Alternative War: Unabridged Read online

  Known by a Swedish name in parliament, having changed it on his arrival in Sweden ten years before, Egor Putilov had wide access to the Riksdag when he entered the deal with the previously imprisoned Russian – a Mafioso type, known to have strong ties to the Russian state. The property deal in question made around six million SKE for Putilov.

  Putilov had also become a well-known newspaper columnist, writing with a distinct anti-immigrant tone, who regularly criticised the Swedish government for granting asylum to refugees, in particular those from the Middle East. “If nothing is done, Sweden’s lax immigration checks could prove very costly,” he wrote in one op-ed for the Aftonbladet, adding comments that Islamic State terrorists were capitalising on Sweden’s “porous” borders. In other similar articles, he made claims similar to those of the alt-right which I have since debunked, including allegations that “stone-wielding Muslim youths attacked him in Stockholm’s ethnically mixed suburbs.” Aftonbladet’s editors believed something was wrong when they discovered Putilov had submitted opinion articles using the false name Tobias Lagerfeldt and found the image he provided belonged to an innocent party75. In a subsequent investigation, they exposed what they claimed were Putilov’s “connections to Russian state agents and criminals,” reporting he had assembled a handful of secret identities to help disseminate pro-Russian and anti-Swedish government views in the media.

  Responding to the scandal, Putilov wrote an email to Newsweek76, in which he denied everything and claimed “the attack against me has to do with internal political situation in Sweden where the ruling left party and the main left newspaper who reported the story are desperate about growing public support for Sweden Democrats.”

  Mattias Karlsson, the Sweden Democrats' parliamentary group leader, suggested the accusations against Putilov were only “speculations,” saying: “No one has proven so far that he has done anything illegal or that he is a security risk at all.”

  Center Party group leader, Anders W. Jonsson, was less dismissive, saying “this is about a Russian who came to Sweden and kept applying for jobs at places like the Civil Contingencies Agency, a person who has used five different identities and writes debate articles under false names.”

  While a property scandal may seem a regular or low-level occurrence in politics, the case was so unusual and disturbing the Riksdag responded without hesitation. Defence Minister, Peter Hultqvist, made a quick public statement that “several people with a high level of competence have declared a potential security risk, therefore, I think that one should take the situation seriously.”

  Clarifying the threat and indicating Russia had, in fact, acquired a ‘hold’ over Putilov by way of the property transaction, Lars Nicander, Director for the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at Sweden's National Defence College, said77: “You can hear intimate conversations, you can hear the different parties' positions on the Nord Stream [gas pipeline], for example, or on NATO and trade agreements. You can even install listening devices.”

  The Putilov Affair, as it became known, drew a tight focus on not only Russian business dealings, and infiltration of politics, but the spread of disinformation which had been gaining force. For example, in August 2016, while the debate was underway as to whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, Swedish social media was flooded with fake news from alternative outlets. The claims included warnings of stockpiling nuclear weapons on Swedish soil, NATO using Sweden to launch attacks on Russia, and sinister claims NATO soldiers would rape Swedish women without fear of prosecution. Hultqvist faced harsh questioning across the country about the false stories, which also started to trickle into the mainstream media. Analysts and experts in American and European intelligence singled Russia out as the prime suspect in the disinformation campaign, as the likely outcome was tightly aligned with their national objectives.

  “Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked with the Kremlin before 200878. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”

  Some of the pressure which can be exerted, according to Swedish research, is as blatant as Putilov’s, while some of it is more nuanced and, often, targeted in places you might not necessarily expect. Russia’s Sputnik brand of news stations, for example, use a subtler approach and try to appeal to Western audiences by featuring anti-establishment voices from both the far left and right. Sputnik established a strategically positioned studio in Tallinn, the home of the original Capstone experiment, and another in Edinburgh.

  Sputnik is owned by Rossiya Segodny, the Russian state news agency set up by Vladimir Putin in 2013 and, according to David Leask – a journalist with Scotland’s Herald newspaper – Sputnik’s Edinburgh operation “aims to tap into the growing Scottish independence movement.”

  “In Scotland, Sputnik is seeking to exploit the deep mistrust felt by many independence supporters in Britain’s mainstream media, especially the BBC,” he told reporters. “To do so, it has hired some staunch Scottish nationalists to staff its U.K. base in Edinburgh.”

  Rossiya Sedogny translates as Russia Today and, though the outlet RT denies any link, Margarita Simonyan was also appointed editor-in-chief of the news agency, which was created by an executive order of Putin as a Kremlin operation. There are no degrees of separation between any of these channels, in truth.

  By March 2017, in the wake of the discovery of Russian efforts on multiple fronts, the Swedish defence ministry had announced the country was reinstating the military draft and four thousand men and women would be called up for service beginning in January 201879. “The security environment in Europe and in Sweden's vicinity has deteriorated and the all-volunteer recruitment hasn't provided the Armed Forces with enough trained personnel,” a spokesperson said at the time, adding “the re-activating of the conscription is needed for military readiness.”

