The report also concluded there were “a substantial number of activities for which financing ought to be considered as non-eligible expenditure,” in respect of spending on polls around the Scottish and Welsh elections in 2016.
Having already uncovered quite a substantial labyrinth of companies which utilise surveys and polling to harvest and trade in data, some of which I’d directly linked to UKIP, Donald Trump, and Arron Banks, the conclusions reached by the EU were set in a much clearer context. The potential data laundering activities and disinformation campaigns used to sway the electorate also tied in with a broader series of links between Farage, Trump, Wikileaks, and Russia, the ongoing Electoral Commission investigation into Leave.EU, and the referrals I’d gone on to make to the ICO in respect of the data laundering and sugging.
Farage responded to the EU report, then as interim leader of UKIP, saying: “We are in an environment where rules are wilfully interpreted as suits. I’ve understood absolutely the rules. This is pure victimisation.”
Speaking to the Guardian after Brexit148, Banks repeated much the same line, saying: “We were just cleverer than the regulators and the politicians. Of course we were,” adding they “pushed the boundary of everything, right to the edge. It was war.” As I’d found, those rules, the mechanisms they were up against were next to useless.
The ADDE as a whole went on to be denied two-hundred-and-fifty thousand Euro in grants for failing to follow the rules and, as a result of the EU inquiry, the parliament told me the group declared itself bankrupt in the wake of it.
Once you start looking, the trail is almost endless. I barely registered this at the time but UKIP had already faced an OLAF investigation which resulted in one of their MEPs being sent to prison for fraud offences – in circumstances mirroring the ongoing Front National investigation. In July 2015, former UKIP MEP Ashley Mote was sentenced to five years in prison having been found guilty of several fraud-related offences committed to the detriment of the European Parliament's budget149. The court case was triggered by an OLAF investigation carried out in 2010, which focused on the expenditure of a part of Mr Mote's allowances for hiring parliamentary assistants through a specific service provider. The evidence showed the MEP diverted over three hundred and fifty thousand Euro into private accounts. The EU Parliament sanctioned the investigation and it was referred to police in the UK who discovered more payments arising from false and misleading documents. The court sentenced Mr Mote to five years in prison. Other investigations into UKIP MEPs including Farage have since started to gain pace.
I really wanted to explore the failings which allowed these situations to arise and OLAF kindly provided me with more information about their structure and powers. The unit fulfils its mission, they told me, by carrying out independent investigations into fraud and corruption involving EU funds, so as to ensure that all “EU taxpayers’ money reaches projects that can create jobs and growth in Europe; contributing to strengthening citizens’ trust in the EU Institutions by investigating serious misconduct by EU staff and members of the EU Institutions; and developing a sound EU anti-fraud policy.” OLAF can investigate matters relating to fraud, corruption and other offences affecting the EU financial interests concerning all EU expenditure, as well as some areas of EU revenue, mainly customs duties. Based in Brussels, OLAF has roughly four hundred staff members, more than three hundred of whom are working as either investigators or selectors or in investigation support (forensics, legal services, etc.) The team have diverse backgrounds – some having worked for national police or customs authorities, or as lawyers or judges. The Director-General of OLAF is Mr Giovanni Kessler and the unit is fully independent in its investigative mandate from any other EU or national institution, body or authority. It neither seeks nor receives instructions from any party and, while this is good, the structural defect of it is obvious. OLAF is not, however, a prosecuting body, it only carries out administrative investigations and, when relevant, OLAF sends the information gathered in its investigations (final case reports) to the competent national authorities for their consideration and possible follow-up. This means local agencies can choose not to take action.
The unit can recommend financial, judicial, disciplinary and administrative action to those local authorities where it finds a misappropriation or wrongful retention of EU funds or an illegal diminution of the EU revenues. In such a case OLAF will recommend to the competent authority at EU and/or Member State level to recover the money or prevent the money from being unduly spent. Where they uncover a possible criminal offence in a Member State, OLAF will recommend consideration of judicial follow-up by the authorities in that state. Where they only find a possible disciplinary offence, the unit can recommend consideration of action by the EU Institution, body or agency concerned. Additionally, where they discover a weakness in the management or control systems or in the legal framework, OLAF may recommend that action should be taken by the competent EU Institution, body, office or agency, or authority of the Member State. This latter happened, causing a huge change across the EU for the better just as Britain was stepping away.
Investigating Le Pen had clarified the picture that the Russian-sponsored far right was united in its focus on the destabilisation of the European Union and, in the face of limited capabilities and responses from the authorities, was capitalising on exploiting its advantage over the electorates through underhand financial and political means. Through pushing the rules to the very limits, as Banks described. Accusations of European interference in the UK’s snap general election, bizarrely made by UK Prime Minister Theresa May, were subsequently alarming in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. At the time I felt it was indicative of either a wilful blindness, an abject failure by our domestic security services, or something more sinister – May was either doing the same or was in on the gag. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council responded, calling for moderation by May150, saying: “The stakes are too high to let our emotions get out of hand because at stake are the daily lives and interests of millions of people on both sides of the Channel.” I agreed with him.
