AFTERMATH: SEPTEMBER 2017 - MAY 2018
Twenty-One:
By the end of November 2017 I had reached burn out, so I rested. Just stopped and rested. All the while, though, I knew the world was still staring into the wrong end of a loaded weapon and that makes for an uneasy sleep pattern.
Having started 2017 still recovering from life after whistleblowing, I fell into a strange world of psychometric voter targeting, data laundering, espionage-led infiltration of the far-right, and hybrid warfare. There's little to be done to prepare a person for it, let alone one who is chasing that particular white rabbit on a limited amount of crowdfunding and with little more than social media to get people reading. I suppose I've always taken things way too seriously.
The pressure of racing time itself, and of having gone up against the pro-active Russian state and its actors while trying to wake anyone in our own Parliament or the over-stretched - and sometimes negligent - security services and enforcement agencies, was immense. I was utterly exposed. Even became the victim of increasing levels of trolling – including from the Russians themselves – and suddenly became overwhelmed by the sense it was all pointless. As the birth of my twin daughters approached I became listless, irritable. Saw myself as having failed the people who had read and shared the articles and the book. Those who were, for the want of a better word, woke. I've been there before, several years ago as my time at Scotland Yard came to its end, but this time I recognised the symptoms for what they were: a warning to back away and regroup. To take my lumps on the chin and try again, because I'd gotten to the point where there was not only too much output but too much input as well. When faced with a world as insane as this one had become, it was inevitable.
It turned out, however, the ears listening weren't so deaf after all. On the 21st of December 2017, the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament, led by the MP Dominic Grieve, released its annual report. Fireworks. (Though you would be hard pushed to see the display by the way it was reported in the British media.)
The Financial Times carried a story on page 3, under the headline ‘Spymasters speak out over Russian threat,' while The Times ran on page 2 with: ‘GCHQ: British cyber weapons could paralyse hostile states.') While I admire the optimism of GCHQ in their own ability, not only is it not the answer, but they are the least trustworthy intelligence service in the West272. The Times piece ended up reading as Brexit marketing puff, not least in the quote from Andrew Parker, Director General of MI5. He told reporters273: “My life has got more difficult since the referendum because of the need to invest reassurance time with our European partners. Half of Europe is scared of terrorism and the other half is scared of Russia, and both halves want us to help them.” Having spent much of the last year investigating the Russian threat, I could already say without doubt the EU is much more advanced in their response to Kremlin activity, across the board. From fighting fake news and disinformation to protecting the integrity of elections, to preparing for the increasingly probable worst with a joint defence initiative. The Times' comment from Parker, their headline — all of the reporting, in fact — led me back an assessment I made earlier in this book, discussing the success of Russia against the West: “The tactics for waging this war include using organised crime as an instrument, and this is the face Western intelligence agencies – in particular the UK, with its genetic code of private education and subsequent non-exposure to criminality – simply failed to recognise. The hybrid conflict we find ourselves in is, in part, a war of the old ways and this new hybrid. The dead languages versus the modern. If you really want to know how all of this came down so hard and fast, I believe the answer is traditional privilege met contemporary criminality and couldn't recognise it for what it was: sharper than Latin.”
The Financial Times did only marginally better274, writing: “SIS informed us that ‘All three Russian intelligence services are tasked with carrying out information operations [which] goes beyond promulgating the Russian perspective and includes the creating and propagation of forgeries and falsehoods’. One obvious area is Ukraine, where ‘Russia conducts information warfare on a massive scale. An early example of this was a hugely intensive, multichannel propaganda effort to persuade the world that Russia bore no responsibility for the shooting down of MH-17 (an outright falsehood: we know beyond any reasonable doubt that the Russian military supplied and subsequently recovered the missile launcher)'.” The truth had finally been written on the wall, for all to see, and the British media took the opportunity to do something for the greater good and painted the damn thing grey instead. When I sat down to write this book early last summer, the problem of the media was firmly on my mind: “I took the time to sit and review everything I’d uncovered so far and decided there was nothing so easy as a simple financial trail which would expose this global mess. Those days of investigative journalism were clearly dead, along with stories compacted to fit headlines and column inches. We were dealing with such a complex problem I still think the whole truth may never be known.” Little has changed since.
With my twin daughters brought into the world as 2017 ended, I found my energy had returned and the exhaustion eased. I still may not have had all of the answers, and definitely not the resources, but I stood by what I said at the very start of chapter one: “I didn’t know any of this in 2016. Like everyone else, I thought the world had simply fallen victim to a deceitful bus and some idiotic, gun-toting rednecks. I was wrong, I’m not ashamed to admit. We all were. But from that mistake arose what I see as a collective duty, to at least try and put things right and make sure it never happens again.” The annual report needed proper analysis, because we still deserve better than we have had, so I wrote it up.