  Shortly after this reintroduction of military service, Sweden’s Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, set out measures designed to prevent foreign countries interfering in the 2018 Swedish general election. On this news, Anders Norlén, chair of the Riksdag constitutional committee, told Radio Sweden parties should avoid relying on Russian propaganda or other support. “Every party in the Swedish parliament has a responsibility to make sure that the facts they use and the arguments they use are sound and valid and not just a way of repeating propaganda from, for instance, Russia,” he said80.

  Mattias Karlsson, who had played down the Putilov scandal on behalf of the Sweden Democrats gave a statement that Russian interference was “likely” and said the security services should be tasked to investigate, but added “the Social Democratic government are using Russia as a means to try to silence the opposition, and trying to make everybody who doesn't share their political views suspect of being a Russian spy.” However, the SD narrative was already ringing hollow and the alarm bells were ringing almost everywhere.

  In June 2016, the European Council on Foreign Relations, chaired by former Swedish PM Carl Bildt, had carried out the first comprehensive survey of so-called ‘insurgent’ parties in Europe81 and found: “Despite their differences, a majority of them are positively inclined towards Putin’s Russia and pursue policies that promote Russia’s interests in Europe.” The report highlighted this applied left and right, as with Sputnik, but predominantly had become a concern with the right wing. The council went on to say “parties are useful for Moscow in that they help legitimise the Kremlin’s policies and amplify Russian disinformation. At times they can also shift Europe’s domestic debates in Russia’s favour.”

  “Voting patterns in the European Parliament show that on issues such as Ukraine, the human rights situation in Russia, and association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, the Dutch PVV leads the pack in pro-Russian votes. UKIP, the Sweden Democrats, Italy’s Northern League, and F
rance’s Front National come in a shared second place,” they clarified.

  Crucially, the report did not refrain from adding: “But it is not just in matters of policy that these parties’ sympathies with the Kremlin are revealed. In them, Moscow has also found convenient and willing conveyors of its anti-Western, anti-globalisation narratives. Several of the far right leaders, such as Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, are frequent guests on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, with Farage reportedly having been offered his own show on RT.”

  While the report noted the obvious policy leanings, it was circumspect in saying: “It is less clear to what extent there is collusion.” Though it noted pointedly: “The notion that Russia might be funding agents of influence by providing financing to sympathetic parties in Europe has become more salient as relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated.” This was published a long time before the extent of the Trump/Russia inquiry began to unravel in the US.

  In their conclusion, the council recommended: “European law enforcement agencies should prioritise looking into Russian covert support for populist parties and [take] steps to counter such support. European governments should consider publishing intelligence on this in the public domain. Voters have a right to be informed about whom they are voting for.” I’ve returned to this last sentence often, wondering how much different the world would now be if this had been done by governments and not by me – and others – after the horse had run gleefully from the stable.

  What became clear to me, from an investigation which began over something as simple as the fact alt-right narratives didn’t fit the publicly available crime figures in Sweden, was the shadow of something much larger loomed over much of the western world. The threat to democracy was credible, substantiated, and it was impossible for me to dismiss the clear and present security risks – for example, no progressive, modern country re-introduces the military draft on a whim. It was also apparent that data, notably ‘big data’, played some crucial role in what was happening because, without it, the delivery of pro-Russian propaganda would not be able to gain such traction through targeting and tailoring to audiences. In turn, those globally similar messages – too alike to be coincidental – could be traced locally to nationalist parties in individual countries, while the people behind those parties and alternative media sources could be traced back to each other – internationally once again – without much effort.

  I didn’t even find it hard to briefly study the interactions between shifting geopolitics and the financial markets either – though within this other factors were obviously at play. For example, while I was still in Sweden, Reuters reported82 that “on eight occasions over the past twelve months, the pound has moved against the dollar in the minutes before the release of the retail sales numbers, correctly anticipating the direction the currency took once the figures were published.” Some experts believed the shifts could only have been as a result of leaks – the information only being provided to a short list of forty-one people in the UK, twenty-four hours in advance of publication. Others believed some funds simply became “very good at predicting movements working with technology and broader data sets.” AI, such as Mercer’s, combined with publicly available 'big data'.

  I had thought, starting out, my investigation was only about skada, the damage caused in Sweden by alternative news, but it turned out I was wrong. The truth had become more important in the world than ever and, in Sweden, I saw the shadow of the snowman clearly for the first time.

  Nine:

  Back in England, I was determined to see what crawled out from the rocks I could see needed kicking over, set out like a trail of breadcrumbs as they were, and the clock was ticking. Because I was working as an independent journalist for Byline, only obtaining funding directly from the public, it was a race against not only time but finances. So, I set to work straight away and started pumping a diverse range of sources.

