Leaked emails expose Paul Mason’s collusion with senior British intelligence agent

• In leaked emails, celebrity journalist Paul Mason plots extensively with Andy Pryce of the UK Foreign Office Counter Disinformation and Media Development unit.
• Pryce’s Counter Disinformation unit has been cloaked behind a veil of near-total secrecy since its inception. 
• Mason and Pryce sketched a blueprint for an information warfare outfit funded “through cut-outs” and modeled after the notorious Integrity Initiative.
• Mason pitched a “Putin Proxy Watch” project guided by “info war experts” to attack “bad actors” in the UK.
• Mason calls for suspending UK libel law to smear targets, special effects-driven project to sensationalize Russian atrocities.
• Researcher Emma Briant advised Mason on his leftist target list, proposing adding independent outlet Declassified UK.
• Mason proposed astroturfed “black and Asian voices” project to push back on Black and brown critics of Ukraine proxy war.
• Mason revealed his participation in upcoming BBC assault on Stop The War Coalition. 

On June 7th, The Grayzone revealed how British journalist Paul Mason planned to wage all-out war on anti-imperialist and left-wing academics, activists, campaign groups, independent journalists and media sites – and particularly this outlet.

Since the conflict in Ukraine erupted, Mason has aggressively assailed any prominent figure calling for a diplomatic resolution or opposing NATO escalation, authoring columns advocating for government censorship of facts and viewpoints he perceives to be insufficiently anti-Kremlin, and demanding “state action” against media personalities that oppose NATO expansion.

Since The Grayzone revealed that Mason has also been operating through covert channels to sabotage his leftist targets, a question lingers: is the British celebrity journalist purely a freelancer, building a clandestine informal coalition of fellow travelers to undermine and ostracize his perceived enemies on his own initiative, or are his activities influenced by shadowy state actors?

An answer lies in leaked private communications between Mason and Amil Khan, chief of intelligence contractor Valent Projects, in which the pair propose individuals to invite to an anti-Grayzone summit, where this outlet’s “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” assault to “to squeeze [it] financially” was to be plotted.

In the email, Mason can be seen asking Khan to invite a “friend” from the Foreign Office, who “may be the same as my friend” within the department. He clearly did not want to name his friend “without permission.” Such obfuscation implies his government contact’s role – and thus their identity – is top secret, to the extent it must be protected by default even from an intelligence agency-adjacent, veteran government psy-ops contractor like Khan, who maintains links with the National Security Council.

In his correspondences with Emma Briant, a self-styled academic propaganda expert, Mason is far less guarded. On April 7th, he shared his elaborate “networks of influence” map with Briant, cautioning that “obviously this is confidential.” He added that he “offered it to Andy but he’s not getting back to me.”

Mason was referring to Andy Pryce, the head of the British Foreign Office’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development (CDMD) unit, which was founded in April 2016 to “counter-strike against Russian propaganda.” In 2020, he moved to London’s Mission to the EU (UKREP), to serve as its its Head of Public Diplomacy. It seems likely he now serves in the Foreign Office’s newly-founded Counter Disinformation Unit – an apparent rebrand of the CDMD.

Little information about Pryce is publicly available, and the CDMD has been similarly cloaked behind a veil of almost total secrecy for much of its existence. In fact, the presence of the shadowy unit within the UK Foreign Office was not public until two years after its launch. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests seeking clarity on the nature and scope of the CDMD’s role, and even its staff size, were denied on the grounds of national security.

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