THE MILITARY-ACADEMIC-MEDIA-NEXUS
A School for Spooks: The London University Department Churning Out NATO
Spies
Alan Macleod uncovers the deep links between the British security state and
the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, responsible for
training a large number of British, American, and European agents and
defense analysts.
by Alan Macleod
April 16th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
LONDON Last week, MintPress exposed how the supposedly independent
investigative collective Bellingcat is, in fact, funded by a CIA cutout
organization and filled with former spies and state intelligence operatives.
However, one part of the story that has remained untold until now is
Bellingcats close ties to the Department of War Studies at Kings College
London, an institution with deep links to the British security state and one
that trains a large number of British, American and European agents and
defense analysts.
The Spook to Bellingcat Pipeline: How Bellingcat Launders National Security
State Talking Points into the Press
For a self-proclaimed citizen journalism outfit, an alarming number of
Bellingcats staff come from the military and intelligence agencies.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Apr 9
A school for spooks
A prestigious university located in the heart of London, Kings College has,
in its own words, a number of contracts and agreements with various
departments within government, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence. Some of those contracts
are up to 10 years long. The university has so far refused to elaborate on
the agreements, telling investigative news outlet Declassified UK that doing
so could undermine U.K. security services.
A 2009 study published by the CIA spoke approvingly of how beneficial it can
be to use universities as a means of intelligence training, noting that,
exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies
at Kings College London, can add several elements that may be harder to
provide within the government system. The paper, written by two Kings
College staffers, is essentially a request to the agency to send more of its
recruits there, and boasts about how the departments staff have extensive
and well-rounded intelligence experience and how their programs offer a
containing space in which analysts from every part of the community can
explore with each other the interplay of ideas about their profession.
In 2013, former CIA Director Leon Panetta took time out of his schedule as
then-secretary of defense to visit the Department of War Studies, where he
expressed his profound gratitude to the unit. I deeply appreciate the work
that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders,
many of whom are in this audience, he said, before adding that it was those
young leaders who must ensure that NATO had the creativity, innovation and
the commitment to develop and share capabilities in order to meet future
security threats, citing the need to expand into tech, surveillance and
cyberwarfare.
CIA Kings College
Former CIA head Leon Panetta exits Kings College after giving a speech in
2013. Photo | DVIDS
It was this department that Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins joined in 2018
as visiting research associate, with Bellingcat maintaining a close
relationship with it to this day.
After studying their writers backgrounds, MintPress can confirm that no
fewer than six Bellingcat employees or contributors including Cameron
Colquhoun, Jacob Beeders, Lincoln Pigman, Aliaume Leroy, Christiaan Triebert
and senior investigator Nick Waters all pursued postgraduate studies
within the department, the most popular being the Conflict, Security and
Development degree overseen by Professor Mats Berdal.
For 13 years, Professor Berdal was employed by the Norwegian Defence
University College, Norways version of West Point. Berdal is one of a host
of Kings College War Studies academics who previously taught there,
including one who continues to be an officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces,
serving in multiple NATO conflicts in the Middle East.
While many in the West picture Norway as a peaceful, enlightened nation, the
country is actually a key driving force within NATO; former Prime Minister
Jens Stoltenberg is the organizations current secretary general. Sending
troops and other assistance, it was the U.S. partner in attacks on Kosovo,
Afghanistan and Libya. Norway has among the highest per capita military
spending in Europe and is one of the minority of NATO members to exceed the
defense spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.
Declassified UK: Revealed: Key Assange prosecution witness is part of
academic cluster which has received millions of pounds from UK and US...
One of the US prosecutions key medical witnesses in the Julian Assange
hearing, who claimed that Assanges risk of suicide is manageable if
extradited to the US, works for an academic institute that is funded by the
UK Ministry of Defence and linked to the US Department of Defence, it can be
revealed.
Daily Maverick | Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis | Oct 2, 2020
A network of pro-war think tanks
Before joining Kings College, Professor Berdal was Director of Studies at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the worlds
most influential think tanks. Also situated in central London, the
organization is directly funded by NATO and its member states, as well as by
major weapons manufacturers such as Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing and
Raytheon. In 2016, the IISS was the subject of a major scandal after it was
found to have secretly accepted £25 million around $34 million from the
government of Bahrain.
