Paul Mason instigated GCHQ targeting of The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg, leaks reveal

By Kit Klarenberg

Leaked material reviewed by The Grayzone reveals failed ‘journalist’ Paul Mason conspired with GCHQ to monitor and attack this journalist and other critics. What did the British intelligence agency do with the sensitive information he secretly provided?

Leaked correspondence reviewed by The Grayzone reveals disgraced journalist Paul Mason covertly collaborated with a unit of the GCHQ intelligence service to monitor and inform on perceived adversaries, including this reporter. In addition to feeding intel on independent reporters to British intelligence, the material shows that Mason privately coordinated his public narrative about a supposed Russian “hack” of his emails with British agents.

The revelations come as a national scandal has exploded in Britain after the ruling Labour party was caught targeting journalists, including me, because they’d been investigating financial corruption by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s top aide, Morgan McSweeney.

On January 27, The Grayzone exposed how former celebrity leftist journalist-turned-security state snitch Paul Mason employed the services of a high-priced legal firm in hopes of silencing his critics. Mason launched his revenge plot after a Grayzone investigation exposed his secret collaboration with state-connected operatives to undermine the British anti-war left. His crusade fell flat, with lawyers warning him against taking any action, while confirming The Grayzone’s reporting on his leaked emails was in the public interest.

Desperate for retribution, Mason went to the a division of the GCHQ intelligence services called the National Cyber Security Centre for a second opinion. From June 2022 to December 2023, he corresponded regularly with a high level contact within the Centre, sharing information about individuals he falsely accused of being somehow implicated in the “hack” of his emails, including this journalist.

In his frantic bid to destroy those who accused him of collaborating with the security state, Mason would only confirm their harshest allegations, placing journalists like myself in the crosshairs of the GCHQ for exposing his vindictive schemes.

Paul Mason’s Twitter/X header flaunts his support for militarism and heightened conflict with Russia

Mason enlists GCHQ unit to target his critics

Founded in October 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) boasts of safeguarding Britain’s “critical systems and online services,” while “delivering world-leading guidance, tools and frameworks for business and citizens alike.” In online materials, the NCSC says it was formed by “combining separate parts of government, MI5 and GCHQ,” and works intimately “with international allies, law enforcement and the UK’s intelligence and security agencies” by unifying London’s “code-making (security) and code-breaking (intelligence)” functions.

Mason’s contact at the NCSC was Eleanor Fairford, then-NCSC deputy director incident manager, now the British Ministry of Defence’s director of cyber defence and risk. According to Fairford’s email signature, her communications with Mason were exempt from British freedom of information laws.

The NCSC’s parent organization, GCHQ, manages mass surveillance operations in breach of local and international law. As documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, the intelligence service operates a secret spy unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) which has worked to counter so-called “hacktivists” by planting computer viruses, jamming electronic devices, spying on journalists and diplomats alike, and using sex-based “honey traps” to compromise a variety of targets.

The mere act of reporting on Mason’s leaked emails was evidently viewed by the NCSC as a major national security threat. Mason’s agency contact dutifully “fed” information he passed along on this journalist and others he falsely accused of complicity in his hack into the Centre’s “system,” with no clarity on what was done with the material, or by whom or what. One way or another though, individuals Mason named ended up in GCHQ’s crosshairs – including myself.

When Mason first approached the NCSC, both he and the intelligence unit were convinced his digital devices had been compromised. However, a forensic search by the NCSC of Protonmail “samples” Mason provided yielded no evidence of foul play. Yet he plowed ahead with the questionable narrative that he and others had been victims of Russian hacking, coordinating his messaging closely with the British state.

Mason took directions from the NCSC on what to say and when to say it about the publication of his leaked emails. He also worked with the state to shape his narrative about the London counter-terror directorate’s detention and interrogation of this journalist when I landed at Luton International Airport in May 2023.

Today Mason is quick to threaten online detractors with severe criminal penalties for suggesting he has a relationship with British intelligence. But the new leaks revealed by The Grayzone deal another blow to the former journalist’s credibility.

Mason consults with GCHQ on ‘device compromise’

On June 9 2022, two days after The Grayzone’s first investigation on Paul Mason’s leaked emails dropped, he secretly met with then-NCSC deputy director incident manager Eleanor Fairford. Prior to the meeting, he provided Fairford with “access logs” to his email account, along with a conjectural timeline of his “hack attempt.” The document revealed Mason had maintained secret contacts with “significant figures” using Protonmail.

Mason’s contacts included Labour leader and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer; Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey; self-appointed “disinformation expert” and psychological warfare veteran Amil Khan, with whom Mason plotted “a civil society counter-offensive on” The Grayzone; Chris Donnelly, senior British military intelligence veteran now leading London’s proxy war strategy against Russia — described a “long-term contact on security issues” — and Andy Pryce of the Foreign Office.

The day after the meeting, Mason informed his lawyers at Blackstone Chambers he’d spoken to a three-person “incident team” at the NCSC, “who said they will pass details” onto the agency’s “investigations team. The former journalist was determined to see me jailed for the supposed crime of reporting on his secret campaign to destroy the British antiwar left.

