Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, a UK-funded covert influence group proposed opening a new office in the US to train a “younger generation of Russia watchers” and “strengthen” America’s role in countering Moscow, leaks show.
From RT.com Published time: 9 Jan, 2019 20:49 Edited time: 10 Jan, 2019 09:37
Raising a new Iron Curtain? NATO exercises in Latvia © REUTERS/INTS KALNINS
The latest tranche of documents, anonymously uploaded online last week, include an outline for “developing a US arm of [the] Integrity Initiative Program” and a schedule for a visit to Washington of its director, which details meetings with former senior Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, and top diplomats and officials.
‘West badly needs US leadership’
Despite the elected White House administration tentatively attempting a rapprochement with the Kremlin at the time, the group, effectively a foreign agent on US soil, suggests in the first document, dated to August 2017, that Washington needs to go in a radically different, if familiar, direction, “before it is too late.”
“The West is badly in need of a reassertion of US leadership. The EU has been unable to generate any strategic thinking or to exercise convincing leadership. Russia (& China) are successfully driving wedges between EU Member States and between Allies within NATO,” reads the plaintive precis.
Back to 1979: NATO military drills in Latvia in summer of 2018. © REUTERS/INTS KALNINS
The solution: revive the Cold War-era resistance to Moscow through a Washington-dominated NATO, which is also listed elsewhere as a financial sponsor of the Integrity Initiative, alongside the UK’s Foreign Office. Read more Integrity Initiative is the biggest story of 2018 – but not because of anything it did
“The US needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal with it,” while “the UK needs reminding how to play its key role of encouraging/enabling US leadership in Europe/NATO.”
To serve these aims, the Integrity Initiative plans to “bring together academics, think tankers, journalists, civil servants, politicians, business people,” who understand “the problem” of Russia, but “have not been working coherently.”
This is a facsimile of the model the Integrity Initiative rolled out in the UK after its founding in 2015, where it used its “cluster” of influential public voices to discreetly sway, manipulate or to outright dictate Russian coverage on such issues as cyber warfare, Syria, and the Skripals. Or, as the text euphemistically puts it, their function is “to ensure the popular support for governments that democracies require.”
With many of the original Cold Warriors now of pensionable age, a vital responsibility of the recruits would be “attracting a new generation of younger analysts to learn from the older generation.”
Screenshot from the leaked US office proposal
There also appears to be implicit criticism of how the actual chosen US president is handling foreign policy, with the document urging the US to “improve its own governance at a time of transition.”
But, luckily for America, it doesn’t have to fear foreign meddling, as “the cluster will work completely impartially and not become involved in US party politics.”
Goulash with Gorka
The second document contains the dates and locations of a trip by Chris Donnelly, a UK military intelligence veteran and director of the Integrity Initiative, to the American capital between September 18 and 22 of an unstated year. In the same upload folder, there are several support documents related to some of the events he was set to attend…READ MORE
Also from RT on this subject:
Well, well…doesn’t this just have “Tavistock” written all over it?
Just the kind of sneaky covert influencing and socio-political engineering that is their hallmark I say! Integrity Initiative, hmm..
