Integrity Initiative

The Integrity Initiative was set up in Autumn 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft and the Free University of Brussels .

Emily Thornberry Shadow Foreign Secretary 12:42 pm, 12th December 2018

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to make a statement on his Department’s funding of the Institute for Statecraft’s integrity initiative.

REPLY - Alan Duncan Minister of State

The Institute for Statecraft is an independent UK-based charity whose work seeks to improve governance and enhance national security. It runs a project called the integrity initiative, which is working to counter disinformation overseas by bringing together groups of experts to analyse and discuss the problem posed by Russian disinformation.

The Government are funding this initiative with nearly £2 million this financial year. That funding covers its activity outside the UK and it does not fund any activity within the UK; nor does it fund the management of the integrity initiative’s social media account. Recent reports that Foreign Office funding has been used to support party political activity in the UK are therefore wholly untrue. (exchange continues) ¹⁾

The Initiative is run under the Institute for Statecraft, a British NGO which receives 95% 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 Studies in the very rich and chic building which, according to the Grayzone’s Mohamed Elmaazi, once housed the Knights Templar and was the London home of William Astor.

This is despite its registration as a charity in Scotland with an address corresponding to a dilapidated and abandoned building. Its funding was recently supplemented by Facebook. It is seeking U.S. tax exemption for a spinoff NGO here, to be funded by the Smith-Richardson Foundation, with the plan to target major cities in the United States outside of Washington, DC or the coasts.

The Initiative operates on the basis of “clusters” or 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. A look at the “clusters” for the United States and Britain reveal them to be 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.

The Atlantic Council is the home of the Digital Research Lab which housed Dmitri Alperovitch, the guy who also leads CrowdStrike, the company which manufactured the fake story about Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta. ²⁾

Greetings. We are Anonymous.

We have obtained a large number of documents relating to the activities of the ‘Integrity Initiative’ project that was launched back in the fall of 2015 and funded by the British government. The declared goal of the project is to counteract Russian propaganda and the hybrid warfare of Moscow.

Hiding behind benevolent intentions, Britain has in fact created a large-scale information secret service in Europe, the United States and Canada, which consists of representatives of political, military, academic and journalistic communities with the think tank in London at the head of it.

As part of the project Britain has time and again intervened into domestic affairs of independent European states. A most demonstrative example is operation ‘Moncloa’ in Spain. Britain set to prevent Pedro Baños from appointment to the post of Director of Spain’s Department of Homeland Security. It took the Spanish cluster of the Integrity Initiative only a few hours to accomplish the task. ³⁾

Early in November we published here a large part of the documents relating to the Integrity Initiative project. The Integrity Initiative have confirmed their validity, yet they don’t consider the information relevant. Meanwhile neither the organization not its sponsors have met out demands and given assurances that the network of clusters will only be used to counter Russia’s disinformation policy. We have also received no reaction from the EU leaders and international organizations although people in many countries showed great concern about the matter.

Therefore we will continue to make public the Integrity Initiative’s documentation until our demands to conduct an open and thorough investigation into its activity on a pan-European level are fully met.

In our previous publication we made an example of Operation Moncloa ⁴⁾

Our previous publication has sparked public outrage in the UK, therefore we feel bound to break silence once again and change the way the operation is going on. Well-coordinated efforts of the Anonymous from all over the world have forced the UK politicians to react to the unacceptable and in fact illegal activity of the British government that uses public money to carry out misinformation campaigns not only in the EU, US and Canada but in the UK as well, in particular campaigns against the Labour party. The Integrity Initiative is now under first official investigation. We promise to give close scrutiny to the investigation that we believe should be conducted honestly, openly and absolutely transparently for the society, rather than become an internal and confidential case of the Foreign Office.

To show our expertise in the investigation as well as to warn the UK government that they must not even try to put it all down to the activity of some charity foundations and public organizations we reveal a part of documents unveiling the true face of The Institute for Statecraft and some information about its leadership.

Indeed, the Integrity Initiative receives its financing from The Institute for Statecraft, a company that very few knew about up until recently. Here is the information that you can get from its official website: its programme has not been updated since late 2017, no data on its employees, no contacts whatsoever, not even an official e-mail, while the source code of its online publications suggests automated uploads of the contents. And here are the documents about The Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative that we are ready to share with you ⁵⁾

We have warned the UK government that it must conduct an honest and transparent investigation into the activity of the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft. Yet, today we can only see some awkward excuses and attempts of the politicians to quieten it all down. The outrageously illicit use of the British taxpayers’ money to organize a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and entire Labour party must not remain unpunished!

To prevent the conservative ministers from lying to the people from the benches of the UK Parliament we have decided to publish another part of the documents that will help make the investigation more honest and open.

