Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  While it is on record that Moroccan intelligence warned Germany about a potential attack planned by Amri and the domestic security services did monitor him in Berlin, he showed no signs of planning a terrorist event according to official reports submitted to the German Interior Minister. As a result, national and international right-wing politicians and commentators drove a narrative which blamed the attack on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and her policy of accepting an “unlimited” number of asylum seekers and migrants. These groups also condemned the lack of border checks under the EU’s Schengen system for allowing the perpetrator to travel freely through several countries after the attack. In essence, this was the same pattern I saw in Sweden and, only days before I travelled there to investigate crime and immigration, that hijacked truck was deliberately driven into crowds along Drottninggatan in Stockholm on the 7th of April 2017.

  The suspect, thirty-nine-year-old rejected asylum seeker Rakhmat Akilov164 from Uzbekistan, was apprehended the same day and admitted carrying out the attack at a pre-trial hearing on the 11th of April. Investigating the incident, Säpo (the Swedish intelligence service) have publicly stated they had received a limited amount of information on the suspect but were unable to confirm it when they followed up on the lead. Due to this, they reportedly deemed him only a “marginal figure,” on the fringes of extremist groups.

  Akilov arrived in Sweden on the 10th of October 2014 and claimed asylum, saying he needed refuge from “the Uzbek security services which he claims tortured him and accused him of terrorism and treason.” Uzbekistan165 remains closely tied to Russia – it was a Soviet socialist republic for almost seventy years until 1991 and both countries have had diplomatic relations since 1992. During the early years of independence, Uzbekistan stayed within the Ruble zone, not leaving until the winter of 1993 but, ten years later, Gazprom took over control of the Uzbek pipeline network, tying the countries together financially once again. In the same year, 2003, Uzbekistan started exporting gas to a recovering Russian Federation. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, separatist tensions began to rise but this was somewhat appeased when Russia forgave nearly all of the Uzbek debt to boost relations between the two countries. When Sweden's Migration Board ruled against Akilov’s application and he was ordered to leave the country within four weeks, he failed to do so voluntarily and did not appear at the Swedish Migration Agency when called. Due to this, his case was referred to police but he went on the run. The subsequent investigation into Akilov found he was registered at the same address as others with links to fraud and other offences. A number of people living at the property were convicted of false accounting and severe tax crimes. He was also linked to Chechnya and a Facebook group which aimed to expose the “terrorism of the imperialistic financial capitals.”

  The Swedish far-right was accused of trying to profit from the Stockholm attack, much in the same way as Le Pen, and were caught by the Swedish press producing fake news and circulating fake quotations online. The disinformation included tweets and social media posts from serving officials within the Sweden Democrats.

  Among all of the suspects, from France to Germany, to Sweden, the common points were easy to identify: criminal offending histories, limited or no links to terrorism – even under surveillance – and mental health issues. In two cases, there were links to suspicious finances and two direct links to Chechnya. Looking at it in this way, having purposefully avoided the limited references to Islamic State, it was much easier to distill the facts as they really are. Something was not right, off, and it went beyond simple extremism or radicalisation. With almost all the suspects killed before questioning and almost every single connected person arrested released without charge, the evidential links to religious terrorism are almost entirely reliant on internet searches and social media, distorted by disinformation. It was this which set me wondering about something else: with so many people now radicalised online, could we even be sure who was responsible?

  In respect of the promotion of extremism and conversion to radicalised ideology online, some claims of responsibility for Islamic State attacks and other activity reported to have been the work of ISIS have already been traced back to the Kremlin-linked hacking group APT28. In April 2015, France's TV5 Monde network was knocked off the air for around eighteen hours in the aftermath of a cyberattack which also led to the hijack of the agency’s website and Facebook page. The hackers, who identified themselves as the “Cyber Caliphate,” also leaked documents they claimed were the identification cards of French soldiers involved in anti-ISIS operations. Initially, the hack was attributed to sophisticated online operatives ideologically aligned to the Islamic State. However, French investigators later announced the attack was carried out by Russian hackers. Sources close to both the investigation and TV5 Monde’s president also told France 24 “the finger of blame” pointed at the Russian state, confirming a report by L’Express. This conclusion was further supported by the findings of security vendors FireEye and Trend Micro166.

  FireEye’s security experts said: “The website which published leaked information was hosted on the same IP block as other APT28 infrastructure and used the same name server and registrar that FireEye has seen APT28 use in the past.” According to the cyber security experts, the computer malware and scripts featured in the attack were typed on a Cyrillic keyboard and timestamps showed the code was compiled, during office hours, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The threats against the families of French soldiers serving overseas and other jihadist propaganda also contained numerous grammatical mistakes, echoing the story which surrounds Guccifer and the DNC leaks. The Russian hacking group, the reports said, also “targeted the computer systems of Nato members, Russian dissidents and Ukrainian activists.”

