“Give a man fake news, and he’ll fool you for a day. Teach a man to fake news, and he’ll lie to you for life.”
—J.M. BERGER
The history of Russian disinformation campaigns is loaded with stories that are bizarre fabrications, fantastical yarns, the worst of conspiracies, and Trumpian outright lies. Russia has always been a nation predisposed to believe almost anything, but under the Communist rule they were immersed in the policy of “Make a Big Lie, Call It the Truth” for three quarters of a century. Needless to say, it made them experts at detecting a lie but also of fabricating a bigger one.
In the digital era, the ability to generate stories with no basis in reality went beyond the KGB officers in Service A of the First Chief Directorate, spreading the incredible lie that AIDS was created to kill blacks and gays. Of course, this was helped by the global news media and fringe commentators. Now you could read about how the Democratic Party had a campaign staffer murdered or how Hillary Clinton and John Podesta ran a child sex trafficking ring from the imaginary basement of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor, or how the most liberal Pope in history, a Hispanic one at that, had a turn of heart and happily endorsed Donald Trump wearing a MAGA hat and all. Every one of these stories was “reported” during the 2016 campaign and sent to hundreds of millions of watchers as the truth. That every one is also a blatant lie is beside the point. It was sent out using a global propaganda distribution system, picked up by US social media and mainstream press and then turned into a debate as to its veracity. Mission accomplished.
Russian military intelligence officer Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov, writing in the GRU’s white paper on propaganda and political warfare said, “A new type of war has emerged, in which armed warfare has given up its decisive place in the achievement of the military and political objectives of war to another kind of warfare—information warfare.”1
Kvachkov is correct about information being a new domain of warfare. Propaganda, fake news, and influence operations are the modern era’s most advanced weapons systems. Bombs are not persistent but they create damage and have a terminal effect. Fake news can persist throughout history and has the ability to change both minds and the perception of reality.
The Russians incorporated social media into their strategic planning for information warfare. Their strategic doctrine states:
“Confrontation between two or more states in the information space to damage the information systems, processes and resources, which are of critical importance, and other structures, to undermine the political, economic and social system, and effect massive brainwashing of the population for destabilizing the society and the state, and also forcing the state to make decisions in the interests of the confronting party.”2
Note that the Russians specifically use the words “massive brainwashing” in their armed forces doctrine when discussing social media information warfare. Their propaganda are cyber weapons flooded into the global information dispersal domain (the internet) and flows through the information battle space (news and social media) to influence or change perceptions in the primary target (your mind) or create secondary results in the impact zone (your mobile phone or television). Social media propaganda harnesses human curiosity to make you look closer.
During the Cold War, Russian intelligence conceptualized, developed, and deployed a perfect communist propaganda weaponization system that harnesses 1) what you know; 2) what you’ve learned; 3) what you hear; and 4) what they want you to believe. With this, they crafted a wholly false but generally believable story. Russia was not the only nation to do this or the first. In World War II, America and its allies had entire ministries dedicated to propaganda.
Chief of the Main Operation Director-Deputy Chief of General Staff Colonel-General Andrey V. Kartpolov was a pioneer in creating cyber warfare operations into a new kind of hybrid warfare. He wrote:
“… the main aim of information psychological conflict is regime change in the adversary country (through destroying the organs of government); by means of mass influence on the military-political leadership of the adversary achieving as a minimum an increase in the amount of time available for taking command decisions and lengthening the operational cycle; by means of influence on the mass consciousness of the population—directing people so that the population of the victim country is induced to support the aggressor, acting against its own interests.”3
Putin’s Russian intelligence has taken finely crafted fake news stories—what psychological warfare experts called Propaganda Products (PPs)—and deployed them into the information domain using a myriad of injection systems: Facebook, Twitter, Sputnik, Russia Today, individual bloggers, conspiracy theory websites, mainstream media comment sections, and even mailing propaganda postcards to journalists. This system disperses the ideological products from Russian philosophers like Dugin and Surkov, and American fellow travelers like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.
