Skripal Case Part Of UK Bid To Revive Cold War, Boost Intel Budget - Ex-Pentagon Adviser

Leaks exposing the UK's role in the notorious Skripal affair shine a light on London's strategy to revive Cold War tensions and to justify increasing its intelligence budget, former Pentagon adviser Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th January, 2019) Leaks exposing the UK's role in the notorious Skripal affair shine a light on London's strategy to revive Cold War tensions and to justify increasing its intelligence budget, former Pentagon adviser Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.

A batch of secret documents released by the Anonymous hacktivist group on Friday revealed that the UK state-funded Integrity Initiative project cooperated with chemical weapons experts and suggested imposing sanctions on Moscow and expelling Russian diplomats. The documents were written nearly three years before the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK town of Salisbury last March.

"These recent leaks of information do add to the research about what really happened in the Skripal case, and also what small part that case played in a larger effort by more than one group to re-establish an East-West Cold War style mentality, one that would allow a significant increase in government spending on war activities and intelligence," Kwiatkowski, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, said.

According to Anonymous, in 2015 the head of the Institute for Statecraft, which runs the initiative, Christopher Donnelly, recruited a chemical and biological weapons expert who previously worked at a military laboratory in Porton Down, near Salisbury. Russia has voiced concerns that experts at the laboratory were developing chemical weapons including the one used in the attack on the Skripals.

Kwiatkowski also said London is unlikely to thoroughly probe the revelations for fear of exposing illegal relationships with other intelligence communities.

The newly leaked documents shed light on how agendas like those of The Institute for Statecraft and its inside supporters within a government can drive complex and well-funded plans for propagandizing voters and demonizing and implicating selected political enemies, Kwiatkowski said.

"Because poisoning and murder is actually interesting to the average citizen, I imagine this story will be downplayed by the corporate state connected media because it really does reveal both a predictable process and an utter contempt for the desires, pocketbook and lives of the average voter in the UK and around the world," she predicted.

The UK government could not be trusted to carry out any honest and impartial investigation into the Skripal case, or the way it had been distorted in the media, Kwiatkowski warned.

"Expecting governments to investigate themselves in any kind of objective way is naive," she said.

The hacktivists also claimed that the Integrity Initiative included covert structures to interfere in domestic affairs of several European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, Spain, and Montenegro.