Giving legs to old midwives tales

A classic bit of Graun journalism today,classified as 'news': 

Timid, incompetent ... how our spies missed Russian bid to sway Brexit

So it's true --there really was a bid to sway Brexit,and it was 'missed'. The whole Referendum thing must be declared null and void! Remainers 'wuz robbed!'

Lots of convincing detail first:

In September 2015 a tall young man with jet black hair and a pleasant grin made his way to Doncaster. His name was Alexander Udod. With the EU referendum vote on the horizon, Udod was attending Ukip’s annual conference. In theory he was a political observer. Actually Udod was an undercover spy, based at the Russian embassy in London....Udod chatted with the man who would play a key role in Brexit – the Bristol businessman Arron Banks. The spy invited Banks to meet the Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko. 

You would think the Guardian was actually there! They fearlessly discovered a photo of A Udod, which confirms their descriptioon --  supplied by the Russian Embassy! Then it gets a bit more cautious:

What allegedly [!] followed was a series of friendly encounters between Leave.EU and the Russians in the crucial months before the June 2016 poll: a boozy lunch, pints in a Notting Hill pub, and the offer of a Siberian gold deal. (Banks denies receiving money from Russia and previously stated his only contact with the Russian government in the run-up to the referendum consisted of “one boozy lunch” with the ambassador.)

Then a bit of 'we don't know but we should be told':

How much did MI5 know about Udod, a career intelligence officer, and his wooing of leading Brexiteers? We don’t know. But the Russia report – published last week after a 10-month delay – paints a damning picture of British spooks who were too timorous or too incompetent to do much about a growing Russian threat, or the Kremlin’s surreptitious attempt to sway the Brexit vote.

Again that surreptitious attempt is now fact . Every credible source supports this, like MPs, and there are smoking guns under the bed:

The MPs who sit on parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) were incredulous at the lack of cooperation from the UK’s security agencies. Asked about Moscow and Brexit, MI5 produced “six lines of text”, the report said. GCHQ didn’t drill down into the St Petersburg troll factory, which pumped out millions of pro-Leave messages. And MI6 failed to ask its secret agents what exactly the Kremlin was up to.

The stuff about the 'troll factory' and its milliions of pro-Leave messages might need a bit more work. The implication, of course, is that it must follow from the details in the earlier report and thus is supported by it.

 

Guarding their backs again:

Agency sources suggest such criticism is unfair. 

Only 'unfair', not inaccurate. 'Agency sources',well-known for speaking to the Gurdina, of course, also said:

They have less operational freedom than the FBI in the US and they are culturally and historically reluctant to wade into politics. Plus the instructions never came.

Well, we know what a bunch of bureaucratic order-followers they are. So what exactly is being alleged?

The report makes clear that nobody in government wanted to investigate whether Vladimir Putin helped midwife Brexit.

Midwifery seems suitably vague, but also a bit complex:

Eurosceptics may have been beneficiaries of Russian interference in 2016. They may be less happy when Moscow throws its weight behind a second Scottish independence vote....such as Moscow’s social media campaign during the first 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

And, puzzlingly, the first was devilishly effective, riddled with dark artery -- but not the second.