The command post for the Russian cyber active measures onslaught is a Russian intelligence subcontractor with thousands of English-speaking computer operators called the Russian Federation Internet Research Agency (RF-IRA). Former acting Director of the CIA, Michael Morell, did not see the weaponization of social media coming, “So, I have little doubt that we, the intelligence community, didn’t see from a strategic sense the weaponization of social media.… I didn’t see… a warning about the possible use of social media to attack us.”4
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, journalism remains a key state information battle space. The news media’s “fake news” is the preferred method for the production and dissemination of Russia’s information. Virtually every “journalist” was first and foremost a state propagandist. Reports from that era say that as many as 70 or 80 percent of the TASS news bureau personnel were intelligence officers. Being a journalist was a wonderful way for a KGB officer to insinuate themselves into circles of power or of interest to the Kremlin. Information KGB agents were deployed around the world under the guise of being journalists to surface forgeries, publish or influence articles favorable to Russia, or engage in disinformation campaigns. Agents would be under the directive of the Information Directorate, the International Information Department, or KGB. The agent could build the same relationships a legitimate journalist might with political or economic figures who could either share valuable information or be subjected to directional information meant to manipulate their view on topics that mattered to the Soviets.5
Russian-run press agencies were used to spread rumors and float forgeries. For example, an old magazine established in India, Blitz, was used by Russians to out CIA personnel, spread disinformation, and drop forgeries. Others, such as the Soviet’s New Times Magazine, was founded in 1943 as a vehicle for communist propaganda posing as journalism. Its mission was to filter state lies into the global news media information stream. It was the publication that KGB defector Stanislav Levchenko worked for when he was stationed in Japan. Levchenko was posted as a journalist for New Times in Tokyo starting in the early 1970s.6 According to US Congressional testimony of the 14 correspondents in the office, 12 of them were KGB staff officers. He spoke fluent English and played the role of a legitimate journalist, which led the Japanese to let him further into backgrounders without people realizing he was a Russian agent. Generally, only when defectors like Levchenko expose them, were these media organizations outed as fronts for spies.
Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev summed up Russia’s use of state media succinctly, “Just as a soldier cannot fight without ammunition, the party cannot conduct a war without print. Print was our main ideological weapon, and we cannot pass it into unreliable hands. It must be kept in the most reliable, most trustworthy hand which could use this weapon to destroy the enemies of the working class.”7
One of the most important operations in the history of Active Measures was Operation Infektion. This fabrication was so effective that it persists among conspiracy theorists even today. As mentioned, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was identified, the KGB fabricated a story that the AIDS virus was part of a biological warfare program created by the United States.8 In 1984, on Independence Day, Patriot, an Indian newspaper, published a story claiming that the virus was created at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Another Russian-designed propaganda weapon had deadly results. The Grand Mosque in Mecca, the point of pilgrimage for all Muslims, is located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It was seized in 1979 by Islamic extremists seeking the return of the Mahdi (savior) for the 1,400-year anniversary of the birth of Islam. Taking advantage of the Middle Eastern penchant to believe in conspiracy theories, Russian intelligence created a region wide campaign to claim the United States orchestrated the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and had bombed it with fighter-bombers. It was a highly successful lie. Even Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini repeated it. Following the reporting, when TV media showed Saudi aircraft bombing the terrorists, riots broke out in Pakistan, including an attack on the American diplomatic outpost, leading to the deaths of two US servicemen defending the embassy, which was burned to the ground. Playing both sides and to add further chaos, the Russians sought to incite anti-Muslim bias in the US. Soviet agents spread the lie that Pakistan’s army was responsible for attacking the US Embassy in Islamabad and not a mob enraged by Russia’s own false report.9
The 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a space-based missile defense system proposed by President Ronald Reagan, nicknamed “Star Wars.” This system was going to get multibillion dollar funding to overtake Russia’s ability to defend against a space-based laser and kinetic anti-missile system. The Soviet Union could ill afford to try to match the United States, so they embarked on a global campaign to remove all support for the system away from America.
