On December 28^th, The Grayzone exposed how the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) concocted a malign scheme to blackmail and intimidate the EU’s European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) and the European Commission.

Established in close coordination with CIA and MI6 officials to prosecute Syrian officials for alleged war crimes, CIJA was repeatedly found by EU regulators to be criminally corrupt.

Now, leaked documents reveal CIJA has taken on a secret role in the Ukraine proxy war since 2022, designating the country as one of its “key areas of operation.”

According to internal files reviewed by CovertAction Magazine, CIJA has been, in its own words, “imbedded [sic] with Ukrainian authorities” from the conflict’s earliest stages.” This covert alliance has extremely sinister implications.

For one, it is inconceivable CIJA will have collected evidence of Kyiv’s own rampant war crimes. Moreover, the Commission has been irrefutably implicated in evidence-tampering and inducement of false testimony to secure wrongful arrests and prosecutions related to its work in Damascus.

It would be unsurprising if CIJA has engaged in similar deplorable activities in Ukraine, with its dubious findings fed to the media, as in Syria. Even more disquieting, individuals and organizations intimately tied to the Commission are implicated in clandestine British intelligence efforts to assist Kyiv in perpetrating atrocities.

A key irregularity in CIJA’s operations identified by OLAF was that the Commission was indistinguishable from a legally separate company founded by CIJA founder William H. Wiley named Tsamota. Wiley is chief executive of both entities, which share offices and key staff.

Grant money given to one entity can thus be surreptitiously funneled to the other, for illicit profit. Furthermore, contrary to CIJA’s professed commitment to international justice, Tsamota offers guidance to Western mining corporations on how to limit and evade their legal liabilities in the event they commit or are implicated in serious crimes.

A leaked document on CIJA’s troubles with the EU’s anti-fraud office acknowledges the Commission and Tsamota have “shared leadership” and “objectives.” Meanwhile, a veteran Tsamota operative is not only posted to Kyiv’s Prosecutor General’s Office, but leading a covert effort to supply extensive clandestine military and intelligence support to Ukraine on Britain’s dime.

This includes monitoring the country’s “pro-Russian contingent”—individuals routinely targeted by the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) for arbitrary detention, torture, false conviction and murder. CIJA could therefore be implicated in the very crimes against humanity it purports to battle.

“Valued Counterpart”

In June, this journalist approached CIJA for comment on Wiley’s targeting of the EU Commission and OLAF. This included proposals to covertly insert or recruit assets in both entities, who could illicitly provide the Commission with “internal emails” and “documentation”—a serious criminal offense. I also inquired whether CIJA was active in Kyiv. No response was forthcoming. Curiously though, every entry on the Commission’s website referencing Ukraine was subsequently deleted.

Among the purged pages was a link to an interview Wiley conducted with the BBC in April 2022, about the ever-mysterious Bucha massacre, and methods for investigating atrocities purportedly committed by Russian forces in the city.

He suggested the case was “fairly straightforward,” forecasting “it shouldn’t be a big problem for the Ukrainians to identify who was responsible for these offenses and to prosecute one or two of them, or conversely send them to The Hague.”

When the BBC host suggested there was a need for “international independent verification” as it wasn’t “just for the Ukrainians to do this,” Wiley insisted Kyiv “have a great deal of capacity.”

Notably, he defensively dismissed any insinuation a Ukrainian investigation of Bucha “would be a stitch-up”—which his interviewer had not even directly implied. In March 2025, Ukrainian police charged 34 Russians in absentia for war crimes allegedly committed in the city.

No international investigation into Bucha has materialized. An emergency UN Security Council meeting on the incident proposed by Russia was blocked by Britain. Moscow’s repeated requests for the names of the alleged victims to be published have been ignored.

Elite imperial journal Foreign Affairs has confirmed Bucha was exploited by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to sabotage peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and keep the proxy war grinding on. The BBC has also since acknowledged questions abound over what actually happened in the city.

Given that CIJA was secretly embedded with Ukrainian authorities at this time, Wiley was well-placed to know the truth. That no international investigation ever emerged is all the more suspicious given ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan opened a formal inquiry into crimes against humanity in Ukraine four days after the proxy war began.

Working directly with Ukraine Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin—whom he has dubbed his “valued counterpart”—Khan visited Bucha in April 2022, and declared there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Russian forces had slaughtered innocent civilians locally.

