Integrity Initiative/Leak

 Integrity Initiative/Leak(Leak,  Mid level deep event)

Date	5 November 2018 - 29 March 2019
Location	CyberGuerilla
Perpetrators	'Anonymous'
Interest of	Volker Birk
Subpage	•Integrity Initiative/Leak/1 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/2 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/3 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/4 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/5 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/6 •Integrity Initiative/Leak/7
Description	A series of 7 leaks, starting on 5 November 2018, of unknown origin and veracity. After some time, the II disputed the authenticity of some of the documents, but was not clear about which.

The Integrity Initiative Leaks began on 5th November 2018 when a set of documents from the group were posted online by 'Anonymous' at Cyberguerilla. Through March 2019, 7 groups of documents were released. The source of the leak remains unknown, although a March 2019 report by Sky News stated that unnamed "Whitehall sources said it is highly likely that Russia's military intelligence service carried out the hack-and-leak of files".

5 November 2018

Leak 1:

Response

On 26 November 2018, the Integrity Initiative admitted that some documents had been hacked, but declined to state whether any particular documents were authentic, leaving the way clear for possible future claims that some were forged.

29 November 2018

Leak 2:

Early in November we published here a large part of the documents relating to the Integrity Initiative project. https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all/ The Integrity Initiative] have confirmed their validity, yet they don’t consider the information relevant. https://www.integrityinitiative.net/articles/statement-russian-media-publication-hacked-ii-documents Meanwhile neither the organization not its sponsors have met out demands and given assurances that the network of clusters will only be used to counter Russia’s disinformation policy. We have also received no reaction from the EU leaders and international organizations although people in many countries showed great concern about the matter.

By 22 February 2019, the post was unavailable.

13 December 2018

Leak 3:

Email addresses

The CND Gen list 2 contains "22 names with email addresses. Most of these individuals have no other connection with the Institute for Statecraft or the Integrity Initiative. The presence on this list of Pablo Miller and Howard Body suggests that this is a list for email updates or consultations on the Salisbury poisonings story."

Current military / MoD

• Colonel Angus Taverner – director of MoD’s news media operations policy during the Iraq war, subsequently enrolled for a master’s degree in public relations.
• Lt Col Annabelle Janes – CO Land Intelligence Fusion Centre
• Lt Col Debi Lomax – Chief of General Staff’s Commander’s Initiative Group
• Captain Joe Walker-Cousins, reservist in Specialist Group Military Intelligence and employed by KBR in Saudi Arabia (see above)
• Howard Body – Principal Analyst and Assistant Head Science Support, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down. "Analyst" presumably refers to strategic rather than laboratory analysis, as he has no science background and gave a presentation on "stabilisation operations" in 2005.
• Ian Cohen – has both army and HSBC corporate emails – name matches HSBC’s Global Asset Management managing director

Journalists

• Helen Boaden – former Director of BBC news
• Isabel Oakeshott – now writing a book about the state of the army

Chatham House

• Duncan Allan – former FCO Eastern Research Group.
• Mathieu Boulegue – Research Fellow, expertise on Russia

Risk/security/intelligence consultants

• Paul Harkness – formerly Brigadier at Army Headquarters, now sole director of Hawk Consultancy
• Pablo Miller – formerly Sergei Skripal's MI6 handler, now Orbis Business Intelligence according to his deleted Linkedin profile.
• Neil Barnett – former journalist, now runs a risk consultancy named Istok Associates
• Paddy Nicoll – served in Black Watch till 1996, and was director of Rubicon International till 2005.

Institute for Statecraft trustees

• Harry Hart – property investor
• Philip Matthews – former director of Astutus Intelligence, current director of PM Homeland Security

Others

• Adam Rutland – FCO Communications and Engagement Department.
• Zachary Harkenrider – US Embassy, Counselor for Political Affairs
• Craig Kennedy – Hudson Institute, Senior Fellow and past president of the German Marshall Fund
• Professor James Gow – King's College London Department of War Studies

Unidentified affiliations

• William Bortrick – registered domain britishexperience.com in 2004, possible match to editor of Burke’s peerage
• Alexander Patterson – sole director of Talisman ADC

4 January 2019

Leak 4:

We have warned the UK government that it must conduct an honest and transparent investigation into the activity of the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft. Yet, today we can only see some awkward excuses and attempts of the politicians to quieten it all down. The outrageously illicit use of the British taxpayers’ money to organize a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and entire Labour party must not remain unpunished! To prevent the conservative ministers from lying to the people from the benches of the UK Parliament we have decided to publish another part of the documents that will help make the investigation more honest and open.

