1 Summary

• During the last few months, the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media was preparing a briefing note focusing on the publicly-funded business activities of James Le Mesurier. A near-final draft was ready when his death in Istanbul was announced on 11 November 2019. We have decided to publish it, with minimal updating, as the material is relevant both to understanding the role of the UK government in the Syrian conflict and also to the investigation of Le Mesurier’s death.
• Le Mesurier was founder of three companies named “Mayday Rescue”: Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai (2014), Mayday Search and Rescue Training and Consultancy Services Limited in Turkey (2014) and Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation in the Netherlands (2015). No accounts are available for any of these companies.
• After providing misleading answers to questions submitted under the Freedom of Information Act, the FCO has admitted that its payments to “Mayday Rescue” for support of the White Helmets – £43 million from 2015 to 2018 – were made not to Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation but to the commercial company Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai.
• Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation is not registered as a charitable organisation (Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling) and as it is “without commercial enterprise” it does not have to file accounts. In the Netherlands a Stichting is commonly used as a vehicle to disburse overseas investment income to undisclosed beneficiaries while minimizing tax liability.
• From September 2016 to February 2018, while Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation was receiving payments from the Dutch Foreign Ministry, the Stichting complied with requirements for governance and transparency by appointing a Secretary and Treasurer. In April 2017 Le Mesurier founded what appears to have been a dummy company named R3Covery BV based in Amsterdam. This company has failed to comply with the legal requirement to file accounts. A possible intended or actual use for this company was to tunnel money out of the Stichting.
• In January 2019 Le Mesurier registered My Zahara Limited as a dormant company in northern England. As the address belongs to a company formation agent that specializes in business tax management and compliance with money laundering regulations, it is likely that the intended use of this company was to repatriate money from Le Mesurier’s overseas companies.
• OPCW inspectors have told us that during the investigations of alleged chemical attacks in opposition-held territory conducted by the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) from 2015 onwards, Le Mesurier worked closely with Len Phillips, the leader of FFM Team Alpha, to select White Helmets as “witnesses” for interview by the investigation team in Turkey. We have set out elsewhere evidence that these alleged chemical attacks were staged, and that in at least three of these incidents the staging entailed mass murder of civilian captives. As an experienced military intelligence officer, Le Mesurier should have been able to assess this evidence.
• Le Mesurier’s activities during the final months of his life indicate that he was following (and possibly coordinating) efforts to smear and silence members of the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media. It is likely that by the end of October 2019 Le Mesurier was aware that both the business activities of Mayday Rescue and his connection with the increasingly controversial OPCW investigation of the Douma incident were coming under close scrutiny.

2 Biography

As links to many original sources such as a ZoomInfo biography of Le Mesurier have recently been deleted, reconstruction of his biography is based partly on published articles that cited these original sources: * Vanessa Beeley 23 October 2015, Whitney Webb 31 July 2017, Tim Hayward 20 December 2017, Vanessa Beeley and Whitney Webb 27 August 2018, Vanessa Beeley 2 December 2019.

• 1971: year of birth, named James Gustaf Edward Le Mesurier
• September 1990: 2nd Lt. (on probation) Undergraduate Cadetships
• August 1996: Captain (536239) in Royal Green Jackets, British Army.
• 1998 : seconded to the Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina under Carlos Westendorp, before being sent to Kosovo in the summer of 1999 after the deployment of KFOR (the NATO-led Kosovo Force).
• July 1999 – 2000: appointed Intelligence Coordinator for Pristina City, acting as liaison officer between intelligence officers of different national contingents in KFOR. A correction dated 3 August 2018 to an article in The Guardian confirmed this, stating that Le Mesurier “held a military intelligence post while on peacekeeping operations in the Balkans in 1999 for one year”.
• June 2000: still recorded as Captain in Royal Green Jackets, retires and is appointed to Reserve of Officers. There is no record of an appointment to the Intelligence Corps in the official British government source, The Gazette.
• January 2001 – February 2002: Deputy Head of the Advisory Unit on Security and Justice in the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). In this position, Le Mesurier acted as political advisor to the UN Police Commissioner and represented the Special Representative on civil-military-police coordination bodies.
• February 2002 – July 2003: advisor on economic crime with the EU Mission in Kosovo, supporting units countering money laundering, terrorism, smuggling, anti-corruption and financial disclosure.
• 2003: posted to Jerusalem where he “worked on implementing the Ramallah Agreement”
• 2005: Vice President for Special Projects at the Dubai-based security firm Olive Group, and Special advisor to Iraqi Minister of Interior.
• 2006-2010: Senior Principal at the security company Good Harbor Consulting, based in Abu Dhabi, where his work included training a gas field protection force.
• 2011-2014: worked with the former diplomat Alistair Harris at ARK. Ark-Lebanon had been founded in 2009 in Beirut, and ARK FZC was registered in Dubai in 2011.

