Leaked emails expose Tory intelligence cabal scheming for Priti Patel’s authorization of MI6-style “counter-intelligence” operation against UK environmentalists. The cabal has turned on Boris Johnson and believes Patel is set to replace him.
Kit KLARENBERG
On May 18th, The Grayzone exclusively revealed that a shadowy right-wing intelligence cabal was conducting a hostile “research and influence operation” targeting perceived Chinese agents of influence on British soil. The operation was directly inspired by MI6 “principles and methods,” and involved UK Home Secretary Priti Patel more widely in the effort.
Environmentalists and green lobbyists are now squarely in the cabal’s crosshairs, as leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal. Leaders of the campaign have sought to prepare detailed dossiers on targets, including information related to their sexual relationships, in order to identify “points of weakness which can be attacked” to achieve “maximum disruptive effect.”
Home Secretary Patel remains the cabal’s main point of contact as it lobbies for official authorization for its malign efforts. What’s more, participants in the operation believe that Patel has already launched a bid to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Leader of the Conservative Party.
Calling itself “Dark Ullen,” the cabal is led by former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove and Gwythian Prins, a member of the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategy Advisory Panel, and former NATO and Ministry of Defence advisor. These two figures played leading roles in a wide-ranging plot to spy on and disrupt prominent Remainers, sabotage Prime Minister Theresa May, and replace her with Boris Johnson in order to secure a ‘hard’ Brexit, through undemocratic if not outright criminal means.
This May 25th, Reuters cited a report by Google alleging that the leaked emails upon which this investigative series is based were first published by Russian hackers. Reuters quoted Dearlove verifying that the emails were authentic. It also solicited comments from self-styled cybersecurity expert Thomas Rid, who declared that journalists “should not shy away” from reporting on the material.
Regardless of the emails’ provenance, their contents demand public exposure, as they reveal illegal scheming, anti-democratic machinations, and corruption of the British government on a staggering scale.
Prins shows Patel how to run ‘a proper counter-intelligence op’
“The Green blob” is a derogatory phrase that appears repeatedly in numerous leaked documents and emails reviewed by The Grayzone and authored by members of Dark Ullen.
The put-down was first deployed in July 2014 by Environment Secretary, Conservative lawmaker, and hardcore Brexiteer Owen Paterson. Back then, Paterson fulminated, “A mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape.”
Having been forced to stand down as an MP in November 2021 due to financial impropriety, Paterson is today an associate of the Tory clique exposed in the leaked emails. His trademark phrase appears in a private briefing note prepared that same month by his fellow cabal member, Gwythian Prins, for Cleo Watson, after she was appointed chief of staff to Alok Sharma, president of the UN’s COP26 climate summit that year. Watson previously served as top aide to Dominic Cummings, the top Boris Johnson advisor who has emerged as his most vociferous critic.
Prins declared it “vital that COP26 fails in the interests of UK national security,” and London abandoned its commitment to achieving ‘Net Zero’ by 2050. In the process, it would be necessary to “neutralise green blobbists,” and achieve “disruptive change” to national energy policy, shattering the “institutional capture” of civil servants by environmental interests. He continued, “The ‘green blob’ will scream but we can cope.”
Other leaked material illuminates how the cabal intends to “neutralise” environmental enemies. What’s more, the documents reveal that they see UK Home Secretary Priti Patel as a vessel for their malign activities.
The cabal furnishes Patel with environmental enemies list
On February 21, 2022 Prins held a one-on-one meeting with Home Secretary Patel. In his possession was a personalized DARK ULLEN presentation authored with John Constable of climate change denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation, to which Prins is an “academic advisor.”
The materials prepared for Patel included an extensive “influence diagram” of environmental and green energy advocates and their proximity to Johnson, along with a confidential PowerPoint presentation.
In an email to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove four days earlier, Prins explained his rationale for his presentation to the Home Secretary: “no harm in showing [Patel] how a proper counter-intelligence op ought to be run!”
The PowerPoint presentation was titled, “‘Green’ catastrophism, ‘Net Zero’ and the ‘green blob’ – first steps in analysis as a political problem.” Prins began the show by invoking Field Marshal Montgomery’s “Laws of War”: “identify your enemy” and “maintain your aim.” Then, the “problem” of environmentalist activism and lobbying would be dealt with “as a conventional secret intelligence operation.”