The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) is a statutory parliamentary body, formed under legislation first in the 1990s and last reformed in 2013. Their remit is broad and according to their background introduction, they oversee: “the intelligence and security activities of the UK, including the policies, expenditure, administration and operations of the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The Committee also scrutinises the work of other parts of the UK intelligence community, including the Joint Intelligence Organisation and the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office; Defence Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence; and the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office.” Routinely given access to highly classified material, the nine members of the Committee are taken from both Houses of Parliament. They elect their own chair from the membership and set their own agenda, collating evidence from the Government and the security services. Every year they report back.
The Annual Report for 2016-2017275 is comprehensive, and broken down into headings. But it also shows something significant. Open source research provides the same information, and more, also doing something the committee does not. Namely, informing the public in real time.
“The threat from international terrorism in the UK is currently SEVERE – reflecting that an attack is highly likely. In 2017, between 23 and 26 May, the UK threat level was briefly raised to CRITICAL (an attack is expected imminently) for the first time since 2007, following the improvised explosive device (IED) attack on Manchester Arena,” the report states. “The scale of the current threat facing the UK and its interests from Islamist terror groups is unprecedented,” it adds. According to the Committee, the ISIL threat in Syria and Iraq is the primary driver and they are focused on what the intelligence services call ‘external operations’ focused on the incitement of violence through propaganda campaigns. What the report fails to grasp in terms of international terrorism is the Kremlin, resulting in flawed assessment and understanding of the threat.
It was established in 2017 that Russia had been supplying weapons across the threat region, via Iran. The intelligence community and media including CNN276 found the weapons had been shipped directly to the Taliban in Afgh
anistan for use against ISIS, but were, in fact, also being used against allies. Meanwhile, Cyprus based FBME, which was pushed out of the US due to it being a nefarious money laundering operation for the Russian underworld, was exposed by Buzzfeed as funnelling Russian mafia money and also sending $33 million dollars to Syria from the Kremlin277. Crucially, millions were found to have been channelled through a company later found to be supporting ISIS fuel trades. The report fails to recognise the link between Russia and Turkey, and Turkey and Syria as a migration base, feeding refugees and returning foreign fighters into Europe. It also omits the crucial fact Russia was actively engaged in sending its own extremists out of the Federation and into the region to fight alongside ISIS.
The report also fails to capture the link between Russia and terror attacks across Europe, which have been used to drive Russia's far-right linked disinformation operations. NATO and the EU including Sweden, which I visited last year, are alive to a situation the UK is apparently not: Russia's strategic deployments in the region extending from Turkey are designed to function in two ways. Firstly, they create a functional funnel by which extreme levels of migration impact upon Europe and enhance the domestic narratives of extremism on both the ISIL and Far-right sides — a known Russian operation and objective. Secondly, they also enhance Russia's strategic positioning in gas and oil fields, which allows further pressure to be added to Europe and the UK. Qatar has been a key example of this, with Russian regional interference supported by SCL278 resulting in a redirection of fuels and the signing of a defence and supply deal in a country which hosted a significant US regional base.
It's apparent from reading the report in detail the British security services are applying patching plaster to the resultant problem, rather than addressing the Kremlin-led operation sapping their resilience. In short, they cannot deal with the primary threat. Strategically, this is a huge success for Russia and for the rest of us depressing — no less so because the report highlights the need for enhanced European co-operation at a time the Government is leading the UK out of the union based upon a referendum which was specifically targeted by Russia (from social media manipulation to fake news, to direct infiltration of Leave groups, to denial of service attacks on the voter registration website). Sadly, the report identifies a known puzzle piece in the different section on cyber threats but fails to make the link. This is an inter-agency intelligence failure.
Under the hostile state summary, the report says: “Hostile foreign intelligence services continue to conduct espionage against a broad range of UK interests, seeking to obtain government and military secrets, intellectual property and economic information, and to conduct operations designed to influence UK policy and public opinion. They engage in a wide range of activity, encompassing the recruitment of human agents with the ability to acquire sensitive information (both protectively marked and unclassified) and, increasingly, the use of cyber in order to target the British Government, the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and UK businesses.” It goes on to say: “Cyber threats fall broadly into two categories – information/data theft and disruptive attacks. They can be conducted by a range of actors, from hostile states to criminals. The sophistication, complexity and potential impact of a cyber attack will vary depending on the level of access the actor has to resources and technology. A state actor may seek to integrate encryption and anonymisation into malware to penetrate a strategic target undetected. More commonly, far less sophisticated malware can be developed to target networks and systems to steal data. Systems are also vulnerable to insider threat, whereby the operator either knowingly or unknowingly facilitates access.”
