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A Russian hacking operation claimed to have exposed a conspiracy within the British pro-Brexit establishment, but the paranoia-fueled septuagenarians targeted by the hackers are more Dad’s Army than the “Deep State. “
The leaked emails reveal how a former MI6 chief and an eccentric historian planned a crusade of political influence that reached MPs, government ministers and Number 10. Together, Richard Dearlove and Gwythian Prins mobilized a network of right-wing elites, adding a marquis, a primary generalist tycoon leader, and publishing house.
Driven by paranoia about the Soros-funded “Operation ResiMac,” the “Green Spot,” and the Chinese Communist Party, these status quo septuagenarians were in a position to protect the country every single weapon in their arsenal, from op-eds to “blacks. “operations. “
His elaborate plans included hiring former MI6 agents to spy on the “remnants”, managing a “mole” in the civil service, offering secret data to Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the risks to the society of the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, and attempting to convince the government to put the editors of a leading clinical journal on state surveillance.
In April 2022, a cache of more than 22,000 emails from a network of encrypted Protonmail accounts belonging to pro-Brexit members of the British status quo was published online, at a URL containing the word “sneaky straw. “The Star Blizzard organization (also known as Coldriver, Seaborgio, and Callisto) was behind the leak.
The site recorded days after the British prime minister appeared on television with President Volodymyr Zelensky, a move that infuriated the Kremlin. The site presented the emails as evidence that the “cunning straw head” (apparently a nickname for Johnson, in reference to his unkempt hair) was a “puppet” of the “coup plotters. “
But the site didn’t get much attention. The first media policy appeared a few weeks later on the pro-Kremlin American news site The Grayzone. The U. K. government warned that the leaks were part of Russia’s “sustained attempts at political interference” and that the Star Blizzard hacking organization operates through Russian intelligence agents.
The origin of the leak raises complex moral questions for journalists. The leaked documents may have been carefully selected or manipulated to mislead. Even if the resources are genuine, there are considerations that strategic “hack-and-dump” operations may also simply give a foreign company undue influence over public discourse.
Dearlove told Sky News in December that the FSB had hacked into his encrypted emails in the early part of 2020, when he was “very active” in a Brexit group. “I exercise my democratic rights as a citizen to be very politically active,” he said. saying.
The former head of MI6 told the show that the FSB first entrusted his emails to a journalist from The Grayzone, describing him as “a Russian puppet”. The curtains had passed into Russian hands “so you couldn’t be sure that the emails were exactly as they existed when I read them and won them,” he said.
Computer Weekly and Byline Times conducted an in-depth investigation of the leaked emails, either to check for signs of tampering or to corroborate their contents. Close examination shows that the hackers’ claims of a “deep state” coup d’état are obviously exaggerated. Instead, the emails reveal a crusade of informal, amateur lobbying involving retirees from the intelligence services, the military, and academia.
At the center of the Protonmail network is a duo: Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence (known as MI6), and Gwythian Prins, historian and former NATO adviser. In their attitude, the two men are opposites: Dearlove laconic and imperious; Excitable and attractive prins.
When the two men gave the impression of being together on a panel at the National Conference on Conservatism, Dearlove delivered his speech in a dull, monotone, while Prins began a rendition of The Skeleton Dance (“the knee bone is hooked to the femur, the femur is hooked to the femur”). hooked to the hip bone”) to demonstrate the interconnected nature of the “awake program. “
But they share certain affinities. Both men are in their 70s. Both were educated and later worked at Cambridge University: Prins as a lecturer in history and politics; Dearlove as master of Pembroke College. Both are foreign policy hawks, with ties to bastions of neoconservatism like the Henry Jackson Society.
Both have roots in the West Country and enjoy activities in the countryside. Prins helps keep his beloved horse, Crunchie, on his Devon estate and is an “avid fox hunter”; Dearlove splits his time between Cambridge and Cornwall and is an “experienced salmon fisherman”.
Perhaps most importantly, both seem to feel a deep sense of alienation from the institutions that have shaped them. Dearlove writes that two of his former colleagues at MI6 now consider him a “dangerous radical”; Prins says he was “unable to digest or be digested” through Cambridge. Prins can’t even find refuge in his personal Pall Mall club, the Athenaeum, where he recently staged a protest against the “overly awake” president who needs to kick back to the dress code.
Together, Dearlove and Prins coordinated a series of influence campaigns on multiple fronts, combining public advocacy, personal lobbying, and covert operations. They have tried to influence the government on a wide range of issues, from Brexit to cybersecurity, from climate change to Covid, from satellites to nuclear power.
Its ideology is rooted in nostalgia for the ethical clarity of the Cold War, when China replaced the Soviet Union as the biggest risk to the West. Each issue, internal or external, is approached from a global geopolitical perspective.
