Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  While the FSB declined to comment on the investigation, Dmitry Peskov, speaking on behalf of Putin, told reporters: “Russian authorities have never cooperated or interacted with terrorists. No interaction with terrorists was possible. Terrorists get annihilated in Russia. It has always been like that, it is like that and it will be in the future.”

  While there was not decisive or definitive evidence available and there is still a long road for the world to travel in that respect, I realised we were already facing a very credible question. What if the Islamic State, as it’s currently understood, is only as real as the Cyber Caliphate? In part, it was this which inspired me to start looking beyond the borders of the European Union and the United States.

  Fourteen:

  Within the somewhat expansive structure of Arron Banks’ complex business network, I discovered a rather plain looking diamond.

  Parsons Jewellers in Bristol had been in the same family for generations when it hit trouble and was eventually bought by the man behind Leave.EU and Westmonster. In his autobiography, the same one which had proven useful time and time again as regards Russia, Banks outlined his desire to turn the outfit into a “brand.”

  According to the Parsons website, Banks sources his gems from a series of mines he owns in South Africa, under the company name Kophia Diamond, and is listed as a director alongside Jonathan Ian Banks and James Pryor. Jonathan has a law firm registered to Banks’ primary offices in Bristol, and Pryor – ex-UKIP and a former Margaret Thatcher communications guru – is the same person connected to the other Banks linked company, Chartwell Political. While there was no website for the mining operation, Pryor’s email address was listed as the contact address for any queries. Banks himself is further linked to the region by lobbying and mining companies unearthed in the Panama Papers and he spent part of his childhood in South Africa, but other contemporary evidence was not hard to come by. On the 25th of January 2015, ahead of the small state of Lesotho’s last election, Leave.EU’s Andy Wigmore and James Pryor were both present in the country, “burning the midnight election oil.” Helpfully, Wigmore posted a photograph of them both – with that caption – on social media, along with pictures of him and Arron visiting mining operations at various points in time. At least one of Banks’ mining operations is located in Lesotho, where early general elections were held in June 2017 following a no-confidence vote in the incumbent prime minister – who led in coalition after a military coup caused the 2012 election to fail and a snap election to be held in 2015. The political landscape was clearly complex and I wrote to Wigmore and Banks, asking how the coming election could affect their mining interests in Lesotho but there was no reply. While there was no indication as to exactly what involvement they had in the 2015 election campaign beyond the photograph, Wigmore, along with both Arron and Jonathan Banks and James Pryor, were pictured with the King of Lesotho on the 11th of June 2014, during an apparent trip to visit their mining facilities. Wigmore’s Instagram in general shows he is no stranger to political celebrity – he can also be found pictured in the infamous gold lift at Trump Tower and with Lord Ashcroft, among others.

  Banks, in his autobiography, describes Pryor as his “fixer in Africa” and states both Pryor and Wigmore worked together for the conservatives in the late 1980s. Banks goes on to say he bought not one but two mines in Lesotho and visits them periodically but makes clear Pryor is on hand there most of the time, to keep him updated. I also asked Wigmore and Banks what connections they have with the king but there was no reply.

  Having a look back through online records, I saw Banks was shown in the Panama Papers174 as the director African Strategic Consulting Ltd (“lobbying”), African Strategic Resources Ltd (“mining”), and African Strategic Capital Ltd (“wealth management”). Of course, there was no indication of illegality in this structure but it did raise some questions so, I asked Wigmore and Banks what lobbying, if any, the consulting group had done. There was no reply so, I also started to look for clues elsewhere, revisiting Banks’ other operations. On the Chartwell website, I found that Pryor listed his previous experience as including assistance to the Basothu National Party175 (BNP) in Lesotho, though it was not clear in which election. The party was facing accusations in advance of the 2017 campaign from incumbent Prime Minister, Pakalitha Mosisili, who said the BNP’s founder, Lesotho Leabua Jonathan, was a “lackey of the British who turned a blind eye to his atrocities to undermine Lesotho’s independence.” He stated a vote for them would be tantamount to returning the country to the “dark era” of nationalist rule.