While the report identifies the traditional risks arising from hostile state activity, thankfully it does also mention the risks to Critical Infrastructure – such as power grid attacks like those Russia have been testing for years in Ukraine, and those like Wannacry which can shut down logistics and health services, again launched by Russia under a North Korean code and network mask despite claims to the contrary. The agencies, thankfully, have also woken up to the denial of service capability provided by insecure domestic items (what is referred to as the Internet Of Things).
The report specifically notes that ISIL's capability does not extend beyond online radicalisation, and this is the known puzzle piece which represents the biggest failure within the document. They correctly identify the Russian cyber attack on France's TVMonde5, saying the more substantial attack in April 2015 had been ‘false-flagged’ as Islamist extremist activity.
“It is possible that Russia is ostentatiously flexing its muscles towards the West under a deliberately thin blanket of deniability, or these may simply be providing a useful public cover for the Russian agencies’ practice runs,” it states. However, the report and the agencies then abjectly fail to set this in the context that Russia is not only supporting ISIL and creating the perfect storm which enhances its existence, but is also masquerading as it online. This includes some of the disinformation and online radicalisation activity driving the very terror attacks sapping their resilience. A lack of imagination has trapped the British establishment in a vicious cycle and this gets worse as the report goes on.
Russia is identified as the top threat facing the UK. It is acknowledged that Russia has targeted and continues to target democracies across the West with hacking and disinformation, cyber weapons, and data theft. It even specifically identifies that elections can be targeted down to individual constituencies. However, the report then all but dismisses the Russian threat in favour of building ties and sharing intelligence on the grounds of...Syria. The Committee writes: “Whilst Russia clearly represents a major threat, there are also areas of mutual intelligence and security interest – most notably around counter-terrorism and Syria.” This is infuriatingly cock-eyed and confirms an absolute failure in understanding of the issues faced, which in turn prevents the security services in the UK from providing any functional response to a live hybrid war.
The annual report leaves something undeniable in public view: the UK is under-equipped, outclassed, outdated, and overwhelmed at a time when the world's temple is pressed against the barrel of a gun. While it confirms every ounce of energy spent in 2017 was worth investing in the right punches, it presents a dark picture of a failed and ineffective system of defence, based on an absence of knowledge and a mudstuck approach to a global shift which left the former empire behind. After a year screaming into the wind, the end of 2017 saw the true state of Russia's threat to the United Kingdom acknowledged for the first time by the security services. But, because of unresolved failures in the media which helped the Kremlin achieve its strategic objectives in the first place, nobody batted an eyelid. I think we can still come back from this, though. We aren't blindly trying to work out what the hell happened and who did it. We know. We aren't in a position where we need to wait for someone official to say it either, they already have. And now, thanks to the annual report, we aren't scrabbling around to understand where the gaps in our defences exist. We can see them clearly. It means we are equipped to do something about our situation, to focus. To stop trying to strike everything and hit only what matters. It's easier to fight that way, even when you get tired. And that's hope, right there.
Indictment after indictment has come since this book was first published279, including those of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. The icing on the cake from the US, for me at least, was the charging of 13 Russians involved in the Olgino troll farms, including Putin's Chef. Cambridge Analytica has also now declared insolvency in both the UK and US280, and the Electoral Commission has not only fined Leave.EU, but referred a case to the police for investigation281 too. The ICO investigations rumble on, and are wide ranging, and the Fake News Inquiry in the UK Parliament has since teamed up with the Russia Probe in the US Senate282. Even Julian Assange has been cut off from the internet by Ecuador for interfering in the affairs of foreign nations283. Everything else which has happened is really a whole other book, ju
st as long and dense as this one, except for the doctrine and philosophy of hybrid warfare I've already written — which was published in April 2018284.
Ironically, two weeks after The Art Of Hybrid War came out, MI5's Andrew Parker stood in Berlin and named Russia as the chief protagonist deploying a “well-practised doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the label ‘hybrid threats’.”285 It was almost exactly a year from the date I sent the statement which formed the basis of this book to the authorities, and nearly six months after my further statement was sent into the Fake News Inquiry286.
Alternative War: Unabridged Page 35