In briefings to MPs and ministers, they argued that China’s Huawei should be excluded from the UK’s 5G network, that green energy policies were “economic self-harm” encouraged through China, for the government to invest in a selective Covid vaccine based on the “lab leak. ” ” theory about the pandemic, and that any kind of involvement in EU defense policy would threaten the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance and NATO.
Computer Weekly and Byline Times have mapped the connections between people in the leaked dataset. It reveals three distinct clusters: Veterans for Britain (originally Veterans for Brexit), a pro-Brexit pressure group that included senior retired military officials; Briefings for Britain, a pro-Brexit website set up by two Cambridge academics; and a team of scientists developing an alternative Covid vaccine.
Leaked emails offer a rare view of who is investing in those campaigns. Julian “Toby” Blackwell, the 94-year-old former owner of the bookstore of the same name, appears to be the main donor to Veterans for Britain. The email correspondence claims that Blackwell paid £89,000 to an unmarried member of staff and agreed to donate £20,000 towards Prins’ living expenses. Prins reports that Blackwell has donated a total of more than £1 million to pro-Brexit campaigns.
The other main sponsors are Timothy and Mary Clode, a couple from Jersey. The emails imply that the Clodes have contributed tens of thousands of pounds to this network of crusading groups.
Like Blackwell, Timothy Clode worked in the publishing industry. He was managing director of Octopus Publishing Group for a decade before he resigned in 1986 and moved overseas. The following year, Octopus was sold to Reed International for over £500m. Clode is a major collector of British art, and there is a gallery at Gainsborough’s House in Suffolk named after the couple.
Another key patron is Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, and former Conservative MP and peer. He took a leave of absence from the House of Lords in 2001 in protest at new financial disclosure rules, then retired in 2017.
Salisbury received some monetary support, with emails stating that he had paid £5,000 for PR paintings by David Burnside, the former Unionist MP for Ulster, and his lobbying firm New Century Media. He also held key meetings of the organization at its Swan Walk assets in Chelsea. and recruited foreign allies, such as the U. S. ambassador and former Australian ministers.
Timothy and Mary Clode declined to comment through a member of their family circle. Toby Blackwell, Lord Salisbury and Richard Dearlove did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Prins told Computer Weekly that “nothing can be trusted about the effects of a proven FSB hack” and did not comment on the express claims made in that article. Dearlove had stated in the past that his Protonmail account had been hacked in an article for The Spectator.
Dearlove had previously told Reuters that the emails reflected a “legitimate lobbying exercise” that had been misrepresented by the hackers. That’s fair enough, as far as it goes: Dearlove and Prins have entrusted much of their power to expert writers. notes and publish opinion pieces in newspapers, typical activities of any crossover group. But they were also willing to resort to political “black magic” to achieve their goals.
To accompany their public call for Brexit, Dearlove and Prins planned a sting operation (codenamed Project C, after the nickname given to MI6 leaders) to hire former spies to gather intelligence on pro-European activists and public officials, along with Blackwell and Clode. Provide monetary support.
In a September 2018 email, Prins tells donors that Dearlove has met with “former SIS staff” and is waiting for a “product sample” to see if they can “offer secret value. “He says Dearlove thinks “there’s gold there if we can get the high-profile ‘Best for Britain’ plans,” referring to the pro-EU crusade group.
Prins claims that Dearlove also has an alternative plan to “use certain former CIA colleagues to set up a phony ‘Democratic Party’ operation to use survivors of (and New York) to penetrate them in this way,” noting that they are “highly trained. “in this kind of espionage. “
After further discussions, the group decided to target civil servants instead of campaigners, focusing in particular on Oliver Robbins, the chief Brexit negotiator under Theresa May, who was suspected of pro-EU tendencies. There is no evidence in the leaked emails that the group went through with these plans.
Prins and Dearlove hoped to expose a Remain conspiracy inside the civil service using their “mole”, a fellow Brexit-supporter named Evelyn Farr. Farr is a historian and has published two books on the correspondence of Marie-Antoinette. She worked as a contractor in the civil service from 2016 to 2022, helping to project manage EU Exit legislation. Under her pseudonyms Caroline Bell and Ian Moone (anagram of “I am no one”), she wrote briefings giving an insider’s perspective on Brexit preparations. Some were published online, while others were delivered in secret to MPs and ministers.
But he didn’t just comment on Brexit. In February 2022, after a meeting hosted by Prins, Farr drafted a presentation on the Online Safety Bill for Home Secretary Priti Patel, warning that it created a potential “back door” for hostile governments to gain access. personal communications in the UK, and raise considerations that “trans activists” and “BLM activists” can simply use the law “to ‘discharge’ others with whom they have dealings”. disagree. “
After the attack, Farr wrote a blog post confirming that she had the pseudonym Caroline Bell. She said the civil service had opened an investigation into a “potential security breach”, which she said was “a smokescreen to question me about ministers”. briefings. ” Reached via Computer Weekly, Farr said she had no additional comment beyond what she wrote in the blog post.
