White Helmets founder Le Mesurier is now a mainstream saint, but leaked docs raise questions about his widow’s role

First, in late October, came a 6,000-word hagiography in The Guardian — less than a fortnight later, the BBC transmitted a 15-part radio documentary on his firm, Mayday Rescue.

Emma Winberg, Le Mesurier’s spouse and Mayday’s Chief Impact Officer, played a starring role in both efforts, in the process breaking the public silence she’d rigidly maintained since her husband’s mysterious death in November 2019.

Strangely though, discussion of her professional history was almost entirely absent. The Guardian was slightly more informative on this point than the BBC, sparingly describing Winberg as “a former British diplomat” working for a “communications firm in northern Iraq” when she became romantically involved with Le Mesurier in March 2016, before joining Mayday in January 2017.

‘Some of the funds will go missing’

The communications firm in question was Innovative Communications and Strategy (Incostrat), cofounded by Winberg in November 2014 with military intelligence veteran Paul Tilley, former director of Strategic Communications for the UK Ministry of Defence in the Middle East and North Africa. Like Le Mesurier, he attended Sandhurst Royal Military Academy.

Media references to Incostrat are sparse, although in December 2016 Rania Khalek revealed the company had approached a Middle East journalist and offered them US$17,000 per month to produce pro-opposition propaganda.

Private correspondence between the reporter and Incostrat indicates the company positioned itself as one of “three partners” of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) “working on media surrounding the Syrian conflict.”

Incostrat’s work was funded by the FCO’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF). In February 2017, a parliamentary report stated CSSF had “substantial allocations” in Syria, amounting to £60 million.

The same report noted there was significant risk the CSSF was “being used as a ‘slush fund’ for projects that...do not collectively meet the needs of UK national security,” and some of the financing it afforded “will go missing or be linked to groups that may carry out human rights abuses.”

The MSM can try rewriting the dubious history of White Helmets’ founder James Le Mesurier, but the truth is there for all to see

‘Using media to create events’

Significant light was shed on Incostrat’s cloak-and-dagger activities in September, when ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous dumped a vast number of FCO files on the web, exposing a variety of covert information warfare actions undertaken by the UK government against the Syrian state over many years.

The overriding objective behind all the initiatives was to destabilise the government of Bashar Assad, convince Syrians, Western citizens, foreign governments, and international bodies the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a legitimate alternative, and flood media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.

In one document, Incostrat boasts of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.” One example of this dual-strategy saw the company create mock Syrian currency in three denominations, imploring citizens to “be on the right side of history.”

The campaign was intended to ensure international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”

“The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by [UK government] officials,” the file states. “We will engage the international media to create a story around the event...The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”

Another saw Incostrat produce “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioural parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS, and dishonestly further the conspiracy theory that “a latent relationship exists between the two.”

Incostrat also provided “a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson” to the media to further the campaign’s messaging, securing interviews in “major news outlets” such as Al-Jazeera, Buzzfeed, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, Times, and Washington Post.

‘Human interest stories’

Another document indicates the company was staffed by veterans of covert Whitehall-funded psyops, noting Incostrat partners previously established a local media platform in Iraq “immediately following the fall of Saddam Hussein,” training “a cadre of journalists” who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.”

The same file also makes clear Incostrat personnel had been providing support to Syrian media platforms and civil society organisations since 2012, before the firm was founded.

In the process, Incostrat operatives played a role in creating eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across the country, developing and managing the Syrian National Coalition’s media office, and helped establish Basma - “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives.”

Other files leaked by Anonymous indicate Basma was the primary creation of ARK, a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by veteran FCO operative Alistair Harris, implying significant overlap between the pair.

Le Mesurier himself worked at ARK 2011 - 2014, and Mayday Rescue was spun out of the company - yet The Guardian’s lengthy elegy alleges Winberg had only been “briefly introduced” to him twice at “garden parties” prior to their formal March 2016 meeting.

Moderate torturers and murderers

As with other FCO contractors operating in Syria, including ARK, Incostrat produced propaganda promoting extremist groups as credible alternatives to the Assad government, and whitewashing their barbarous nature.