CIJA’s proximity to Ukrainian investigators would, one might think, produce ample evidence supporting this charge. Then again, despite its founding mission being to prosecute Syrian officials for war crimes, the Commission has contributed to vanishingly few legal actions in its 14 years of operation.

Its primary role throughout the West’s dirty war against Damascus was providing the mainstream media with material that formed the basis of high-profile investigations into purported Syrian government atrocities.

CIJA was also centrally involved in the “Caesar” fraud, which led to crippling sanctions being imposed on Damascus. In this fraud, a defector code-named Caesar, who was found to have been a U.S. intelligence asset, testified before both houses of the U.S. Congress about alleged atrocities committed by the Assad government that turned out mostly to have been carried out by jihadist rebels backed by the CIA under Operation Timber Sycamore.

It would be unsurprising if CIJA has repeated this propaganda role throughout the Ukraine proxy war. The reasons for the Commission’s activities in the country remaining unadvertised are not clear, and it is also uncertain who or what is footing the bill for its services.

One explanation for both mysteries may be that, in addition to collecting—or concocting—evidence of Russian war crimes, the organization and individuals and entities to which CIJA is connected are simultaneously implicated in Kyiv’s own atrocities.

“Identify Users”

In November 2022, The Grayzone exposed how Prevail Partners, a private-sector cutout staffed by British military and intelligence veterans, was leading a covert effort to create and train a vast Operation Gladio-style Ukrainian terror army to carry out assassinations, sabotage and other dirty work behind enemy lines on behalf of the SBU’s Odessa branch.

Prevail colluded in this venture with a shadowy company named Thomas in Winslow (TIW). In the wake of that exposé, TIW’s website was subject to an intensive clean-up.

Today, its content offers little description of the firm’s activities, vaguely characterizing TIW as “your trusted partner in strategic decision-making…in conflict zones,” and no information on who or what is running and funding the endeavor.

A brief but ponderous “what we do” section suggests the company provides “on-the-ground human intelligence and advanced data analysis in some of the world’s most volatile regions,” focusing on “counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and anti-money laundering.”

This is, ostensibly, to “equip leaders” with “clarity, foresight, and operational advantage” to make “informed, strategic decisions.”

Prior to The Grayzone revelations, TIW’s website amply spelled out how the firm was preponderantly focused on Ukraine. Boasting the company had an “advance team…currently on the ground” operating from an office in Odessa, TIW was said to have ongoing “war crimes investigation” and “justice sector capacity building” programs in place locally, in conjunction with Ukraine’s Attorney General and the President’s Office. “All data collected” by its expert team “will be shared…and archived for future use,” TIW pledged.

Its landing page also provided identities of TIW staffers. Among them was Peter Becker, a U.S. military journeyman who subsequently diversified into international law in Afghanistan and Iraq. [NOTE: I’m not sure what a “military journeyman” (line 2) is.]

His LinkedIn profile suggests he has served since early 2022 as an “evidence collection manager” for Tsamota in northeast Syria, while simultaneously working in the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office. Moreover, leaked documents indicate Becker led a private consultation with the Odessa SBU’s deputy director on how Prevail and TIW could assist the agency’s operations.

Conducted in the proxy war’s initial stages, a subsequent “capability proposal” was circulated among Prevail and TIW in April 2022 based on the discussion, which focused “on targeting and specialist capability to support that function.” This not only applied to military contexts, but domestic operations against Ukraine’s “pro-Russian contingent.”

The proposal noted “tracking and monitoring of devices played a key role in the conversation,” and “improved technology to intercept and monitor social media, messaging, emails, smart phone transmissions” were key needs for the SBU.

While Ukraine’s Security Service possessed “existing methods and capability to track phones,” they “had no way to identify users,” and “their capability often tracked Russian phones that led them to legitimate civilians.”

The proposal noted the SBU was “visibly impressed and excited” by the array of surveillance tools offered by Prevail and TIW. Assistance in this field was subsequently provided in the form of Anomaly Six, illegal spying technology that identifies individual smartphone users and monitors their movements.

“A Hunt”

Elsewhere, the proposal noted the SBU sought “technology to access electronic information contained in captured smart phones,” which was “another area where we can provide significant support” to the agency’s “existing capability,” including breaking into encrypted data.

