The US’s record of intervening in the politics of Global South countries is well known. But in recent decades, US intelligence agencies have meddled even in the affairs of staunch ally the UK, and the US military maintains a major presence in the country.
President Barack Obama speaks at the ‘Town Hall’ discussion with British youth at the Royal Horticultural Halls on April 23, 2016 in London, England. (Max Mumby / Indigo / Getty Images)
This article is adapted from the preface to The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the American Empire, second edition, by Matt Kennard (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before — the consequences of US imperialism around the world — because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.
Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the United States after World War II, and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a “junior partner” to the US hegemon.
London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital that spreads neoliberalism around the world and the UK’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed Britain still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.
But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often-weak states. A lot of this work is documented in The Racket.
But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire that had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country, the country where I had lived nearly all my life. Britain, in fact, appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world for this book.
The similarities did not stop there. Just as the mainstream media could never mention the term “US empire” or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain. This was, again, an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight. The work I began doing would have never made it into the Financial Times.
Something Different
The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015. A veteran antiwar and anti-imperialist politician and activist, Corbyn was a complete outlier within the British political system. He was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also to the ability of the United States to retain the UK as a vassal state.
The different pressure points that stay hidden in normal times when the system is running like it should quickly became exposed. This was made explicit in June 2019, when US secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited the UK and was recorded saying privately:
It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.
Pompeo had served as CIA director from 2017 to 2018, and Corbyn later told me he believed Pompeo’s comments were intended as “a quite deliberate message” to him. Corbyn then mentioned the CIA-organized overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
Britain’s traditional subservience to the United States “could have gone a different way at various points in modern history, recently if Jeremy Corbyn hadn’t been destroyed by a vicious media campaign,” Noam Chomsky has written. But it was not a coincidence. The United States was integral to building a British political system that made a “different way” next to impossible.
I began looking at how the US state had been interfering in British politics to stop the rise of anti-imperialist leaders. The UK has never had a prime minister that was not signed up to the American imperial project. I started to realize this was not a mistake, but the result of concerted efforts from Washington.
The British-American Project
One particularly interesting organization was the British-American Project (BAP), which describes itself as “a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds and political views.”
Work to create the BAP began, with funding from the US embassy in London, in the early 1980s when Labour was headed by Michael Foot, the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader to emerge since World War II. The BAP’s aim was to push British progressives into a pro-American political position at a time when the CIA was worried about the strength of the Labour left and its “anti-American” views.
Just as the mainstream media could never mention the term ‘US empire’ or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain.
Many Labour figures who became outspoken critics of Corbyn’s leadership from 2015 to 2020 were also involved in the BAP. Corbyn was the first non-Atlanticist Labour leader since Foot resigned in 1983.
Declassified files from the CIA show how concerned the intelligence agency then was by the left turn in Labour. The BBC noted “the deep level of concern inside the CIA about the strength of the Left within Labour in the early 1980s, a political force which the agency regarded as anti-American.”
The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that “a Labor majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests.” Foot’s 1983 election manifesto questioned “the programme for establishing American-controlled Cruise missiles on our soil” and noted that a new European security pact should end with the “phasing out” of NATO.
“Deeply Suspicious”
The BAP’s own official history notes that “the traditional British left-wing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues” in the period, adding “this was the era of Michael Foot’s leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament.”
Historian Stephen Dorril has written that Eugene Rostow, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the US arms control and disarmament agency, was in 1982 “concerned about the growing unilateralist movement” and “helped initiate a . . . propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND.” Foot was a founder and strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), while Corbyn has been a member of the peace group since he was fifteen and was vice-chair when he became Labour Party leader.
The US neutralization campaign, which was leaked to the Washington Post, “would take three forms,” Dorril continued: mobilizing public opinion, working within the churches, and a “dirty tricks” operation against the peace groups. William Casey, then head of the CIA, met with the US Information Agency to organize the propaganda campaign in Europe.
But in 1985, with Foot defeated and the BAP established, the CIA expressed concern that the Labour Party was still “in the hands of urban leftists given to ideological extremes.”
The CIA made its 1980s files about Labour available online in 2017, soon after Corbyn was elected leader. They were extensively covered by the British media and contained two specific references to Corbyn, who was a Labour MP at the time.
The CIA was particularly concerned about Foot winning the 1983 general election, with an internal report stating that ‘a Labor majority government would represent the greatest threat to US interests.’
One file noted Corbyn’s support in 1986 for an El Salvadoran trade union federation, Fenastras, which was linked to Marxist guerrillas during the country’s civil war, while the Americans backed the military government.
