After The Grayzone exposed CIJA – the Western gov’t-funded regime change outfit – for collaborating with al-Qaeda and its allies in Syria, files show the group sought to penetrate and “intimidate” European financial regulators who charged them with corruption.
Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal the intelligence-linked Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) launched a malicious effort to infiltrate and subvert the European Commission and EU anti-fraud office after it accused them of corruption. In order to carry out these attacks, its director solicited the services of at least one longtime MI6 operative, Ian Baharie.
The group, which came to prominence in the early stages of the Western-backed dirty war on Syria, describes itself as a “non-governmental organisation dedicated to collecting evidence… for the express purpose of furthering criminal justice efforts” across the world.” CIJA’s work in gathering supposed evidence of the abuses of the Syrian government of deposed President Bashar Al-Assad earned it gushing praise from Hillary Clinton and puff profiles from The New Yorker, New York Times and The Guardian.
As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed in a 2019 profile on CIJA – one of the first critical investigative reports on a group touted by mainstream media as “independent” – one of the NGO’s top funders was the US State Department, which granted it over $500,000 in a short period. Today, CIJA boasts that it “currently works to support prosecutions in 16 countries” and is “assisting 52 law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies and 14 prosecutorial offices globally.”
Unmentioned there, and entirely ignored by English-language legacy media outlets, is the fact that the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) placed CIJA on an EU blacklist as punishment for unethical activities including cooking accounting books, forging documents, and graft. The group has been on EU regulators’ radar since at least 2015, when OLAF conducted a raid of CIJA’s registered headquarters only to find no trace of the organization actually operating there.
Now, leaked documents and emails reviewed by The Grayzone indicate CIJA’s founder and executive director William “Bill” Wiley undertook a retaliatory campaign of dirty tricks aimed at removing his organization from the EU blacklist. His grand scheme included a ruthless sting operation on a former staffer he accused of whistleblowing, as well as plans to gather dirt on OLAF officials which European Commission officials would be “intimidated by.”
With a career skirting the line between the world of NGO’s, multinational corporations and Western intelligence, Wiley sought out a veteran British MI6 operative to assist his dirty tricks campaign. Though CIJA promotes universal jurisdiction for purported crimes committed by rogue foreign governments, the leaked files show the group is more than willing to circumvent the law to advance its own objectives.
Espionage veterans for justice?
CIJA was established in 2012 by MI6 and US intelligence veterans seeking to compile evidence of abuses by Syrian security forces. CIJA’s founders aimed to lay the groundwork for future war crimes prosecutions in politically favorable NATO country courts.
By this point, Damascus had yet to deploy its military to deal with the dirty war imposed on it by foreign powers. CIJA’s creation mere months before the outbreak of civil war suggests both foreknowledge of what was to come in Syria, and anticipation of President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. Indeed, its business model was built on regime change. Insight into CIJA’s objectives can be gleaned from the little-known operations involved in its founding, which include ARK and Tsamota.
Created by MI6 veteran Alistair Harris, ARK was one of a constellation of contractors employed at enormous cost by British intelligence to conduct covert psychological warfare campaigns in Syria, from the very beginning of the crisis which consumed the country. ARK’s aim was to destabilize Bashar Assad’s government by convince the domestic population and Western citizens that CIA and MI6-backed militants pillaging the country were a “moderate” alternative. It attempted to achieve this aim by flooding the media with pro-opposition propaganda.
Meanwhile, Tsamota offered guidance to major corporations on how to maximize profits in the Global South, while limiting their local and international legal liabilities, particularly in regard to human rights abuses committed by private security firms. Its staff, like ARK’s, is comprised of military and intelligence veterans, including its founder Bill Wiley. After two decades in the Canadian military, Wiley cut his teeth in international law as a lawyer who ostensibly defended Saddam Hussein during his trial for crimes against humanity.
In fact, Wiley was imposed on the former Iraqi leader’s defense team without Hussein’s consent by the US embassy in Baghdad’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office. Given that the CIA presided over interrogations of Hussein, and sought to prevent embarrassing disclosures in court about its longrunning relationship with the Iraqi leader, Wiley’s presence raised questions about whether he was been running interference on Langley’s behalf.
As Washington moved in on Syria in 2012, initiating a multi-billion dollar dirty war for regime change, CIJA basked in glowing media coverage for its role in providing the fodder to justify sanctions that would decimate the Syrian economy.