This would aid “improvements in collecting and analyzing” human, signal, and open-source intelligence, including “social media monitoring.” The document concluded that Prevail and TIW could “add huge benefit” to the SBU’s intelligence-gathering and actioning capacity due to the firms’ “collective experience” with “the F3EA cycle.”

F3EA (find, fix, finish, exploit, assess) is a military doctrine honed during the criminal 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and subsequent occupation. Under its auspices, targets are identified, kept under continuous surveillance, captured or killed, intelligence gathered from them, then this trove analyzed to identify further targeting opportunities.

The SBU was reportedly “impressed” with the pitch presented by Prevail and TIW via Peter Becker, and welcomed having “dedicated mentors/advisors inside their tent,” which was said to amount to “boots on the ground.”

The longevity of Becker’s presence within the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office suggests that it is likewise “comfortable” with having foreign advisers “inside their tent.” It is uncertain whether Becker represents TIW and/or Tsamota/CIJA in this capacity.

But his dual roles definitionally represent a macabre conflict of interest. There is a high likelihood the spying support and technologies provided to the SBU by Prevail and TIW have assisted the commission of grave, industrial-scale crimes by Kyiv’s military and intelligence apparatus.

For example, since the proxy war’s eruption, savage attacks on opposition elements within Ukraine—including assassination—have become routine. This brutal wave of repression ratcheted up significantly in the wake of Kyiv’s 2022 counteroffensive.

Residents of recaptured territory accused or suspected of having “collaborated” with occupying Russian forces—including by simply accepting food, or continuing to teach at local schools—have been arrested, prosecuted and jailed in vast numbers.

Others have been targeted by hit squads. As a Ukrainian Interior Ministry official boasted in October 2022: “A hunt has been declared on collaborators and their life is not protected by law. Our intelligence services are eliminating them, shooting them like pigs.”

Multiple UN Human Rights High Commissioner reports have recorded how the SBU routinely engages in enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions of suspected “collaborators.” In June 2023, the Commissioner noted how, in many cases, detainee confessions are secured using beatings, electrocution, mutilation, sexual violence, and threats of execution and rape.

Moreover, national and local prosecutors consistently rubber-stamp legally questionable detentions and convictions. We can only speculate whether Peter Becker, and by extension CIJA, TIW and Tsamota, are implicated in this rampant corruption of Ukraine’s legal system.

“Getting Killed”

Today, prosecutions of Russian officials for war crimes seem further away than ever. Karim Khan’s personal crusade was brought to an abrupt halt in February 2025. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC and its staff for seeking international arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity” committed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. These measures have reportedly made it virtually impossible for the Court to fulfill even basic tasks.

In March 2025, Washington announced it was withdrawing from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, a European initiative. The Trump administration simultaneously cut support for the Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team, created in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Its purpose was to provide Ukrainian authorities “with logistical help, training and direct assistance in bringing charges of war crimes committed by Russians to Ukraine’s courts.” It is unknown if CIJA was in any way involved.

Undeterred, in June, Kyiv and the Council of Europe signed an agreement to establish a “Special Tribunal” to prosecute Russian officials for war crimes.

EU figures, including Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, hailed the move as a historic “moment for justice, international law, and the future of Ukraine,” which would “bring perpetrators of this illegal war of aggression to account.”

This is precisely what CIJA has been preparing for since the proxy war commenced. Yet, the Commission will likely be barred from directly participating.

As The Grayzone revealed on December 28^th, the motivation for CIJA’s malicious targeting of the EU Commission and OLAF stemmed from its corrupt “justice” activities in Syria landing the outfit and Tsamota on an EU blacklist.

As William Wiley confessed to an MI6 contact, this resulted in the Commission “getting killed” financially, unable to secure contracts from Brussels and other international donors.

Revelations that CIJA used criminal tactics in a botched attempt to wrongfully convict an innocent Syrian in May 2024 surely further damaged the firm’s standing.

As Russia inexorably advances across the battlefield, CIJA’s ability to seize, distort or concoct evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, let alone exploit such material for prosecutions, grows ever-slimmer. Yet, despite OLAF’s damning findings, and calls for police investigations into the Commission’s activities, Wiley and his companies remain protected by Western governments.

CIJA’s utility to them is clear. While the organization may not achieve its stated mission of holding purported war criminals to account, it remains a dependable source of atrocity propaganda, with which Anglo-American imperialism can be consistently justified.

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