You can download all files in a single archive. ⁶⁾

December 28, 2018 by Mark Curtis

The UK government-financed Integrity Initiative, managed by the Institute for Statecraft, is ostensibly a “counter disinformation” programme to challenge Russian information operations. However, it has been revealed that the Integrity Initiative twitter handle and some individuals associated with this programme have also been tweeting messages attacking Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. [i] This takes on special meaning in light of the numerous UK military and intelligence personnel associated with the programme, documented in an important briefing by academics in Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media. ⁷⁾

by Mike Robinson | Sunday, 2nd December 2018

What is the Integrity Initiative?

On 5 November this year, Anonymous released a series of documents which it claimed were from an organisation called Integrity Initiative. The existence of the hack was picked up two weeks later by Russian press. To date there has been zero substantive coverage of the hack in British, US or European press.

On 26 November, Integrity Initiative published a statement on the Russian media coverage of the hack. In it they said:

• The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.
• The Integrity Initiative aims to unite people who understand the threat, in order to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare.
• The documents included in the leak comprised of a handbook, funding information and lists of people organised by ‘cluster’.

According to the handbook, Integrity Initiative aims to:

• bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

And it has achieved this by organising:

• a network of clusters across Europe and North America

These clusters are made up of:

• people who understand the threat posed to Western nations by a flood of disinformation.

So Integrity Initiative claims to have built a network of networks of people who operate to counter Russia’s ‘disinformation’. As Patrick Henningsen pointed out in last Monday’s UK Column News, this includes actual interference in the appointment of someone to a government position, using Twitter attacks to prevent the appointment of Colonel Pedro Baños as director of Spain’s Department of Homeland Security. Isn’t this exactly the type of behaviour that western governments and media claim of Russia? ⁸⁾

Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist Craig Murray - December 13, 2018

Even the mainstream media has been forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in “clusters of influence” around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute’s internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative’s thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US “novichok expert”, have cheerfully admitted it.

The mainstream media have tracked down the HQ of the “Institute for Statecraft” to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic Daniel Edney).

By sleuthing the company records of this “Scottish charity”, and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building. It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.

Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.

Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically check it out. Kit did so and was aggressively ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.⁹⁾

Integrity Initiative is the biggest story of 2018 – but not because of anything it did RT 23 Dec, 2018

Obscure leak reveals ‘network of networks’

From the start, the unmasking of the smugly Orwellian 'Integrity Initiative', progressed like a post-Assange spy thriller. The first tranche of insider files is uploaded on November 5 to a niche Anonymous server. There it lays broadly unnoticed for a fortnight among the anarchist tracts and hubristic threats to remake the world from behind a monitor.

But this leak is substantive, and once opened and disseminated – first through Twitter, then Russian media, then other alternative media sources – explosive. Internal documents talk of creating a “network of networks” to fight “malign” Russian influence. Applications for funding from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) promise to set up over a dozen undercover “clusters” of “competent, committed and well-connected individuals, ideally with a suitable institute affiliation” from Canada to Germany to Georgia that would be deployed in the service of specific anti-Russian “goals.” ¹⁰⁾

Moon of Alabama - January 4, 2019

'Integrity Initiative' - New Documents From Shady NGO Released

The British Government runs an anti-Russian smear campaign through the pseudo non-government-organization Integrity Initiative. Some person, operating under the 'Anonymous' label, obtained internal papers of the Initiative and publishes those in several batches. Moon of Alabama was one of the first sites that analyzed the released papers.

Our last piece on the Initiative concluded: After reading through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

Today the Anonymous account released a new batch of some 50 internal Integrity Initiative documents at the CyberGuerrilla website.

With the new release Anonymous lays out a timeline that connects the Skripal affair in Britain with the activities and personal of the Integrity Initiative. Our last piece had already drawn the Skripal connection to the Initiative, but some of the new documents add to the trail.

The trail starts with a document (pdf), written in January 2015(!), that lays out a plan and options for sanctioning Russia.

We have since seen that several of these planned sanctions have been realized after this or that curious event, like the alleged use of doping by Russian athletes and during the Skripal affair.

It will take some time to analyze the newly released papers and to draw conclusions. If you opt to read them yourself please leave notes on them in the comments.

Previously published:

• Nov 24 - British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns
• Dec 13 - British Spies Infiltrated Bernie Sanders' Campaign?
• Dec 14 - Newly Released 'Integrity Intitiative' Papers Include Proposal For Large Disinformation Campaigns
• Dec 15 - The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The “Russian Threat”

Tim Hayward provides a complete list (scroll down) of all articles written so far here and elsewhere about the Integrity Initiative. ¹¹⁾

The funding for 2018-9 is listed in one of the leaked documents[Which?] as follows:

• Funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy, £12,000 for each inaugural workshop = £168,000
• Funding from partner institutions £5,000 for each inaugural workshop = £70,000
• Funding from NATO HQ for educational video films – free provision of camera team
• Funding from Lithuanian MOD to provide free all costs for their stratcom team for a monthly trip to support a new hub/cluster creation and to educate cluster leaders and key people in Vilnius in infowar techniques = £20,000
• Funding from US State Dept, £250,000 for research and dissemination activities (excluding any activity in USA)
• Funding from Smith Richardson Foundation, £45,000 for cluster activities in Europe and USA
• Funding from Facebook, £100,000 for research and education activities
• Funding from German business community, £25,000 for research and dissemination in EU countries ¹²⁾

The Anonymous have released another batch of documents shedding light on some of the project’s activity, published on the Cyber Guerrilla hacker group website.

