Intel agencies join information battle as NATO squares up to 'strategic adversary'

Long out of view since the disastrous invasion of Iraq, spy agencies are now engaging directly with the public and media to shape perceptions.

Image: Unsplash/Parker Coffman

Part two in a series of stories investigating NATO civil society engagement in the Asia Pacific region.

The approach of intelligence agencies involved in the US-led Five Eyes spy apparatus has dovetailed with NATO’s drive for informational control in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere.

The US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia have been using various means - including declassified reports, annual threat assessments, media stand-up events, interviews and editorial pieces - to push the notion of a ‘good versus evil’ battle faced by the West, warning that authoritarian regimes, including China, pose an escalating threat to liberal values and democratic norms.

Governments and opposition politicians alike are taking the narratives on board in an increasingly McCarthyite environment where public servants tread warily and dissent can bring negative attention and serious consequences.

But what lies behind these ideological renderings is a real battle to maintain US economic dominance, a position underpinned by a post-war monetary system that has kept much of the non-Western world subjugated.

The rise of China and other nations who now lead the alternative, rapidly expanding trading group BRICS is shifting the balance of power from one of unipolarity exercised since the fall of the Soviet Union, to one of multipolarity.

Washington has been using groups like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to help maintain its hegemony by funding media and civil society groups to shape, undermine or even overthrow troublesome governments, while the threat of NATO’s hard power remains ever present in the background.

As it does so, the US and Western sub-imperial powers face internal problems of their own, in particular, increasing social unrest. Politicians of all hues have failed to address growing economic inequalities in their countries, operating as they do within the narrow confines of representative systems shaped by corporate and hegemonic interests.

A striking case in point is the UK, where unpopular Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in January that social security benefits would be ruthlessly cut, while pledging over $US3.6 billion this year to support Ukraine’s war effort.

Threat inflation

In the Asia-Pacific region, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service’s (NZSIS) inaugural annual threat assessment in 2023 can be seen as indicative of how the Five Eyes partners are addressing the situation.

The report warned that trust levels in media and government were diminishing, referencing a NZ Treasury report into social cohesion that “found the reasons for diminishing levels of trust relate to perceptions that people are being deliberately lied to and misled; that those with power don’t have New Zealand’s best interests at heart; and that politicians are incapable of solving the problems facing the country”.

It presented this instability not as a result of democratic deficits created under its own version of neo-liberalism and something requiring a political solution, but merely as a weakness exploitable by major BRICS trading nations, using disinformation and other deceptive means.

The report argues that “foreign states may leverage significant social tensions to further their interests and shape narratives on a topic of interest or to sow disruption”.

Its subsequent 2024 threat report, as with other Five Eyes countries, focused on the increasing threat of espionage involving foreign powers.

The danger with this securocrat framing, many argue, is that a pernicious atmosphere of fear and suspicion seeps into the body-politic of New Zealand. Not only does it risk smearing those fighting against social inequalities as useful idiots or agents of foreign powers, but also makes it fraught to argue for a fairer distribution of global wealth and power within an emerging multipolar order, as an alternative to the unipolar US ‘rules-based’ order that has failed to deliver for so many.

It may also unduly constrain voices against militarisation in the Asia Pacific region.

A draconian foreign interference Bill currently before Parliament reveals politicians’ willingness to legislate based on spy agency advice.

Fear and manipulation of public consciousness

Professor Emeritus at the Department of Journalism and Communication at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, believes reports that inflate threats from China and elsewhere follow a precept of the inventor of public relations in the US, Edward Bernays - that fear is an excellent resource for propagandists and that the more it is increased, the more valuable it becomes in persuading people to fall in line.

Bernays, who was Sigmond Freud’s nephew, instrumentalised psychoanalytic insights into subconscious, base human impulses to help entrench capitalist consumerism within US society.

His thinking informed modern corporate marketing techniques and forms of social control. It also shaped US regime-change propaganda, which was demonstrated during the 1954 coup that deposed the democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. Bernays falsely characterised Árbenz as a Soviet stooge who posed a grave threat to the US on its border.

“Are the intelligence agencies seeking, just like Edward Bernays all those years ago, to maximise the sense of threat so that they can better manipulate public consciousness. I think that's what it comes down to,” Boyd-Barrett says.

For Boyd-Barrett, the collective West is attempting to beat back the forces of multipolarity with regime-change activities and proxy wars, as with the Russia-Ukraine war, while China and other members of non-Western trading organisation BRICS face similar containment strategies. These conflicts are being pursued on false pretences, Boyd-Barrett argues, something NATO and Five Eyes intelligence agencies would claim is dangerous disinformation.

