How Politicians Smear The World, Vol. 1: The Contract
As the scandal involving British spying on journalists deepens, we're learning more about connections to earlier scandals in the U.S. and beyond. Part One in a Series
In England, the order came from high above. Start with the contract. In the fall of 2023, a “global advisory” firm called APCO was contacted by a party think tank called Labour Together. They were asked to assemble a package of offensive information operations against journalists who reported on misdeeds of Labour figures like future Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
Racket just received the contract, which leaves no doubt future cabinet minister Josh Simons was the point man:
Simons, inexplicably not yet fired, signed off on a program of reputational thuggery against the Sunday Times (in the persons of Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke), future The Fraud author and Racket contributor Paul Holden, and me. Though only Holden and I were named, others eventually joined the unhappy list.
Simons first called the idea that he’d investigated journalists “nonsense” and said he was merely looking at a “suspected illegal hack,” but the contract clearly shows other goals. It lays out use of “human intelligence investigation (HUMINT)” (in English, deploying human beings to infiltrate our lives), along with “financial investigation” using “forensic accounting,” plus “media packaging” and scariest of all, “stakeholder outreach.”
“‘Stakeholder outreach’ is messing with clients, donors, advertisers,” explained one source. “Going after your business, your friends, your support network.”
Simons, who still refuses to answer queries, wasn’t just a name on a letter. He was involved in the process, asking APCO for updates, even contributing to research (in a maladroit way, as it turned out). For instance, in November, 2023, after the deal kicked in, he wrote a letter to APCO responding to early research into Holden:
APCO’s work produced immediate dividends, though the techniques rolled out against future reports were eccentric, if not downright crazy.
Labour Together was angry about revelations that McSweeney had failed to declare £730,000 in donations, which had already been reported by the Sunday Times. By January 31st, Holden came out with a story here on Racket showing that a Labour-affiliated “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, had falsely told the IRS it was a charity.
Holden then began work on a new story for the Telegraph about Labour Together’s financial misdeeds. On February 6th, as he neared publication, he sent a right-of-reply letter to Labour Together, asking for comment on difficult questions, as all good reporters do. The group apparently didn’t view his letter on behalf of the Telegraph as ethical journalism.
“I think they went mad at that point,” is how Holden characterized things.
Two days later, on the 8th of February, 2024, three things happened.
First, Holden was contacted by an obscure reporter who falsely represented himself as working on a story for the site Open Democracy. “I thought it was someone genuinely interested in my research,” he said. “But the questions were more and more about the scope of my work… I got creeped out and ended the call.”
Within hours after, Holden received (as previously reported) a letter from Guardian editor Pippa Crerar, informing him that he was at the center of a probe by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of Britain’s GCHQ, analogous to the American NSA.
In the letter, Crerar and the Guardian dubiously claimed the NCSC was “investigating” Holden. Labour Together by then had indeed passed information from the APCO investigation to the spy agency, but it’s unclear whether they’d opened a probe or had just passively received a packet from the think tank.
At roughly the same time he was receiving the Guardian letter — certainly the same day — the Telegraph received a letter from Mishcon de Reya, Keir Starmer’s old law firm. The legal heavyweights told the paper that if they published Holden’s piece, they’d be in furtherance of a Russian hack-and-leak scheme, using information that would “relate to a sensitive ongoing investigation by the UK intelligence services into a hack of the Electoral Commission.”
In an act Holden calls “despicable,” the Telegraph then switched out his piece for an un-bylined article titled, “Labour Together failed to declare £700k in donations amid anti-Semitism fears.” The piece preposterously claimed McSweeney — the longtime right hand of Keir Starmer — failed to comply with electoral law out of concern for the safety of a Jewish donor:
Holden, commenting on the Telegraph running “that abomination” of a story, noted it “made no sense to include a cockamamie antisemitism angle,” because “the biggest donor to Labour Together, whose donations weren’t declared, is Martin Taylor, who is not Jewish.”
The lunacies were just beginning.
APCO ended up producing at least one 58-page report about the targeted reporters that included information about Pogrund, Holden, me, Andrew Feinstein, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, and John McEvoy of Declassified UK. The report was packed with outrageous, often ridiculous misinformation. In the cases of Holden and Feinstein, the report not only claimed the two had had extensive Russian links, but were in an “ANC intelligence unit”!
Holden greeted the last news with astonishment.
“What absolute morons!” he said. “I’ve investigated multiple sitting ANC politicians and MPs for corruption, including two presidents,” citing two books: Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything and Zondo at Your Fingertips.
A bizarre side note to all of this is that in the middle of this madness, Feinstein announced that he planned to run for Starmer’s MP seat. That made this spying campaign not just a matter of messing with journalists, and elevated it to the level of political dirty tricks. This issue has gotten almost no play. “Absolutely,” says Feinstein. “The media has largely ignored that.”
By that time, as Pogrund just explained on the Times podcast “The State of It,” the Sunday Times reporter had already begun to be asked about a variety of bizarre rumors that were “carbon copies” of the allegations in the report, which the Times now possesses. In one case, within 24 hours of the APCO report’s publication, Pogrund said he received a query from a “senior” Labour figure asking about “rumors” that he was “the beneficiary, in sourcing terms, of a person characterized as a Russian asset.”
Some of the other reporters spoke of losing work around that time, but none described oddities that fit the “stakeholder engagement” description in the same way that Pogrund and Holden could.
Overshadowed today by news about Prince Andrew’s arrest over ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the Labour-spying story in England has already reached the stage of being spoofed in Private Eye, which likely means heads will soon roll. Private Eye joined The New World and Racket as the only outlets to point out the agonizing in-house development at the Sunday Times. The paper’s Political Editor is Caroline Wheeler, married to former Times writer Tom Harper, who now runs media relations at APCO — the company that just reputation-bombed her newsroom. “That aggression,” joked one Lebowski-literate British source, “will not stand, man.”
A “cabinet inquiry” has already been launched into the misbehavior of Starmer’s cabinet in this affair, a move that instantly became the source of much hilarity in the UK press. MPs from all sides have called for resignations and other action:
Making all of this more comic is the fact that APCO, and Harper, have themselves done work for wealthy Russians. In one case, APCO worked on reputation management for the daughter of a Russian-Israeli oligarch after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like many prominent smear-artist firms that make a living accusing people of ties to Russians, it has ties to Russians.
Some of the personnel APCO chose to do its research on people like Holden, moreover, were veterans of that broader Russia-smear game, which is where the story gets more interesting for Americans.
This mess connects to a coiffed British ex-spy who wears a “signature James Bond Omega watch,” and who’s made an apparently unkillable career of launching false allegations of Russia ties against people all over the world. The APCO story is at most a half-degree of separation from Christopher Steele, now somehow back in the news despite achieving great fame as perhaps the wrongest source in journalism history. He thrived by helping pioneer the concoct-and-smear playbook used by APCO:
