Written by: Aidan Jonah

A major Canadian company’s US subsidiary received $9 million USD from the US Department of Defense (DOD)’s for a ‘social deception’ contract, a review of grants reveals.

The specific funding agency? The secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Amidst the US President Donald Trump’s pushing of USAID regime change operations into the State Department, many previously missed US government grants and contracts have come to the public eye.

Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS), the company receiving the contract, is owned by a Canadian company, Thomson Reuters Corporation.

What has Thompson Reuters’ media wing been doing for Western governments?

Reuters, originally founded in the UK back in 1850, became Canadian when it merged with the Thomson Corporation of Canada after being acquired in 2008, and now functions within the auspices of the Thomson Reuters Corporation.

The Grayzone has detailed how declassified documents showed that “Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency”, with BBC “as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.”

Later, the UK foreign office used Thompson Reuters to create and finance a supposedly independent media organization, Aswat Masriya, in 2011, which conducted propaganda for the army in 2012 by inflating protest numbers, giving wall-to-wall coverage of a UAE-financed youth group initiated a petition demanding then Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi be removed from office – producing propaganda for them including claims of tens of millions of protesters being against Morsi – which enable General Abdel Fattah Sisi’s July 2013 coup.

Beginning in 2017, Thomson Reuters worked to promote “unbiased and high quality” journalism in Russia and Eastern Europe, so unbiased that it was dedicated to “countering Russian state-funded propaganda.” This work was done partially on the UK foreign office’s dime, including more than a dozen “study press tours” for Russian journalists with a view to creating “a network of journalists across Russia who share similar ethics, standards and interest in British affairs”. The Grayzone also noted that “Several Zinc Network documents list Reuters as a member of the UK FCO-funded Consortium media intervention in the Baltic states.”

When Blackstone purchased Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk for an estimated $17 billion in 2018, they notably did not purchase the Reuters News, despite its iconic status among corporate elites and governments.

In 2021, The Grayzone explained that:

“A top former official who was tasked [2015 to 2018] with ‘the responsibility of advancing Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government,’ Government Global Business Director Dawn Scalici, had previously served as a CIA agent for at least 33 years.”

That same year, X (when owned by Jack Dorsey) began collaborating with Reuters and the Associated Press to “to expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information.”

What has TRSS been doing for the US government/USAID?

TRSS isn’t a well known company among ordinary Canadians or Americans. Eye-catchingly, TRSS brags about providing “Actionable intelligence that exposes vulnerabilities across DOD commands, programs, and missions” and speaks of its “Law enforcement, intelligence, and DOD expertise”.

In 2018, TRSS began a $9 million USD contract with the US Department of Defence for “ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)”. The funding agency? None other than the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA is famous for funding and developing “ARPANET”, which eventually evolved into the modern internet. However, DARPA’s work has included working to build “large space and lunar structures” which could be in violation of “Article IV of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (OST), which prohibits the ‘establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications’ anywhere on the lunar surface or cislunar orbit (between the earth and the moon).”

DARPA has funded a molecular diagnostic firm to diagnose COVID-19 using an implantable biochip, which Mintpress notes was “also developed with DARPA money”. DARPA is also funding research and programs in a bid to implant chips in soldiers’ brains. An eye-catching show of their determination was shown by Mintpress in 2015:

“When DARPA launched its RAM (Restoring Active Memory) program last year, it projected it would be about four years until researchers were implanting permanent chips in humans.”

Other DARPA ambitions with implanted chips in soldiers’ brains include “allowing soldiers at battle to communicate by thought alone”.

By 2018, DARPA was working to develop “Mosaic Warfare”, a concept where remotely-piloted or autonomous systems/weapons both on ground or the sky could be used simultaneously with sentient military forces to make a military “situation much more complex” in hopes that it “can overwhelm the opponent’s decision-making.” Particularly eye-catching, when you consider all the US military bases in the Asia-Pacific close to China, are comments by a Navy Reserve officer, about Mosaic Warfare’s utility for the Navy, one very busy with constant “freedom of navigation” missions in the South China Sea:

“John Waterston, a Program Manager in the STO and a Navy Reserve officer, said Mosaic Warfare may impose even more complexity on the adversary in the maritime domain, because it encompasses a diversity of environments: air, land, sea, and undersea. His charge now is to figure out how ships, submarines, aircraft, and unmanned systems all can work together to achieve a mission.”

The stated purpose of Project Overmatch is strikingly similar to the Navy Reserve officer’s ambitions, “to connect ships, planes and weapons”.

Put a Defense News article segment in the picture, and the image should be clear:

“‘Here’s how I see it: any data, anywhere, any time that is needed. And the vision, when I start to spin this out, is coalition warfare,’ Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman said at a Defense Information Systems Agency event Nov. 7. ‘You have a U.S. Marine Corps [High Mobility Artillery Rocket System] getting a firing solution from an Australian [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capability; maybe you have a Japanese frigate that’s also going to hit the same target there; you’ve got multinational F-35s coming on station to provide combat air-support capability. All of this is going to have to happen quickly.”

From DARPA’s “Mosaic Warfare” to the US Navy’s “Project OVERMATCH”, which Breaking Defense says is “the Navy’s piece of the Pentagon’s ambitious global network initiative known as Combined Joint All Domain Command & Control”, the path is straightforward.

In 2020, Mintpress reported that “DARPA’s newest program seeks to create an encryption technology standard across the breadth and scope of the Internet of Things (IoT).” What was the big aim behind this program?

“full spectrum dominance of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) space sought by the U.S.”

If US companies would dominate the encryption industry, then the US government could have an easier time obtaining sensitive information that would be invaluable to US spies and the military.

DARPA is a shadowy and peculiar agency of the US DOD, and the TRSS’ engagement with DARPA doesn’t end with the aforementioned contract.

There’s also a contract DARPA gave to TRSS, which began in 2020 and was extended until 2027, whose total obligations have risen to $29.5 million USD. The contract’s purpose is for a mysterious “DOPPLER”. From 2018 to 2023, TRSS had a contract with DARPA for “MASS EFFECT”, with total obligations rising to $12 million USD by its end. Neither piece of terminology is explained by DARPA in the contract disclosures.

TRSS’ engagement with the US DOD goes above DARPA. TRSS has been supporting “the agency’s global intelligence mission” since 2023, after it “won a 5-year, $60 million blanket purchase agreement from the Defense Department”.

The nature of TRSS’ work with the US DOD is consistently vague, and that is certainly no fluke.

With a Canadian company’s subsidiary consistently working for the mysterious US DOD agency, DARPA, it appears there may be more of a Canadian hand than expected, within the US state apparatus’ efforts to manipulate ordinary Americans into compliance with US imperialism’s dictates.

Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

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