One document refers to the firm “providing strategic communications support to the moderate armed opposition.” An FCO tender for the project indicates some of the “moderate” groups to which Incostrat may have provided “strategic communications support” — “the Free Syrian Army, the Supreme Military Council, Revolutionary Forces Syria and…mid-level units such as Syrian Revolutionaries Front, Jaysh al-Islam [and] Harakat al-Hazm.”

The inclusion of Jaysh al-Islam (JAI) on this list is striking, for more reasons than one. While none of the collectives mentioned would adhere even vaguely to any definition of the term ‘moderate’, except perhaps broadly relative to the most murderous ‘rebel’ elements in Syria — with which each group regularly collaborated in any event — JAI was an especially and notoriously brutal fraternity.

For years, it ran the assorted areas it occupied under extremely vicious interpretations of Sharia law, kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing and executing innocent men, women and children for even the mildest infringements of strict Islamist code. Along the way, JAI carried out many atrocities, including parading caged Alawite families in the streets, using hostages as human shields, and attacking Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons.

While the UK government denies providing any backing to JAI, the files released by Anonymous confirm the other groups mentioned by the FCO all did receive Whitehall support of various kinds. Moreover, independent journalists who visited areas the group occupied found JAI worked closely with the White Helmets, which received tens of millions in funding from London.

Other files released by Anonymous indicate ARK reaped vast sums promoting the Helmets at the FCO’s behest, developing “an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group in order to “keep Syria in the news.”

Along the way, ARK produced a documentary on the Helmets and ran their various social media accounts, including the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra overwhelmed the city, numerous Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ in its main square.

The linkage between JAI and the Helmets gains an acutely sinister dimension given the former’s primary base of operations was the city of Douma, the site of a highly controversial alleged chemical weapons attack 7th April 2018.

The Helmets were central to Western news reporting in the initial hours and days following the contested strike, its operatives claiming two Syrian Air Force helicopters dropped barrel bombs containing the nerve agent sarin on the city.

Images they provided of cylinders embedded in buildings circulated widely on social networks and media platforms the world over, along with footage of local residents being hosed down in hospitals, children foaming at the mouth, and piles of dead bodies in a housing complex.

Paris, London and Washington claimed to possess secret proof Assad’s forces had attacked the city with chemical weapons, and in response launched a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria 14th April 2018.

In March 2019, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a final report on the incident, which concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a chemical weapons attack had occurred in Douma, and “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

However, a number of the organization’s previously suppressed files are now in the public domain — they make clear the report’s findings were directly contrary to the overwhelming majority of evidence collected by investigators who actually visited Douma, which pointed strongly to a staged ‘false flag’ incident.

An illicit affair

The documents imply witness and forensic evidence contradicting the notion a chemical weapons attack occurred in Douma, excluded from the OPCW’s final report on the incident, was collected in Turkey. The BBC’s radio series on Mayday confirmed this evidence was provided to investigators by Le Mesurier and the White Helmets.

While the OPCW website makes no reference to this assistance, not merely in respect of the Douma investigation but its probes of at least three other alleged government chemical weapon attacks in Syria, in June 2018 Mayday’s deep and cohering ties with the organization were exposed by none other than Emma Winberg.

Speaking at an Atlantic Council event alongside Bellingcat founder and chief Eliot Higgins, she described how the Helmets had in 2015 specifically been provided with OPCW-standard training and equipment to collect samples from the scenes of airstrikes for the organization. The ease with which this privileged position could be abused was apparently not considered, or indeed of no concern.

This followed two years in which the group’s status as ‘first responders’ in the Syrian crisis had become ever-more firmly established in the mainstream, thanks in no small part to the endless deluge of footage posted on the group’s social media channels, which was frequently. rebroadcast by Western news platforms.

In 2014, Winberg said, human rights organisations began “taking an interest” in the footage and reaching out to Mayday directly, seeking witness testimony from Helmets among other things.

She also suggested the attention generated by the group’s video clips was serendipitous, as the helmet-mounted cameras they wore were originally intended to be a “training aid” — it wasn’t until later, allegedly, they thought to publicise the content captured.

Fittingly, Winberg’s brief talk fed into a speech by Higgins, in which he demonstrated how Bellingcat and other media organisations made use of the White Helmets’ footage.

‘How communications influence’

It’s highly implausible the FCO-funded information warfare specialists that trained and promoted the Helmets weren’t well-aware in advance of the propaganda value of imagery from the conflict.