Founded in 1958, the IISS provided much of the intellectual basis behind the
Cold War scaremongering around Soviet military capacity, thereby pushing
NATO members to spend more on arms. On its advisory board are a former NATO
secretary general, the former chief of defense intelligence for the Israeli
Defense Forces, and, until recently, the CEO of Lockheed Martin. Today, the
think tank is a major driver in the increasing hostility towards China,
Russia and North Korea. A number of other current Department of War Studies
academics have held positions at the IISS as well. Indeed, Kings College
boasts that one of the key benefits of studying there is its established
links with the IISS.
A second pro-war think tank with which Kings College prides itself on
working closely is the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and
Security Studies (RUSI). RUSIs funding comes from many of the same sources
as the IISSs. Its senior vice president is retired American General David
Petraeus and its chairman is Lord Hague, Britains secretary of state from
2010 to 2015.
A host of Kings College academics including Jack Spence, Benedict
Wilkinson, Brian Holden-Reid, Walter Ladwig, Thomas Maguire and Neil Melvin
have also held positions at RUSI. Perhaps the most notable Kings
College-RUSI crossover is Professor Sir David Omand, who was formerly the
think tanks vice president, as well as the head of GCHQ, Britains version
of the NSA.
Source | RUSI
Bellingcat writer Dan Kaszeta is an associate fellow at the organization.
Bellingcat, RUSI and Kings College often cite each other in papers and
reports, providing something of a united front on controversial issues of
statecraft.
One man who links the IISS and RUSI together is Professor Sir Lawrence
Freedman, a key member of the Department of War Studies who went on to
become King Colleges vice principal. A powerful figure in British politics,
Freedman contributed to Prime Minister Tony Blairs 1999 speech in which he
established the Blair Doctrine, a maxim that NATO could and should
militarily intervene anywhere in the world to stop human rights violations.
A rogues gallery
For an institution that prides itself on cultivating independent thought,
there exists a remarkable overlap between the staff of the Department of War
Studies and the innermost halls of power of the British state. Professor
John Gearson, for example, was principal defence policy adviser to the
Defense Select Committee at the House of Commons, a senior adviser to the
Ministry of Defense, and taught terrorism and asymetric warfare to military
officers at the U.K. Defense Academy.
Another professor, Michael Goodman, is a current British Army reservist and
formerly the Official Historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee (a body
that oversees Britains intelligence organizations).
Visiting professors include Paul Rimmer, who was deputy chief of defence
intelligence until last year; Lord Robertson, who was secretary general of
NATO at the time of the Afghanistan invasion; and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the
former minister of defense. The longtime cabinet member was the creator of
the Rifkind Doctrine the controversial British policy on nuclear weapons.
Rifkind rejected the idea that the country should use atomic missiles only
as a last resort after being attacked, insisting that he could also use them
simply to deliver an unmistakable message of Britains willingness to
defend her vital interests.
Vera Michlin-Shapir
Kings College visiting fellow Vera Michlin-Shapir moderates a panel in Tel
Aviv on the future of post-war Syria. Photo | INSS
It is not just British officials who teach Kings College students, however.
Christopher Kolenda, for instance, was commander of an 800-man strong U.S.
task force in Afghanistan, where he pioneered innovative approaches to
counterinsurgency according to his bio at the hawkish think tank the Center
for New American Security (CNAS), where he is a senior fellow. CNAS recently
released a report calling for more innovative use of what it called
coercive economic statecraft, (i.e., sanctions) and continues to saber
rattle against China and Russia.
Between 2009 and 2010, Kolenda was a strategic advisor to COMISAF, the
Commander of International Security Assistance Force. In plain English, he
provided some of the brains behind the occupation of Afghanistan. Before
pursuing a role in academia, he was also a senior advisor to Undersecretary
of Defense Michele Flournoy and three 4-star generals. Flournoy was
President Joe Bidens first choice to run the Pentagon.
The department also contains a number of Israeli academics, including Vera
Michlin-Shapir, a former official in her countrys National Security Council
who worked in the prime ministers office. Meanwhile Ofer Fridman served as
an officer in the IDF between 1999 and 2011, during which time it was
carrying out some of its worst war crimes against Palestine and Lebanon.
After leaving the IDF, Fridman became an arms dealer, becoming the head of
non-lethal weapons at LHB Ltd., which describes itself as the leading
company in Israel for security and defense advanced solutions. In 2016,
Kings College also hosted a lecture by the former head of Shin Bet, the
Israeli secret police force.
The department has links to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well, with one
senior research fellow, Nawaf Obaid, a former special advisor to the Saudi
Ambassador in the U.K. and Ireland and a consultant at the Royal Court in
Riyadh.
