Apologies for very long post. I think its naive to assume that US doesnt exert that kind of foreign interference on UK.
Summary of extended article:
CIA protected informants heading up US funded NGOs in UK providing CIA with information about when UK PM (Gordon Brown) intends to announce election - weeks ahead of time. US funded media outlets in UK though 'National Endowment for Democracy' to create media campaigns to undermine Labour candidates.
Creating operations to install pro American leadership in UK political parties.
Exercpts from Article:
One example of covert US influence -
US interfere in our democracy to ensure we dont elect left wing politicians who are antiwar and anti imperalist.
June 2019, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited the UK and was recorded saying privately:
'It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.'
US have made concerted efforts to ensure that the UK has never had a prime minister that was not signed up to the American imperial project.
The British-American Project (BAP), which describes itself as “a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds and political views.”
BAP was created in the early 1980s when Labour was headed by Michael Foot, the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader to emerge since World War II. The BAP’s aim was to push British progressives into a pro-American political position at a time when the CIA was worried about the strength of the Labour left and its “anti-American” views.
Many Labour figures who became outspoken critics of Corbyn’s leadership from 2015 to 2020 were also involved in the BAP. Corbyn was the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader since Foot resigned in 1983.
Declassified files from the CIA show how concerned the intelligence agency then was by the left turn in Labour. The BBC noted “the deep level of concern inside the CIA about the strength of the Left within Labour in the early 1980s, a political force which the agency regarded as anti-American.”
The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that “a Labor majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests.” Foot’s 1983 election manifesto questioned “the programme for establishing American-controlled Cruise missiles on our soil” and noted that a new European security pact should end with the “phasing out” of NATO.
The BAP’s own official history notes that “the traditional British left-wing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues” in the period, adding “this was the era of Michael Foot’s leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament.”
Historian Stephen Dorril has written that Eugene Rostow, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the US arms control and disarmament agency, was in 1982 “concerned about the growing unilateralist movement” and “helped initiate a . . . propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND.” Foot was a founder and strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), while Corbyn has been a member of the peace group since he was fifteen and was vice-chair when he became Labour Party leader.
The US neutralization campaign, which was leaked to the Washington Post, “would take three forms,” Dorril continued: mobilizing public opinion, working within the churches, and a “dirty tricks” operation against the peace groups. William Casey, then head of the CIA, met with the US Information Agency to organize the propaganda campaign in Europe.
But in 1985, with Foot defeated and the BAP established, the CIA expressed concern that the Labour Party was still “in the hands of urban leftists given to ideological extremes.”
The CIA made its 1980s files about Labour available online in 2017, soon after Corbyn was elected leader. They were extensively covered by the British media and contained two specific references to Corbyn, who was a Labour MP at the time.
The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that ‘a Labor majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests.’
The National Endowment for Democracy —
working in the UK, funding media groups — something that had picked up around 2015, the year Corbyn was first elected leader of the Labour Party. A nonprofit corporation funded by the US Congress, it had plowed over £2.6 million into seven British independent-media groups in the five years up to 2020.
The NED was “created . . . to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,” the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to “support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries.”
the NED was also working in the UK, funding media groups — something that had picked up around 2015, the year Corbyn was first elected leader of the Labour Party.
Since the end of the Cold War, the NED had grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to the creation of the NED in the 1980s, remarked in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” But the NED has traditionally focused on Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
The NED created in 1983 by Reagan funded three British media outlets and four UK press freedom groups.
This was a time of embarrassing scandals for the CIA. A Washington Post article soon noted, “The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete.”
The NED was meant to defend against these scandals by putting certain programs out into the open. “The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy,” the Washington Post continued. “Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert.”
CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, who served in the agency in the 1960s, commented in 1995:
Nowadays, instead of having just the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process secretly by inserting money here and instructions there and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy.
John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, said that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations. “In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from propagandizing the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries — the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” he said.
“The National Endowment for Democracy, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, countless Washington-area ‘think tanks,’ and Radio/TV Martí, are the vehicles for that propaganda,” he added, referring to the US broadcaster that transmits to Cuba.
Kiriakou, who served in the agency’s core Directorate of Operations, continued:
And what better way to spread that propaganda than to funnel money to “friendly” outlets in “friendly countries”? The CIA’s propaganda efforts throughout history have been shameless. But now that they’re not legally relegated to just Russia and China, the whole world is a target.
The Index on Censorship, the UK’s foremost free-expression group, which monitors threats to free speech and publishes censored writers, received £603,257 from the NED in 2016–2021, according to its Charity Commission accounts.
Index’s chief executive, the former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, was appointed in June 2020 — six months after losing her seat in Parliament. A US diplomatic cable, published by WikiLeaks in 2010, named Smeeth as a “strictly protect” informant for the US embassy in London.
The cable — written in 2009 by US deputy chief of mission in London, Richard LeBaron — noted, “Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that [prime minister Gordon] Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12.”
The cable continued that “a despondent Smeeth said” Brown had to abandon his election plan after a drop in Labour’s poll numbers following a media scandal. LeBaron added, “This information has not been reported in the press.” The cable was classified as “confidential” and “not for foreign eyes.”
One of the founders of Index in 1972, the poet Stephen Spender, had earlier resigned as editor of Encounter magazine when it was exposed as being funded by the CIA. Spender said he was unaware of the funding arrangements.
John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told me that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations.
Spender then founded Index and quickly solicited a “substantial grant” from the Ford Foundation, which Frances Stonor Saunders states in her award-winning work The Cultural Cold War acted as a conduit for CIA funds in the period. Saunders told me it was “widely known at the time the Ford Foundation was a witting partner of the CIA.” In her book, Saunders wrote, “The foundation’s archives reveal a raft of joint projects.”
This is how it works.