It was here that Prins made clear how Patel should be willing to go to destroy the enemies of British industry. Among the tactics he advised was the identification of targets’ “social (including sexual) relationships.”
In a following slide, Prins described his strategic blueprint as “as far as one can go informally,” a possible appeal for formal recognition and financing of DARK ULLEN by Patel and the Home Office. A cited case study not included in the presentation was said to offer “an example of how competent steps to contain and neutralise undemocratic forces of any sort need to be conducted.”
Clues as to what this case study might have entailed are contained in an email sent by Prins to Patrick Robertson, a confidant of Patel who directed the pro-Brexit Bruges Group think tank. In his note, Prins pledged that DARK ULLLEN would engage in “the sort of work that MI5 run properly would be doing” to undermine individuals named in the diagram, which the cabal would “prosecute once we have a green light.”
Prins further requested that Robertson establish a dedicated Protonmail account for Patel, as she wished to remain in contact, and suggested the Home Secretary use encrypted messaging app Signal “for swift messaging me should she so wish.”
Cabal leader Prins boasts of bond with MI6 torturer
There is no evidence in the leaked tranche of covert contact between Prins and Patel via private email. Such communication would amount to a breach of the ministerial code. However, Prins and Evelyn Farr, the cabal’s “centrally-placed mole” in the civil service, have both spoken with Minister of Leveling Michael Gove and his assistant Pamela Dow via non-official email accounts in the past, despite Gove – and other Conservative ministers – having already been censured for this practice.
Further emails illustrate the high-level access Prins had cultivated. For example, this March 14, Prins emailed theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist to BP, to request a meeting with Roddy Kennedy, the petroleum giant’s longtime international communications chief, as a step toward recruiting him to Dark Ullen.
Prins emphasized the cabal’s hostility to Russia and China, and stated his hope that Western sanctions on the former country’s oil sector would prompt BP to step back from its “Beyond Petroleum” transition to renewable energy. [6]
Koonin responded that Kennedy was “a savvy straight-shooter” and “master at his job…completely open in internal conversations.” External conversations were “a difference [sic] story but, then again, that’s exactly what you need from a PR guy.” Prins delightedly thanked him for the insight.
Evidently, Dark Ullen requires an experienced propagandist to advance its objectives. Such a sensitive, high-level reference check strongly hints that the “green light” anxiously awaited by the cabal back in February has at last materialized. After all, the services of a pro like Kennedy do not come cheap.
Notably, Prins and Koonin appear to know each other through a former MI6 operative named Mark Allen. Allen headed the agency’s counter-terror operations during the same period Britain’s foreign spying agency became embroiled in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, through which terror suspects were abducted, forcibly extracted overseas, and interrogated under torture.
Not long after sending an incriminating fax detailing how a terror suspect kidnapped by MI6 and rendered to Libya should be questioned, Allen resigned. Almost immediately, BP tapped him as its special adviser on Libyan oil contracts. The company went on to sign multi-billion deals with Gaddafi’s government. Following the NATO-led regime change war that ousted and assassinated Gaddafi, BP hired more former MI6 personnel, including former agency chief John Sawers.
Allen has never been held accountable for his role in the extraordinary rendition program.
Clear indications of cabal influence over Patel’s policy and public statements
The interest of Britain’s foreign spying agency in the energy industry could hardly be more flagrant. BP is intimately connected to corporate espionage firm Hakluyt, which conducts ‘arms’ length’ operations on behalf of MI5 and MI6 – such as spying on and disrupting the activities of environmental activists.
An October 2020 email from Prins to Dearlove suggests Dark Ullen may represent the latest of the intelligence world’s dark plots against environmentalists. In that missive, Prins proposed the creation of a “Vauxhall Cross unit,” a reference to the headquarters of MI6. He then suggested that if the former MI6 director’s “successor” saw “our value to him,” they might “fund the operation.” This could have been a reference to John Scarlett – or perhaps a subsequent MI6 chief.