Yet, Winberg’s narrative is even more incredible given ARK, the firm so intimately intertwined with Incostrat and Mayday, extensively tutored and equipped hundreds of Syrians in “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story,” post-production techniques including “video and sound editing and software, voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design and software.”

ARK’s students were also instructed in practical propaganda theory, such as “target audience identification, media and media narrative analysis and monitoring, behavioral identification/understanding, campaign planning, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it,” and more. Such disciplines would no doubt be extremely effective in the staging of a ‘false flag’ attack.

The FCO continued funding Incostrat to the tune of millions after Winberg’s departure, and does so to this day. Cofounder Paul Tilley also left the company at around the same time, and founded IN-2 Comms, which“provides a more tailored product to the public and private sector focussing on specialised communication campaigns.” The firm has likewise reaped vast sums from Whitehall ever since.

One wonders whether the FCO’s extensive network of psyops cutouts played any role in the recent propaganda blitz surrounding Le Mesurier, Winberg, and the Helmets.

The BBC’s Mayday series credits Abdul Kader Habak as having provided “Arabic translation and additional research” to the project. According to his Facebook page, he worked for ARK 2013 - 2019.

Chloe Hadjimatheou, the documentary’s producer and presenter, has previously reported on events in Syria. In 2016, she produced a five-part documentary, Islamic State's Most Wanted, on citizen activist collective Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.

The group was founded by journalist Naji al-Jerf, who subsequently served as its primary spokesperson — he was also an ARK employee, playing a pivotal role in training and coordinating the firm’s vast network of stringers in Syria, and managing its distribution networks. He was murdered by ISIS operatives for these activities in December 2015.

On 18th November, Winberg announced her retreat from the public eye via Twitter, saying she would be “offline for the foreseeable” in order to “get to work”. It’s not certain what this “work” will entail, but mainstream efforts to deify her husband and obscure the reality of his professional history, the group he founded, and how and why he died, are evidently ongoing.

Addendum
Part2 of dossier on J. Le Mesurier

The MSM can try rewriting the dubious history of White Helmets’ founder James Le Mesurier, but the truth is there for all to see

Le Mesurier (l) and wife, Emma Hedvig Christina Winberg, a Swedish citizen. The contradictions multiply as the plot thickens.

On the morning of November 11, 2019, James Le Mesurier, founder of Syria’s controversial White Helmets, was found dead in Istanbul. Since then, the Western establishment has struggled to get its story straight on the man, his professional history, the group he founded, and how he died. 

The latest example of mainstream media narrative management in the ever-mysterious case came in the Guardian onOctober 27, in the form of a 6,000-word hagiography of Le Mesurier, authored by its veteran Middle East reporter Martin Chulov.

Many at this point will be familiar with the idolatrous portait it paints of its subject – a heroic humanitarian committed to benevolent causes who saved untold lives, tragically driven to suicide by a “disinformation campaign led by Russian and Syrian officials and peddled by pro-Assad bloggers, alt-right media figures and self-described anti-imperialists.”Nonetheless, it marks the first time the significant controversy surrounding his financial dealings has ever been explored, let alone mentioned, by a British news outlet.

In July this year, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published a long-read of its own, explosively revealing how, three days prior to his death, Le Mesurier ‘confessed’ via email to the White Helmets’ many international donors, who’d funded the group to the tune of hundreds of millions over the years, that he’d committed fraud. 

The disclosure was prompted by an internal audit by a Dutch accountant of the finances of Mayday, the foundation started by Le Mesurier to find, train, and support the White Helmets. The audit found, among other things, that he had been paying himself and his wife, long-time UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) operative Emma Winberg, “excessive” salaries and supplementing the totals with unjustifiably vast cash bonuses; that his employment of his wife represented a potential conflict of interest; and that he might be guilty of tax evasion. 

While claiming this malfeasance wasn’t intentional, Le Mesurier took full and sole responsibility, and expressed fears that further investigation could expose yet more “mistakes and internal failures.” 

Monetary misconduct

Damning stuff indeed, but De Volkskrant’s seismic disclosures have been curiously ignored by all other Western media outlets until now. The Guardian’s article deals with the damning revelations, both directly and indirectly – Le Mesurier, whom Chulov knew personally, and with whom he clearly maintained an intense affinity, is acquitted on all charges. Indeed, the White Helmets founder is said to have simply “unravelled under the weight of claims that would later prove to be false.”