  President of FireEye, Richard Turner, said: “What we already suspect is that the group is sponsored by the Kremlin. We now also believe that ISIS was a decoy and APT28 was actually responsible for the attack on TV5 Monde. Russia has a long history of using information operations to sow disinformation and discord, and to confuse the situation in a way that could benefit them.”

  “The ISIS cyber caliphate could be a distraction tactic. This could be a touch run to see if they could pull off a coordinated attack on a media outlet that resulted in stopping broadcast and news dissemination. We have been watching APT28’s infrastructure very closely and have seen them target other journalists around the same time as the TV5 Monde attack,” he added.

  Though the thought was deeply unnerving, if state-sponsored actors could hack under this guise for this purpose, it was a credible threat that they may be hosting and managing false Islamic State radicalisation operations too. This changes the meaning of terrorism as we have known it for several years and, combined with the clear advantage certain parties were exploiting in the wake of events, tends to provoke the taking of a more critical view of all these incidents. There can be no exception to this, even in the United Kingdom.

  On the 22nd of March 2017, a terrorist attack took place in Westminster167. The attacker – fifty-two-year-old Briton Khalid Masood – drove a car into pedestrians on the pavement along the south side of Westminster Bridge and Bridge Street, injuring more than fifty people and killing six. After the car crashed into the perimeter fence of Parliament grounds, Masood abandoned it and ran to New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed and killed a police officer. He was then shot by another armed officer and died at the scene. Though the attack was instantly attributed to Islamic terrorism by right-wing figures and media outlets across the world, police have found no link with any terrorist organisation.

  Born Adrian Russell Elms, the deceased suspect later changed his name to Adrian Russell Ajao, then to Khalid Masood after he converted to Islam. Police said he also used several other aliases, including Khalid Choudry. He dropped out of school at sixteen and by eighteen was described as a heavy cocaine user. In 2000, he was sentenced to two years in prison for grievous bodily harm after a knife attack in a public house, w
hich took place in Northam in Sussex. He was sentenced to a further six months in prison in 2003 for possession of an offensive weapon following another knife attack in Eastbourne. As well as these two prison terms, Masood had convictions for public order offences going back to 1983. His background matched the French and German suspects and his profile was otherwise atypical, as most jihadi terrorists are under thirty while he was over fifty.

  While an ISIS-linked news network reported that Islamic State did celebrate the attack as their own, analysts monitoring their activity online said claims of responsibility appeared to be part of a broader effort to mask losses in Iraq and Syria, and specifically cited: “The lack of biographical information on the attacker and lack of specifics about the attack suggested it was not directly involved.” Government and security services in the UK agreed. Towards the conclusion of the initial investigation, Neil Basu, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Senior National Coordinator for UK Counter-Terrorism Policing, announced investigators believed Masood acted alone, adding: “There is a possibility we will never understand why he did this.”

  Westminster clearly fitted the obvious exception pattern of the other events and is the only attack, with the exception of the Turkey assassination, which had any direct connections to a political target. All of these incidents have, however, helped drive the disinformation narrative, feeding right-wing politicians and false reports such as those which led me to Sweden in the first place, the very same investigation which exposed the previously missing links in the chain which definitively connect Russia and the far-right. The change in the pattern of terror incidents and the surrounding information suggested something very drastic had changed not just in the method, but in the suspects too: petty criminals, drug users, often with mental health issues and who could not be directly linked to terrorism. I found myself asking again and again if there was something else to it.

  False flags have been broadly admitted in the past – actions used to justify another end – and large payments of cash, such as those made in Nice, are not associated with the acts of radicals. In fact, and more to the point, Da’esh has been losing financial ground for years. By February 2017, Alessandro Pansa, Director General of the Department of Information Security for the Italian Council of Ministers, publicly announced168: “ISIS has significantly retreated. Its sources of revenue, primarily smuggling oil products and antiquities, are at the edge of drying out.” Russia, however, which appeared to be at the heart of everything else we were witnessing, was no stranger to deploying black operations tactics. Together with the Dagestan military offensive, it was a false-flag bombing which led the Russian Federation into the Second Chechen War.

  In September 1999, Russia saw apartment bombings169 which killed almost three hundred people and injured more than one thousand. Explosions happened at Buynaksk on the 4th of September, Moscow on the 9th and 13th and Volgodonsk on the 16th. An explosive device similar to those used in these bombings was also found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan a week later. On the day after the last devices were found, Vladimir Putin ordered the air bombing of Grozny, which marked the beginning of the Chechen offensives.

