The Five Eyes Alliance Intelligence Network Enables Reciprocal Spying
It benefits our government when people believe that the US Government does not use propaganda against its own people, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Five Eyes Alliance (FVEY) is a cooperative intelligence network that monitors citizens’ and foreign governments’ electronic communications. Furthermore, through the reciprocal spying and intelligence sharing terms and conditions of the FVEY, any barriers to domestic spying and propaganda activities that one of the FVEY intelligence agencies encounters can be circumvented by working with another member. The members of FVEY are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. FVEY was formed after World War II to share intelligence among the five nations. FVEY is the oldest and most prominent of three related US-centric intelligence alliances. The Nine Eyes alliance includes the original five members of FVEY and Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. It is considered the most comprehensive espionage alliance in recorded history.
FVEY originated in 1943; the U.S. and the U.K. formed a cooperative intelligence agreement — a secret treaty known as the BRUSA Agreement. This was later formalized as the UKUSA Agreement, which expanded into the FVEY agreement, although there is evidence that the UKUSA agreement is still viable between just the US and the UK. In the next decade, Canada, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, Australia, and New Zealand were temporarily added to the UKUSA agreement. In 1955, the group was narrowed down to the current FVEYs countries.
FVEY intercepts telephone calls, faxes, emails, social media data and text messages from satellites, telephone networks and fiber-optic cables. FVEY also receives user data records from large technology companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype, and Apple. Each member country has multiple government agencies involved, and each agency is responsible for one to two roles, including “human intelligence, defense intelligence, security intelligence, geo-intelligence, and signal intelligence.”
When our government is allowed to combine propaganda with techniques such as neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis, bots, big data, and controlled messaging, do “we the people” even have truly independent individual beliefs, or is everything we think being manipulated? If that is the case, what does this mean for democracy? When a government decides to wage PsyWar on its own citizens, then the fundamentals and concepts of free agency, sovereignty, voting integrity, and representative democracy become irrelevant.
If we wish to remain independent thinkers and preserve our ability to learn, think, and debate issues, we must become warriors in the fight against government development and deployment of propaganda, censorship, and PsyWar.
The British Army’s 77th Brigade; an example of FVEY deployment of a military PsyWar against FVEY civilians during the COVIDcrisis
According to the US Department of Defense Psychological Operations Manual of 2010, in the case of domestic crisis management, the DoD can become involved in psyops operations against civilian citizens during times of crisis management. The manual states:
“When authorized, PSYOP forces may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population”
As discussed above, the policies of the US Government currently allow deployment of both military, intelligence, and homeland security PsyWar personnel and weapons on US soil against US citizens. Technically, deployment of US Army PsyWar capabilities and weapons on US Citizens is limited to domestic situations requiring disaster relief and crisis management, however those terms are not well defined and therefore subject to broad interpretation by Army commanders and the Office of the President (Commander in Chief). Other US military policy and guidance indicates that deployment of these capabilities during a domestic crisis should be restricted to advisory (to DHS, FBI, or other domestic psyops/PsyWar capabilities), details of how or if these US Army units were deployed or involved in COVIDcrisis propaganda, censorship, bot, troll, crowdstalking or other information warfare operations has not entered the public domain. However, the COVIDcrisis was defined by the Executive branch as requiring a “whole of government” approach which can safely be assumed to include deployment of DoD psyop/PsyWar capabilities. Mainstream media freedom of information requests and other investigative journalistic activities in the UK and Canada have documented deployment of military psyop/PsyWar capabilities against domestic citizens in those countries, and by extension it is likely that other FVEY partner nations deployed similar capabilities.
In the case of the US Army, the primary psyops/PsyWar divisions of the US Army’s active duty Psychological Operations forces are organized into two Military Information Support Operations Groups (the Fourth and Eighth Psychological Operations Group (Airborne), both located at Ft. Liberty, NC. These US DoD capabilities trace their roots back through the “ghost army” program of WW II. These active duty operations are supplemented by two Army reserve psyop groups based in Twinsburg, Ohio (second psyops group) and Moffett Field, California (seventh psyops group), which provide seventy four percent of total Army capacity.