Whatever Prins had planned, there are clear indications that he directly influenced Priti Patel’s public statements, as well as Home Office policy. The Grayzone has documented several instances of Patel faithfully following the scripts he fed her in private. There is also an email dated February 15th, in which Prins shared a draft “urgent action briefing” for the Home Secretary with Constable.
In the note, he implored Patel to adopt “an aggressive gas to nuclear (fission then fusion) strategy to put the British state and economy back on a thermodynamically sound footing.” The first component of this effort was “immediate executive over-ride” of a government order for energy firm Cuadrilla to abandon its fracking exploits in Lancashire two year earlier, due to intense public opposition and the efforts causing record-breaking earth tremors in the surrounding area.
And so it was on March 31 that British energy regulators withdrew demands for Cuadrilla to terminate its operations at the site, and announced days later a review of the countrywide moratorium on further fracking exploration.
Home Secretary ‘preoccupied with a leadership bid’ in secret, cabal says
As we have seen in previous investigations by The Grayzone, the intelligence cabal’s ambitions extend beyond any single issue to influencing the broad scope of national security policies, and even determining who occupies Whitehall.
A February 17 email sent by Prins reveals that the cabal even has a stake in Covid-19 policy, as it was seeking tens of millions in government funding for an unusual alternative to the UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine called Omnivaxx.
Dearlove, the former MI6 chief, replied by warning Prins to “keep off the vaccine issue with” Patel. While predicting that the government’s mass vaccination campaign would eventually prove a “flawed success,” too much “political emotion and capital” was tied up in the issue.
Remarkably, Dearlove added that Patel was “preoccupied with a leadership bid” – which will come as news to any political observer.
Until this point, there has never been no public acknowledgement that Patel is in any way interested in becoming Prime Minister. A recent Politico profile states the Home Secretary has “no appetite to move against” Johnson. Patel has even cautioned dissenters within the Conservative party to “rally behind” Downing Street’s current occupant.
Then again, as the first installment of this series revealed, the cabal was well aware Johnson’s own premiership bid was in “full swing” back in September 2018. That was many months before Theresa May resigned and the Conservative leadership contest had begun, or was even a realistic prospect. Clearly, Dearlove, Prins and their insidious underlings have inside knowledge of affairs that were entirely unknown to the public.
This June, when Johnson faced a vote of no confidence in his leadership, two Conservative MPs, Steve Baker and David Davis, were among the loudest voices calling for his resignation. Baker and Davis happen to be cabal confidantes who received private briefings from Evelyn Farr, a cabal mole who infiltrated the British civil service on behalf of Prins.
Patel’s alleged ambition to serve as leader sheds light on her approval of the extradition of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Following London’s withdrawal from the European Union, it is simply unacceptable for senior British politicians to offend Washington in any way, especially if they are seeking higher office.
Entrenching the UK’s status as America’s vassal was the cabal’s rationale for ensuring a ‘hard’ Brexit, as they were determined to fully extricate London from the EU’s defense and intelligence commitments. The cabal believed Johnson would deliver them what they wanted, but their plan failed to materialize on his watch, and assorted efforts to forge a direct line to Johnson likewise foundered.
Prins’ desperate search for a direct line to Johnson was evident when he emailed Dearlove on May 4, 2020. Claiming to be in possession of Johnson’s private phone number, which appeared to be active on Signal, Prins suggested this represented “a special postbox when we need,” given the cabal’s briefings didn’t seem to be reaching the premier.
Disturbingly, Prins went on to propose effectively pimping out his own daughter to secure an introduction to the Prime Minister.
In response, the former MI6 chief warned against capitalizing on the contact details, suggesting GCHQ would have thoroughly frisked and back-doored Johnson’s electronic devices after he was elected Prime Minister.
He reminded Prins that “we ourselves listen to the personal comms of quite a few ‘friendly’ leaders.” Clearly, the cabal didn’t want established intelligence agencies knowing what they were up to.
No such barriers appear to have obstructed the cabal’s relationship with Priti Patel, referred to in the above email by Dearlove to Prins as “your girl in No. 10.” If the Home Secretary is actively colluding with Prins and Dearlove through a secret, undisclosed Protonmail account, prying eyes and ears may never know.