He adds: “At the same time, are they trying to pass off what is basically just a matter of commerce and corporate profit competition between one part of the world and another for an existential battle? That this is about civilisational survival, a struggle that we can all die from because these people, Slavs and Chinese peoples in particular, are autocratic, semi-barbarian and they kill people, and who seem incapable of understanding Western superiority. Is this what they’re doing? I am inclined to say, yes absolutely, it could be.

“To get this message across, of course, they have to lie incessantly both about the West and about Russia and China, on the basis of utterly false dichotomies between ‘democracy’ and ‘autocracy’.”

Old and new propaganda models

For Boyd-Barrett, intelligence services and the NATO propaganda machine have been devising new means to do so, as well as relying on old methods too.

He points to what he calls “the mediatisation and legitimisation of intelligence” and gradual elevation of spy agencies from something seen as seedy, the corrupting tool of power, to something heroic in the face of external threat.

The mediatisation phenomenon in the US, he says, started about six years ago.

“You’ve got characters like ex-CIA director John Brennan becoming a national security analyst on NBC,” he says. “James Clapper, a former Director of National Intelligence had a similar kind of analyst role for CNN. Then there’s Michael Hayden, another former CIA director, and again, he has some kind of analyst role for CNN.

“In the world of intelligence, the media are incredibly valuable as open sources of information and they may place their own people in the media for a whole variety of different purposes.

“They may recruit people who are already working in the media for either specific projects or for more general relationships. Intelligence use the media very regularly to plant stories. Perhaps that's the single most important way in which intelligence routinely uses the media.”

Boyd-Barrett also believes that, while intelligence agencies inflate threats posed by adversaries for political purposes, they are conversely downplaying the risk of nuclear war.

In September last year, CIA chief Bill Burns and head of MI6 Richard Moore held a public talk facilitated by the Financial Times, where Burns said there was a danger at the end of 2022 of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, “but the US was not intimidated by that”.

CIA director Bill Burns (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum / Ciaran McCrickard)

Russia President Vladimar Putin had warned of the dangers of catastrophic conflict escalation to the point of nuclear war, if Russia believed it was facing an existential threat by NATO participation in the Ukraine conflict.

“Nobody in the West is going to be intimidated by such talk,” Moore added.

“I think the nuclear risks are real,” Boyd-Barrett says. “The scandalous thing is that Western leaders are not trying to minimize the risks. Even if the risks of intentional nuclear war are slim, all the harsh rhetoric and provocation makes the possibility of accidental nuclear war much greater.”

Spy agencies back in view

The public engagement by Burns and Moore was one of several by top intelligence figures in 2024, with the pair presenting an image of their organisations coming out of the shadows to declassify intelligence reports to expose Western adversaries’ nefarious schemes, discussing their activities with a transparency that earns a social license to operate within a modern democracy.

The spy chiefs presented a contrasting China as a ‘dark, pragmatic’ force devoid of values, happy to supply dual-use technology to Russia and support its supposed expansionist ambitions.

In October MI5 chief Ken McCallum in a speech repeated their assertion that Russia was on a mission to generate "sustained mayhem on British and European streets", claiming MI5 had also responded to 20 plots backed by Iran since 2022.

These mirrored albeit less dramatic reports by intelligence agencies in Australia and New Zealand of cyberattacks and political espionage involving the Chinese state.

Co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, Dr Piers Robinson, says the intention of the speeches and reports is to alarm the public and bring them to a position the logic of which would ultimately rationalise war with Russia and China.

“I think the behaviour of the intelligence services is indicative of how serious the geopolitical situation is becoming now,” he says.

In past decades, Western wars were largely covert and involved the outsourcing of propaganda to civil society groups like UK investigative journalism platform Bellingcat, an M16 cutout part-funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), used to disseminate against foreign foes and those deemed a domestic threat.

Employing ‘astroturf’ groups may have been seen as more effective after intelligence agencies got their fingers burnt when false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were used by Tony Blair by justify the UK Government’s part in the illegal invasion by the US in March 2003, Robinson says.

‘I think the behaviour of the intelligence services is indicative of how serious the geopolitical situation is becoming now.’ - Piers Robinson

“Now we're back into a phase where there's almost talk of open war with Russia and global conflict and also, of course, with Iran in the Middle East, and we have the situation with Israel and Gaza,” he adds.

“It may be that they’re thinking ‘we're going to potentially move into a greater military conflict than we have at the moment’.

