Ongoing lawsuit between American and British info warfare contractors sheds light on scale of covert operations against Iran
Voluminous legal filings reveal numerous codenames of U.S. Government-backed information operations against Iran between 2012 and 2020.
When the former president of the Austin-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield, Inc. (MSI) filed a False Claims Act claim against the company in December 2023, the Eastern District of Virginia lawsuit was quickly sealed. To date, the names of both the plaintiff and the defendant are partially hidden from searches within the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system.
Ingrid de la Fuente had resigned from her role as president of MSI the previous May, during her firm’s covert acquisition by the San Francisco-based gig-work information collection firm and U.S. intelligence contractor Premise Data. The central claim of the lawsuit — which was subsequently voluntarily dismissed without prejudice — was that MSI had overbilled an unnamed U.S. Government agency by roughly $1.5 million on a secretive foreign information collection contract codenamed BEOWULF, ultimately costing $4,497,786.77.
Recently published legal filings reveal that BEOWULF was an intelligence collection program across 10 Iranian cities contracted by U.S. Special Operations Command from at least August 2019 to September 2020, during the latter half of the first Trump administration, to a United Arab Emirates-based shell company acting on behalf of MSI. Led by two former executives from the infamous British information warfare contractor Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), Alexis Everington and Richard White, Information Advisory Services (IAS) interwove its intelligence collection and “strategic communications” work with the operations of women’s rights nonprofits such as Karama.
The same filings reveal similar surveillance and information warfare contracts in numerous countries around the world, as well as in Iran beginning as early as 2012, with the Iran-focused codenames including: ELBOW (2012-2013), ZHUKOV (2017), GENESIS (2018-2019), NIRVANA (2018-2019), OZZY (2018-2019), PRINCE (2018-2019), QUEEN (2018-2019), STING (2018-2019), METALLICA (2019), YARDBIRDS (2019), AHAB (2019), and CAUFIELD (2019).
Intelligence collection programs were also revealed to have targeted monitoring of Iranian WiFi networks (FINN), “Iran Purchases” (GATSBY), collection of an “Iran Area Survey” (LORNA), and “Iran Market Research” (QUIXOTE and ROBINSON).
Two months prior to De la Fuente’s suit, Everington and White initiated their own lawsuit against MSI’s president, Timothy Riesen, for allegedly shortchanging them in the payout from Premise Data’s acquisition of MSI in mid-2022. The lawsuit remains active more than two years later, with the litigation having revealed the contents of the information warfare contractors’ encrypted groupchats and, more recently, a veritable dictionary of worldwide intelligence collection and information operations codenames.
The targeted countries were further disclosed to have included countries such as: North Korea, through the codenames AEROSMITH (2017-2018) and FOREIGNER (2018-2019); Syria, through BRADLEY (2013-2014), MACARTHUR (2015), YELLOWTAIL (2015), QUINAN (2016), WELLINGTON (2015-2018), TESLA (2018-2019), U2 (2018-2019), and WHITESNAKE (2019); and Yemen, through ALLENBY (2014), DOOLITTLE (2014), HUDAYDA (2015), ADEN (2016), RIDGWAY (2016), TITO (2017-2018), and XTC (2019). Ukraine and Somaliland were reported to have been targeted by IAS in 2014, through programs respectively named ITO and EISENHOWER.
Many of these programs were further revealed in a recent legal filing from IAS executives to have overlapped with MSI’s collaboration with the U.S. Government’s since-defanged long-term soft-power arm, the Agency for International Development (AID), through a Jordan-based Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Activity (MELA) program. IAS’s Jordan-focused intelligence collection was further revealed to have operated through the codenames CLAUSEWITZ (2013-2014) and PARK (2016-2017).
Both MSI and its parent company, Premise Data, were subsequently acquired in August of last year by the Alexandria-based special operations and foreign weapons-procurement contractor Culmen International. Premise’s branding has remained essentially unchanged — with the company’s short-lived CEO, Matt McNabb, leaving to restart a company he led prior to its acquisition by Premise, named Native — but MSI has since rebranded as a Culmen subsidiary.
Premise’s own pitch to U.S. Special Operations Command in mid-2019 regarding its support for information operations, as well as human intelligence and signals intelligence programs, through activities such as tasking gig-workers to map out wireless infrastructure in targeted regions, was revealed through a slide deck published by The Wall Street Journal in 2021.
The recent wave of riots within Iran have largely called for the overthrow of Islamic leader Ali Khamenei by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had sole control of the country from 1953 until 1979, following the joint CIA/MI6 coup of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, made the uncommon choice of directly advertising its participation in the recent riots — which have included the burning of mosques — receiving further overt amplification from former CIA director Michael R. Pompeo. A mysterious ad campaign overtly attempting to recruit family members of the Iranian government living abroad — as part of the “Blue Message” campaign — was further exposed by this publication in September to have been run through the LLC of an Atlanta influencer, according to Google, which confirmed suspension of the account earlier this week.
Joint covert operations in Iran led by teams of American and British contractors have apparently been quite active in the previous decades, including through the newly revealed partnerships between MSI and IAS, such as BEOWULF and METALLICA. And the partnership between MSI and IAS in the Middle East was itself a successor to the partnership between MSI president Tim Riesen’s previous employer, Archimedes, and the previous employer of IAS executives Alexis Everington and Richard White, SCL. Covert information collection in Iran through the partnership between Riesen and SCL was first revealed by The Grayzone in 2018.
MSI’s rebranded website further openly advertises that the company has worked in Venezuela, in relation to the government’s nationalization of a joint venture between a company in an unnamed country with a firm in Venezuela. “Madison Springfield was engaged to investigate the circumstances surrounding the expropriation and ascertain whether any of the project assets were recoverable in order to offset any resulting claim,” stated the website, adding that, “This investigation involved interviews of executives from the joint venture and government officials, research of public records, and financial analysis.”