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thegrayzone.com

British-run spy tech powers Ukraine


proxy war, putting civilians at risk -
The Grayzone
Kit Klarenberg

13-17 minutes

Leaked files reveal the Anomaly 6 spy firm is providing


intelligence to the British military through a cut-out
involved in the Kerch Bridge bombing and other acts of
dangerous sabotage in the Ukraine conflict.

On December 6th, The Grayzone revealed how British military


and intelligence agencies were deploying technology created by
shadowy private intelligence firm Anomaly 6 to illegally spy on
citizens across the globe.

The company’s technology effectively transforms every


individual on Earth into a potential target for surveillance and/or
asset recruitment by monitoring the movements of their
smartphone. Anomaly 6 embeds tracking software in popular
applications, then slices through layers of theoretically
anonymous data to uncover a wealth of sensitive information
about a device’s owner.

Anomaly 6’s services are provided to Britain’s soldiers and spies


through Prevail Partners, a private military company which The

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Grayzone has exposed as Whitehall’s arm’s-length cutout for


prosecuting its proxy war in Ukraine. The firm has constructed a
secret partisan terror army on Kiev’s behalf, and helped plan the
Kerch Bridge bombing by Ukraine’s services.

Now, the Grayzone can reveal that Prevail is exploiting Anomaly


6 to provide “decision-enabling intelligence to the UK’s defence
and security architecture.”

Files anonymously leaked to this outlet reveal that Britain’s


Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) has used Anomaly 6’s
technology to monitor and track the movements of Russian
military and intelligence personnel in real-time, on both a group
and individual basis. Through aggressive harvesting of data, the
technology has enabled the planning of military offensives and
artillery attacks, assassinations, asset recruitment, and other
measures.

The leaked files raise serious questions about whether Anomaly


6’s technology has been used throughout the Ukraine conflict in
an array of targeted operations against specific individuals and
infrastructure. If it has, Britain bears ultimate responsibility for
the outcome of these disturbing actions, which in some cases
amount to crimes against humanity.

As The Grayzone has already demonstrated, Anomaly 6


markets its technology as impeccably precise, while it hoovers
up massive amounts of private data and targeting innocent
individuals, falsely painting them as national security risks. The
firm’s ham-handed approach raises the obvious risk of Russian
and Ukrainian citizens being misidentified by Britain’s military
intelligence apparatus, with dangerous if not deadly
consequences.

British military intelligence tracks Russians ‘in realtime’

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By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Anomaly


6 was already providing its surveillance services to the British
Home Office through Prevail. Over the course of several
months, the firm racked up a multi-million dollar tab.

Anomaly 6 sold its technology to Britain as an innovative means


for tracking movements of newly-arrived refugees to the country.
Without the migrants’ knowledge or consent, they were steered
through “passive data collection gates” as soon as they
registered at immigration centres. Their phones were then
tagged for monitoring in the hope they could lead authorities to
criminal gangs and human traffickers.

This connivance is likely to have been completely illegal under


data protection laws, and the European Convention on Human
Rights.

As soon as Moscow launched its military operation, the British


government deepened its involvement with Anomaly 6.
London’s Defence Intelligence Agency instigated what it called
“Project MATTERHORN”, a six week trial in which Prevail
provided Anomaly 6-sourced “location-based commercial
telemetry data” in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

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Six weeks later, Prevail wrote to the DIA outlining the costs of
three and six-month-long extension packages. The Agency
apparently took them up on the second offer; two days after
receiving Anomaly 6’s pitch, the company provided a detailed
proposal and contract to Prevail.

For $708,750 over the half-year period, Anomaly 6 was


contracted to provide “a data feed of country specific data
containing harvested first party commercial telemetry data and
delivered to client directed cloud-based infrastructure.” Should
the DIA require it, “additional countries, regions or queries”
could be added at any point during the contract.

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It’s not hard to see why Anomaly 6’s services were considered
so valuable by the DIA. Files reviewed by The Grayzone include
case studies showing how the company’s technology was used
both before and after the Russian invasion “to gain a
realtime/near realtime understanding of the disposition” of
Russian “troops, equipment, and lethal materials.”