Response

The Integrity Initiative claimed on Twitter that some of the documents leaked in batch #4 were not theirs and had been misrepresented as part of the organisation.

24 January 2019

Leak 5:

As of this publication, access to the Integrity Initiative website has been denied and only confirmed followers can view its twitter account. We’ve been long waiting for that very move from our opponents since, as is known, nothing attracts more attention than an attempt to conceal facts. Yet, well-coordinated efforts of the Anonymous from around the world have enabled you to learn everything about the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft even if their farcical websites are unavailable. Today we will continue publishing the documents and facts which confirm that the UK taxpayers fund a full-scale informational war that is going on across entire Europe.

8 February 2019

Leak 6:

While the UK Government keeps on defying our demands for an honest and unbiased investigation into the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative’s meddling in domestic affairs of sovereign European states, Chris Donnelly’s team awkwardly try to justify their illegal activity paid for by the British taxpayers. The Integrity Initiative’s German cluster held a meeting in Berlin on the 31st of January 2019. A well-known British intelligence officer Harold Elletson and the cluster’s chief Dr Hannes Adomeit co-chaired the event. They again made an effort to divert people’s attention from the organisation’s wrongful activity in the European Union. However their pathetic attempt has been shattered to pieces by irrefutable evidence that we have been and will continue to share with you.

29 March 2019

Leak 7:

Greetings! We are Anonymous.

Having found that Sir Alan Duncan and Frau Deborah Haynes intend to keep on misleading the international community, lie to members of the UK Parliament and feed falsehood to the Media, we have again decided to break silence to protect the informational environment in civilised countries.

Here is another project of the FCO’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme that we have previously mentioned. They call it EXPOSE Network and the UK taxpayers will have to pay almost 10 million pounds for it.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Integrity Initiative/Leak/1	The first of many leaks which exposed covertly organised groups of Russophobic academics, journalists, government officers and deep state operatives who strategised about how to alert to people to a purported Russian "threat".
Integrity Initiative/Leak/2	The second Integrity Initiative Leak, 24 days after Integrity Initiative Leak 1.
Integrity Initiative/Leak/3	The 3rd tranche of documents released as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak, on 13 December 2018.
Integrity Initiative/Leak/4	The fourth Integrity Initiative Leak, from early 2019.
Integrity Initiative/Leak/5	Released on the 24 January 2019, the fifth Integrity Initiative Leak.
Integrity Initiative/Leak/6	The 6th Integrity Initiative Leak, posted on 8 February 2019.
Integrity Initiative/Leak/7	The final tranche of Integrity Initiative documents, released in March 2020, which gave an impression of the scale of the multi-million pound operation

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Date
Institute for Statecraft/Secrecy	“Was there a ‘D Notice’ issued by the British government forbidding mainstream media outlets from reporting on the embarrassing leak of this clandestine propaganda operation?”
Integrity Initiative/Leak/1	“The Institute for Statecraft [Integrity Initiative’s parent organisation], an independent charity, was hacked several weeks ago and numerous documents were published and amplified by Kremlin news channels. The Russian state media campaign’s objective is clear. This is yet another example of Russian disinformation intended to confuse audiences and discredit an organisation which is working independently to tackle the threat of disinformation.”	November 12 JL

 

A document sourced from Integrity Initiative/Leak

Title	Type	Subject(s)	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Notes from colleagues in the Baltic States who are monitoring Russia carefully	Wikispooks Page	Skripal Affair Russia/Propaganda	18 March 2018	Integrity Initiative	A document from the Integrity Initiative Leak which asserts that "A criminal investigation [into the Skripal affair] alone will not throw these essential clues up, and is unlikely to yield sufficient judicial evidence We need to be looking at, and explaining, this attack from a political and military-intelligence perspective. That means educating our audience to understand how Russia sees this world as being at war."

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.