Yet in an email warning that The Grayzone was “planning [a] YouTube special” about his leaked emails, Mason seemed dejected. Because I no longer resided in the UK, British authorities would likely be unable to move forward with any prosecution. He explained to his legal team that NCSC investigators “didn’t sound hopeful,” because, as they put it, “Klarenberg does not live here.”

Undeterred by this news, and despite his own lawyers warning him there was a substantial public interest in this outlet’s reporting on his emails, Mason secretly furnished information on me and others to the GCHQ division over the next 18 months. Meanwhile, he coordinated with the NCSC’s Fairford on public messaging about the alleged hack of his emails.

On June 11 2022, Mason informed Fairford he’d conducted a “screen sharing session” with a Reuters journalist “who took away my access log and helped me search for potential spoof and phishing emails.” They consulted “an industry source”, who advised Mason “the most likely cause” of his alleged hack was “device compromise.”

Fairford fired back that the NCSC investigators “were reaching similar conclusions” when they’d spoken with Mason. She wrote that the screenshots embedded in The Grayzone’s reporting “looked like they came from a phone, possibly [belonging to Amil Khan], suggesting his phone is compromised.” Fairford noted that Israel’s Pegasus spyware was “in use,” implying without any evidence that a state actor could be responsible.

Two weeks later, Fairford requested Mason forward “samples” from his Protonmail account to the NCSC for forensic analysis, and suggested an official investigation was underway. She told Mason she’d “passed the info re. Klarenburg [sic]” to unnamed “colleagues,” who she said “may be interested,” adding: “I hope the police make some headway on that front.”

The NCSC deputy seemed determined to get a reporter jailed for embarrassing Mason.

Late that August, Mason emailed Fairford, asking if she’d seen a recent Politico story confirming that the British government was investigating the origins of the leaked emails reported by this outlet. The article, he wrote, was “presumably based on” secret briefings by Fairford and her NCSC colleagues, because it confirmed “the investigation into the hack.” Mason assured his associate that he was “not commenting beyond welcoming the investigation” but asked to be kept “informed” about the inquiry.

Fairford may have sensed that Mason’s increasingly unhinged antics could taint a perfectly good intelligence operation. She soon informed Mason, “probably best you didn’t comment, thank you.” His request for state approval had been politely denied.

Mason provides intel on adversaries directly to GCHQ; no evidence of Russian hack found

Nearly a year later, Mason contacted Fairford again after I was detained at London’s Luton airport under counter-terror powers. During my airport detention, Britain’s terror directorate grilled me on my familiarity with supposedly Kremlin-affiliated hacking groups, including Seaborgium, while ludicrously demanding to know whether this outlet had an agreement with the FSB to publish hacked material.

“Would it be worth touching base over the recent flurry of interest in the Seaborgium/KK [Kit Klarenberg] issue?” Mason asked Fairford four months after my detention. “I’ve kept totally silent on it.”

Fairford replied that she was “very happy to chat”, and provided a link to a Microsoft Teams virtual chat – apparently overlooking grave security concerns associated with Microsoft Teams which suggest it’s a less-than-ideal platform for a GCHQ division to conduct a sensitive call. Though it’s unclear exactly what was said in the conversation, emails sent immediately thereafter give a clue as to their topics of discussion.

In one email, Mason sent Fairford critical mainstream investigations of China-based US tech billionaire and leftist activist donor Roy Singham, claiming they “[linked] him to Chinese state propaganda organs.”

In another email, Mason forwarded this journalist’s Twitter exchanges to Fairford for inspection. Mason pointed to my dismissive responses to a seemingly endless series of posts by Scott Lucas, an unemployed former academic and Syria regime change cheerleader, who declared that by failing to respond to his little-viewed questions, The Grayzone and I had conceded defeat. According to Mason, the digital harassment campaign was actually an attempt by Lucas to decipher the “lines of [my] legal defence” by “meticulously trying to rope a dope with KK [Kit Klarenberg] on Twitter.”

Fairford pledged to “do what I can on my side.” Mason expressed gratitude for her assistance in investigating my Twitter posts, responding, “it’s appreciated, come what may.”

It’s unclear what GCHQ may have done with this information. But it wasn’t the only example of Mason snitching on innocent people to Britain’s signals intelligence agency on bogus grounds.

Just five days later, Mason sent Fairford screengrabs of Twitter/X posts by David Miller, an anti-Zionist academic and media personality, claiming the content showed Miller “admits he ‘helped’ Klarenberg in my hacking case.”

In reality, as the posts themselves made abundantly clear, Miller assisted in authoring two articles on Mason’s leaked emails, related to the journalist’s attacks on dissident academics, in which he coordinated with the BBC. The proposition that Miller in any way assisted in “hacking,” let alone publicly admitted this, was patently false.

Nonetheless, Fairford thanked Mason for the apparent intelligence bonanza, which she indicated had been processed by an unspecified surveillance system. “I’ve fed it all in,” she wrote, while ominously promising, “watch this space.”

She went on to inform Mason that his Protonmail sample had been analyzed, but NSCS “didn’t find anything in it” which seemed to indicate a hack. This admission, which would appear to undercut the entire stated rationale for ongoing British government efforts to surveil journalists, elicited no further discussion.