While lauding the group for “capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass torture and killings,” major news outlets showed little interest in probing how CIJA gathered evidence of purported abuses. As the 2019 investigation by The Grayzone’s Blumenthal revealed, the group’s methodology largely consisted of paying vast sums to terrorist groups like Al Nusra and ISIS for smuggling sensitive documentation out of abandoned government buildings in areas taken over by the armed opposition.
CIJA strikes back after EU fraud bust
Throughout the Syrian dirty war, CIJA’s promoters in legacy media remained blissfully unaware that the organization had engaged in a series of unethical activities which had come under heavy scrutiny by the European Anti-Fraud Office, known as OLAF.
In 2017 and 2020, EU regulators found that Tsamota and CIJA had committed industrial scale graft, crooked accounting, and other malfeasance in relation to EU-funded projects the pair managed.
In the former case, Tsamota was awarded an EU contract for €1.834 million to “provide support to higher legal education in Iraq” in 2013. OLAF investigators found the company either failed to provide requisite documentation or provided falsified information, including its operating address. Tsamota also made multiple questionable payments to subcontractors, and did not operate according to a “stable structure,” with many consultants employed through oral contracts. OLAF was unable to recover evidence the project had been implemented at all.
In the 2020 ruling, OLAF found “while the project partners claimed to support the rule of law, they were in fact violating regulations on a massive scale, with false documents, irregular invoices, and self-enrichment.” The anti-fraud agency called for police probes into the activities of both CIJA and Tsamota in European countries, but local police repeatedly refused to open an investigation. Perhaps not coincidentally, OLAF thanked its government donors for staging “interventions” on the matter.
Nonetheless, leaked documents and emails reviewed by The Grayzone indicate OLAF’s findings landed CIJA on an EU blacklist, severely hampering its ability to secure lucrative contracts. Rather than accept responsibility, Wiley raged against OLAF, accusing the EU regulators of being “engaged in a concerted effort to destroy” his political enterprise. He even wondered if the investigation had been triggered by “malign foreign interference” originating in Russia.
Wiley proposed a vast and highly aggressive campaign of recriminations against OLAF, including targeting individuals suspected of abetting the anti-fraud agency’s “wrongdoing” against CIJA.
His master plan focused on collecting “HUMINT,” or human intelligence, by stealing internal OLAF communications and documents. If Wiley and his colleagues could obtain enough evidence of “foreign penetration of EU institutions,” he wrote, senior European Commission officials might be bullied into providing what he described as a “discrete settlement.”
Wiley hoped a quiet legal agreement would allow CIJA and Tsamota to collect millions of dollars due to what he claimed were “substantial financial losses occasioned as a result of the sustained EU OLAF campaign against these parties.”
In one document, issued in response to a request from the Dutch foreign ministry for advice on handling media requests, CIJA appeared to blame a June 2019 article in The Grayzone for the group’s predicament, painting the financial scrutiny it faced as “the outcome” of “attempts to discredit the work of CIJA” by this outlet and other critical sources. The Dutch government declined to release CIJA’s letter in full, claiming its publication could “jeopardize” the Netherlands’ “relations with other states and international organizations.”
CIJA conducts ‘ongoing operation’ against OLAF
Much of the evidence revealing the intelligence-tied plot against EU officials can be found in an August 2024 internal CIJA paper entitled, “The EU OLAF Campaign.” The document provides a clear window into Wiley’s paranoid mindset. According to the CIJA founder, EU officials now “served the interests of the Russian Federation and [its] Western proxies and useful idiots.” He went on to allege that Brussels’ anti-fraud office was guilty of “extraordinary degrees of incompetence and vindictiveness” in its scrutiny of CIJA.
Wiley speculated that the entire investigation could have been the result of “malign Russian state interference,” claiming that two of the leadership roles in the “EU OLAF unit responsible for the attacks” on CIJA were held by individuals who “may have nefarious links to Russia or otherwise to Bulgaria.”
Ultimately, CIJA was simply the victim of an “increasingly vigorous campaign of Russian state and proxy dis- and misinformation,” the founder asserted. But proof of Moscow’s involvement is questionable at best.
Moreover, in October 2022, a purported phishing effort against Wiley’s email by the “spoofed” address “of a former MI6 officer” was attempted, but failed. “At this same time, two former MI6 officers with associations to the CIJA and/or Wiley were targeted by the same hacking group,” the briefing stated — confirming that CIJA and its founder were in close contact with multiple operatives of at least one Western spying agency. Wiley attributed this alleged cyberattack to “cyber elements of the Russian FSB,” without providing evidence.