The final round of France’s campaign took place on Sunday the 7th of May 2017 and the result may have changed the world forever. Macron won despite a huge, if somewhat predictable, leak of emails. In the wake of his election, the EU and NATO started to change gear straight away, and Russia was called out as an enemy within weeks, along with the UK and US.
Le Pen was formally charged with misspending on her staff in June 2017151.
Thirteen:
It was only weeks since Sweden but, sitting back, I knew the far-right had aligned internationally, working in a complex network to undermine democracy and the stability of western powers. Collaborating across multiple fronts, they were deploying state of the art techniques to hack data, emotionally control electorates, and spread disinformation. Over a period of years, they had gained control of political discourse and, subsequently, beneficial economic outputs through an almost indecipherable maze of personal and company connections. Seeing it all come together was like watching a slow motion car crash and the situation was exacerbated by a dawning realisation all of this raised more questions than it answered, especially when the changing face of terrorism was considered. The greatest unanswered question which leapt out at me was: has this global operation also played an active role in terror attacks aimed at the democracies they are targeting? There is still no firm answer, but the red flags were up, even as I first pondered the darkness of it.
In 2000, almost all terror attacks across the world involved the use of bombs. Non-complex, explosive devices. And, between 2006 and 2013 the number of terrorist attacks across Europe dropped significantly, including in the highest volume category – separatist violence152. During the same time period, the number of arrests increased, as countries introduced updated surveillance and counter-terrorism strategies. The largest increase in arrests related to religious terrorism offences, though there was a disproportionately la
rge increase in this group when contrasted against the other categories of terror. I suppose I may always wonder if this is connected to the same theory Manne Gerell raised with me – about implicit bias and the new underclass – but that’s a question for greater minds.
While there was clearly an argument to be made that efforts of the authorities and the airline industry restrictions on liquids had an impact in reducing bombings, the fact remains bomb-making materials are still broadly available across Europe. As my investigation found in Sweden, ex-military explosive stock is readily accessible and in active use, and the Brussels bombing underlined the point. 2015, however, saw a significant shift in the style of attack – the method turning to the use of vehicles to mow down pedestrians. When you start to probe these new attacks, set in the context of the development of a global operation which psychologically targets people to drive its own agenda with an extensive disinformation network (which has also claimed to be ISIS in cyber-attacks) the significant change in the terror pattern takes on a different tone. This can also be held up to scrutiny against the quick responses of Alt-Right media sites – and even Donald Trump – who have presumptively claimed incidents as being terrorism often within minutes of the attacks taking place, all of whom use the events to drive their own viral messages through their complex channels. These narratives have been exploited to the advantage of far-right political parties, often during active campaigns, and many of those parties, I’d established, were clearly linked to Russian destabilisation operations.
The lesser known of the vehicle enabled incidents took place in Nantes on the 22nd of December 2014 following another in Dijon, the day before.
Three days before Christmas in 2014, Sébastien Sarron ran over pedestrians at the Christmas market in the French city of Nantes153 using a van, then attempted suicide with a knife. Ten people, including the suspect himself, suffered non-fatal injuries and one person died. French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, went on record to say the attacker was unbalanced. While there were some reports circulating at first which claimed Sarron had shouted “Allahu Akbar,” police swiftly stated a notebook in his van contained “incoherent suicidal phrases” and set out his fears of “being murdered by the secret services.” Sarron was an alcoholic French farmer, drunk at the time of the attack, and committed suicide in his prison cell in April 2016.
In Dijon, the day before, another man was arrested after a vehicle-ramming attack, driving into pedestrians in five areas of the city within the space of half an hour. Two people were seriously injured. The forty-year-old driver was known to the police for minor offences, committed over the course of twenty years, and had repeatedly been treated for: “Serious and long-established psychiatric issues.” The local prosecutor said the incident was not linked to terrorism. The New York Times reported154 speaking to the city prosecutor in the aftermath, who said the driver had become “very agitated” at home after watching a television program about “the plight of children in Chechnya.”
The next attack took place on Bastille Day, the 14th of July 2016, in Nice155. French investigators identified the perpetrator – killed during the incident – as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a thirty-one-year-old man of Tunisian nationality. Originally born in the North African country, he held a French residency permit and lived in Nice where he married his French-Tunisian cousin, with whom he had three children. His parents continued to live in Tunisia and stated after the attack they rarely heard from him since the move to France in 2005. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s father told investigators and reporters the attacker underwent some psychiatric treatment before he moved to Nice and, according to his wife's lawyer, was repeatedly reported for domestic violence. Looking briefly into his background, he was known to French police for five criminal offences including threatening behaviour, violence, and petty theft. François Molins, the prosecutor leading the inquiry into the possible involvement of organised terrorism linked to Islam, has publicly made clear there was no link to the religion, except in a very short period before the attack156. Discussing the motives, he referred to the deceased suspect as: “A young man completely uninvolved in religious issues and not a practising Muslim, who ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had an unbridled sex life.”