3 Establishment of the White Helmets

Following a meeting in March 2013 in Istanbul with the Syrian National Council and the Qatari Red Crescent. With $300,000 in seed money from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom, Le Mesurier worked with the Turkish disaster response team AKUT to set up a seven-day course to train and equip a 25-person rescue team, recruited by the SNC, for duty in opposition-held areas of Syria. The Syrian National Council made available two Syrian activists — Raed Saleh and Farouq Habib — to assist Le Mesurier in this. In a speech delivered in Lisbon on 26 June 2015 (recording now deleted), Le Mesurier cited a study by the market research agency GfK Verein showing that in fragile states security forces have some of the lowest levels of public trust, and that professions with the highest level of public trust are firefighters, paramedics, rescue workers and other similar types of first responders.

The White Helmets brand first appeared in August 2014 with the registration of the domain name whitehelmets.org by Alison Weiner of Purpose Inc., a communications agency based in Brooklyn, New York. UK government support for the White Helmets since 2017 has been provided under the Syria Resilience Programme of the Conflict Security and Stability Fund (CSSF). In a Summary of this programme dated 18 July 2017 the FCO reveals some of the UK government’s objectives of this support. The Programme Summary notes that the White Helmets “provide an invaluable reporting and advocacy role”, which “has provided confidence to statements made by UK and other international leaders made in condemnation of Russian actions”. Metadata show that the document was saved by Amanda Harris, manager of the Joint Programme Hub of the CSSF.

4 Companies controlled by James Le Mesurier and his associates

5 Government funding of Mayday Rescue

An archived version of the the mayday.org website shows the donors as:

• UK – Conflict Security and Stability Fund
• Kingdom of Denmark – Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Kingdom of The Netherlands – Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Germany – Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Financial Tracking Services database hosted by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs shows funding of $607,311 during 2019 to “Mayday Rescue Foundation” from the French government.

A Review Memorandum from the Department for Stabilisation and Humanitarian Aid of the Dutch goverment dated January 2015 lists payments from other governments up to that time: US $6 million, UK £10.3 million, Denmark $4.5 million, and Japan $0.55 million. FCO expenditure records show payments totalling £43 million between May 2015 and October 2018. The Danish ministry of Foreign Affairs lists DKK 60 million (£7.2 million) to “White Helmets” beginning in 2016. The Evaluation report of the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported in September 2018 that the Netherlands government had contributed almost €10 million to Mayday. US funding for the White Helmets is provided through a US-based company Chemonics.

6 Role of Le Mesurier in providing evidence to the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Turkey

From 2015 to 2018, FFM Team Alpha undertook investigations of alleged chemical attacks in opposition-held territory based on material gathered from opposition-linked NGOs in Turkey. It is clear that since 2015 these FFM investigations relied on White Helmets as witnesses and providers of samples and alleged munitions, though the FFM reports sometimes attributed this to other NGOs such as the Chemical Violations Documentation Centre in Brussels or the Syrian Institute for Justice. We have been informed by OPCW inspectors that during these investigations in Turkey Le Mesurier worked closely with Len Phillips, the leader of FFM Team Alpha, to select White Helmets as “witnesses” for interview by the FFM team. We have reported also that Phillips worked closely with his successor as leader of FFM Team Alpha, Sami Barrek, on the preparation of the interim and final Reports of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident. Le Mesurier’s role in providing purported witnesses for the FFM indicates that that he was closely involved in managing the FFM investigations and raises the possibility that he was involved in planning these incidents.