“It seems ridiculous that they're even entertaining that idea, because the West is losing on multiple fronts, but maybe that is what's going through their minds. In that context, they might be thinking now's the time to get the intelligence people out front, conditioning the public for something very big, some way down the road. I think that's very plausible.”

Hard propaganda versus hard reality

For Robinson, such a plan would be catastrophic and selling it to the public not easy, particularly given the Western-backed genocide in Gaza and Ukraine’s eastern front collapsing.

“If you look on the ground in Ukraine, and it's very clear in relation to the Middle East and Israel, these are military adventures as it were, which perhaps 20 years ago we would have been well placed to initiate and then come out on top.

“But we're not anymore. The strategic balance is shifting, so that hard propaganda drive is coming up against that hard reality.”

Robinson says claims of foreign state propaganda and infiltration may have some basis in fact, but the threat is being grossly exaggerated. Dissenting voices on foreign policy can also be stifled by being associated with it, something he has personal experience of.

He played a leading role within the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a body made up of other British academics and independent researchers. It also included sociologist David Miller, who recently won a legal case against Bristol University after being sacked for his anti-Zionist positions.

The group critiqued a UK government information campaign aimed at facilitating regime change in Syria, a scheme now completed after the fall of Bashir al-Assad in December at the hands of Western-backed jihadists.

Related: NATO Targets Its Own Population With Cognitive Warfare | Neutrality Studies interview with Dr Jonas Tögel

Robinson says, when he argued it prudent that no conclusions be drawn over claims of a chemical attack in Douma by the Assad regime in 2018 until the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released its findings, he was immediately smeared in UK media as an Assad apologist.

Integrity Initiative

The role of registered charity, the Institute for Statecraft (IfS), in attacking Robinson may point to the corrosive dangers to the democratic process posed by NATO and intelligence agencies operating counter-disinformation campaigns in the Asia Pacific region.

The IfS ran the Integrity Initiative (II), a project established in 2015 that ostensibly targeted Russian disinformation. In 2018, activist group Anonymous released a cache of files on the scheme, which it claimed showed the project was “a large-scale information secret service in Europe, the United States and Canada, which consists of representatives of political, military, academic and journalistic communities with the think tank in London at the head of it”.

The project was funded by the British Foreign Office to the tune of millions of pounds. Journalist Kit Klarenberg at the time reported the documents revealed it was also being funded by NATO and led by intelligence agencies.

“Some of The Times journalists who attacked me, their names turned up in the Integrity Initiative leaks,” Robinson says.

“Essentially you had a co-option of academics and journalists into these clusters involving intelligence people to deal with Russian propaganda, but it was essentially about closing down counter narratives and promoting Western narratives.”

Other named journalists were involved in attacking people like the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, aggressively mirroring foreign policy settings of Westminster.

“This kind of the penetration of academia, the mainstream media and the NGO sector is very pervasive,” Robinson says.

“All of these institutions, which are supposed to function as a system of checks and balances, don’t work anymore because, essentially, they have become hollowed out. There are probably quite a lot of academics around who are also co-opted by the intelligence services. It was the case during the Cold War and I'm sure it's the case now. The same goes for the mainstream media.”

Hollowed out institutions

Robinson points to a Western political class going through the motions, intent on managing an ideological and corporate status quo, while following Washington’s foreign policy lead.

“I think that creates the situation we have at the moment where there's this remarkable lack of political scrutiny,” he says. “The establishment parties look very weak to me. They look to me very much empty vessels. The politicians we tend to have in power don't have anywhere approaching the gravitas of politicians, say even 20 or 30 years ago. They don’t even seem to have the intellectual ability to ask serious questions.

“They're people who've risen to the top because they fit and they've been puffed up, but they're not really credible… I think that is symptomatic of the state we're in as a Western empire. We're now to the point where our domination is coming to an end and our hollowed-out democratic institutions are being rallied to maintain this empire in a lost cause.”

Censorship legislation like the EU’s Digital Services Act, online harm bills in the UK and elsewhere, state-sponsored disinformation projects and social media purges are being used to suppress criticism of dominant narratives emanating from Washington. McCarthyite attacks on those challenging those narratives are destroying careers and lives. The surveillance and arrest of independent journalists is adding to an ominous atmosphere descending across Western countries.

But for Robinson the repressive response, one that now threatens to extend deeper into the Asia Pacific region, offers hope.

“These big guns in their armoury - censorship, outsourcing propaganda to civil society groups and then just traditional propaganda drives – these together look quite intimidating. They also jailed Julian Assange and people look at what he had to go through. But what you have running against that is much lower levels of trust of the public and much more activity in the independent media realm. In a way, it's a sign of their weakness that they're having to use these tactics, especially censorship.”