There is another oddity in this case in that, while Lahouaiej-Bouhlel regularly sent small sums of money to his family in Tunisia, only days before the attack he persuaded friends to smuggle bundles of cash worth around one-hundred thousand Euro to his relatives. The whole attack, in truth, does not feel right and I had a horrible intuition, even at the time, he had been paid to commit the atrocity – I remember calling a good friend, also an ex-cop, and talking it through in this really uncomfortable so who was it then? way. We had almost the same conversation nearly two years later when Andrei Karlov, Russian Ambassador to Turkey, was assassinated by Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, an off-duty Turkish police officer157. The killing took place at an art exhibition in Ankara, Turkey on the evening of the 19th of December, following several days of protests over the Russian involvement in Syria and Aleppo.
Reacting to the assassination, Trump accused the trigger man of being “a radical Islamic terrorist,” while the Russian Duma responded158 by saying: “The culprits in this monstrous provocation, both the executors and those who guided the terrorist's hand by instigating Russophobia, ethnic, religious and confessional hatred, extremism and fanaticism, must face their deserved punishment.” In addition, Turkey’s despotic President Erdoğan responded159 with a video message in which he said “Turkey-Russia relations are vital for the region and those who aimed to harm ties were not going to achieve their goals.” The Turkish Foreign Ministry also made clear they were not prepared to let “this attack cast a shadow on the Turkish-Russian friendship.”
Islamic State groups, who have repeatedly shown they will claim almost any attack in their name to spread their message, have never taken responsibility for the murder.
I suppose what set the alarm bells ringing in my head, though it made much more sense in the wake of what I started investigating in Sweden, was the moment Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, started making claims the killing was: “A false flag operation by the West.” Frantz Klintsevich160, the deputy chairman of the Russian Defence and Security Committee, also reportedly said the assassination of Karlov was a “true provocation,” adding: “It was a planned action. Everyone knew that he was going to attend this photo exhibition. It can be Isis or the Kurdish army which tries to hurt Erdogan. But maybe – and it is highly likely – that representatives of foreign Nato secrets services are behind it.” Klintsevich was the person who previously promised a “harsh and unambiguous” response to any planned expansion of NATO membership, and said Russia would “aim our weapons, including the nuclear ones” at any countries seeking to join the alliance. This was rather pointedly aimed at Montenegro, who finally joined NATO in May 2017, but that membership finally came in the wake of a Russian assassination attempt on the country’s Prime Minister.
Two Russian intelligence officers spent months overseeing the recruitment and equipping of a small force of Serbian nationalists to attack the Montenegro parliament building, disguised as local police, and kill Milo Djukanovic. The plot was only foiled hours before it was due to take place and Nemanja Ristic, one of the plotters wanted by the authorities, had been photographed not long before the incident standing next to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister161. When the sensational allegations were made public, with the full support of the UK security services, Lavrov was simultaneously making a speech criticising NATO as a “Cold War institution,” saying it was the expansion of Western unity which had been the cause of instability across Europe over the last thirty years. I must confess, I didn’t know much about Lavrov at the time, but I kept his name on file, just in case. As things developed, I’m glad I did.
Looking back over all this a few years down the line, knowing the breadth of the international disinf
ormation network and who it was working for, what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Nice terror attack made more rational sense. Social media was virally attacked with false claims of hostage situations, a double attack – with some accounts showing images of the Eiffel Tower exploding – and claims of a further attack in Cannes. This was accompanied by almost endless images of wholly unrelated persons being named as missing persons, victims, and suspects. Marine Le Pen came out almost straight away too, condemning immigration and government policy in response to the attacks, attracting a lot more voter interest than usual due to the artificially amplified public mood.
On the 19th of December 2016, another truck was deliberately driven into a Christmas market, this time at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin162, leaving 12 people dead and 56 others injured. The truck's original driver, Łukasz Urban, was found shot dead in the passenger seat. The suspect, Anis Amri163 – a failed asylum seeker from Tunisia – was killed in a shoot-out with police near Milan four days later.
Amri fled from Tunisia to escape imprisonment for stealing a truck and arrived for the first time in Europe in 2011 on a refugee raft at the island of Lampedusa. According to reports he lied about his age, pretending to be a minor, and was sent to the temporary migrant reception facility on the island where, according to Italian security officials, he took part in a particularly violent riot, when the centre was set on fire and several people were injured. He was subsequently imprisoned for four years for this and a robbery offence. In Tunisia, Amri was also sentenced in absentia to five years in prison, reportedly for aggravated theft with violence and his record stated he had been arrested several times for possession and use of drugs. According to his family, he drank alcohol, took drugs and was never really religious. Amri was released in 2015 and it is believed he went to Germany at this point, where he was involved in a bar brawl, drug dealing, and an eventual knife attack over drugs in July 2016. He disappeared after police tried to question him. After he was shot dead in Milan, his autopsy found that he frequently consumed drugs.
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