Bulletins and News Discussion from February 17th to February 23rd, 2025 - The Sankara Renaissance - COTW: Burkina Faso

BAP, the CIA, & CND

But Ruth Smeeth isn't even the spookiest Smeeth in McSweeney's political project and personal orbit. Her husband Michael Smeeth, a wealthy businessman focussing on the push for UK private healthcare as well as various greenwashing companies for fossil fuel aviation, has long been a central member of the British-American Project (BAP). It presents itself a pro-business network of influential US-UK figures, but barely even bothers disguising its true role as a mechanism to assist and elevate US assets in the British political establishment. Michael Smeeth has not only repeatedly been the chair of the organisation, but also one of its three directors from as early as 2011.

Other prominent members include:

• UK/US military leaders
• members of removedoutfit Le Cercle
• Peter Mandleson himself of course
• prominant BBC flagship 'journalist' Jeremy Paxman
• longtime BBC News presenter Jane Hill
• longtime ITV & now Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips
• London Mayor Sadiq Khan
• civil rights lawyer and former Liberty head Shami Chakrabarti
• former Bilderberg Group chair, Conservative party chair, & General Secretary for NATO Peter Carrington
• architect of the Iraq war & World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz
• and rather interestingly, Janet Bloomfield who was installed as the chair of the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in the early 90s

The fact that the BAP was an American intelligence network has been common knowledge for people paying attention since the 1980s. Brilliant investigative journalism and driving force behind the best years of Private Eye, Paul Foot, who equated the BAP to “CIA front organisations” set up in the 1960s “to promote ‘sensible’ elements in British Labour". Infamous journalist John Pilger was also amongst their critics who called them out for being a thinly veiled US intelligence network and was attacked in the press and the press rooms when he tried to warn fellow journalists that they may be being 'led by the nose from Washington or Langley' in dealing with them. In fact, there's multiple reports of members of BAP joking openly about where the money and influence really came from, including when new members asked how BAP events were so lavish by saying variations of 'It's all funded by the CIA of course'.

So ingrained was the knowledge at the time of what BAP truly represented, that the BAP website to this day includes a PDF about their history which feels the need to have a long section trying to handwave and sneer the allegations away. It's called The False History & you can read it here. It dismisses the likes of Foot and Pilger with 'loony leftie' handwaving and states that no 'direct funding or direction from US intelligence has ever been proven'. The only other journalist they namecheck, in an effort to minimise the accusations, is Tom Easton who wrote an article for a small parapolitics magazine called Lobster back in '97 called The British American Project for the Successor Generation. The original is archived but behind a paywall on the Lobster site, but you can also read it here. Conveniently they don't mention similarly critical reporting from the US from the likes of the LA Times or the fact that respected British journalist & historian Frances Stonor Saunders - who literally wrote the book(s) on the changing nature of CIA cold war networks, including *Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War * - said about the BAP in comparison to earlier CIA cutouts that “All that's changed is that BAP are much more sophisticated.”

They also ignore the fact that there have been multiple former Labour MPs and journalists who have talked about the true nature of the BAP and the fact that the CIA used it as a recruitment network for British Labour politicians.

Most prominent is probably Emma Dent Coat, the first ever Labour MP for the rich London neighbourhood of Kensington, who they tried to recruit via BAP during her time in the heavily monitored and infiltrated CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Remember Janet Bloomfield on the list above?

The following is from an excellent longer article on the BAP, which you can read over at Declassified:

She told Declassified that a friend who was a senior official in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) tried to recruit her to the BAP in the 1980s. Coad later found out this person “worked with the CIA”. At the time, the US government had, according to an official memo leaked to the Washington Post, initiated a “propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND”. “In the late 80s, I was a journalist working in design and architecture and very busy at the time, travelling around a lot and writing for various magazines,” Coad told us. “At the time, a local friend who was senior in CND started talking to me about this project that she was involved in.” “She basically said that if I was able to go to Washington and give a talk about the work I was doing, I’d have a lovely dinner, it would all be paid for, and then I’d be part of this international group who were just trying to improve life,” Coad added. “Then I would be part of that group forever and I’d be invited to things periodically, and it would give me a really good profile.” Coad thought about it and discussed it with her then husband. “But I just felt there was something a bit smelly about it frankly,” she says. “It didn’t ring true, something so generous just for me being there, so I politely declined.” “Later I found out what the British-American Project was all about,” she adds. “Then I found out a couple of years later that this friend – who had by then moved out of the area and I’d lost contact with her – worked with the CIA, and I was absolutely appalled.” Coad says she was good friends with the husband of the alleged CIA operative, and that he told her she was working for the agency as soon as he found out. “There was something not quite right. I was just a jobbing journalist really, in a faintly glamorous environment, why would I be of interest to this international group?” But Coad can understand why she was a target. “I’ve always been a socialist, I always had those values from school,” she says. “I was political at college, at university, I had roles in the unions, I’d always been political. So clearly she knew that.” She adds: “I started writing a book on Spanish design architecture, so I was busy, and I think my stock was rising at the time. The recruiter was very prominent in CND, which I supported.” After Coad was told about the CIA connection “it began to drop into place,” she says. Coad then looked up the recruiter who had moved on from CND to a prominent PR firm. “I thought, ‘that’s interesting, a bit of a leap from what they were doing before’. I thought it was very strange that they would go from CND to working for a right-wing advertising agency, so it rang true, and I believed it.” Coad says she hasn’t given the BAP a moment’s thought for years. “But obviously it’s been working very hard behind the scenes, and of course they would have been very worried about Jeremy Corbyn.” In fact, it’s difficult to find anyone involved in Starmer’s rise to power and the in-Labour project to remove Corbyn and purge the party without a connection to the BAP. Chairs of anti-Corbyn groups, backers and funders of failed Corbyn leadership challengers, “anti-hate” groups that focus exclusively on anti-Israel sentiment, client journalists and so on.

(continued further...)

Or realized they are the fruits, about to be plucked and eaten by the giant orange smiling orangutan