The author is at pains throughout to frame “disinformation” as fundamental to Le Mesurier’s untimely demise, in terms of causing him immense “stress,” which led to him “disintegrating” mentally, damaging his reputation and that of the White Helmets in the eyes of world opinion, and, in turn, stoking erroneous suspicions in donor countries that he and his company were engaged in various improper activities. 

The question of how a battle-hardened military veteran could be so deleteriously impacted mentally and emotionally by “attacks on Russian television and social media,” particularly if they were entirely without substance, is unasked and unanswered. 

There’s little doubt Le Mesurier wasn’t in a good state during his final weeks. It’s been widely reported he was taking sleeping pills and psychiatric medication. Less well amplified were Turkish news reports alleging he and his wife had “fought violently” while dining out together the day before his death. 

Chulov alleges “a distressed Le Mesurier” told friends just before he died that claims of Mayday’s monetary misconduct “seemed to come from nowhere.” In fact, questions about what purpose the vast sums donated to the company were put to, and where they all ultimately ended up, had long circulated. 

While his article states that donor countries maintained their support for the White Helmets “despite the disinformation surrounding the group’s work,” this isn’t true. In September 2018, the Dutch government ended its backing, after a damning Ministry of Foreign Affairs report outlined serious concerns about Mayday’s financial practices, including an almost total lack of oversight over, and even awareness of, how its money entered Syria, and precisely whose pockets it eventually lined.  

However, Chulov feels confident dismissing any and all suggestions of embezzlement, for he’s in possession of a report by forensic auditors Grant Thornton, conducted at the request of Mayday’s donors, which concluded there was “no evidence of misappropriation of funds” by Le Mesurier and Winberg. 

Except that he isn’t, because it hasn’t been made public, at donors’ express request. Instead, he relies on the claims of a nameless “source familiar” with the report – which could conceivably, of course, be Winberg herself.

Excessive salaries plus bonuses

It’s clear Grant Thornton’s report isn’t an unalloyed clean bill of health, either – the auditors found “significant gaps in the administrative organization and internal control environment of Mayday” and “identified significant cash transactions that have not been (fully) recorded in the cash books and/or general ledger.” 

Moreover, due to Mayday’s “informal” working environment, many key discussions took place “orally and over WhatsApp,” meaning auditors “had to reconstruct a number of financial events and are unable to provide certainty in those cases.” 

Chulov is quick to dismiss the significance of these failings as nothing more than “shoddy” bookkeeping, contending “auditors found nothing to support the far more serious allegations made”against Le Mesurier – despite apparently not having actually read the report himself. 

Likewise, he concedes Mayday’s executive salaries had been “higher than industry standards”, although his anonymous source familiar with the report is on hand to reassure him, and readers, “they were not off-the-scale high.”In 2017, Le Mesurier informed the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was paying himself a salary of €24,000 per month, before bonuses – several orders of magnitude higher than the designated salary ceiling at other Dutch government-funded enterprises. And considerably more than the $150 a day the White Helmet rescuers on the ground received.

References to Le Mesurier founding three separate companies named ‘Mayday Rescue’ – Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai, Mayday Search and Rescue Training and Consultancy Services Ltd in Turkey, and Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation in the Netherlands – are predictably absent from the Guardian’s article.

Accounts aren’t publicly available for any of them – the Dutch entity, while not registered as a charitable organisation, is characterised as being ‘without commercial enterprise’, so doesn’t have to file accounts at all. Dutch ‘stichtings’, or foundations, are openly advertised by Dutch law firms as ideal ways for wealthy individuals and corporations to minimize tax liabilities and distribute funds internationally. 

The company nonetheless complied with governance and transparency requirements, appointing a Secretary and Treasurer. As such, the UK government could plausibly claim that Mayday Rescue, to which London funneled £43 million between 2015 and 2018, was, to the best of its knowledge, fully above board. 

Tax havens and tangled webs

Except the £43 million actually went to Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai – something only begrudgingly admitted by the FCO in March 2019, in response to a Freedom of Information request, after much heel-dragging and obfuscation. 