Weapons spending good, Russia bad.
While the departments staff are concerning enough, much of Kings College
academic output is even more troubling, and appears to be completely in line
with that of NATO and weapons contractors. One study named A benefit, not a
burden: The security, economic and strategic value of Britains defence
industry, for instance, reads like a press release from Raytheon, extolling
how many people the industry employs. The report claimed that remaining one
of the worlds top arms manufacturers was crucial in build[ing] a secure
and resilient U.K. and to help shape a stable world. Without a vibrant and
thriving domestic defence industrial base, it warned, there is a risk that
the U.K. will jeopardise its freedom to act in an unstable, fast-changing
world, concluding that the government should protect or ideally expand
its defense spending budget.
A report from last August also lobbied the government to invest in making
the United Kingdom a leading nation for space. Investment in space
surveillance capacity is key to seizing the commercial and diplomatic
opportunities offered by space while defending U.K. economic and security
interests, it concludes. Surprisingly, the report insists that it would
take only a modest investment from the government to turn Great Britain
into a leading force in a rapidly expanding market.
Kings College also published a study, titled The future strategic
direction of NATO, advising that the organization urgently needs a
coherent policy on China and that it must re-up its commitment to
countering Russia. It recommends that the majority of member states increase
their military budgets and that they must share the burden of
responsibility on nuclear weapons by allowing the U.S. to store missiles
inside their territories.
Meanwhile, their 2018 report Weaponizing news: RT, Sputnik and targeted
disinformation analyzes Russian state-backed media outlets and accuses them
of carrying out a campaign of information-psychological warfare over its
coverage of contentious events such as the alleged Skripal poisoning and the
wars in Ukraine and Syria. The report claims Russian media is turning news
into a weapon by projecting an image of strength and stability while
highlighting flaws in Western democracies. While praising the work of
Bellingcat and disinfo outlet Prop or Not, it concludes by advising that
the West must use technical means to prevent propaganda.
Thomas Rid King's College
Kings College professor Thomas Rid testifies before a Senate committee on
Russian meddling. Photo | CSPAN
These technical solutions, we now know, have largely entailed NATO
indirectly taking control of social media. In 2018, Facebook announced that
NATOs cutout organization, the Atlantic Council, was becoming its eyes and
ears, giving it significant control over curating its news feed, supposedly
in an attempt to limit disinformation. Yet many of the most lurid stories
around RussiaGate were started by the Council itself, which pumped out
report after report accusing virtually every political movement in Europe
outside the establishment beltway as being the Kremlins Trojan Horses.
Kings College staff have also been crucial in propagating the idea of
Russian interference in American politics, with Professor Thomas Rid
testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the dark
art of Russian meddling, and condemning WikiLeaks and alternative media
journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation. Rid previously described
2016 as the biggest election hack in U.S. history.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired former NATO press officer and
Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Ben Nimmo as head of its intelligence team.
Meanwhile Reddit appointed former Atlantic Council Deputy Director of Middle
Eastern Strategy Jessica Ashooh as its head of policy. And Eliot Higgins, of
course, was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council as well. In recent
years, social media giants like Facebook and Google have radically altered
their algorithms, demoting content from adversarial nations, but also
attacking alternative media that challenge the power of NATO and the
national security state.
Today, the Department of War Studies hosted an online seminar with two
senior NATO officials who discussed what they saw as Russia and Chinas
increasingly aggressive actions, as well as new ways in which NATO can
secure its control over the internet.
Facebook Hires NATO Press Officer as Intelligence Chief
Facebook hired, Ben Nimmo, former NATO press officer, and senior fellow at
the Atlantic Council, to lead global threat intelligence strategy"
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Feb 9
A military-academic-journalistic nexus
What is being described is a network of military, think-tank and media units
all working towards furthering the goals of the national security state.
Bellingcat regularly holds seminars and courses at Kings College, teaching
the next generation of state officials how to use big-data and surveillance
tools.
While Kings College provides an academic veneer for the national security
state, Bellingcat provides a journalistic one. This cluster of think tanks,
academic reports, and newsy investigative articles all cite one another as
credible, independent sources when, in reality, they are all part of the
same network furthering an agenda. It should be noted that this was an
investigation into just one department in one school in one college of the
University of London. The links to the highest levels of power were so
profound and so manifold that it often seemed harder to find someone in the
department who was not linked to military or intelligence communities. Thus,
one could be forgiven for mistaking the Department of War Studies for a
department of war mongers.