  “Chief Leabua, supported by the English, was not ready to accept defeat,” he said. “He declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution instead. Basotho entered a dark era in which their basic human rights were violated. A lot of people were killed, while some Basotho were literally buried alive in places like Lipeketheng at Hlotse in Leribe district. Those were the acts of the nationalists.”

  “Last year, we celebrated 50 years of Lesotho’s independence and we have now begun another journey. Like I said, we started the first journey on a wrong foot under a nationalist regime. We cannot afford to repeat that mistake by starting another 50-year journey under a government of nationalists,” he added.

  Chief Malapo of the modern BNP responded with a now internationally familiar, Trumpesque narrative, saying “Ntate Mosisili is a pathetic liar. He believes he can fool every Mosotho with his distorted information and propaganda.” He may as well have said “fake news.”

  I asked Wigmore and Banks if there was any financial support given by donation to any of the Lesotho political parties in the 2017 race but there was no reply.

  The BNP’s history, I discovered, was colourful, fractious, and deeply tied to Russia. After trips to the People's Republic of China and the Eastern Bloc in May 1983, Basotho Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan announced that China and the Soviet Union would be establishing embassies in the kingdom. The South African government responded angrily to the announcement and reminded Jonathan of a promise he made in 1965 not to allow an embassy of any communist country in Lesotho so long as he was Prime Minister. Vincent Makhele, the Basotho Minister of Foreign Affairs, visited Moscow in September 1984 for discussions with officials in the Soviet government. In a sign of increased KGB presence in Lesotho, staffing levels in the embassy in Maseru were increased and in May 1985 the Soviets appointed their first resident ambassador to Lesotho. In December 1985, Makhele returned to Moscow and signed a cultural and scientific co-operation agreement (along with a technical and economic agreement) with the Soviets. These inroads in Lesotho suffered a setback when Jonathan was overthrown during January 1986, in a military coup which was led by Justin Lekhanya. As a result, the Russian embassy in Maseru was closed in August 1992 and the Russian Ambassador to South Africa has also been allocated to cover Lesotho since. The two countries have maintained a history of bilateral agreement, however. Predominantly with Russia providing scholarships, including to senior government officials. In the summer of 2014, around the time of Banks’ group meeting with the king, Russia began to deliver humanitarian aid to Lesotho.

  Lesotho’s illegal mining operations are also an increasingly violent affair and, in March 2017, police arrested four people in connection with the massacre of fourteen illegal Basotho miners on Gauteng’s East Rand176. The bodies were found following other, unrelated shootings around illegal mine shafts near to Benoni, with six corpses found along the railway line and the rest on the banks of a stream nearby. Police believed this was a clear body dump and not where the killings took place. According to reports, the area had become the: “Epicentre of a battle between gangs for control of tonnes of precious metal in disused mine shafts.” In a briefing, the national police commissioner, Lt-Gen Khomotso Phahlane, revealed that four men — all of them Basotho nationals — had been arrested, three of them being caught on the run in Lesotho. “Several firearms‚ which we suspect may have been used in the killings‚ have been recovered wit
h those who were arrested in Lesotho. We are working with our Interpol counterparts to have them brought back to South Africa along with the weapons,” he said.

  One witness177 to the murders anonymously told reporters:“Zimbabweans, Malawians and Mozambicans were digging and they came up through the hole during the early evening with their gold rocks. The Basotho were waiting for them. They were armed and ready to shoot. When they came out the hole, the Basotho shot them, stole their gold and dumped their bodies by the railways.”

  One 2017 joint report between the South African government and the United Nations estimated that “Turf wars between international crime syndicates are behind the deaths of more than two hundred illegal miners murdered in the killing fields of South Africa’s mines over the past four years.” It was released before the Benoni murders.

