ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 first introduces and illustrates the concept of deflective source propaganda. It shows how the activities of intelligence agencies lying scarcely concealed behind various iterations of RussiaGate discourse also constitute contemporary forms of deflective source propaganda. This is illustrated at length by means of a detailed analysis of the Skripal affair in the UK in 2018. The chapter argues that long before the real facts of the affair could have been known, assuming that the entire incident was not staged or pre-scripted in some way (as is indicated by documentation of the government-funded Integrity Initiative), the British government engaged in anti-Russian propaganda by asserting Russian responsibility before it could have securely determined the source of the poison used, the origin of that poison, or the manner in which it was deployed. In this way the Skripal affair became one link in a long chain of pro-war NATO maneuvering against Russia, while deflecting public attention away from possible ties between Skripal and the role of the “Steele dossier” in generating RussiaGate discourse in the first place.