The Soviet Union organized a massive global campaign to discredit the policy, technology, and safety of the planned system. Though the US would be decades away from experimental stages of the system, the Soviets blitzed the global media. According to Congressional testimony, they took an innovative step of using actual scientists to lead the argument against deployment of such a system. “To make their criticism of SDI more authoritative, the Soviets are using scientists to take the lead in defining the SDI issue.” Anti-SDI–themed propaganda was introduced from daily news reports, UN conferences, festivals, cultural exchanges, non-governmental organization meetings, and white papers, to even the photos at innocuous international commemorations such as the 40th anniversary of VE day.
The anti-SDI campaign was a massive effort that involved thousands of people informed of the Kremlin’s wishes through tens of thousands of wire or telephone transmissions daily to coordinate such a global campaign. A modern effort could be pulled off with as few as 5 people with some desktop computers and a green screen. The modern effort could reach billions as opposed to thousands on its best day.
But it is General Agayants’ assessment of political propaganda warfare that is most noteworthy. Before he died in the mid-60s he said, “Sometimes I am amazed how easy it is to play these games, if they did not have press freedom, we would have to invent it for them.”10
For a snapshot of a historical fake news campaign we look at India during the 1970s. India was a massive propaganda market for the KGB. India was considered a point-of-entry country to get fake news and propaganda into the Western media information stream. Russian secret agents would buy newspapers, journalists, and entire printing presses. In an extremely slow age of news communications by Teletype and couriers, each propaganda article had to be meticulously crafted in such a way that it was plausible and checkable with carefully positioned sources. It would take weeks or months to position propaganda then, whereas today it would take less than a few seconds to transmit a whole year’s supply of fake news articles. For example, in the first two months of 1977, the KGB spent over 3 million rupees (approximately $100,000 or $6.3 million in today’s dollars) to bolster the election campaign of the Communist Party of India.11 As an allied political group, this kind of expenditure was expected as a usual donation to the Communist International (COMINTERN) ally. In India, the KGB’s intelligence infiltration of the global news world was overwhelming. Over the years, the Indian press was flooded with KGB propaganda products from ten Russian allied or operated newspapers and one press agency. During the Indira Gandhi era (1971–1977), the following number of anti-Western, pro-Communist propaganda articles were introduced into the media stream through plants in India:
• 1972, 3,789 articles (10 per day)
• 1973, 2,760 articles (7 per day)
• 1974, 4,486 articles (12 per day)
• 1975, 5,510 articles (15 per day)
When Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1976, which included a press crackdown, Russia had a harder time planting fake stories, but they still managed to get 1,980 articles out in 1976—still 5 per day. By 1977 the Russians realized that India was no longer a favorable entryway. Gandhi had tightened the reins on communist propaganda and it withered down to only 411 articles that year.12
The entirety of Russian state media, from its founding numerous agencies, magazines, and newspapers, including the most notable newspaper in the world that was so detached from reality that its name became equivalent to the meaning of a lie: Pravda (Truth). Other Soviet-era agencies were the TASS, Novosti, and Sputnik news services, and radio stations such as Radio Moscow, Radio Peace, and Progress and Ria Novosti.
When the Soviet Union collapsed all of these agencies were up for sale to the person with cash in hand. Novosti News Service continues as a state news agency, and has been supplemented by companies that started off as free and independent media, but were quickly bought out and converted by Putin or his allies back to state news à la the Communists. So pervasive is Russian state media that now more than 80% of all television in the country is state-run. The other 20% is satellite TV.
Alexander Yakovlev, founder of the International Democracy Institute and a Putin critic, sagely noted that under Putin state television and controlled social media are the big drivers of Russian opinion. He said: “To take the Kremlin, you must take television.”13 That television is firmly in the hands of the President and his friends.
