James Le Mesurier

James Gustaf Edward Le Mesurier (25 May 1971 – 11 November 2019) was a British former military officer and security consultant who was the co-founder of the White Helmets, a volunteer civil defence organisation in the Syrian Civil War, founded in southern Turkey in 2014. Le Mesurier was a British Army officer and worked as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia. Le Mesurier died in a fall from the balcony of an Istanbul building where he kept an apartment and an office.

Early life Le Mesurier was born on 25 May 1971 at RAF Changi in Singapore. He was the son of an Englishman Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Havilland Churchill Le Mesurier, of the Royal Marines, and his Swedish wife, Ewa. Having graduated from university, he was appointed second lieutenant (on probation) on 20 June 1993 upon entering the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. At Sandhurst, he graduated top of class and won the Queens' Medal award. He was promoted to lieutenant on 11 August 1993, and to captain on 11 August 1996.

He served in Northern Ireland, then for two years became an infantry training instructor with the Army Training Regiment in Winchester. He retired from the military on 1 June 2000. He was affected by the West's inability to prevent in the atrocities in the Kosovo War. It appears, according to BBC News, that Le Mesurier attempted to join MI6 at about this time; he failed their vetting procedures.

Le Mesurier then worked for a year as a United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo Policy Advisor in the former Yugoslavia. Subsequently, he took an Advisor role at the Embassy of the United States, Baghdad.

From 2012 to 2014, Le Mesurier worked for the UAE consultancy Analysis, Research, and Knowledge (ARK), In 2013, with the Turkish NGO AKUT Search and Rescue Association, ARK started training non-governmental Syrian civil defence teams in Turkey, funded by the UK, U.S. and Japanese governments and managed by Le Mesurier.

Work with the White Helmets Foundation and activities

From 2011, Le Mesurier worked for the UAE consultancy Analysis, Research, and Knowledge (ARK), an organisation created by Alistair Harris, which was involved multiple projects in Syria. However, he wished to focus on voluntary civil defence exclusively and, in 2014, founded and was the director of the charity Mayday Rescue. He was connected with the introduction of a code of conduct for volunteers requiring them not to be connected to any armed groups. Volunteers who showed any sympathy for the jihadists were sacked. Le Mesurier told Dutch television in 2016: "They have rescued regime soldiers from under piles of rubble, and they do so neutrally and they do so impartially. For them what is important is saving a life. It doesn't matter who that life belongs to."

In the 2016 Birthday Honours, Le Mesurier received an OBE "for services to Syria Civil Defence and the protection of civilians in Syria".

"If you make the decision to risk your life, to save other people, it goes against radicalization", Le Mesurier told di Giovanni in an article for Newsweek in 2016. "They’ve emerged as the representative of the average, good Syrian."

Russian and Syrian disinformation campaign The Times reported that Le Mesurier was "the subject of an intense black propaganda campaign for years by pro-Assad activists and Russian diplomats". The New York Times reported that the group and Le Mesurier were the target of "unfounded conspiracy theories". Janine di Giovanni has written the claim he was a spy lacks any evidence. Ben Nimmo, of the social media analysis company Graphika, found that such claims began around 2015 with the involvement of Russian forces in the War, and increased after Syrian government forces along with their Russian allies began the Siege of Aleppo in late 2016 with their targeting of hospitals, a potential war crime, which the White Helmets witnessed and were by now able to provide video evidence.

A week before Le Mesurier died, he was accused on Twitter by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Maria Zakharova, without evidence, of being a former MI6 agent with "connections to terrorist groups", including al-Qaeda. The UK Permanent Representative to the UN, Karen Pierce described Le Mesurier as a "true hero". She denied the charges, saying that they were "categorically untrue. He was a British soldier."

Financial Irregularities

While working on the operation to evacuate White Helmet volunteers from Syria in July 2018, Le Mesurier took $50,000 in cash from the Mayday safe. Le Mesurier initially backdated false receipts accounting for the full sum and, when discovered, asked for it to be taken from his salary. It is reported that he admitted to fraud. In 2019, a Dutch auditing company, SMK, acting on behalf of Mayday's Dutch funder, questioned what had happened to money and met with Le Mesurier in Istanbul on 7 November (three days before his death). Le Mesurier reportedly offered his resignation. The Foundation's donors requested a forensic audit. the publications Der Spiegel and De Groene Amsterdammer challenged the accuracy of the reporting and questioned the sources used, and Der Spiegel claimed that The Guardian and BBC had rebutted its core allegations. In 2018, he married Emma Winberg, who was a director of Mayday Rescue and was formerly a Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomat.

Death On 11 November 2019, Le Mesurier was found dead in the street at 4:30 in the morning (1:30 GMT) in the Kemankeş Kara Mustafa Paşa neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, Istanbul, as a result of what appeared to have been a fall from his balcony. Le Mesurier was found with fractures to his head and legs. Le Mesurier's wife said they had only gone to bed a short while earlier at 4 a.m., taking sleeping tablets.

On 14 November 2019, Le Mesurier's body was repatriated to London, while the Turkish investigation continued. At the time of his death, it was reported by The Independent and PBS NewsHour that the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad said Le Mesurier had been murdered by Western intelligence services coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The television news in Moscow claimed his death was a "purely English murder" by his "MI6 handlers". On 2 March 2020 Turkish prosecutors closed their investigation, with the death ruled as a suicide. His widow was released from her restriction on leaving Turkey.