Corbyn was also mentioned in a US diplomatic cable sent from Istanbul in 2002 and published by WikiLeaks, describing a protest in the city against the US push for war in Iraq, which embassy staff apparently monitored. “Union leaders made speeches and the crowd chanted anti-US and anti-war slogans including ‘No to Imperialist War,’ and ‘We Will Not Be American Soldiers,’” the cable noted, adding that “speakers included a British Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn from the Labor Party.”
The Media
The BAP and its cultivation of the progressive forces in Britain to a pro-American position reminded me of what I had seen around the world, with the funding of civil society to keep target societies under US control.
I started then looking at some of the specific institutions I’d seen enforcing US control in places like Bolivia and Ecuador. One of them — the National Endowment for Democracy — pops up regularly throughout The Racket.
I quickly found that the NED was also working in the UK, funding media groups — something that had picked up around 2015, the year Corbyn was first elected leader of the Labour Party. A nonprofit corporation funded by the US Congress, it had plowed over £2.6 million into seven British independent-media groups in the five years up to 2020.
The NED was “created . . . to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,” the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to “support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries.”
I found that the NED was also working in the UK, funding media groups — something that had picked up around 2015, the year Corbyn was first elected leader of the Labour Party.
Since the end of the Cold War, the NED had grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to the creation of the NED in the 1980s, remarked in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” But the NED has traditionally focused on Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I found that the organization has recently funded three British media outlets and four UK press freedom groups. All were seen as on the progressive end of the political spectrum.
“Infrastructure of Democracy”
The NED was created in 1983 by President Reagan, who actually set out the idea in a set-piece speech in Westminster, in front of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The aim, he said, was “to foster the infrastructure of democracy.”
This was a time of embarrassing scandals for the CIA. A Washington Post article soon noted, “The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete.”
The NED was meant to defend against these scandals by putting certain programs out into the open. “The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy,” the Washington Post continued. “Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert.”
CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, who served in the agency in the 1960s, commented in 1995:
Nowadays, instead of having just the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process secretly by inserting money here and instructions there and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy.
John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told me that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations. “In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from propagandizing the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries — the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” he said.
“The National Endowment for Democracy, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, countless Washington-area ‘think tanks,’ and Radio/TV Martí, are the vehicles for that propaganda,” he added, referring to the US broadcaster that transmits to Cuba.
Kiriakou, who served in the agency’s core Directorate of Operations, continued:
And what better way to spread that propaganda than to funnel money to “friendly” outlets in “friendly countries”? The CIA’s propaganda efforts throughout history have been shameless. But now that they’re not legally relegated to just Russia and China, the whole world is a target
Funding
One particularly interesting case was the Index on Censorship, the UK’s foremost free-expression group, which monitors threats to free speech and publishes censored writers. It received £603,257 from the NED in 2016–2021, according to its Charity Commission accounts.
Index’s chief executive, the former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, was appointed in June 2020 — six months after losing her seat in Parliament. A US diplomatic cable, published by WikiLeaks in 2010, named Smeeth as a “strictly protect” informant for the US embassy in London.
The cable — written in 2009 by US deputy chief of mission in London, Richard LeBaron — noted, “Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Burton Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that [prime minister Gordon] Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12.”
The cable continued that “a despondent Smeeth said” Brown had to abandon his election plan after a drop in Labour’s poll numbers following a media scandal. LeBaron added, “This information has not been reported in the press.” The cable was classified as “confidential” and “not for foreign eyes.”
One of the founders of Index in 1972, the poet Stephen Spender, had earlier resigned as editor of Encounter magazine when it was exposed as being funded by the CIA. Spender said he was unaware of the funding arrangements.
John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told me that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations.
Spender then founded Index and quickly solicited a “substantial grant” from the Ford Foundation, which Frances Stonor Saunders states in her award-winning work The Cultural Cold War acted as a conduit for CIA funds in the period. Saunders told me it was “widely known at the time the Ford Foundation was a witting partner of the CIA.” In her book, Saunders wrote, “The foundation’s archives reveal a raft of joint projects.”
This is how it works. Not just in the developing world but, I was learning, in the developed world, too. In fact, the control was even deeper.
The Hidden Fist
But I soon understood that the United States was not just interfering in the British political process, media, and civil society. The hidden fist of the US empire, the massive American military — which I’d seen deployed all over the developing world — was also occupying Britain.
I found the US Air Force (USAF) had 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, a number that was increasing rapidly. Britain, in fact, hosted the third-highest level of USAF personnel of any country in the world, ahead of historic US military outposts like South Korea and Italy.
These American airmen had flown bombing missions to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya from their bases in Britain. “The USAF presence in Britain isn’t just some remnant of the Cold War. It’s ongoing and very active,” Kate Hudson, chair of the CND, told me.
