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Going-Postal’s old friends in the shadowy world of contractors used to disseminate government propaganda are back in the news. This particular practitioner of the dark arts of perception management and black propaganda came to Puffin’s attention in April 2024.
A G-P article entitled Citizens Khan And The Home Office Propaganda Effort put the spotlight upon Sara Khan after she authored Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience: A New Strategic Report. The Bradford-born, privately educated 46-year-old, who attended the University of Manchester and qualified as a pharmacist, emerged as a counter-extremism expert and founder of the Home Office-backed Inspire programme.
In January this year, amidst turmoil in Mittel Europa, Prime Minister Robert Fico used a Bratislava press conference to accuse the Slovak opposition of planning a coup to overthrow his government. He stated that the opposition intended to occupy state buildings, block roads, organise a nationwide strike, and provoke clashes with police.
Fico also mentioned that a “foreign power” influenced the 2023 Slovak parliamentary elections to the detriment of his party, SMER. Although Russia, China, and Iran are often cited as the perpetrators of such mischief, might the paper trail – or rather, the digital trail – lead closer to home? First, a history lesson.
The Information Research Department
In 1948, the Foreign Office established the Information Research Department (IRD) as a Cold War propaganda vehicle with close ties to the intelligence services. The IRD’s task was to provide content to counter Communist activities in Western Europe, British colonies, and elsewhere across the globe. A clandestine organisation, its existence didn’t became public until 1977, at which time successor organisations took over its role.
Journalists and opinion formers were selected with care, introduced to the IRD with discretion, and were told as little as possible about the unit. Well-researched and slanted anonymous copy was handed to them to be incorporated into their work, or passed in its entirety as if their own.
Prevent/RICU
In response to the London bombings of 2005, by 2007 the Home Office had set up the Prevent programme to challenge domestic Muslim violence. This included a Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU) founded by Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer and head of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT).
A decade later, The Guardian newspaper described RICU as a ‘shadowy propaganda unit inspired by the Cold War’ and the successor of an ‘offensive [that] targeted communism, trade unionists and newspapers in developing countries’, i.e. the IRD.
When investigating Ms Khan, we discovered that these days the Home Office uses contractors to provide advice, news media training, social media, and other help to carefully selected and clandestine outlets. We also found out that the focus was shifting from Islam to the ultra-hard extreme far right. One of the major contractors used is called the Zinc Network.
The Zinc Network
Last year, via its official publications, the Zinc Network claimed to be:
‘A full-service communications agency – providing multimedia production, creative concepts, technical build, insight gathering, strategy, data analysis, dissemination and evaluation in-house. We help governments, communities, businesses, and NGOs succeed.’ They add, ‘good storytelling and communications can strengthen society and inspire positive social change.’
In four and a half years, they had grown to almost 250 employees and had offices in Australia, Iraq, East Africa, and Tunisia, as well as at their headquarters in the UK.
Zinc, therefore, provides content to appropriate civil society organisations without accreditation, both here and overseas, in the same way that the IRD distributed to legacy journalists during the Cold War. In the modern day, such material still includes stories fed to newspapers but also involves leafleting and a presence on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, online radio, blogs, and websites, often hosted by civil society groups.
In the subsequent 12 months since our original investigation, the emphasis has broadened and moved eastwards. Via LinkedIn, they boast of new offices in Washington DC and, as the focus shifts to Eastern Europe, in Kiev and Tbilisi. They inform: ‘We work with a broad range of governmental, NGO, and private sector clients,’ including:
- USAID
- The US Department of State
- The US Department of Defense
- The UK Home Office
- The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office
- The UK Ministry of Defence
- The African Union
- UN agencies and missions
- the European Commission
- Microsoft
With the brass neck of those who ‘work with’ the likes of the above, Zinc now boast on LinkedIn:
‘We conceptualise and create award-winning programmes, interventions, and campaigns that change the way that people think, feel, and act across a wide range of pervasive social issues, including disinformation and misinformation, violent extremism, poor governance, threats to children and young people’s online safety, gender-based violence, and more.’
This leads us to a more recent Bratislava press conference, held at the end of last month and covered by The Telegraph, in which Prime Minister Mr Fico added to his previous allegations.
“There was a targeted deliberate activity by a foreign power, which is our ally in NATO, in cooperation with some Slovak journalists and in cooperation with some Slovak political influencers, to influence the election in 2023.”
He claimed the UK’s Foreign Office had a £10m deal with Zinc Network, a London-based media agency, that had been used to influence Slovakia’s last parliamentary election. “This agency was tasked with finding influencers and political activists in Central and Eastern European countries and influencing events in those countries,” the prime minister said.
The Foreign Office and Zinc did not issue a denial but rather couched their intervention in different terms. According to the Foreign Office, “This activity focused on encouraging young people to participate in their democracies and to vote in upcoming elections, regardless of their political affiliation or support.”
However, as we learned in the youth-targeted push for voter registration at the Brexit referendum, the assumption is that younger voters are likely to support the left, the EU, Green issues, or, in a Slovakian election, to vote Progressive. The Foreign Office cited its Open Information Partnership which works across 24 countries supporting investigative journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and fact-checkers.
When challenging the Foreign Office and Zinc, Mr Fico was in part quoting a Declassified UK article claiming YouTube videos are funded in secret and signed off by the UK Foreign Office with non-disclosure agreements used to ban influencers from disclosing government involvement. Zinc rejected the allegations, stating that it is proud to have supported civil society organisations in Slovakia to “deliver a voter education campaign.”
Billed as a UK-based communications agency, they told Polish broadcaster TVP World: “We are aware of recent media coverage that attempts to misrepresent this campaign and undermine the efforts of our civil society partners.” The response added: “We strongly reject this characterisation. We continue to support civil society’s defence of democracy and freedom of expression.”
On an even more sinister note, a year after the Slovak election, Fico was the victim of an assassination attempt. Would be assassin Juraj Cintula, a 71-year-old poet and writer, was framed as a right-winger, but in reality his politics had shifted to the Progressive party at the 2019 election. Soon after the attempted killing (two shots to the abdomen and one to the shoulder – which required saving surgery), the respected Slovak media outlet Štandard noted,
“The assassin supported Čaputová [a co-founding member of Progressive Slovakia] and Ukraine, condemned Trump and Fico.
The assassin Juraj Cintula, who attempted to take the life of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in Handlová on Wednesday, has, according to open sources, strongly sympathised with liberalism and its representatives in recent years. His media-reported inclination to the opposite way of thinking is a thing of the past. After the shooting, he finally admitted that he attacked because he disagreed with government policy.”
All of which reminds us of another G-P investigation into a similar attempt at a clandestine, influencer-based, anti-regime operation overseas. When researching Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe And The Propaganda War Against Iran, we discovered a similar propaganda attempt there, with local influencers being recruited by Ratcliffe, a dual Iranian-British national. That ended in catastrophe, with Ratcliffe being detained, her laptop compromised, and some of her assets within the Islamic Republic being executed.
If this is what the British government and its contractors are doing clandestinely in faraway places such as Iran and Slovakia, it begs the question: what are they up to here?
© Always Worth Saying 2025