As reported previously by Computer Weekly and Byline Times, Dearlove and Prins planned a covert attack on the prestigious science journal, Nature. After the journal rejected a paper by the scientists Birger Sørensen and Angus Dalgleish that claimed Covid-19 originated in a lab leak, Dearlove and Prins began making baseless accusations that the editorial staff were “Chinese agents of influence”.
The emails reveal that Prins asked Michael Gove, then cabinet secretary, to place the Nature editorial under government supervision. Dearlove contacted a former Foreign Ministry official with a similar request, urging “the powers that be” to keep them “under mandate,” as he hopes they “will be in contact with the Chinese for instructions. “
There is no credible evidence of the accusations made through Dearlove and Prins. Dearlove himself got a more credible explanation for why the article had been rejected when an editor told him it was “written as a stream of consciousness rather than an academic/scientific article. ” “.
As head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Dearlove played a key role in providing intelligence on alleged weapons of mass destruction to Prime Minister Tony Blair. After all, when the Chilcot report was published in July 2016, he singled out Dearlove, stating that his “personal intervention and urgency gave more weight to a report that had not been well evaluated. “
The criticism clearly stung. Dearlove had spent a decade out of the spotlight as master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. But the Chilcot report and the Brexit vote seemed to mark a turning point. In the following years, Dearlove began making political interventions that would previously have been unthinkable for a former intelligence chief.
On the eve of the 2017 general election, he called Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn a “danger to the nation” if he passed MI6 security checks. In 2018, he sent a letter to Conservative association chairs, accusing Theresa May of resigning British National Security with her Brexit deal and urging them to pressure their MPs to vote against it.
More recently, Dearlove spoke at the contentious National Conservatism Conference and has been a regular guest on right-wing channel GB News, appearing several times since the channel’s inception.
Despite this, Dearlove retains the usual retirement perks of a former intelligence chief. He left his post at Cambridge to become chair of the board of trustees of the University of London. He sits on the board of companies in oil exploration, insurance and cyber security. As a director at Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, Dearlove has earned over $2.6m in fees and stock awards since 2012. He even co-hosts a popular current affairs podcast.
While he rarely holds back when criticising others, Dearlove is more sanguine when assessing his own record. Two decades on from the invasion of Iraq, he was interviewed on a BBC podcast and asked whether the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was fundamentally wrong. His response: “No, I don’t think it was. This is a really complex issue, and I don’t think people understand how complex it is.”
Dearlove’s partner and “co-conspirator” has also undergone a dramatic political evolution in his career. Gwythian Prins, then known as ‘Gwyn’, began his career in the 1970s as a historian at Cambridge University, where he researched the early colonial era. Several years of fieldwork in Africa have resulted in a highly sought-after academic e-book and compelling accounts of guerrilla encounters.
Prins has become a well-known advocate for nuclear disarmament and edited a 1984 e-book of essays called Defended to the Death, which claimed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “was becoming a suicide pact. “
Despite these harsh criticisms, Prins was subsequently recruited to join NATO as an adviser through his “old friend” Christopher Donnelly, NATO’s special adviser for Central and Eastern European affairs. He has also worked in the science and generation arm of the Ministry of Defence, Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.
In the early 2000s, Prins was a well-established geopolitical hawk. A staunch supporter of the invasion of Iraq, he argued that getting rid of a tyrant was sufficient justification, regardless of whether or not weapons of mass destruction existed.
His educational education and prodigious ability to write made him useful to politicians and army leaders seeking to influence defense policy. Prins gave seminars and co-authored papers with the likes of Lord Salisbury and Vice-Admiral Jeremy Blackham.
His collaboration with Dearlove began in the same vein. The two men crossed paths after the Brexit vote, galvanised by the sense of betrayal of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement. They were a smart team, with Dearlove offering credibility and contacts, and Prins. doing the most of the legwork.
But for them, the referendum was a Pyrrhic victory. They were experts in a movement that “is fed up with experts”; wonderful strategists from a party more interested in culture wars than real wars; a couple of neocons among the NatCons.
The hackers who leaked the sneaky “straw head” claimed to have exposed the machinations of the British deep state. But a careful investigation of the emails shows something quite different: a network of older right-wing elites, marginalized by the realignment of the Conservative Party, who have struggled to translate their access to policymakers into influence.
The government has warned that Russian hacking operations may pose a risk to our democracy. In this case, leaking curtains are more likely to be obstructive than destabilizing. But it is a pressing reminder that our lobby regulation formula is not compatible with objective.
Dearlove and Prins ran a years-long political influence campaign funded by wealthy private donors. They met with senior government ministers and sent regular briefings to Number 10. Without the “sneaky strawhead” leak, the scale of this activity would never have come to light. The public has a right to know who has the ear of government – and they should not have to rely on the operations of a foreign intelligence agency to find out.
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