Wiley places OLAF ‘under investigation’
In March 2020, OLAF published a press release announcing it had exposed fraud by “partners” managing a “Rule of Law project in Syria.” CIJA was not named, however. According to Wiley’s briefing note, this was the result of his outfit “bringing an action” before the European Court of Justice.
“The identities of Tsamota and Wiley are protected from public view,” he wrote. Still, “the press release gave rise to a social media storm, coupled with negative mainstream media coverage, which very nearly destroyed Tsamota/CIJA,” Wiley lamented. Though almost universally ignored by the English-speaking press, the scandal had a major impact in Europe, where Dutch and Belgian outlets reported widely on the EU probe.
The briefing also shows CIJA reached out on numerous occasions to EU financial regulators, who repeatedly rebuffed them. This followed Wiley’s desperate attempts to convince OLAF Director General Ville Itälä to purge their 2020 press release from the web.
In the leaked note, Wiley complained that in mid-2023, Itäla invoked an investigation into CIJA by the author of this article, Kit Klarenberg, as a justification for his refusal to remove the incriminating press release. Unable to conceal his disgust, Wiley slammed Itäla for citing a “leading purveyor of Russian disinformation… as an authoritative journalistic source.”
Itäla’s rejections are likely to have only further fueled the CIJA founder’s vindictive crusade against the EU Commission and OLAF. The leaked briefing offers several disquieting examples of the menace with which Wiley was willing to pursue EU apparatchiks he suspected of wronging the Center and Tsamota.
For instance, he suggested that veteran British civil servant Nicholas Ilett, who was OLAF’s acting director general when the agency first issued a damning report on Tsamota in 2017, might be “open to engagement” with a “(former) UK official” given his professional background. However, Wiley noted this would create “the risk of tipping off EU OLAF that it is under investigation by parties unknown,” as “there is no way of knowing” whether Ilett would inform the agency of CIJA’s machinations. Were Ilett “non-cooperative,” Wiley proposed “he might be invited to retain a solicitor to advise him of the elements of the crime of seeking to pervert the course of justice, which includes the fabrication of evidence and falsely accusing someone of a crime.”
There is little evidence to suggest Ilett attempted to “pervert the course of justice.” But there are multiple examples in the leaked briefing of Wiley openly advocating tactics against the EU and OLAF that would constitute serious crimes.
Wiley seeks to break EU investigation by causing ‘reputational damage’
Over the course of an 18-month-long “inquiry,” CIJA’s Wiley concocted “three working hypotheses” which would help inform his quest for vengeance.
First, he theorized that former Tsamota employee Cinzia Verzeletti “was run by EU OLAF as a source” while working for the firm, and deliberately sabotaged its operations, opening the organization up to allegations of fraud. Second, he postulated that OLAF “pursued the Tsamota/CIJA file in a vindictive manner inconsistent with [established] rules and regulations.” The theory was that “malign foreign interference” was to blame for OLAF’s repeated rulings against Tsamota/CIJA.
As punishment for her supposed treachery, Wiley suggested that Verzeletti “should be prioritised” as a “target” by CIJA. The two other “working hypotheses” were to be “examined by way of concurrent activity.” Finally, Wiley proposed a tactic of “last resort”: gathering compromising information which European Commission officials would be “intimidated by.”
But before embarking on a campaign of dirty tricks, Wiley hoped unspecified “initial breakthroughs” with European officials would “lead to a cascade of additional, valuable information as those affected…seek to protect their personal positions.”
Wiley concluded by reiterating “the purpose of [CIJA’s] ongoing operation” against the EU Commission and OLAF was “not to cause public embarrassment” to either. Instead, he sought to end “OLAF attacks” on himself and the organizations he ran, while securing “a discrete settlement.” He was optimistic the EU would fold to CIJA’s backdoor bullying, as “the European Commission is particularly vulnerable at the moment to reputational damage” that could arise due to public allegations of “malign foreign penetration of EU institutions.”
It did not seem to matter to Wiley that those charges might be entirely baseless. He was on a mission, and nothing – not even the truth – could deter him from his objective.
Wiley blackmails and threatens innocent woman
Cinzia Verzeletti had been employed by Tsamota as a “proposal writer and project manager” between 2012 and 2014. CIJA conducted an extensive investigation into her personal and professional life, even snooping on the residence where she lived while working for Tsamota to determine if she was still there.
In a lengthy leaked briefing note, CIJA assessed “to a reasonable degree of probability” that Verzeletti “was run as a source” by OLAF within Tsamota, and had been directed by an OLAF “handler” to “commit a handful of administrative errors.”