This is in continuation of the released documents regarding the Integrity Initiative and their subsequent targeting of UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Following reports from various media, the Integrity Initiative is now under official investigation from the British government. ¹³⁾

Integrity: Grasping The Initiative by Tim Hayward January 10, 2019

[Scroll down for links to discussions: latest update 10 January 2019]

This is my first personal blogpost since April. At that time I referred to a ‘coordinated smear campaign’ against anti-war journalists, tweeters and academics, whose number included myself and other members of the SPM Working Group. The portrayal of us as “useful idiots” for some or other official enemy, I suggested, was evidently a strategic communication.

We now know a lot more about the coordination of that communications strategy, thanks to the recently accessed documents exposing the Institute for Statecraft’s so-called Integrity Initiative (here, here and here).

Numerous points of interest and concern emerge, one of which regards the high profile attack launched at our Working Group on the front page of The Times. Two of its authors, we learn, are named in the newly available documents. They – Deborah Haynes and Dominic Kennedy – have not so far responded to invitations to clarify their association with the “Initiative”.

What we do know from the documents is that a coordinated network was very closely following all public comments on such critical events as the Skripals poisoning in Salisbury, on which SPM produced its first Briefing Note, and the chemical attack in Douma this year, which was the focus of SPM’s second Briefing Note.

The working group’s third Briefing Note will be released soon [update, 21 Dec 2018, it is now published here]. Meanwhile, for anyone wishing to catch up with others’ comments on the “Integrity Initiative”, links to discussions of the issue will be maintained here below.

[Update 22 Dec 2018: currently the full set of II documents is available at https://fdik.org/Integrity_Initiative/]

[Update 4 January 2019, 4th set of II documents released and available, separately and in a single folder, at https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all-part-4/ Also worth noting now is that while there are more than 60 articles on the matter linked below, still practically nothing has been heard from mainstream Western media outlets.] ¹⁴⁾

by Kit Klarenberg

For many years, public spaces online have been subject to an ever-intensifying blitzkrieg both by dedicated state-run bot and troll networks, and apparently grassroots initiatives. In respect of the latter, the one that started it all was the Lithuanian Elves, back in 2015.

An ostensibly informal collective of concerned citizens banding together to rebut Russian “fake news”, its activists have been praised effusively in the mainstream for their troll-busting prowess, and repeatedly held up as a paragon Western states must follow in order to effectively battle purported “disinformation”.

Unsurprisingly though, none of the countless glowing media profiles of the movement published to date have recognized that the movement has all along benefited from the sponsorship and promotion of British intelligence…

For many years, public spaces online have been subject to an ever-intensifying blitzkrieg both by dedicated state-run bot and troll networks, and apparently grassroots initiatives. In respect of the latter, the one that started it all was the Lithuanian Elves, back in 2015.

An ostensibly informal collective of concerned citizens banding together to rebut Russian “fake news”, its activists have been praised effusively in the mainstream for their troll-busting prowess, and repeatedly held up as a paragon Western states must follow in order to effectively battle purported “disinformation”.

Unsurprisingly though, none of the countless glowing media profiles of the movement published to date have recognized that the movement has all along benefited from the sponsorship and promotion of British intelligence.

Excerpt from Integrity Initiative file

“The Elves provide necessary knowledge for the development and implementation of an effective civic response,” an Initiative document declares. “Civic activists and volunteers [become] actively engaged in cyber resistance and digital resilience.”

By early 2018, the Dutch, Norwegian and Spanish defense ministries had also received direct training from the Elves and 77th Brigade, resultantly creating corresponding “units within their own ranks.”

Comparable divisions will have inevitably been created elsewhere in the years since. The organization had grand plans to circulate these and other meddling methods to the US, and a separate chapter in the aforementioned Disinformation and Fake News handbook moreover indicates former British colony Singapore has taken lessons from the Elves in tackling online “disinformation”.

There are clear indications too that Integrity Initiative was involved in the production of NATO’s Forest Brothers promotional clip. One file notes the organization is in receipt of “funding from NATO HQ for educational video films,” and been provided a camera team free of charge by the military alliance for the purpose, at precisely the time the clip was published. Two years later, it published an essay criticizing “Kremlin disinformation” regarding the Brothers on its now-defunct website. ¹⁵⁾