In a 2021 article series, the NATO-affiliated journal “NATO review” provides current justification and rationale for developing and expanding NATO and FVEY hybrid or fifth generation PsyWar capabilities:
. . . the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. . . . Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. It is much more feasible to, let’s say, sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real. . . . What takes the centre stage here is the role of civilians: how they think and act in relation to the state. Contemporary digital and social media platforms allow hybrid actors to influence this to the detriment of the adversary state with considerable ease. . . .This translates into perilous erosion of the core values of coexistence, harmony, and pluralism in and amongst democratic societies as well as the decision-making capability of the political leaders. Ultimately, what hybrid threats undercut is trust. . . . It is for this reason that building trust must be deemed the key bulwark against hybrid threats, especially ones that are geared towards undermining democratic states and polities. . . . People must have confidence in the state organs for governments to ensure compliance with their decisions. . . . Building, re-building, and fortifying trust remains critical to creating durable resilience in the face of hybrid threats that acutely imperil the security at the state and societal levels. Trust-building within and across communities ought to be the linchpin of efforts to neutralise hybrid warfare and threats.
In the case of the United Kingdom (England), the best documented FVEY deployment of military PsyWar capabilities against domestic civilians and residents during the COVIDcrisis has involved the British Army’s seventy seventh brigade, a disinformation unit responsible for information warfare and psychological operations. The 77th brigade consists of various groups, including:
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16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team
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Surveillance Group
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Understand Group
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Cyber Electro Magnetic Activities Effects Group (with the 2nd Medical Group joining later)
The formation and mission scope of the seventy seventh brigade is detailed in a November 2018 article in Wired magazine titled “Inside the British Army’s secret information warfare machine”. Journalist Carl Miller described seventy-seventh brigade warfighters as knowing “how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.” The description of this battle unit personnel clearly demonstrates the integration of modern civilian sector commercial sales capabilities within military propaganda operations. In his reporting, Miller provides additional details and nuances of the group and its mission.
The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since… Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers”, “reach”, “traction”. ““Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. .. Ever since NATO troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that NATO soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of NATO information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of NATO troops happily working with Baltic hosts. Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn’t have to look like it came from the military and doesn’t have to necessarily tell the truth. I saw no evidence that the 77th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.
JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.
I have personally experienced repeated hostile social media activity personally targeting me in a coordinated manner every time I travel to the UK to speak regarding COVIDcrisis and COVID genetic vaccine issues, and in particular when I have spoken in support of British House of Commons MP Andrew Bridgen. Many of the social media accounts that are involved in these waves of attacks self-identify as being involved in some way with the seventy-seventh brigade. Some of these may originate with an irregular government-affiliated group that appears to have loose ties with the seventy-seventh, known as the “Mutton Crew”. The “Mutton Crew” is a suspected covert wing of the seventy-seventh brigade, a disinformation unit responsible for information warfare and psychological operations.
The “Mutton Crew” operatives are believed to engage in online activities, such as:
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Derailing debates with name-calling and ridicule
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Filing spurious complaints about targets, alleging infringement of Twitter rules
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Compromising online platforms, as evidenced by the unusual listing of Swaledale Mutton Company at the top of follower lists for these accounts
Independent journalist Iain Davis, who writes a popular Substack under his own name with the tagline “The Disillusioned Blogger” describes the “Mutton Crew” tactics as crude but effective, due to the complicity of Twitter (X) platform itself .
On 14 May 2024, British member of parliament, Andrew Bridgen, a long-standing critic of government policy on COVID-19, alleged that he had been targeted on Twitter by the “Mutton Crew” network, in a sustained campaign of online harassment against him. Bridgen accused the intelligence network of bombarding him with communications of a “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”. Bridgen called for the public’s help in gathering evidence against the anonymous perpetrators. It is essential to recognize that the 77th Brigade’s activities, including those of the “Mutton Crew,” are shrouded in secrecy, making it challenging to verify the extent of their operations. However, available information suggests that the “Mutton Crew” is a component of the 77th Brigade’s information warfare efforts, aimed at influencing online discourse and silencing critics.