  According to the Moscow City Court, the bombings were acts of terrorism organised and financed by the leaders of the armed group, the Caucasus Islamic Institute, yet thirty-six hours after this announcement, three FSB agents were arrested by the local police for planting the Ryazan explosives. The incident was, however, officially declared to have been a training exercise and the agents were released on Moscow's orders.

  Prominent figures Yury Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, David Satter, Boris Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky, and even the secessionist Chechen authorities have always maintained claims the 1999 bombings were a false flag attack, coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya – a move which boosted the popularity of former FSB director Putin. The pro-war Unity Party succeeded in the subsequent elections to the State Duma and helped Putin attain the presidency within a few months. The MP Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, which were rejected and a public commission to investigate the bombings was rendered ineffective by the government's refusal to respond to its inquiries. Notably, two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin, have since died in apparent assassinations and Litvinenko’s death is probably the most famous execution of a spy in history – he was poisoned with radioactive material in London. The British public inquiry concluded the FSB killed him, and “probably” did so on the direct orders of Putin himself170.

  Nervously drumming my desk, I found myself thinking it was entirely possible the changed face of terror in Europe was the darker side of the global destabilisation operation I’d been sticking my nose into, this hybrid offensive. In many ways, it made sense, not least because the public reactions helped the disinformation and far-right narratives become more mainstream and embedded in national politics and media reporting. Russia was obviously no stranger to false-flags to achieve its goals, the apartment bombings showed that but, once I started looking, the darkness began to layer. For example, Ukraine took Russia to the International Courts of Justice in The Hague for a face-off in March 2017, having lodged a forty-five-page indictment171 in the same January. The Ukrainian government was asking the United Nations’ highest court to fine Russia for “intervening militarily in Ukraine, financing acts of terrorism, and violating the human rights of millions of Ukraine's citizens.” The indictment accused Russia of violations of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism 1999 by: “Supplying money, weapons, training, and other support to separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine,” and demanded compensation for “terrorist acts committed on its territory, including the shelling of civilian areas and the shoot down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.”

  Olena Zerkal, one of the deputy foreign ministers of Ukraine told the court: “Russian Federation tactics include support for terrorism and acts of racial discrimination, as well as propaganda, subversion, intimidation, political corruption and cyberattacks.”

  Malaysia Airlines Flight 17172 (MH17) was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17th 2014, killing almost three hundred people on board. The Dutch-led team of detectives from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine, who spent more than two years investigating the incident, presented their initial findings in September 2016, saying that “audio intercepts, witness statements, and forensic evidence show the missile launcher, a Buk SA-11, arrived from Russia after separatists requested additional support against Ukrainian airstrikes.” According to a report by the Telegraph, they added that “it fired the missile that brought down MH17 from a field about ten miles south-east of the crash site on the afternoon of July 17 before returning across the border next day.”

  Wilbert Paulissen, head of the Central Crime Investigation department of the Dutch National Police, told reporters: “MH17 was shot down by a 9M38 missile launched by a Buk, brought in from the territory of the Russian Federation, and that after launch was subsequently returned to the Russian Federation.” Some witnesses also submitted evidence to the investigation claiming the weapon was, in fact, supplied and crewed by the Russian army’s 53rd Air Defence Brigade, which was stationed in Kursk.

  Responding to the report on behalf of Russia, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said: “The Dutch Prosecutor’s findings confirm that the investigation is biased and politically motivated.”

  The further I looked into the links between Russia and terrorism, the worse the picture got, and then I discovered Russian security services had been sending its own extremists to Syria to fight with the Islamic State, in a state-sanctioned effort which started in 2012.

  Initially an exercise which appears to have b
een designed to minimise domestic terror attacks around the winter Olympics, by December 2015 almost three thousand Russians had left the country to join wars in the Middle East. Alexander Bortnikov, director of the FSB, confirmed this during a meeting of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee and official data appears to show more than ninety percent left Russia after the summer of 2013. One senior analyst for International Crisis Group, an independent body aimed at resolving conflicts, Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, told Reuters reporters that “Russian is the third language in the Islamic State after Arabic and English. Russia is one of its important suppliers of foreign fighters.”

  The news agency had been investigating the situation and found several people willing to come forward173. One had been a wanted man in Russia, a member of an outlawed Islamist group, hiding in the forests of the North Caucasus, dodging patrols by paramilitary police and “plotting a holy war against Moscow.” In December 2012 the FSB found him and said if he agreed to leave Russia, the authorities would not arrest him and would facilitate his departure. “A few months later, he was given a new passport in a new name, and a one-way plane ticket to Istanbul” Reuters wrote, adding: “Shortly after arriving in Turkey, he crossed into Syria and joined an Islamist group that would later pledge allegiance to radical Sunni group Islamic State.”