Dubai is a notorious tax haven, and FZ-LLCs – Free Zone Limited Liability Companies – aren’t subject to any taxes on dividends, so they can be used to easily and opaquely repatriate profits. The entities are required to maintain accounting records, which can be inspected by authorities, but aren’t required to file accounts of any kind. 

It may be significant that one of Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation’s three directors, alongside Le Mesurier and Winberg, was a British Army veteran, Rupert Davis, who, in April 2016, founded the company Chameleon Global. Dissolved in October 2020, it was categorised as dormant – that is, non-operational – for the duration of its existence. Le Mesurier also founded other companies, with indeterminate connections to his assorted Mayday entities. For instance, in April 2017 he established Sisu Global BV in the Netherlands. It has never filed accounts, in breach of Dutch law. Le Mesurier resigned in November 2018, but Winberg apparently remains a director.
In January 2019, Le Mesurier registered My Zahara Limited as a dormant company in northern England, at an address belonging to a company formation agent specializing in, among other things, compliance with money laundering regulations, suggesting he intended to use the firm to repatriate money from his overseas firms.

Davis was also, until April 2019, connected to Sisu Global BV, a company in the Netherlands founded by Le Mesurier in April 2017. It has never filed accounts, in breach of Dutch law. Le Mesurier himself resigned from it in November 2018. Winberg apparently remains a director. 

Chulov also, again predictably, dismisses as “disinformation” allegations that the White Helmets were “created by governments determined to remove Assad from power”; that Le Mesurier was “an agent of western intelligence, using a rescue organisation as a Trojan horse for regime change”; and that the organization was in any way affiliated to violent extremist groups.

What are matters of public record, however, is that the White Helmets were funded by the very governments avowedly committed to ‘regime change’ in Syria via covert and overt means; that Le Mesurier’s professional history includedspells as a military intelligence operative; and that the group has openly collaborated with the Al-Nusra Front, among other jihadist elements, and engaged in violent activity.

In a June 2015 speech discussing his founding of the White Helmets, Le Mesurier cited a market research agency study which found that, in fragile environments, security forces garner low levels of public trust while first responders have the highest as a key motivating factor in his decision to establish a “humanitarian aid group.”

Untold millions for propaganda

That the White Helmets’ benevolent image was very carefully constructed and promoted by a government attempting to achieve ‘regime change’ is amply underlined by FCO documents leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous.

The documents reveal that ARK, a firm founded by FCO veteran Alistair Harris where Le Mesurier worked between 2011 and 2014, played a pivotal role in promoting the White Helmets, developing“an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group to “keep Syria in the news.” 

Along the way, ARK, among many other endeavors, produced a documentary on the White Helmets, and ran its various social media accounts, among them the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra took the city, the White Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ with the group’s fighters in its main square.

NATO-friendly media & organizations refuse to address White Helmets’ atrocities

ARK profited to the tune of untold millions of pounds from these and other information-warfare efforts. The same illicit file tranche also reveals InCoStrat, founded by none other than Emma Winberg, also reaped large bounties for manipulating public perceptions about Syria, within and without the country. In one file, the firm boasted of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.” 

One example of the former strategy saw InCoStrat produce mock Syrian currency, in three denominations, imploring Syrians to “be on the right side of history.” It was intended to ensure that international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”

The file states: “The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by HMG officials … We will engage the international media to create a story around the event … The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”

Another document indicates that Winberg’s InCoStrat also established Basma – “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives” – and engaged in propaganda operations in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, training and maintaining a network of journalists who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.” 

On the subject of propaganda, establishment efforts to rehabilitate Le Mesurier are scheduled to continue apace in future.

Starting on November 9, the BBC will transmit a 15-part radio documentary on Mayday Rescue. Over the summer, Chloe Hadjimatheou, a reporter on the project, approached a number of journalists and researchers who’d publicly raised questions about the White Helmets, asking if they wished to contribute to the program. 

Several of the individuals targeted subsequently published their correspondence with Hadjimatheou, showing that the program’s preordained agenda and objectives couldn’t be more blatant.

What is clear is that any suggestion Le Mesurier was a British intelligence operative surreptitiously attempting to foster regime change in Syria, or that the White Helmets weren’t an entirely benevolent, independent humanitarian organization will be rubbished, and all voices critical of the group will be smeared as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian and Syrian governments.