A host of Western government officials, intelligence agents, and assets have been directly involved in intimate collaboration with Nazi groups
(MPN) -- A MintPress investigation has found that a host of Western government officials, intelligence agents and assets have been directly involved in intimate collaboration with Nazi groups and individuals since at least 2014. This has included involvement in creating and operating the Nazi-run kill list in Ukraine, which MintPress revealed recently.
While Western media have belatedly been forced to concede that there are Nazi influences in Ukraine, many journalists have insisted that the visible fascist patches on uniforms are only there to troll Russians and that they are insignificant and a gift to Russian propaganda. Still, other journalists admit to asking Ukrainian service members to cover up their Nazi symbols. Yet, as we shall see, this collaboration goes much further.
Perhaps a good place to start is with the ongoing role of a key intelligence-linked official who has taken on a propaganda role on behalf of Ukraine since the launch in February 2022 of what the Russian government calls its “Special Military Operation.” Meet Cormac Smith, a member of the first Irish bobsleigh team to qualify for the Winter Olympics in 1992. He has appeared in scores of news reports passing on Western propaganda talking points about the role of Russia in Ukraine. But who is Smith working for?
According to his own account, he is a “private citizen” supporting “Ukraine/global freedom.” Yet until December 2018, he was the deputy director of communications for the British Cabinet Office – the official body responsible for supporting the prime minister. He was also previously attached to the UK Foreign Office as the strategic communications advisor to the foreign minister of Ukraine.
Last May, The Irish Independent claimed that Smith is “an unlikely key player in the information war,” who “estimates he has given about 100 TV, radio and print interviews with the international media in the past few months to tell Kyiv’s side of the story.” Smith has a nice line in outrageous propaganda gambits, claiming that Russians are the actual Nazis and that they murder, rape and pillage, including the rape of children.
As it turns out, the source of many of the allegations of rape – including multiple alleged cases of rape to death of children – was the Ukraine parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova. Her evidence was alleged to be a helpline set up to report allegations of human rights abuses. Her tales were too much even for the Ukrainian government, which dismissed her at the end of May 2022.
Last year, it was comprehensively demonstrated that her stories had little evidential basis. However, even before this, she had already reportedly admitted to “promoting fake news to persuade Western countries to send more arms and aid.” Smith nonetheless carried on making vague allegations of rape (including of children) for months afterward. Naturally, no evidence was ever cited. He repeated the rape allegation almost monthly between April 2022 and January 2023. (In 2022: May, August, September, October, November, and in 2023: January, April, May).
In April 2022, he concluded a tweet about the alleged rapes of “2 million women of all ages” with the line: “Russians are fucking animals, there is no other Russia, they must be defeated.”
Three weeks earlier, Smith asked, “Is there any difference between” Russian tank crews in Mariupol and “Nazi SS murderers who put Jews in the gas chambers.”
In December, he paraded claims that “Russians are much worse than Nazis.”
Of course, Smith denies Maidan was a U.S.-backed coup, that NATO expansion did not cause the Russian intervention and that Ukraine “is not full of Nazis” integrated into the military, police and intelligence services. Thus, we find him at the forefront of Nazi apologism. But who is he working for?
According to his own account, “Since Moscow began threatening a full invasion, he has been in daily contact with former Ukrainian colleagues and friends.” As he told The Irish Independent:
‘I was out there in December [2021] visiting and they said it would be really helpful if you can help as a commentator because you really understand us,’ he says. ‘This is also an information war and I am trying to make a small contribution. Russia is a country that lies on an industrial scale, and we were trying to get people to see that for years, but it’s only now that the scales are falling from people’s eyes.’”
Yet in September 2022, he tweeted that he had “six years experience of Ukraine, including two years working at the heart of her government.” This suggests that his self-employed role has involved significant work on Ukraine for an unknown client.
Perhaps of more relevance to his actual role is the latter part of that admission: his two years in Ukraine. What was he doing there, and for whom did he work? It turns out that he was a British government agent. Perhaps he still is. Smith joined the U.K. Cabinet Office in April 2016. He gave this account on his LinkedIn page in 2020:
After three months at the Cabinet Office I was asked to travel to Ukraine to lend communication expertise to the country’s government as strategic communication advisor to their foreign minister. I was attached to the British Embassy in Kyiv and became the first foreigner to be embedded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Ukraine.”
“Over 18 months I was credited with introducing positive changes to…how the MFA communicated, not just in Kyiv but across the globe. I also worked with the Ministries of Health, Finance, Education & Science and the Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration; as well as advising both the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and the NATO mission in Kyiv on crisis communication.”
What is the NSCT? At that point, the unit had just been set up and focused much of its efforts on influencing the public on the alleged Russian poisoning of the defector Sergei Skripal. Smith wrote in his now deleted résumé that “by the end of the Summer [of 2018], the NSCT had played a pivotal role in a ‘hands down’ victory over the Kremlin in the information war.” It is instructive to learn from this his key role in coordinating the lies and misinformation circulated by the British state in that period.
The NSCT was funded by the U.K. Foreign Office’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) and, as can be seen in documents published by the Foreign Office, the identity of the lead agency (indeed even the “type” of agency) was redacted on “security” grounds. The only agencies liable to redact in these circumstances are intelligence agencies, suggesting that it was MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency. NSCT is thus revealed as a potential MI6-directed op.