For example, Anomaly 6 tracked Moscow’s pre-invasion military


buildup, starting in April 2021. By harvesting smartphone data
signals generated at a Russian Military training area south of
Voronezh, the company identified over 100 devices that had
been used at the facility, and was able to determine a clear
“pattern of life,” including home addresses (or “bed down
locations”), areas and sites frequently visited and workplaces for
each user.

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This information, Anomaly 6 suggested, could be used for


“observing troop movements into a potential conflict zone,” and
much more: “combining this data with other open source and
classified data sets further enables and empowers the client to
permit successful mission outcomes.”

Anomaly 6’s spyware has also been deployed to “corroborate”


reports of “Russian trained Syrians” in the conflict, cross-
referencing data to find smartphones active in Syria in 2021 that
were supposedly detected in Ukraine in March 2022. Some
were tracked to the Voronezh training facility, which the
company speculated “could be a staging post to integrate
Syrians into Russian forces on the Kharkiv axis.”

“This is mostly individual devices, but it is highly likely that these


are indicative of larger groups. Additional Syrians at these
locations are highly likely,” Anomaly 6 surmised.

However, the firm did not consider the possibility that it had in
fact tracked the devices of Russian military advisors posted in
Damascus before heading to Ukraine. Even mainstream
Western think tanks have dismissed the proposition that Syrian
fighters have been active in the Ukrainian theatre. It was only in

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the final months of this year that Russia formally deployed such
forces.

Anomaly 6 fumbles targets’ identities, putting innocents at


grave risk

In other cases, Anomaly 6 claims to have achieved highly


precise target identification capability. For example, the
company tracked the device of a lone “Chechen militia fighter,”
and pinpointed “a hardware device associated with the GRU
Aerospace and Geo-intelligence Centre.”

“Prior to the Russian invasion the device visited a GRU location


in Rostov-on-Don, the Kremlin in Moscow, and an unidentified
location in Unecha,” an Anomaly 6 presentation asserted. “The
device was then active in Donetsk, Ukraine having crossed the
border at an unknown time and date.”

This individual appeared keenly aware of the risk of being


tracked through their cellphone. Anomaly 6 found it difficult to
adequately identify their “pattern of life,” which are said to
potentially signify “some tradecraft or communications security
awareness.” Nonetheless, what data could be harvested

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highlighted one location in Donetsk they had visited “more than


any other,” leading the company to speculate it was “linked to
Russian GRU or Advanced Force activity.”

Anomaly 6 had more luck in tracking another individual whose


device pointed to a “pattern of life” consistent with someone
“conducting invasion related activity.” Their movements
indicated they lived and worked in Moscow, which made their
travel to Ukraine “interesting compared to regular force
movements” in the eyes of the firm’s analysts. Anomaly 6
identified an area of Donetsk they had visited that was “possibly
used for Command and Control, liaison, and governance,”
speculating the device in question was “diplomatic or
intelligence related.”

Though this level of detail seems impressive, Anomaly 6 could


well have misidentified at least some of its targets, and even the
locations they apparently visited. A leaked Anomaly 6 case
study exposed by The Grayzone purports to document the
company’s identification of the smartphone of a US-based
nuclear physics expert who conducted “multiple trips to North
Korea” between March and August of 2019.

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Anomaly 6 outlined how it unearthed the academic’s name,


address, marital status, employer, and photos of their children,
along with the schools and universities they attended, by linking
their smartphone to sites they visited across the US. The
company believed the academic’s supposed trips to Pyongyang
made them either a major counterintelligence hazard, or an
intelligence asset ripe for recruitment.

When The Grayzone contacted the academic, however, they


fervently denied they or their smartphone had ever been to
North Korea. They may well have been sincere – smartphone
geolocation data can be highly imprecise. If so, the academic
and their family were placed in the crosshairs of Anomaly 6’s
clients on the basis of a badly bungled analysis. In an active war
zone, an error like this is likely to cost innocent lives.

