revised chronology in “Part III: A British Intelligence Fraud Creates the Coup Against Donald Trump,” which is the conclusion of my three-part report.

The public face of this operation, the cutout and sacrificial lamb, was Fusion GPS, with the actual controllers of the operation sitting in London. Bruce Ohr, the now demoted third man in the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division hierarchy, is married to Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion. Both Ohrs had a longstanding relationship with Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, based on investigations of Russian organized crime dating back decades. Neil King, Jr., also works for Fusion. He’s married to Shailagh Murray, Barack Obama’s senior policy adviser at the White House, having previously worked for years for Vice-President Biden.

Otherwise, most of Fusion’s staff is composed of former reporters for major national newspapers, who know how to feed tips and hot stories to their former friends or those they hire to put bylines on the propaganda ordered up by their clients. A major client for Fusion’s products has always been law enforcement. Fusion is a major drop point for feeding and amplifying out stories planted by the intelligence community to its network of journalists. Fusion has had a “professional relationship” with at least Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence in Britain since 2010, if not with other entities associated with Sir Richard Dearlove.

Outright Lies

What I really want to emphasize here is just how preposterous the Steele Report actually is. The dossier itself is flat-out, totally and utterly false—a stinking hideous fraud. Christopher Steele, in all his subsequent testimony, describes it as “unverified raw intelligence” and refuses to vouch for its accuracy. Even its most fervent champions, such as Michael Isikoff, who met personally with Steele in September 2016, now doubt the document, which provided the central legends of Russiagate.

After the election, Tom Steyer, George Soros, and other Silicon Valley billionaires provided some $70 million dollars in an attempt to put meat on Steele’s work product. A big part of this exercise, I think, is to create enough atmospherics and smoke to prevent the public from concluding that those who believe this crap are stark raving mad and belong in mental institutions rather than having any say in our government. That is also a large part of the function assigned to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

To believe that the dossier is true requires you to assume that Christopher Steele had some 32 sources inside the Russian government. What they allegedly told him is specific enough in time and content to identify them. You have to further assume that the British government, therefore, was willing to roll up this entire network, since the intention was for the dossier’s wild claims to be published as widely as possible.

By all accounts, Britain and the United States, together, do not have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy tradecraft. The dossier uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19 percent of the energy company Rosneft (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for the United States to lift sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The January 2 issue of the Federalist magazine carries a significant article by Lee Smith, who contends, with documentary evidence, that much of the dossier is simply drawn from public source postings, some of which are Ukrainian and some Russian, with embellishments by Steele to change actual events into nefarious crimes. In other words, there are no real Russian sources. Others have made similar comments about the dossier’s most salacious and incendiary allegation, that Trump cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow who urinated on the bed in which the Obamas had slept. This seems to be simply a rejiggered revival of 2009 British propaganda stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome “defiling” Putin’s bed. No one ever said that the British are original.

So, the story is long and a little complicated, but a real story nonetheless. I’m open for questions.