Of the alleged chemical attacks investigated by FFM Team Alpha, three were associated with civilian fatalities that were documented by images: six members of the Taleb family in Sarmin (2015), some 70 civilians in Khan Sheikhoun (2017), and at least 35 civilians in Douma (2018). In each of these incidents people dressed as White Helmets and endorsed by the leadership of that organization had a key role as purported first responders. We have reviewed elsewhere evidence that these incidents were staged and that the victims were massacred captives. The clearest evidence that the White Helmets were actively involved in managing a massacre of civilians is from the Khan Sheikhoun incident on 4 April 2017, where a Syrian jet was alleged to have dropped a sarin-containing munition on the town causing the deaths of at least 70 people. The Joint Investigative Mechanism’s subsequent investigation of this incident reported that a flight map (presumably provided by the US military) “indicated that the closest to Khan Shaykhun that the [Syrian] aircraft had flown had been approximately 5 km away”, effectively ruling out an airstrike as the explanation for the incident. The only possible alternative is that the Khan Sheikhoun incident was organized on the ground, and this must have required the active involvement of the White Helmets. Although the White Helmets are famous for videoing their activities, there were no images of a search and rescue operation from the Khan Sheikhoun incident. The first images of the incident were recorded from about 7 am onwards, showing victims being hosed down by the White Helmets outside their base in a cave complex near the town. Later they were seen laid out in morgues in the town. Images of the children who were laid out in morgues showed that several had recent head injuries. In at least two cases by arranging images in temporal sequence and matching identities it was possible to establish that they had received these head injuries after the time they were purportedly rescued by the White Helmets.

How much Le Mesurier knew about the planning of this incident as a managed massacre, and the role of the White Helmets in carrying it out, we do not know. It is however reasonable to state that as an experienced intelligence officer, he should have been able to assess the reliability of the testimony of the White Helmet witnesses that he selected to be interviewed by the FFM.

7 Role of Le Mesurier in media operations against critics of the White Helmets

From late 2016 reports from Syria by Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett began casting doubt on the role of the White Helmets. In April 2017 a counter-attack against these critics was initiated by Chris York of the Huffington Post. Before then, York had written only a few brief articles about the Syrian conflict, from a neutral standpoint. York’s first appearance as a journalist, describing himself as “overqualified”, had been on 24 October 2011 as the author of a HuffPost article reporting how he had been denied entry to Palestine six days earlier. His LinkedIn profile gives no details of his curriculum vitae before 2012. On 6 April 2017, two days after the alleged chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, he posted an article that denounced “‘false flag’ accusations” as “totally wrong” and cited a purported fact-check of an article by Vanessa Beeley that had commented adversely on Le Mesurier and the White Helmets. In response to a question from us, York has stated that he had no contact with James Le Mesurier or Emma Winberg before writing this article, and that he met Emma Winberg only in March 2018. In October 2017 York attended an event in London at which Beeley spoke.

On 18 December 2017 an article in The Guardian by Olivia Solon denounced Beeley, Bartlett and others who had suggested that the White Helmets were an information operation, describing them as a “network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”. This was followed two days later by a report from the Syria Campaign that described Beeley as “at the heart of this Russia-backed disinformation campaign” and quoted a study of Twitter conversations commissioned from the social media analytics firm Graphika:

The social media activity criticizing the White Helmets looks similar to other disinformation campaigns we have analysed and bears some of the same indications of coordination, and a number of the specific accounts attacking the White Helmets have played a role in other specifically Russian disinformation campaigns as well.

In response, the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media posted its first public statement, citing the Syria Resilience CSSF Programme Summary, and arguing that this document provided “grounds for considering the White Helmets as part of a US/UK information operation designed to underpin regime change in Syria”. This brief post by what was at the time an obscure group of academics was followed by a stream of online flak directed at members of the Working Group. In this onslaught George Monbiot of The Guardian and Idrees Ahmad of Stirling University appeared to have leading roles, apparently as triggers for a larger set of mostly anonymous accounts that piled in against their targets. From February to April 2018, hit pieces on the Working Group were published by Brian Whitaker on his blog, by York in the Huffington Post, and in The Times at the instigation of Oliver Kamm.