  Ahead of the 2017 election, the Construction and Mine Workers Union accused diamond mines of coercing their workers into signing advance voters’ applications in violation of their rights178. They have lodged a joint call with the Transformation Resource Centre, asking the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to intervene and assure the miners were protected. In a strongly worded attack, they made plain it was a criminal offence to “force workers to provide the IEC false information about employment” or to “prohibit workers from voting” on Saturday the 3rd of June 2017. Tskioane Peshoane of the TRC accused the government of condoning the contravention of the electoral act by foreign companies. I asked Wigmore and Banks if they were aware of the Union’s concerns, whether it affected their own operations, and if they had any concerns of their own. There was no reply.

  Aside from mining – which includes, I discovered, the ownership of shares in a Niger uranium operation – and politics, Banks had also focused a lot of efforts on charity work in Lesotho, along with other projects. In 2013, a proposed microlending facility, was to be bankrolled by the British businessman179 to: “Enable Basotho women to diversify business interests and explore opportunities they could not pursue before” according to Thesele Maseribane, the Minister of Gender, Youth, Sports and Recreation. On signing the memorandum of understanding, Banks was apparently “committed to providing further funding to establish the financial institution behind the plans.” At the time, Lesotho was implementing a three hundred and sixty-million-dollar contract signed between the country’s Government and the United States Government through the Millennium Challenge Corporation – an independent US foreign aid agency which states it is: “Helping lead the fight against global poverty.” Another of Banks’s charities, Love Saves The Day, has been linked to suspected money laundering in Wigmore’s native Belize.

  As a foreign business opportunity with development funding flowing in and a host of measures taken by the government to make the country a more attractive investment prospect, it isn’t hard to grasp Bank’s broader interest in Lesotho, but how he got there might not be such a mystery.

  I was talking to a contact about all this and the discussion of Lesotho reminded them of a conversation a friend once had over dinner with Pryor. The friend – a former broadsheet correspondent – went on to explain “Pryor effectively told me that they work on elections in dodgy places, sometimes taking on work passed on from Lynton Crosby that was considered too sensitive for Crosby.” Sir Lynton Keith Crosby180, to give him his full name and title, is an Australian political strategist who has managed election campaigns for right-of-centre parties in several countries. Crosby has been described as a “master of the dark political arts” and “The Wizard of Oz,” and, in 2002, he was described as: “One of the most powerful and influential figures in the nation.” His most famous tactic, for political clients losing arguments, has been dubbed The Dead Cat Technique, which involves throwing something so horrible at winning opponents everything up until that point is instantly forgotten. Theresa May employed Crosby’s services in the snap election of 2017, in the middle of which not one but two terror attacks took place – one a bombing in Manchester and the second a vehicle enabled attack at London Bridge. May eventually suffered heavy losses in the final vote, losing her majority, but was able to mitigate this to some degree as other parties suspended campaigning in the wake of both attacks during the short campaign.

  With the Leave.EU crew running Lesotho campaigns and funding election activity in the UK at the same time – and having discovered the connection between them and May went beyond a “Conservative/UKIP” alliance logo on social media dark posts – I became certain more deceased felines were being kept on ice, ready to be thrown on the table.

  Fifteen:

  Faced with these undeniable connections between Trump, Brexit, Russia, and the far-right – including France’s Marine Le Pen, I made a very personal decision to go all in and see how far I could get. It was already looking bleak, of course. Alongside Russia were the alt-right and a monstrous disinformation network – shady collaboration incorporating the deployment of Wikileaks, other hacking operations, and psychometrics company Cambridge Analytica. And all of them were engaged in ongoing interference with Western democracy. The extent of this murky, cloak and dagger operation was, however, becoming increasingly easy to root out.