According to the Wikispooks archive, the “Mutton Crew” is led by pharmaceutical propagandist Dr. Graham Bottley, and the network operates dozens of online accounts on social media platforms. Operatives in the network are renowned for engaging in vicious psychological warfare (PsyWar) tactics. On Twitter (X), the network is notorious for trolling the accounts of activists, dissidents and government critics, especially over COVID-19. “Mutton Crew” accounts on Twitter frequently have the Swaledale Mutton Company account shown at the top of their Follower list. Their treatment is different on the “X” platform relative to other known troll and bot operations. In contrast to the standard chronological order of Followers on Twitter where the most recent followers are listed first, Swaledale Mutton Company is invariably listed at the top of the Follower list for these “Mutton Crew” accounts according to Ian Davis. “Mutton Crew” operatives are trained in emotionalizing, antagonizing and goading their opponents into making aggressive and potentially abusive comments, responses which could be construed as abusive or ‘hate speech’ are then reported to Twitter. The network utilizes other recognized techniques of psychological warfare (PsyWar) to suppress the truth and to propagate disinformation which are detailed in the 2001 essay “Twenty-Five Ways To Suppress Truth: The Rules of Disinformation” by H. Michael Sweeney.
In a November 2020 article authored by investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the deployment of both the British Army seventy-seventh brigade and US Military PsyWar capabilities in response to the COVIDcrisis was documented and discussed in detail.
British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.
In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
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Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national- security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
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Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns
are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article
bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens. This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism. Ahmed told the UK newspaper The
Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “antivaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
At the time, the intent of the UK government to deploy British military PsyWar capabilities in support of government-approved narratives was also documented by both the Times of London and the Daily Mail. As the Times reported:
The (British) army has mobilised an elite “information warfare” unit renowned for assisting operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to counter online propaganda against vaccines, as Britain prepares to deliver its first injections within days.
The defence cultural specialist unit was launched in Afghanistan in 2010 and belongs to the army’s 77th Brigade. The secretive unit has often worked side-by-side with psychological operations teams.
Leaked documents reveal that its soldiers are already monitoring cyberspace for Covid-19 content and analysing how British citizens are being targeted online. It is also gathering evidence of vaccine disinformation from hostile states, including Russia,
Next month the 77th Brigade will begin an “uplift” of professional and reserve soldiers to join operations.
Ministers are alarmed at the impact that online propaganda is having on public opinion. A recent report found that more than one-third of people are uncertain or are very unlikely to be vaccinated. Ministers believe Britain will become the first western country to approve a vaccine next week. A BioNTech and Pfizer treatment is set to receive approval within days, paving the way for injections as soon as December 7. Ministers will then launch a huge public campaign to encourage people to get a jab. The campaign will be reinforced by counter-disinformation efforts led by the Cabinet Office, with support from the army and GCHQ.
Mr. Paul Schulte, a retired British civil servant with current academic affiliations with Birmingham Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security, as an Honorary Professor and King’s College Department of War Studies, as a Senior Visiting Fellow, provided written testimony to the British Parliament in November of 2020 titled “Mitigating the Coming Infodemics and The Impacts of Information Disorder on the British Body Politic” in which he provided analysis and justification for the decision to deploy British army capabilities against both British and other FVEY citizens in support of governmental COVIDcrisis policies including mass vaccination. His testimony provides insight into the mindset of and subsequent policy justifications of both himself and his peers at the point in time immediately prior to onset of the COVID genetic vaccine mandates that were deployed in a heavy handed and unethical manner throughout virtually the entire western world, and particularly in Europe and the FVEY alliance nations.
