Tulsi Gabbard's Rocky Road to Confirmation as Director of National Intelligence

The OPCW whistleblowers, the Senate Hearings and British Intelligence

On 12 February 2025 Tulsi Gabbard was finally confirmed as the new Director of National Intelligence. During her Senate Select Committee hearing on January 30th the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) whistleblowers, who blew the whistle on the corruption of its Fact Finding Mission (FFM) into the alleged chlorine gas attack in Douma on 7 April 2018, were cited in defence of Gabbard’s sceptical stance toward chemical weapons allegations in Syria. This was an important development. To date, the OPCW Douma controversy has surfaced in the European Parliament and, in the UK, myself and colleagues from the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media presented the issue at the invitation of an MP at the UK Parliament in early 2020. Questions have also been raised in the German Parliament whilst the controversy has surfaced repeatedly at UN SC level. Within the OPCW itself, the issue has formed the backbone of a long running standoff between states allied with the West and those from the global south. Now, finally, the issue has at least been mentioned in the US Senate.

The stakes are extremely high. Gabbard has courted significant criticism for her questioning of the alleged chemical weapons attacks in Khan Sheykhoun (2017) and Douma in 2018. In 2021, along with 27 other experts and respected voices, she signed a Statement of Concern calling on the OPCW to address the issues raised by the whistleblowers. She was also interviewed by Tucker Carlson on the issue.

During the run-up to her hearing, the Washington Post published a hit piece on Gabbard, accusing her of incompetence in matters of intelligence and of relaying Russian propaganda. In particular, this article appears to have been influenced by Professor Gregory Koblentz’s (George Mason University) 19-page memorandum to the committee.

Koblentz is a research academic who specialises in chemical weapons issues and yet the memo he wrote is clearly biased. It is liberally sprinkled with problematic terms, such as ‘conspiracy theory’ (used 14 times) and ‘disinformation’ (used 19 times), which are used to to discredit Gabbard’s questioning of US intelligence claims. The memo goes on to cite a study by the German NGO GPPI as evidence of Syrian government chemical weapons use, but fails to mention this study was funded by the German and Canadian governments whilst the lead author of the report, and head of GPPI, clearly has a close relationship to the White Helmets group, itself funded by the US and UK governments and a primary source of allegations regarding chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Here is the head of the White Helmets and the head of GPPI having dinner together:

In fact, Koblentz downplays the fact that the OPCW FFMs relied heavily on the White Helmets for the ‘evidence’ of alleged attacks by obfuscating this important truth:

In fact, the OPCW FFMs were never able to visit on site, up until Douma, because the first mission had been attacked by opposition groups back in 2014. From that point onwards, it was deemed too risky and, as a result, ‘local government organisations’, including the White Helmets, came to be heavily relied upon. As

Aaron Maté

explains in this article, this reliance on third parties represented a basic corruption of chain of custody requirements.

Censoring the Existence of the OPCW Whistleblower Inspectors

The most significant omission in Koblentz’s memo, however, concerns its failure to even mention the fact that the OPCW’s own scientists had blown the whistle on the Douma investigation, revealing that it had been manipulated and censored in order to reach a ‘pre-ordained’ conclusion that blamed the Syrian government. The end result is a significantly deceptive memorandum which exaggerates the strength of evidence in support of the official narrative on CW use in Syria whilst censoring the most important fact that Gabbard had strong grounds upon which to question what had happened in Douma because of what the OPCW’s own inspectors had revealed to the world.

I asked Koblentz, during a webinar, why he had ignored the OPCW whistleblowers but no answer was forthcoming:

The memory holing of the OPCW whistleblowers continued during Gabbard’s Senate hearing. Senator Mark Kelly, in particular, grilled Gabbard regarding her scepticism over the alleged attacks in Khan Sheykhoun and Douma, demanding to know why she had questioned official US government claims.

In response, Gabbard twice raised the OPCW whistleblowers, but both times Kelly quickly moved the conversation on to another of Gabbard’s sources, MIT Professor Ted Postol.

Aaron Maté

discusses this with Judge Napolitano here:

Jimmy Dore’s February 1st review of the hearing also covers Kelly’s attempts to divert discussion away from the whistleblowers (starting at 15.50):

What this all tells us is precisely how important the OPCW whistleblowers are. The corruption they reported threatens to derail the Syria chemical weapons narrative and, most importantly, their expertise and credibility are such that academics like Koblentz and politicians such as Kelly cannot contend with the evidence they have presented to the world.

British intelligence alarmed at Gabbard’s potential appointment

Come Tuesday the 4th of February, the initial Senate vote was taken and which successfully moved Gabbard forward to the full vote held today (12 February). Almost immediately, the British intelligence services were briefing against Gabbard. The Telegraph, a well-known conduit for the UK intelligence services, relayed threats that Gabbard’s appointment might compromise intelligence sharing with the US.