Wiley postulated that these supposed “errors” were made deliberately in order to “undermine the proper functioning of Tsamota’s European Commission contract,” thereby opening the organization and CIJA to allegations of fraud. However, Tsamota assessed Verzeletti “was not knowingly a Russian asset,” and may have been “manipulated, directly or indirectly, by one or more Russian assets” within OLAF.
Wiley appeared enthused by the progress of the sting operation, writing that Verzeletti had “been softened by anonymous, remote means,” and was “unaware of the precise reasons for this meeting nor the professional affiliations of her interlocutors.”
The CIJA director had been contacting Verzeletti under a pseudonymous email for some time, using the moniker “Richard.” Posing as a journalist investigating infiltration of OLAF, Wiley relentlessly harassed his former employee, accusing Verzeletti of maintaining contacts with “foreign assets,” if not being a “foreign asset” herself. He also suggested she could be in legal trouble, and demanded an in-person meeting.
In the event that Wiley somehow validated his theory that Verzeletti was planted by OLAF in Tsamota, he vowed to warn her that she had committed “a criminal offence pursuant to Belgian penal law,” and could be exposed to “financially-ruinous civil liability in the event that Tsamota was to act against her.” In return for “full disclosure on her part of all aspects of her relationship” with OLAF “during and after her engagement with Tsamota,” he planned to offer Verzeletti “immunity from criminal and civil action.”
“Further reassurance can be provided that she is not the target of the investigation – whilst, at the same time, making it clear to Verzeletti that her misconduct will be disclosed by lawful means in the public domain in the event of her failure to cooperate either directly with Tsamota or, should she prefer, relevant legal and/or law-enforcement authorities,” Wiley wrote.
The CIJA director tacked on a series of menacing plans: “Ensuring the cooperation of Verzeletti might best be achieved through reassurance she was the victim of an EU OLAF conspiracy against Tsamota, which used her to nefarious ends which she could not have foreseen…It is important Verzeletti be left in no doubt the difficult position in which she is about to find herself…can and will be made significantly more serious, legally and reputationally speaking, in the event of her non-cooperation with this inquiry…If nothing else, Verzeletti will arguably be keen not to lose her current job.”
To advance his plot, Wiley arranged for an agent to meet Verzeletti on August 26, 2024. He was Ian Baharie, a veteran of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service. Unfortunately for the CIJA chief, Baharie viewed his scheme with deep skepticism.
Wiley begs MI6 for help infiltrating EU Commission
On August 14 2024, 12 days before the planned meeting with Verzeletti, Wiley emailed Baharie, seeking his assistance with “the target.” He attached the assorted briefing notes on CIJA’s perceived enemies, informing Baharie that if he “[wished] to proceed to further discussion and ultimately the tasking, there would be a further note concerning [Verzeletti’s] likely handler.” Wiley wanted Baharie’s thoughts on “how to approach the interview” on August 26, and “whether we need to line up an additional body for the meeting, if only to serve as room meat.”
Baharie seemed perplexed by the material provided by Wiley, suggesting he might be “missing a document” given there was no clear “[operations] plan for the forthcoming meeting” with Verzeletti. He asked numerous questions about Wiley’s ultimate objectives, and how he hoped to achieve these goals – “a private campaign”, or “series of private conversations” with EU officials? Baharie suggested it was “prudent” for CIJA “to map out the enemies and enemies’ enemies before starting any conversation or campaign.”
Strikingly, the communications show Wiley in fact wasn’t fully sold on the idea OLAF had become riddled with Moscow-controlled chaos agents. In a possible reference to the CIA, Wiley remarked that “the mob at home” had “convinced itself, to a degree which I have not, that the Russians are behind this.” The admission strongly suggests he knowingly sought to fabricate evidence to support his conspiratorial charge.
Wiley claimed a year prior, “the mob at home promised to deal” with CIJA’s OLAF problems, but that “such assistance was never forthcoming… because the Belgian service would have to be engaged.” He added “Al” – an obvious reference to ARK chief Alistair Harris – had recently briefed Baharie’s “old crew” – MI6 – about CIJA’s problems. Wiley said he “heard from other sources” London’s foreign spying agency was aware of his travails. It is unclear, however, whether British intelligence played any role in the decision by Manchester police to avoid investigating CIJA.