Britain stiffens US resolve at all levels”

On August 20th, Ukraine’s CIA-trained Security Service (SBU)


assassinated Daria Dugina, the daughter of nationalist Russian
philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, deploying a car bomb to kill her as
she travelled through a Moscow suburb. The targeted killing was
intended as a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who has been falsely portrayed in Western media as an avid
student of Dugin, despite having never met him.

Given what is known about the operation to assassinate


Aleksandr and Daria Dugin, the nature of Anomaly 6’s spyware,
and Prevail’s relationship with the SBU, the question of whether
the firm’s technology was used to track the pair is ineluctable.

Whether it also informed the SBU’s Odessa branch when to


trigger the truck bombing of Kerch Bridge must be considered
as well. The attempt to assassinate Russian State Space

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Corporation leaders Dmitry Rogozin and Artyom Melnikov while


they dined at a Donetsk restaurant appears to have relied on
tracking technology much like the kind spun out by Anomaly 6.

Then there are the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion’s death squads


which hunt frantically for “collaborators” in formerly Russian-
occupied territory. Have they too been granted use of Anomaly
6’s spyware?

These are only a few of the countless scenarios in which


Anomaly 6’s technology could have executed. And it is not only
London’s DIA that can exploit the company’s wares, courtesy of
Prevail. So too can Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters,
assorted elite military spying units, special forces such as the
SAS and SBS, the GCHQ, MI5, and MI6.

Prevail’s involvement in the Kerch Bridge bombing plot amply


demonstrates the company’s utter lack of compunction about
civilian casualties and clear interest in terrorist acts. It originally
proposed going further than what actually transpired, blowing up
a ship packed with ammonium nitrate beneath the structure. The
company approvingly cited the carnage caused by the 2020
Beirut Blast, which killed hundreds, injured thousands, and
inflicted billions in damage, as an example to emulate.

As such, it seems inconceivable the British special forces


veterans running Prevail would be anything other than
enthusiastic about guiding Kiev’s most violent undertakings, or
shy from carrying out such acts themselves.

Washington’s sharing of intelligence with Ukraine is well known,


and has proven pivotal to the execution of an array of successful
operations and counter-offensive actions. However, the White
House claims to observe rigid limits on what it discloses and
when, in order to prevent a wider war with Moscow. This has

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included a ban against providing precision targeting intelligence


for senior Russian officials by name.

No such reservations or restrictions appear to exist in London’s


case. In fact, the position of much of the British government,
intelligence services, and Army appears to be that the proxy war
must be escalated as much and as often as possible. Within
London’s military-intelligence circles, any exercise of prudence
by the Biden administration is seen as a reflection of cowardice.

On December 16th, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak demanded an


audit of the progress of the war in Ukraine to date. The
disclosure piqued intense fears within Whitehall that the new
premier could emulate and thus exacerbate the “caution” of the
Biden administration. A nameless source revealed to the BBC at
the time London had “stiffened the US resolve at all levels,” via
“pressure.”

“We don’t want Rishi to reinforce Biden’s caution. We want him


to [keep] pushing in the way Boris did,” they explained.

Senior British military-intelligence veteran Chris Donnelly


echoed this perspective in a chilling email sent to Brigadier
Julian Buczacki of the British Army’s elite 1st Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade just hours after the
Kerch Bridge assault. Donnelly was a driving force behind that
attack, directing his underlings to draw up blueprints for it. He is
also the mastermind of Prevail’s secret Ukrainian terror army.

Invited to serve as an “expert” high-level advisor in “escalation”


to London’s Chief of Defence Staff, Donnelly condemned
Biden’s supposedly careful approach to the conflict as “so
unwise as to beggar belief,” and “the opposite word to
‘deterrence’.”

With the political leadership in London under unrelenting

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pressure to accept Donnelly’s radical view of the conflict, it


appears almost certain the UK will seek new and more brazen
means of provoking Russia into escalating. The forces gathered
around Prevail are determined to throw caution to the wind,
even if it means tempting a nuclear winter.

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