The Telegraph, published within hours of the initial Senate Vote on February 4th.

And why might British intelligence be so alarmed at Gabbard’s potential appointment? One possible answer takes us back again to the White Helmets and the alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Not only were the White Helmets funded by the US and UK governments (via USAID in the US and the Foreign Office’s CSSF fund in the UK), as noted earlier, they were also established and run by a former British military officer, the late James le Mesurier and his wife, Emma le Mesurier (née Winberg), who is described on her LinkedIn page as a former political officer from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The White Helmets playing a key role in supplying ‘evidence’ to the OPCW and le Mesurier himself helped to arrange alleged witnesses to be supplied to the FFM team. And, to top all of this, a recent Politico article reported that Emma le Mesurier had admitted to working for MI6 on a number of occasions.

This is where the controversy over the Douma alleged chemical attack, driven by two of the OPCW’s own inspectors, starts to look extremely messy for the British government and its intelligence agencies. The incident itself involved the killing of 43 civilians, many of them women and children. One of the facts to have emerged from the OPCW whistleblowers is that the original toxicology report, authored by NATO chemical weapons experts, was systematically suppressed. It had concluded the civilians had not been killed by chlorine gas and that no other nerve agent traces were found. And if they were not killed by chlorine gas, how was it that their had bodies turned up, gathered in piles, in an apartment block in Douma? An introduction to the key censored scientific issues can be read here whilst the BG21 Review provides a comprehensive record of what happened during the Douma investigation and can be read here.

Victims discovered in the apartment building in Douma appeared to have been killed almost instantaneously and to have gathered in piles.

The witnesses, many of whom were White Helmets, who claimed to the OPCW investigators that the civilians had perished in a chemical attack, had been organised under the supervision of James le Mesurier.

Meanwhile, other witnesses stated categorically that the hospital scenes, aired to the world, had been staged by the White Helmets. They have subsequently changed their story, after the overthrow of the Syrian government, but their original claims were corroborated by the BBC’s Riam Dalati who stated, in winter 2019, that 6 months of research and interviews had confirmed the scenes were indeed staged.

The reasonable inference to draw from the evidence we now have about what happened in Douma, coupled with the information that has emerged from the OPCW whistleblowers, is that the Douma alleged chemical weapons attack was staged with the involvement of the White Helmets, that 43 civilians were killed by something other than the alleged chlorine gas attack, and that James le Mesurier played a role in the events. Whichever way one looks at this, we have a war crime of significant proportions and one that UK intelligence-linked actors had proximity to.

How much le Mesurier knew about how the 43 civilians had been killed has gone to the grave with him. Two weeks after an OPCW official gave testimony at the Courage Foundation Panel in Brussels, detailing the manipulation of the investigation, le Mesurier fell to his death from the roof of his apartment building in Istanbul.

Nor is Douma the only problem for UK intelligence. In 2013 The Times was involved with an MI6 sample gathering operation in a town called Sheik Maqsood. We know this because Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (former British military) explained in a Wilton Park podcast that he had worked alongside Times journalist Anthony Lloyd in Sheikh Maqsood. The Times reported on the incident and the samples were sent off to Porton Down. The then British Prime Minister David Cameron described this as confirmation of sarin use in Syria:

Excerpts from Berlin Group 21 Review of the Douma Controversy

When a UN-OPCW investigation examined these claims, however, it made clear the evidence was insufficient to conclude that the alleged attack had occurred.

Another incident in which the paw prints of British covert activities can be seen is that of one of the earliest alleged chemical weapons incidents in Homs 2012. This was originally presented as a nerve agent attack but, very quickly, the narrative came off the rails when the US government indicated the incident was probably at most an inappropriate use of riot control gas. Claims of mysterious chemical weapons such as ‘Agent 15’ were dismissed. It subsequently emerged that some of the dubious information had been supplied by components of a British information operation in Syria:

Excerpt from ‘Homs 2012 and the Genesis of the Syria Chemical Weapons Narrative’, UK Column.

The alarm displayed by British intelligence services at the possible appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence starts to make sense. The issues raised by the OPCW whistleblowers present the world with a can of worms that, if opened, will reveal the truth of what happened in Douma and the various roles British funded groups, officials and intelligence operatives played, as well as the broader pattern of alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority

This weekend the head of the OPCW, Fernando Arias, who refused to ever even meet with his own inspectors who were reporting the corruption of the Douma investigation, travelled to Damascus and met with al-Julani, the ‘ex’ terrorist head of what remains of Syria. They declared that there would be co-operation to dismantle stockpiles of chemical weapons and production facilities. No doubt Western governments, OPCW senior management, and their newly established proxy in Damascus, will now work hard to serve up the proof of Syria’s chemical weapons. However, the murky background of these alleged attacks, the role of Western intelligence services, and, most importantly, the evidence presented to the world by the OPCW whistleblowers, will not be going away anytime soon.