Max Blumenthal has published an analysis, on the Consortium News website, of leaked British Foreign Office documents which show Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action operating alongside British intelligence contractors to effect “a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia.”
The article quotes former Labour Party MP, Chris Williamson, who said, “These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using.”
The hacked documents were published under the Anonymous banner by the same group who, in 2018, released documents from another British Foreign Office-funded program called the Integrity Initiative, which ran a number of “cells” of journalists and diplomats around the world, working to “counter Russian disinformation".
Blumenthal writes, “The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC — two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world — attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its ‘ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,’ and to ‘counter the Russian government’s narrative.’ Among the FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to ‘weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.’”