Russia’s present international television channel, Russia Today (now referred to by its initials RT), and other stations including Channel One, Russia One, and Gazprom oil company–controlled NTV, continue in the tradition of Pravda by providing a seeming legitimate face to what were state-run agencies subordinate to the national leadership and intelligence agencies.14
Former Putin loyalist Gleb Pavlovsky told PBS television documentarians that Putin coordinated the state disinformation campaigns. The inner circle made conscious decisions about what to expose, who to attack, and what narratives would work best. Considering that Putin’s Four Horsemen advisors were all ex-KGB officers, it should come as no surprise. Pavlovsky said:
“We had meetings every week, and during the election campaign, we had meetings every day, and it was decided what TV channels would show what news, what kind of articles would be published in different newspapers, what would be posted at different websites. This was a strict plan that was executed precisely. Putin decided that this was the case everywhere.”15
On the other hand, free independent media companies that crossed Putin would be targeted for destruction or purchased by the oligarchy and turned into state allied media. For example, Dozhd (TV Rain), the formerly free and independent news and information channel, was cut off from access to the Russian people after they infuriated the Kremlin with an online poll about surrendering Leningrad (St. Petersburg) to the Nazis in WWII to save lives. After a majority of pollsters agreed, it was shut down. One can only see it on the internet behind a paywall. Russia allows it to operate along the Fox News model, to keep one free voice in opposition so they could say they are “Fair and balanced.” It’s run by journalist Natalya Sindeyeva, and provides an outlet for those who desire greater freedom and democracy but also know by visiting the site they will be monitored by the state.
Spearheading Putin’s national disinformation agencies is Dmitry Peskov. Peskov is the Presidential Press Secretary and the Deputy Chief of the Presidential Executive Office. Born into the Soviet Union, he graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 and was assigned to the Foreign Ministry. During the fall of the Soviet Union and transition to an uncertain democracy, Peskov remained in the Russian Embassy in Turkey until 1995. Under Boris Yeltsin he was brought into the press service just in time to work for Putin in his first term. He grew close to Putin and has been the Presidential Press Secretary since 2012. Under Peskov, the propaganda image of Putin as statesman, masculine leader, and clever spy was crafted. Peskov has the ability to create narratives that do well in Russia precisely because they can be created out of whole cloth. In the Soviet era, journalism was the preferred cover story for the production and disseminations of information warfare products. Today RT, Sputnik, Newsfront, and other channels continue that tradition.16
Founded in 2005, Russia Today was a television and website voice of the Kremlin, based in Moscow. Consistent with the Kremlin disinformation history of sowing doubt in credible news sources around the world and in government institutions of the West, its motto was “question more.” RT broadcasted in multiple languages including English, French, Arabic, and Spanish. It had multiple channels including RT Arabic, RT en Español, RT America, RT UK, RT Documentary, RT Deutsch, and RT en Français. It was broadcast on cable stations in the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, Portugal, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Italy, Israel, the Philippines, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.
RT regularly covered stories of interest to the Kremlin with a slant designed to support the pro-Russian narratives including coverage of the Ukrainian revolution, the seizure of South Ossetia in Georgia, the seizure of Crimea, and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The broadcasters regularly praise Vladimir Putin and criticize the leaders in the West.
RT promoted anti-American views by bringing on hosts and guests who could be relied upon to discuss American policies in negative terms. Fringe voices or hosts who had lost their seats in American media soon found a comfortable seat in RT studios including Larry King, Ed Schultz, and Julian Assange. The same year WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed he was going to expose Russian leaders and oligarchs for corruption, he was given a show on RT called World of Tomorrow. In 12 broadcasts, Assange conducted interviews with various political voices including Hassan Nasrallah, Slavoj Žižek, Moncef Marzouki, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Noam Chomsky, and Tariq Ali.
Former American hosts like Liz Wahl have shared their stories about being fed narratives that were clearly Kremlin biased or untrue. Liz Wahl resigned from RT during a live broadcast in March 2014, and later became a chief critic of the news outlet.17
In response to the active measures Russia had been conducting against the United States in 2016, RT was forced to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) for being “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”18 The designation requires RT to disclose its financial information. RT editor Margarita Simonyan claimed that in response, American staffers were quitting out of concern that they would be charged for working with the Kremlin-controlled propaganda organization.19 In retaliation, the Russian government passed a law in November 2017 aimed at Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Current Time TV, and other outlets that were forcing them to register as foreign agents.
