Ben Swann and Elizabeth Lane delve into the workings of an organization behind coordinated influence campaigns
A sprawling network of media influence “clusters” has existed in NATO member states for years, seeking to portray voices opposing the policies of the military bloc and the EU as Russian propaganda, RT America’s Ben Swann and independent investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane have learnt.
Founded in 2015, soon after the Western-backed coup in Kiev, the so-called Integrity Initiative program was designed to counter what it called Russia’s disinformation. It was run by the UK Foreign Office-funded Institute for Statecraft – an organization posing as an independent charity that was founded by Christopher Donnelly, a former adviser to a NATO secretary general, and Daniel Lafayeedney, a former Special Air Service officer.
The definition of ‘Russian propaganda’ developed by the organization, which received funding not just from London but also from the NATO-linked Atlantic Council, was so broad that it virtually included any criticism of NATO and the EU.
“They are not really after Russian disinformation,” Lane said. “They targeted independent journalists. And that’s very clear in their own communications.”
For the Integrity Initiative, Russian disinformation was “any position that is counter to the NATO position,” according to Swann.
Among the most prominent targets of the Integrity Initiative were former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and retired Spanish Army colonel Pedro Banos, who lost his appointment as director of national security in the Spanish government in 2018 amid a concerted campaign portraying him as a Russian asset.
The campaigns were focused on “killing the image” of any dissenter to the point where their political careers were ruined, Lane explained. “If you assassinate their image, no one wants to be associated to that person. And that’s what happened with Pedro Banos. That’s what happened with Jeremy Corbyn.”
The network established “clusters” of politicians and journalists it treated like “assets” in virtually all NATO nations, with many of them often unaware that they were part of a media influence network, according to Lane. “They are just given the script and they legit trust the story and they run the story and turns out they are part of the propaganda,” she said.
The Integrity Initiative came into the spotlight in 2018 when hackers, claiming to be linked to the Anonymous collective, leaked a trove of documents revealing the scale of its operations. The revelations led to an investigation into the Institute for Statecraft’s activities by the Scottish charity regulator OSCR, which concluded in 2019 that the organization was violating charity rules.
The institute then formally announced that it was terminating its involvement with the Integrity Initiative in 2019 but continued to operate until August 2023, when it was dissolved several months after being declared an “undesired organization” by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office over what officials called “aggressive militarist rhetoric” and a “discreditation campaign” against the Russian authorities.
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