A report dated June 2018 written by four students at the Central European University in Budapest and posted by Bellingcat reveals that Le Mesurier had been studying closely the media activities of Vanessa Beeley and others who had expressed doubts about the White Helmets at around this time. The authors describe an interview with Le Mesurier and Winberg on 8 February 2018 in which Le Mesurier appeared to echo the Graphika study:

The Mayday foundation was a victim of a disinformation campaign released by actors calling themselves “independent journalists” such as Vanessa Beeley, a British blogger who made her way through Russian-controlled media outlets. The campaign tried to claim the White Helmets didn’t exist but were actors instead, or that they were a branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria. “We didn’t design ourselves to do that [counter-attack disinformation campaign],” said James Le Mesurier. He investigated these attacks on social media and found resemblances with Russian information warfare techniques getting disseminated by small segments of pro-Assad, pro-Russia, or anti-Western profiles on Twitter. The anatomy of his work shows prominent levels of coordination by these actors.

Le Mesurier had two twitter accounts – @lemesurierjames and @USARinwar– that followed 3270 other accounts by September 2019. These follows included not only the individuals mentioned above – York, Monbiot, Whitaker, Kamm, Ahmad – who had led attacks on those who question the role of the White Helmets, but also numerous anonymous accounts that appear to be triggered by their activities. These anonymous accounts generally repeat the same talking points, without adding any original material. It would be surprising for Le Mesurier to have been following them unless he had some role in coordinating or evaluating their activities.

8 Le Mesurier’s final months

Le Mesurier’s registration of My Zahara Limited in the UK in January 2019, using a company formation agent that specialized in compliance with money laundering regulations, suggests that he planned to repatriate money from his overseas companies and perhaps to wind them up as the role of the White Helmets came to an end with the return of opposition-held territory to Syrian government control. This is consistent with reports in the Turkish media that in the last few weeks Le Mesurier had told colleagues that he was planning to leave Turkey. In a briefing note posted on 26 June 2019, we included two items of new information about Le Mesurier’s activities: (1) that we had learned from OPCW inspectors Le Mesurier had met regularly in Turkey with Len Phillips, leader of OPCW’s FFM Team Alpha which deployed to Turkey from 2015 onwards to interview purported witnesses to alleged chemical attacks in opposition-held territory; and (2) that the FCO payments to “Mayday Rescue” had been to Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai rather than to Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation in the Netherlands. Two weeks later a change of name of Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC to “Mayday Rescue Foundation” was initiated, presumably by Le Mesurier.

In 2019 online information about Le Mesurier’s past began to disappear. Additions to Le Mesurier’s list of Twitter follows suggest that in the last few months of his life he was monitoring efforts to smear and silence members of the Working Group: Twitter accounts that he began to follow in September and October 2019 included student journalists in Bristol and Edinburgh who had published articles smearing members of the Working Group in their university posts, and a local councillor in Lewisham who had objected to a member of the Working Group being invited to speak. Confirmation of Le Mesurier’s role in media operations against the Working Group was provided on 13 November 2019 by Oliver Kamm, who tweeted a quote from a leading article in The Times that day (presumably written by him):

Last year The Times identified a small group of academics at British universities spreading pro-Assad conspiracy theories … Le Mesurier was ceaselessly targeted by conspiracy theorists, whose falsehoods have insinuated themselves into public debate. He reached out to this newspaper to urge us to keep on their case.

On 23 October the Courage Foundation released new information about the OPCW FFM investigation of the Douma incident that had been revealed by a “reluctant but credible whistleblower” to a panel including the first Director-General of the OPCW. At about this time we began contacting former employees of Mayday Rescue with questions about transactions between companies controlled by Le Mesurier. Thus by the end of October Le Mesurier would have had reason to believe that the net was closing on his role in the staging of alleged chemical attacks and on his business dealings.

One objective of our investigations into the information operations associated with alleged chemical attacks in Syria is to bring to justice the perpetrators of these incidents and those who colluded with them. From open sources combined with material from confidential informants, we have identified some of the key individuals involved, of whom Le Mesurier was one. We appeal to others who have information about these operations to come forward or to contact us in confidence. Documents that are covered by official secrecy laws can be passed securely to Wikileaks.