  On the 12th of January 2017, Arron Banks posted a picture of Andrew Wigmore in Mississippi. The caption read: “Andy over in the US this week with Gov. Bryant. & our good friends from Mississippi!” I knew this because an American researcher had contacted me via Twitter and set out some information which would have taken a lot longer to find otherwise. I call Wendy Siegelman the Queen of Charts, such is the quality of her work.

  In April 2008, then Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour welcomed a delegation headed by Russian Federation Senator Mikhail Margelov and the US-Russia Business Council (USRBC) President Eugene Lawson to Jackson181. USRBC is a trade association based in Washington, DC, which represents around three-hundred companies with operations in the Russian market. The Council’s mission, it says, is to expand the US-Russian commercial relationship and lobby for an economic environment in which businesses can succeed in a “challenging Russian market.” The council also provides “significant business development, dispute resolution, government relations, and market intelligence services.” The membership is cartel-like, being made up of major interests such as Alfa-Bank, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Ford, LUKOIL, Procter & Gamble, along with other well-known businesses, banks, law firms, and accountants. A career Foreign Service Officer, Daniel Russell was appointed CEO in 2013. He had served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for relations with Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus and for international security and arms control issues in the US State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. He also held the role of Chief of Staff to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, William Burns, from 2008 to 2009; as Deputy Chief of Mission in Moscow from 2005 to 2008; and as Deputy Chief of Mission in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from 2000 to 2003. With a CV like that, it was far from a flight of fancy to believe Russell may have been a spy.

  At the time the delegation visited Barbour, a Russian investment by SeverCorr was in its first phase in the state and had brought four-hundred-and-fifty high-paying new jobs to Mississippi. The salaries were nearly ninety thousand dollars on average, compared to the state's median income of under forty thousand, according to reports. Mississippi listed over five billion dollars of exports in 2007 and the state's exportation to Russia alone grew fifty-two percent between 2004 and 2007. Over that period, many of the sectors the state government had been targeting for growth benefitted from the increase – for example, non-traditional Mississippi exports of computers and electronic products skyrocketed by more than five-thousand percent and Governor Barbour made a public statement that Mississippi looked “forward to a long and thriving relationship with Russia.”

  At a delegation luncheon sponsored by SeverCorr, said to have been arranged to “enable state business leaders to take a closer look at Russia economically and politically,” USRBC’s President,
Eugene Lawson, underscored the idea SeverCorr's investment in Mississippi should send a signal to other Russian companies – and the Russian government – that the US was open to (and welcomed) foreign investment. As Lawson pointed out, not one Russian investment in the US had been turned down by the US foreign investment review process, which is conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Senator Margelov, meanwhile, emphasised the importance of mutual cooperation in his own remarks, suggesting the two countries put aside the “negative rhetoric” which had emerged in Duma elections and that year's US presidential campaign which saw Barack Obama enter the White House, ousting the Republicans. Margelov suggested the US needed to take advantage of “a new generation coming of age in Russia that is not bound by Cold War stereotypes.” He also asserted: “Today's global realities demand pragmatism and an “equal partnership” between the US and Russia.”

  Margelov had worked as an interpreter in the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union182. He also taught Arabic at the Higher School of the K.G.B and was Senior Editor in the Arab section of the TASS News Agency. He was a spy. Between 1990 and 1995, he was employed by a number of US consulting companies dealing with investment projects and, in 1995, became project director for the publicity campaign of Grigory Yavlinsky and the Yabloko party. In 1996, he was the chief co-ordinator for advertising in President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign, after which he went on to head the President's public relations department and was later a director of the Russian Information Centre (Rosinformcentr), a government agency covering events in the Northern Caucasus. From May 1998 to September 1999, he held a managerial position at RIA Novosti news agency, then spent January to March 2000 as a consultant to Vladimir Putin's Electoral Headquarters, in charge of contacts with foreign media. In 2009 Canada refused an entry visa for Margelov, by then the Kremlin’s special representative to Africa. The reason, according to Canadian sources183, was Margelov’s connection to the Soviet intelligence services.