Claim: A leaked confidential letter shows that the British intelligence agency MI6 ordered the creation of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE) through journalists Hamid Mir and Munizae Jahangir and former Senator Farhatullah Babar and provided £7.62 million to finance the “new pressure group”.
Fact: The letter in question is AI-generated.
On 27 and 28 October, a video surfaced on social media platforms alleging that the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) — also known as Military Intelligence, Section 6 (MI6) — ordered an individual named “Jacob” in Islamabad to bypass local press bodies and create the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE) by using journalists Hamid Mir and Munizae Jahangir and former Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Senator Farhatullah Babar and provided £7.62 million to finance this “new pressure group”.
Screenshot of one of the viral posts
The accompanying caption reads as follows:
“حامد میر پچھلے کئی دنوں سے آخر کیوں اتنا اچھل رہا تھا؟ راز فاش ہو گیا! گمنام ہیروز نے ایم آئی سکس (MI6) کا خفیہ خط لیک کر کے پوری واردات بے نقاب کر دی۔
[Why exactly had Hamid Mir been acting so agitated over the past few days? The secret has been revealed! Anonymous heroes leaked a confidential letter from MI6, exposing the entire scheme.]”
The Urdu voiceover in the viral clip is transcribed as follows:
“Why was Hamid Mir dancing like a monkey for the past few days? And when there are dozens of press clubs and unions for journalists’ rights across the country, what was the need to form a new, parallel entity overnight? Apparently, it was termed [a move to promote] freedom of the press; however, anonymous heroes have leaked a secret letter that has exposed the intricate crime behind this entire ruse.
“A letter sent from the British intelligence agency MI6’s London headquarters to ‘Jacob’ [who is based] in Islamabad clearly acknowledges that the majority of Pakistani journalists and press clubs stand with the national narrative and have refused to run any anti-state campaigns. This is why Jacob was ordered to bypass existing organizations and launch a new pressure group under the name ‘Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression’ through Hamid Mir, Munizae Jahangir, and Farhatullah Babar.
“The real game is not [the protection of] journalistic rights but to make money because today, after being fired from Aaj TV and the failure of ‘Voice.pk’, the unemployed Munizae Jahangir has secured a new MI6 project to make money by joining forces with Hamid Mir. This group will be given £7.62 million — approximately PKR 2.75 billion — in three installments through offshore channels to operate their network in Islamabad.
“This means that at the top of this newly-formed union’s actual [organisational] chart is a foreign master in London who is showering pounds and at the bottom are Hamid Mir, Munizae Jahangir, and Farhatullah Babar, who are out to fill up their pockets [with money] under the guise of journalism, in exchange for significant remuneration.”
The video is based on a viral confidential letter linked to MI6 that is claimed to have been leaked by “anonymous heroes”.
The purported letter includes the subject “Operational Realignment of Media Assets,” is labelled “CLASSIFIED STRAP3 SINT UK EYES ONLY,” and states its origin as “Vauxhall Cross, London (Directorate of Strategic Influence).”
It notes “an unfavorable shift within the Pakistani media landscape” as “a growing majority of local journalists and editorial leads have adopted a decidedly pro-state posture”, thereby “obstructing our strategic objectives and insulating state institutions from external pressure”.
Labelling Jahangir, Babar, and Mir as “local assets”, the supposed document says the CPFE would serve “as our primary vehicle for targeted narrative interventions”. It also mentions the authorisation of “an initial seed allocation of £7.62 million”, which “have been cleared for disbursement in three tranches via your designated offshore routing channels”.
Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE)
The CPFE was formed during a roundtable conference attended by “senior journalists, representatives of press unions, political leaders, and civil society members”, according to 27 October 2026 report in Dawn.
Titled “How to Strengthen the Custodians of Free Speech to Expand the Space for Freedom of Expression?”, the roundtable was “moderated by senior journalist Munizae Jahangir and presided over by veteran journalist Nasir Zaidi”, the publication said.
Its aim is to “strengthen freedom of expression & end persecution of journalists”, Jahangir wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Multiple other outlets, such as Voice.pk, Geo News, and Journalism Pakistan, also reported on the CPFE’s formation.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check observed several errors in the letter in question. For starters, the spellings are in American English, not British English, which would have been used by the UK’s intelligence agency. These include words like “unfavorable”, “neutralizing”, “authorized”, and “utilized”.
Other errors are listed below:
- The categorisation “CLASSIFIED STRAP3 SINT UK EYES ONLY” includes the word “SINT” — an apparent typo — but it should actually be “SIGINT,” which means ‘signals intelligence’.
- The origin mentioned at the top is a “Directorate of Strategic Influence” but, at the bottom, it refers to a “Directorate of Overseas Operations”. Neither of the two appear to exist in real life.
- The word “editorial leads” is incorrect; a more typical term would be “editors” or “editorial leaders”.
- Significant typos such as “operation operations” and “criticality critical”.
- The PPP senator’s name is misspelled as “Farhat Ullah Babar”, when it should be Farhatullah Babar.
- Numbers from 10 and upwards are typically written numerically, not spelled out; however, the letter says “fourteen days”.
To check if the supposed letter was created using artificial intelligence (AI) tools, we ran it through Google’s SynthID Detector, which confirmed our suspicions.
The tool said it detected SynthID, an imperceptible watermark embedded in content generated by AI models of Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao. “This media was made or edited with Google AI,” it noted with “high confidence”.
Results from Google’s SynthID Detector
Lastly, Hamid Mir has also spoken out about allegations linking him to M16. While responding to another journalist who spoke about the campaign against him, he said, “Thank you very much for your prayers. Every evil carries within it an aspect of good as well. … None of this is new to me; I’ve passed through even more dangerous situations than this and I’m prepared for whatever lies ahead as well.” He also expressed gratitude to another individual.
On 1 November, the veteran journalist shared a column he wrote for the Bangladeshi outlet, The Daily Star, saying, “Some people are claiming that I work for MI6. Some are making fake claims about my properties. In 2012, I offered myself for accountability in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and I am ready to do so again.”
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the viral letter linking the CPFE to MI6 is AI-generated.
Virality
We found the viral video shared at least eight times on Facebook, while the letter itself was posted thrice on the same platform. It was also shared four times on Instagram and twice on Threads.
Pages run by Azaad Digital posted multiple videos and analyses on the fake letter.
One X post by @InvestigatePak — which previously posted disinformation debunked by Soch Fact Check — gained over 82,000 views.
We also observed what may possibly be Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB) under the hashtag “#ایم_آئی6_کا_دلا” or “#Pimp_Of_MI6” on X.
Meta defines the term “Inauthentic Behavior” as “a variety of complex forms of deception, performed by a network of inauthentic assets controlled by the same individual or individuals, with the goal of deceiving Meta or our community or to evade enforcement under the Community Standards”.
However, CIB — coined by Meta in 2018, according to EU DisinfoLab — is “where adversarial threat actors use false identities to engage in sophisticated forms of Inauthentic Behavior”.
A 2023 paper states that CIB “is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a mix of authentic, fake, and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network (AN) across multiple social media platforms” and campaigns using it “mislead others by acting with pre-arranged exceptional similarity and ‘secret’ operations”.
News articles reporting on the letter as authentic appeared on Azaad Urdu and Pakistan Connect.
Conclusion: The letter attributing the CPFE’s formation to M16 is AI-generated, as evidenced by several errors in its contents as well as an assessment by detectors.
Background image in cover photo: Hannah Reding
To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com