Sputnik was a news website that replaced the defunct RIA Novosti in 2014. RIA Novosti had been the worldwide Russian news agency until it was dissolved in December 2013. When it was launched by the Kremlin via Rossiya Segodnya, its new general director, Dmitry Kiselyov, said it was being launched to challenge “aggressive propaganda that is now being fed to the world.”20 Andrew Feinberg told Politico that he thought working at Sputnik was going to be a good job for a freelance journalist. Yet in no time he was asked if he’d report on items that were not true.21
Most NATO cyber warfare experts believe that Sputnik was set up to be a propaganda warfare distribution system. The indictment of the Internet Research Agency by the special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018 seems to indicate that the shift from RIA Novosti to Sputnik was a deliberate reengineering to prepare a specific fake news distribution system for the 2016 election operation to elect Donald Trump.
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory described accurately RT TV broadcast operations as a key component of hybrid warfare combat support. RT was not just used to spread propaganda, but it shaped the perceptions of the viewing population in and around Ukraine at key times in the invasion.
“At critical moments, RT’s support for Russian government positions has become even more explicit, adopting almost identical language to Kremlin statements. This is the most overt form of propaganda, literally propagating the government’s messages in the very same words in which they are given. For example, throughout March 2014, the Russian government referred to the new Ukrainian government in ways which denied its legitimacy. Some of the terms used by the Foreign Ministry included ‘the Kiev regime,’ ‘the current “Ukrainian government,”’ the ‘current Kiev authorities,’ ‘the people calling themselves the Ukrainian authorities,’ and ‘the coup d’état in Ukraine.’”22
These terms transmitted nonstop by RT became a way of signaling to pro-Moscow Ukrainians the official talking points that were expected to be used in and around media. As local ethnic Russian Ukrainians/Crimeans repeated these terms, they became part of the common parlance for all discussions about Ukraine. This created a cycle of common discussion points heard from the man on the street in Kiev, Sevastopol, and Moscow, and were mainstreamed in any discussions about Ukraine. This uniform speech pattern essentially brought the user into a continuous cycle of verbal brainwashing, whether they were aware of it or not.
The DFRL also did an extensive study of German social media nets linked to the Kremlin @RT_Deutsch, Sputnik Deutsch (@de_sputnik), and NewsFront Deutsch (@newsfront). These Kremlin organs not only spread propaganda, they acted as megaphones to amplify messages and act as links for real life individuals to share ideological materials and rally points for extremists. DFR noted “[Our] analysis shows that the most active amplifiers of these outlets do, indeed, include apparent bots, but they are not the most important factor. The signals are significantly boosted by pro-Kremlin activists, far-right users, and anti-migrant users, who have been known to work together to harass critics.”23
Putin and his state media often use “analogies” in their influence operations on the world stage, particularly when disparaging NATO. One example is the Russian state-controlled media narrative that emerged during Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He evoked images of Nazis and Fascists in Ukraine to manipulate Russian public opinion, with World War II images, about his military incursion into Ukraine. Robert Donaldson noted:
“Analogies can reflexively serve as a strong unifying force. Putin often uses analogies against the international community. He stated on several occasions that Russia’s incursion into Crimea was little different from NATO’s incursion into Kosovo. He forgot to add, of course, that Russia consumed Crimea, while no NATO country incorporated Kosovo.”24
The DFRL identified patterns of propaganda and fake news reporting when Russia seeks to discredit NATO operations and exercises. They identified consistent metanarratives used by Russia. They included the themes that:
1. NATO is unwelcome and NATO troops are occupants
2. The [insert geographic region here] are paranoid or “Russophobic”
3. NATO is provocative and aggressive
4. NATO is obsolete and cannot protect its allies
5. NATO [insert geographic region here] are sympathetic to the Nazi ideology25
IN LATE MAY 2006, a contingent of 227 reservists from Marine Wing Support Group 47 (MWSG-47) went to Ukraine to participate in the annual US-Ukrainian military exercise “Sea Breeze 2006.” This is an annual naval and capacity building exercise held in the Black Sea. The Marines were reservists from Michigan who were deployed to Ukraine to construct dining tents, latrines, and other housing for the multinational forces.26
The Marine contingent arrived on board a contracted container ship Advantage and docked in the port of Feodosiya. The American State Department was informed locally that Russian officials had spread rumors among the local Russian-speaking population that the boats carrying the Marines contained “poisonous substances” to be used in Crimea. They also told locals that the Marines carried materials to build a permanent NATO base in the area.