  It didn’t take much time at all to break into what turned out to be a very deep rabbit hole83. On the 21st of April 2017 the Electoral Commission (EC), the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance in the UK, released a statement confirming they had “begun an investigation into Leave.EU’s EU Referendum spending return.” I had been back from Sweden for ten days, writing up the thousands of words from my trip.

  It doesn’t take much effort to find out Leave.EU is a limited company created by UKIP donor Arron Banks, who is currently listed as the main shareholder with Companies House – to campaign for Britain’s exit from the European Union in the 2016 referendum. While Leave.EU applied to the Electoral Commission to be the designated official campaign this was, in the end, awarded to Vote Leave and an application for judicial review of the decision which Banks threatened was never followed through. The Commission’s press release stated their decision to launch an inquiry: “Followed an assessment which concluded there were reasonable grounds to suspect that potential offences under the law may have occurred.” The investigation was, they said, focused on whether one or more donations – including of services – accepted by Leave.EU was impermissible and whether Leave.EU’s spending return was subsequently “complete.”

  On clarifying the rather dry release with the press office, a spokesperson told me: “We don’t comment on ongoing investigations,” but they were happy to explain that “a service would be a donation in kind.” They could not give a timeframe for the investigation either, “due to complexities in these cases,” and were unable to “speculate on sanctions if a finding was [subsequently] made, as this varies on a case by case basis.” The spokesperson simply recommended I refer to the Enforcement Policy on their website, a document giving more detail on offences and sanctions, which I duly did and discovered the EC’s powers to investigate offences are granted under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, known as PPERA, rather than under their statutory supervisory powers. The policy was clear that the EC would only use the PPERA powers as a last resort and that it was a criminal offence to fail to comply with, obstruct, or provide false information to, such an investigation.

  On the Commission’s publication confirming the commencement of the investigation, Arron Banks made his own rather aggressive statement, saying: “Today’s announcement is politically motivated and the timing is intended to cause maximum damage just before the general election. We will not be cooperating any further with the commission and we will see them in court.” Banks had been set to stand as the UKIP candidate in Clacton-On-Sea following the resignation of the party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, but withdrew on the 24th of April 2017 in a move which was described in the tabloids as “chickening out.”

  While I was openly curious as to whether a “see you in court” would class as obstruction, the Electoral Commission spokesperson told me there was no comment to be made on the response of Banks.

  Having an initial dig around, it wasn’t hard to find some public traces of the concerns which appeared to have sparked the inquiry. Member of Parliament for Aberavon, Stephen Kinnock, openly welcomed the investigation which, in his view, seemed to specifically relate to the donation in kind of services by the psychometric data specialists Cambridge Analytica. According to further reports, Kinnock had also written to the Electoral Commission in March 2017, citing concerns the “market rate for a donation of this kind could amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds” and that “any substantial additional spending between 15 April last year and the referendum on 23 June would have pushed Leave.EU over the spending limit for the regulated period.”

  “They were allowed by law to spend up to £700,000 but according to the accounts they filed they spent £693,000,” he added helpfully.

  Cambridge Analytica was, of course, used by the successful Trump campaign in the US Elections and the British-born CEO, Alexander Nix, previously stated this earned the company $15 million dollars from that one campaign alone.

  My sources had, by this point, sent me documents con
firming Kinnock voiced his concerns in writing to the Special Crime and Counter-Terrorism Division of the Crown Prosecution Service, also in March 2017. I tried to reach him for comment, but even now have received no response. Thankfully, the same source gave me access to documents, which were verified, and which showed a significant level of detail in the allegations made to the Electoral Commission. Specifically, they related to the donation of services by Cambridge Analytica to Leave.EU and the reasons for the EC investigation made for grim reading – not least because they showed signs of a cover-up taking place.

  The documents set out that: “In a February [2017] Newspaper interview with The Observer, Andy Wigmore, the director of communications for Leave.EU stated that Cambridge Analytica was 'happy to help' with their EU referendum campaign but that they had not 'employed' them. However, this appears to run contrary to previous claims made by both Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica.” The evidence then started to show a pattern of the retrospective deletion of internet records. For example, it noted: “In a now deleted post on their website titled The science behind our strategy, Leave.EU stated that: Cambridge Analytica are world leaders in target voter messaging. They will be helping us map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters. Most elections are fought using demographic and socio-economic data. Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic methodology however is on another level of sophistication.”

  “And in November 2015,” the evidence went on, “PR Week reported the following comments from Cambridge Analytica’s development programme editor: “Cambridge Analytica director of programme development Brittany Kaiser, who will be spending time split between the UK and US in the coming months, was speaking today (Wednesday) at a press conference hosted by Leave.EU. She later told PR Week that the firm had been approached by the campaign several months ago, but only started working with it more recently. She said the firm’s team of data scientists and analysts, some of whom were based full-time in the UK, would be enabling targeted messaging by “understanding why certain things worry people…probing why people care about a certain issue.” There’s actually a picture of all of them together on the internet and the distancing leaves only suspicion.