During Ukraine tensions in 2022, huge American B-52 nuclear-capable bombers were seen leaving and arriving at a RAF base in Gloucestershire. “The US says they were on a training exercise to ensure they are ‘ready,’ presumably for war on Ukraine,” Hudson added. “Once again, we have a situation where war or other military actions can be prosecuted from Britain without parliamentary scrutiny.”
Of the 55,223 active-duty US airmen deployed overseas in 2021, 16 percent were hosted in Britain. There were, in fact, more active-duty USAF personnel in Britain than in forty of the United States’ own states. This included Maryland, which hosts Joint Base Andrews, home to Air Force One and known as “America’s Airfield.”
US military personnel in Britain are all in England, with access to eleven Royal Air Force (RAF) bases, stretching from Cambridgeshire to Yorkshire. They are known officially as United States Visiting Forces (USVF).
Altogether there were 12,147 US military personnel in Britain in March 2022. A further hundred fifty Americans are deployed with NATO, the majority at its intelligence center at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. The US military had one hundred personnel based in London, including fifty-two inside the American embassy, and 135 people deployed at multiple undisclosed locations across the UK.
The Jewel in the Crown
The largest US military presence is at RAF Lakenheath, a 727-hectare site in Suffolk. Despite being called an RAF base, it is leased to the USAF, and its population is overwhelmingly American. There were 5,404 US Department of Defense personnel based there in 2022.
A nondescript village with a population of five thousand people, Lakenheath directly abuts the US base and has a clear American influence. The Turkish barbers proudly display the Stars and Stripes alongside the Union Jack on their shop front. The Volvo car dealership on the outskirts sells only to US military personnel.
‘We have a situation where war or other military actions can be prosecuted from Britain without parliamentary scrutiny.’
In the Co-op on the quiet High Street, Klara, twenty-four, is stacking shelves. She followed her boyfriend, an engineer, to Lakenheath a year ago after he found work nearby.
“It has been quite weird at times, because obviously there’s a lot of people moving in and out throughout the year,” she told me. “Especially working in the shop, I do see a lot of new faces for such a small village.” She added, “There are a lot of Americans coming in.”
Klara said the US aircraft have become more frequent in recent months. “When I first moved here, they used to fly every three hours, just five or six planes at once. But recently, the past two or three months, they’ve been flying quite a few every few hours, so it’s gotten more over the months.” She added, “With the planes it does get loud sometimes.”
Does she have any security fears about living next to a USAF base? I asked. “Personally I do think about it. If war does happen, we are kind of like the target, aren’t we, with the base right there? So yeah, it is a bit scary sometimes, if you actually properly think about it.”
A road sign for cars exiting RAF Lakenheath reminds drivers to “Drive on the Left.” The issue has been on the national agenda since 2019, when nineteen-year-old Harry Dunn was killed by the wife of a CIA officer driving on the wrong side of the road near RAF Croughton, another US-leased base in Northamptonshire. The United States helped the driver, Anne Sacoolas, leave the country soon after and later said she had diplomatic immunity for the alleged crime.
As well as being a CIA base, RAF Croughton is a USAF communications station and accounts for 25 percent of all military communications from Europe back to the United States.
Command and Control
The United States is spending billions of pounds upgrading air bases in the UK to enable Washington to intercept international communications and launch military strikes from Britain more quickly.
Of the 55,223 active-duty US airmen deployed overseas in 2021, 16 percent were hosted in Britain. There were more active-duty USAF personnel in Britain than in forty of the US’s own states.
Some of the locations are hubs for offensive bombing missions. RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire is the USAF’s only bomber Forward Operating Location, or military base, in Europe. The aircraft deployed there “enable US and NATO warfighters to conduct a full spectrum of flying operations.” Made available by the British government, it was used by US bombers during the war in Iraq in 2003. Just after I visited, two nuclear-capable American B-52 bombers were spotted leaving RAF Fairford for a “target acquisition” exercise over mainland Europe.
But the UK appears to have very little control over what happens on the USAF operated bases or the missions that are flown from them.
The overarching framework for the stationing of US forces in the UK comes from two pieces of legislation. In 1951, NATO established a Status of Forces Agreement to govern hosting arrangements between its member states. The following year, the Visiting Forces Act incorporated the NATO agreement into UK law. But Hudson of the CND said that these agreements “ultimately reserve jurisdiction of US personnel to the US.”
Most of the American bases are called RAF stations and leased by the United States. “Because of this, while the physical buildings comprising the bases are usually the property of the UK Ministry of Defence, very little of what happens in them is controlled by the British government,” Hudson said.
The empire never sleeps. And despite the mainstream media working to keep it invisible, it’s everywhere.