Forty-eight hours after arrival the protestors blockaded the port and shouted anti-American and anti-NATO propaganda at the troops. The troops tried to move to the Ukrainian naval base near Stary Krym to start work on a barrack facility they were rehabilitating. Over 2,000 protestors organized by Russia and the local pro-Russia Party of Regions, and the Natalya Vitrenko Bloc besieged the convoy, rocking the buses the Marines were riding in and smashing windows. The Marines were forced to take shelter in a military hospital until they could be evacuated back to the United States. As they left, protestors lined the roads with signs saying, “Yankee Go Home.”27
DURING THE 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, the Russian TV news spread a series of calculated fake news stories to lay the groundwork for popular acceptance of the coming invasion. Putin’s state news services put out a flood of fake news reports that ethnic Russian citizens in Ukraine’s Donbas region and Crimea were being persecuted in Ukraine. Invariably the news reported that pro-European “Color Revolution” or “Maidan” protesters, who took power back from the pro-Moscow government, were paid agitators working for NATO and the CIA. Another propaganda story spread by Russian television and Facebook reported that Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a Russian-speaking toddler. News reporters breathlessly reported on a mass of ethnic Russian refugees fleeing Eastern Ukraine for Russia.28 For people living in the region, the Russian media gave the impression a major war was on the verge of breaking out. Populations of both countries were bombarded with fake news injected into real reports to shape the narrative around the coming conflict.
The RAND corporation conducted a study of Russian propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion of Crimea. They found the propaganda streams were “‘high-volume and multichannel’ while disseminating messages not grounded in reality. The propaganda media is also ‘rapid, continuous, and repetitive,’ and ‘lacks commitment to consistency,’ which makes it difficult for nation-states to counter it.”29
This extensive preparation of the political, psychological, and propaganda battlefield allowed Moscow to take territory and hold it because Russia and its allies were prepared to accept it as a just military operation or a fait accompli depending on the point of view.
The Russian propaganda warfare arms attack virtually all NATO operations and exercises to keep the metanarrative of the inherent evilness of the Atlantic alliance. In 2015, US soldiers deployed to “Operation Atlantic Resolve” in Ukraine had details from their personal lives publicized by Russian officials. The agents discovered information on their social media accounts and broadcast chosen details. These came after allegations of US Army officers raping children.30 In Latvia, Russian propaganda efforts portrayed NATO servicemen in the country as raping women or living in luxury apartments paid for by local taxpayers.31 A Russian website mimicking a Finnish government research site presented alternative headlines like a cyber threat center had a direct link to the CIA and accused it of waging “hybrid war” against Russia.32 In 2016, the Bulgarian prime minister cancelled a joint exercise with NATO forces because he did not want to risk war with Russia after it produced propaganda about the naval exercise.33
Moscow dipped into the heart of NATO in January 2016 when it helped drive a fake story about the rape of a 13-year-old Russian-German girl. Moscow used the internal divisions against immigrants to shape the story, then used its intelligence and media arms to drive the story. Russian television outlets including both Sputnik and Russia Today ran near constant reports on the story, Russian hackers drove the story through social media, and eventually the Russian foreign minister questioned the ability of German officials to keep citizens safe.34 While the story eventually proved false, the Kremlin was able to take that pause to further drive divisions within even a relatively stable Western democracy.
In contrast to their influence operations in the West, Russian mass media inside their borders are under the control of the state. The Kremlin agency Roskomnadzor manages all access to the internet for its citizens. At any moment, the Russian state can monitor, limit, block, or cut off anyone who incites dissent or even disparages the Kremlin in any way. Numerous independent voices have been blocked without explanation by Putin.
The favorite tool of the state for limiting or blocking “free speech” is to say that the organization, website, or individual has used “illegal information,” a veiled charge that borders up on the state’s secrets laws. The Kremlin can identify and cite virtually any speech as illegal and often claims it is part of an espionage operation supported by American intelligence.