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A more skeptical academic than Paul McKeigue might have wondered if the emails flooding his inbox from “Ivan,” a supposed Russian spy, were too good to be true.
Ivan seemed to share many of McKeigue’s personal obsessions, in particular his desire to discredit investigators collecting evidence of war crimes committed in Syria. And he claimed to have access to both cash and secret intelligence.
The Edinburgh professor of genetics, who spends much of his private time pursuing fringe theories claiming that attacks on civilians are organized to smear Bashar al-Assad’s government, enthusiastically immersed himself in his new correspondence.
For three months he filled hundreds of pages with speculation, even accusing journalists, investigators and diplomats of working as conduits for Western intelligence agencies. He revealed the identity of a confidential source and shared information she gave him.
But McKeigue wasn’t writing to a Russian spy, not even a man named Ivan. The email account was controlled by a group of staff from one of the organizations it hoped to discredit, who say they were covered up due to concerns about the tactics McKeigue and his allies were prepared to deploy in an effort to defend the already Syrian government. your Russian country. allies.
“We never thought it would go this far. He accepted the communication immediately without making any control, ”said Nerma Jelacic, former Observer journalist who now works at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) and played a key role in the operation.
“In the end, there were about 500 pages of email correspondence from December 1 through March,” he says, in his first full account of the action.
The CIJA collects documentary evidence from Syria so that war criminals can be held legally responsible for the atrocities. His work has already been used in a landmark trial in Germany, the first time Syrian officials have faced charges of state-sponsored torture.
It appears to have also irritated McKeigue, who is preparing a report on the group with ideological allies, and was seeking information that could discredit the CIJA.
“We knew they were directing their attention to us,” Jelacic said. “In part, we wanted to see what security risk they might pose to the people who work for us in terms of what they might reveal.”
They were stunned both by his willingness to interact with a suspected Russian agent and by the information he shared.
Among the most damaging claims McKeigue made was that a Russian diplomat at the Geneva embassy, First Secretary Sergey Krutskikh, was communicating with members of the “Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and the Media” about encrypted systems.
It is an alliance of far-left academics and researchers who claim that Western journalists, NGOs and others act on behalf of the CIA and MI6 to undermine the Syrian government, including false evidence of civilian deaths and chemical attacks.
It includes controversial Bristol University professor David Miller, who has been accused of anti-Semitism by his own students, a claim he denies, and blogger Vanessa Beeley, who has frequently visited Syria on government-sponsored trips.
Members of the group questioned the veracity of the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and claimed that Russia was accused of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
They were also part of a year-long public campaign against the White Helmets, a civilian rescue organization that angered pro-Syrian and Russian factions by filming atrocities while trying to save lives and then sharing the footage.
The organization’s founder, James Le Mesurier, died in an apparent suicide in 2019 amid intense public pressure, which included smears not only about the group’s work, but also about its finances and personal life. The CIJA feared it could face a similar attack.
“Why did we do it? We had seen what happened to James Le Mesurier, ”said Jelacic. “We knew they would not only go after the organization, but the leader, Bill Wiley, and say, ‘He’s a spy. It is corrupt ‘”.
Throughout the correspondence, McKeigue sought personal information about the finances of Wiley and CIJA, after the European Anti-Fraud Office, Olaf, raised questions about their accounting. None of this affects the credibility of the file it has compiled and the CIJA defends its financial management.
“From what you now know about Wiley,” he asked Ivan in an email, “do you think he might have some kind of drug problem (like cocaine)? This is just wild speculation on my part, but it could explain some of his irrational and unpredictable behavior. “
For Jelacic, who fled the former Yugoslavia as a teenager with his family during the war, the attempts by McKeigue and the Task Force to question what is happening in Syria bring back memories of far-left campaigns to deny the genocide in Bosnia.
“What is different is that it is a level of misinformation never seen before. The worrying thing is that it is tolerated, ”he said.
“Even in mainstream academic circles, this misinformation and denial is misrepresented as free speech and expression … We have a moral duty to face review and denial.”
McKeigue told the Observer that the sting had been a “clever deception operation”, and that he could have used “cautious language” had he known the exchanges would be made public. When asked about claims of contact with a Russian diplomat, he declined to comment directly, except to hint that he may have exaggerated in some exchanges.
“The people on the other side of this operation got me to reveal information provided by others that was not meant to be shared, along with other information that may have been embellished,” he said. “This was a failure on my part for which I accept responsibility and have apologized to those concerned.”
The professor has also denied doing anything wrong or illegal, saying he kept an open mind about who he was communicating with.
In its own statement, the University of Edinburgh told the Observer: “The actions referred to in the media reports were carried out in the capacity of Paul McKeigue as a private citizen, not as an employee of the university. We respect the rights of staff to have interests outside their functions within the institution. However, if we receive complaints about someone’s conduct that we believe is damaging to our reputation, then we will consider whether an investigation is required and take appropriate action. “