Wiley proposes infiltrating OLAF to steal documents
By August 2024, Wiley lamented that CIJA was “still getting killed” by the EU’s blacklist of his organization. Given the lack of help from Western spying agencies, he now turned to spies he described as “private sector cyber outfits in the US, Europe and Ukraine to do” the “digging… I am not equipped to do on my own.” This had extended “as far as it can without getting into grey areas such as hacking,” Wiley wrote.
He added that he was waiting on these sources to provide “Moscow flight manifests” which he hoped would discredit Laszlo Illes, an OLAF audit officer who was assigned “the Tsamota/CIJA/ARK file in January 2020” by the anti-fraud agency. Wiley bragged, “quite obviously, if the prick was in Moscow a few months back, we will find ourselves in a rather agreeable position.”
He went on to outline the vague contours of a HUMINT operation targeting the European Commission, suggesting once assets inside the organization were recruited, it would “bring reasonably quick results” as “nobody trusts anybody else in the Commission.” The CIJA founder predicted that “when one source is cracked sufficiently, a cascade of facilitators… keen to save their own asses will follow.”
Wiley believed CIJA’s identification of “points of weakness with respect to a number of the useful idiots who have advanced EU OLAF’s plans” would assist in his Machiavellian scheme. “If/when we have sufficient evidence of wrongdoing,” it would be provided to veteran NATO and British Foreign Office operative Claire Grimes, who Wiley claimed had access to “the right people in the Commission,” with “the authority to facilitate a discrete settlement” to CIJA for its alleged mistreatment by Brussels’ anti-fraud office.
Wiley further proposed cultivating “one or more sources” inside OLAF, “who can get into the file(s) and provide us with… internal emails.” Before then, he hoped to find somebody to meet with Verzeletti, noting that if the former Tsamota employee “[speaks] truthfully to what we assess was the case, such disclosure would provide us with significant points of leverage against others.” If CIJA could simultaneously prove OLAF’s Laszlo Illes had traveled to Russia, “we might well have enough already to engage” Grimes, Wiley salivated.
CIJA elicited false evidence for wrongful convictions
At the time of publication of this article, OLAF’s press releases on CIJA’s Syrian fraud remain online. There is no indication the agency has dropped its probes into the organization, nor any suggestion the European Commission was successfully infiltrated and bullied into providing CIJA with a “discrete settlement,” as Wiley hoped.
Moreover, three months after Wiley attempted to harness Ian Baharie’s cloak-and-dagger nous to tighten the screws on Verzeletti, an EU-funded outlet called The Black Sea published a damning investigation into how CIJA spearheaded a criminally corrupt, failed prosecution of an innocent man.
In March 2023, police in Sweden, Belgium and Germany arrested three Syrian emigres: Walid Zaytun, Eid Muhameed, and Mustafa Marastawi. CIJA had produced dossiers fingering the trio as active members of ISIS, accusing them of having participated in public executions in the town of Al-Sawana in May 2015. As The Black Sea revealed, however, the evidence against the Syrians was “based on a handful of testimonies with significant and glaring inconsistencies.” According to the outlet, CIJA investigators elicited the bogus testimony with offers of “visas to Europe,” and also “tampered with witness statements.”
In May 2024, following a month-long trial, a Swedish court acquitted Walid Zaytun of all charges. In their ruling, judges said the prosecution failed to prove its case, while raising serious concerns over how CIJA’s witnesses changed their statements “in several important respects” throughout the police investigation and “may have deliberately provided incorrect information.” CIJA’s dossier on Zaytun, “upon which the entire case was constructed”, was judged to be “essentially worthless”, with “extremely limited probative value.” The status of the two other cases is uncertain.
The Black Sea concluded that CIJA existed at the heart of a “burgeoning multimillion-euro industry of non-profit war crimes investigations.” The largely opaque sector operates without much oversight, at arm’s length from the governments from which it is funded. The scope for abuse is massive.
Despite being founded during the earliest days of the Syrian “revolution,” CIJA has secured few convictions. Its biggest success was the prosecution of two government defectors in 2021. Their own lurid public claims about Assad’s alleged abuses were subsequently weaponized to doom them to prison. There are clear indications the witnesses supplied by CIJA delivered false testimony at their trials. Whether CIJA similarly “enticed” these individuals to lie, as in Zaytun’s case, remains a matter of speculation.
Nonetheless, as the leaked files outlined here indicate, CIJA and its founder Wiley have invoked the pursuit of justice as cover for a series of criminal schemes targeting the very institutions that supported them.
CIJA and OLAF were approached for comment, but did not respond.