Several months later, Mason homed in on a new target who had irritated him to the point where he felt compelled to tattle to the authorities. It was Michael Tracey, an independent American journalist who had dropped in on the Labour Party’s 2023 annual conference.

Afterwards, Mason wrote to the NCSC’s Fairford to complain that Tracey managed to enter “with a press pass.” Identifying the journalist as “involved in the email leak [emphasis added],” Mason boasted that he was “getting him chucked out now for harassing me.”

Mason insisted to Fairford that it was “worth knowing he is here.” The NCSC agent concurred, assuring him the intelligence had been “put into the system.” But no evidence existed to demonstrate that Tracey had been even peripherally “involved” in the leak of Mason’s emails – let alone a supposed “hack.”

It appeared that Mason was simply seeking revenge on Tracey for embarrassing him a year prior at a pro-Ukraine proxy war rally in London which consisted of a small band of pro-NATO activists marching through central London in support of military aid to Ukraine. As The Grayzone reported, Mason emailed an intelligence-aligned “friend” in the Foreign Office, Andy Pryce, to warn him that Tracey had attempted to question participants in “our” pro-Ukraine rally.

Tracey has claimed that while covering the rally, Mason told him to “fuck off,” then threatened him with physical ejection from the site. Mason went on to issue a public invitation for Ministry of Defence officials to join the “anti-war” demonstration. Mason’s paranoia was apparent in his private exchanges with Pryce.

“I’d be interested to know who pulls [Tracey’s] strings – and what reason he’s in the UK,” he mused, referring to Tracey as a Tulsi “Gabbard fanboy.”

Mason instigates British state information operations

Despite Mason’s pathetic antics, his persistent appeals to the intelligence services resulted in consequential action against Moscow.

On December 1, 2023, Fairford summoned Mason to an urgent meeting at NCSC HQ in London. One week later, she notified him that Andy Pryce was “fully briefed on the announcement,” which would be made that morning, with an official statement in parliament. Later that day, the British government made it official: they were formally accusing the Russian state of “cyber interference” in the country’s “politics and democratic processes.”

According to London’s version of events, Moscow had sponsored hacking operations lasting years targeting countless high-profile figures. The UK sanctioned a supposed FSB officer, accusing him of hacking, and Foreign Secretary David Cameron summoned Russian ambassador to Britain Andrei Klein for a formal drubbing over the purported digital attack. But, perhaps due to the glaring absence of evidence provided to support its bombshell accusations, the news went largely unreported by mainstream outlets.

The NCSC could not conclusively link Moscow to the leaks, determining merely that it was “highly likely” that individuals and groups tied to the FSB were responsible for the alleged hack. An official factsheet accompanying the announcement was heavy on organograms and Wikipedia-style profiles of FSB divisions allegedly involved, but it lacked concrete information. London alleged that British parliamentarians from “multiple parties” were targeted by Russian hackers, but the UK failed to provide any clarity on when this activity supposedly began – let alone a sliver of proof tying it to the Kremlin.

Despite the lack of evidence, Mason was desperate to make as much noise about the NCSC’s announcement as possible. On December 12, he authored an op-ed for The New European baselessly asserting that he’d fallen victim to “a cyber espionage campaign designed to disrupt the functioning of our democracy.” Mason credited the government for being “rightly economical with the details” of the apparent campaign, while claiming a “very high bar of evidence” had been cleared to incontrovertibly prove he was personally hacked by Russian agents.

Mason concluded his rant by celebrating that under Britain’s new draconian National Security Act, “if you damage someone’s reputation, or threaten them, or deliberately lie about them, and you do so intentionally to support an interference operation by a foreign state, you are looking at up to 10 years in jail; and 14 years if it involves electoral interference.” He ended with a seemingly veiled threat against The Grayzone: “These powers remain untested in the courts. I look forward to them being tested.”

That same day, Fairford emailed him to praise his “great piece in the New European.” She signed off, “hope it was cathartic!”

Laughingstock of the left mobilizes British intel in his defense

These days, Mason remains a target of widespread ridicule from the British left, not only for his record as a security state snitch, but because he is guaranteed to overreact whenever anyone prominent dares to mention it.

Mason recently threatened the head of Britain’s Green Party, Zack Polanski, with a “10 year jail sentence”under the National Security Act for spreading “disinfo” which has been “publicly attributed to Russian intelligence.” He was referring to factual reporting published by The Grayzone. The ridiculous threat only invited further waves of online mockery.

Though he had become a walking punchline for the British left, Mason’s leaked correspondence with NCSC leadership demonstrates that the disgraced journalist had nonetheless managed to mobilize London’s intelligence services against his critics, and to escalate hostility with Russia, on the basis of the shoddiest allegations.

After fielding congratulations from Fairford for his role in inspiring the NCSC’s accusation of Russian “cyber espionage,” Mason effusively thanked the entire division of cyber-spies: “I hope the whole thing achieved what was needed from your and the [Foreign Office’s] point of view. Please do convey my thanks to your colleagues.”