Basically, Paul Schulte’s testimony details the then widely held (but undocumented) belief that Russia and China were actively exploiting vaccine hesitancy in Western nation (and specifically British) citizens, that the genetic vaccines under development at that time by Oxford/Astra Zeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer were presumed to be safe and effective, and that therefore the Government was justified in deploying the advanced PsyWar weaponry developed for offshore combat by units such as the seventy-seventh brigade against its own citizens, and implied that similar deployments of military PsyWar capabilities against citizens were planned to occur in the other FVEY alliance nations.
..observing and reflecting on the strains and disputes occurring from Covid 19, reported in the US, UK , France, Israel and other democratic states, and as a student of group psychology and political warfare, I have become concerned that there are systemic informational vulnerabilities in relation to biosecurity threats, whose social, political and strategic implications have not, as far as I can tell, sufficiently addressed in public discussions of resilience in the National Security Strategy, and which include indirect impacts on public health and prosperity. I have been in touch with networks of experts in UK, and US academia, and participated in recent London and transatlantic online expert workshops on national resilience and biosecurity responses. This has confirmed to me that the informational problem potentially ranges all across all elements of healthcare – from those looking up dietary advice, to parents concerned about vaccinating their children. For wider society, it could, for example, include the sources that specialists from various disciplines, as well as ordinary members of the public, will access to inform themselves about the range and utility of available medical treatments, and medical history, including the history of infectious diseases.
The notion that, usually undefined, “Information Warfare” poses a threat to British national cohesion and social resilience is now widely accepted in national security planning, but far less so in public debate over health issues. As a very recent article in the RUSI Journal put it: “The information environment is under siege by a mass of domestic and foreign actors whose tools and agendas overlap in ways that blur borders and challenge norms. Capability outpaces both regulation and education.” According to the latest MoD Integrated Operational Concept 18, (IOC), aimed at 2025, but written in the present tense: “The old distinction between foreign and domestic defence is increasingly irrelevant. When ‘fake news’ appears to originate not abroad but at home it gains credibility and reach, stoking confusion, disagreement, division and doubt in our societies. This has been particularly evident with the significant uptick in disinformation and misinformation during the coronavirus crisis……Sub-threshold operations are continuously executed at reach by malign actors who seek to undermine our military readiness, our critical national infrastructure, our economy, our alliances and our way of life.” Public commentaries on these clandestine activities are accumulating fast. On 14 October the new MI5 Director General, Ken McCallum was explicit.
“Crucially, on the vaccine, we’ve been working to protect the integrity of UK research…, our academic research, our infrastructure. And, much discussed, threats to our democracy. In the 2020s, one of the toughest challenges facing MI5 and indeed government is that the differing national security challenges presented by Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other actors are growing in severity and in complexity – while terrorist threats persist at scale.” This was rapidly followed by linked revelations in The London Times of open Russian efforts on state TV channels to denigrate and so damage international public trust in the Covid vaccine under development in Oxford. The two statements have been seen as unusually pointed counter- disinformation responses. On 9 November The Times was able to publish further information quoting “official sources” to reveal that GCHQ22, in cooperation with the British Army’s 77th Brigade was involved in offensive cyber operations tackling anti-vaccine disinformation, using tactics similar to those used against the Islamic State. A rapid response team has been established in the Cabinet Office to coordinate such action against damaging narratives, including bogus treatments and conspiracy theories about the virus. But the sources stated that disruption would only be permitted against information originating from state adversaries and not online content from ordinary citizens, however misinformed. Nor could UK government specialists attack websites based in the other nations of the “Five Eyes” Intelligence Partnership (US, Canada Australia and New Zealand), which would remain the responsibility of partner agencies.
We were warned. Based on information available even before the genetic “vaccine” products were authorized for emergency use, journalist Whitney Webb clearly saw and anticipated the PsyWar that was about to be deployed. And the world did nothing. How many more times will we not listen to those among us who are able to see through the fog of modern, military-grade fifth-generation psychological warfare and anticipate what lies and cyberattacks are about to be deployed against us?
By Robert Malone
