The report detailed how Russia was suspected of using fakes and planted stories to wreak havoc on the West during the Cold War through influence operations rather than military might. And these tactics did not stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, social media and the cloak of online anonymity it provides have only made it easier and potentially more effective for governments and bad actors to get involved in a similar dirty trick playbook, ranging from the spread of falsified or hacked documents online until the creation of false reporters. promote them.
It is this modern-day digital disinformation playbook that US intelligence agencies are sure to watch out for before the November presidential election, especially after Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election took over. surprise to the country. But to fully understand Russia’s use of tactics like fake news and leaked materials, it’s helpful to examine the country’s long history of painstaking influence operations dating back to an analog era.
Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy who lived undercover in the United States in the 1980s, explained how it was done in its day in an interview with CNN Business last year.
The KGB would be tasked with providing a convincing forgery of a US government document, often aiming to implicate the US in something in poor taste and designed to confirm an existing conspiracy theory. Such a fake would be given to a sympathetic and unconscious reporter, sometimes from a dark place in a far corner of the world. It would be printed as news, and if the Soviets were lucky, it could eventually be picked up by more established means.
Oleg Kalugin, another covert KGB agent living in the United States, recounted in his book “Spymaster” how the KGB paid Americans to paint swastikas in synagogues in New York and Washington. This tactic had the potential to inflame tensions in the United States and give the Soviet-controlled press a negative story to tell the Russians in their country about their capitalist enemy.
In the decades that followed, our lives have moved largely online, and so have Russia’s attempts to misinform and meddle in American affairs.
In groundbreaking work by the Atlantic Council and online research company Graphika, researchers showed how a suspected Russian group has been distributing counterfeit documents online in recent years. These efforts included a bogus letter purporting to be from a United States senator and another letter designed to look like it came from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The same Russian group is believed to have been behind a bogus tweet from Senator Marco Rubio claiming that an alleged British spy agency was planning to derail the campaigns of Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The false tweet was picked up and falsely reported as real. by RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet. There is no evidence of coordination between RT and the Russian group that promoted the false tweet, but RT did not issue a correction.
The Internet has not only made it easier for Russia to create counterfeits, it has also helped in its ability to distribute documents, forged or stolen.
This month, the British government said it was “almost certain” that the Russians attempted to interfere with their 2019 elections by leaking documents related to a UK-US trade deal on Reddit. The documents were withheld by Britain’s opposition Labor Party, unaware of their origins, as the basis for allegations that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wanted to sell parts of the British National Health Service to healthcare providers. Americans.
Russia’s hand in hacking and leaking emails related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was well established by the investigation and evaluations of Special Adviser Robert Mueller of the US intelligence community. In 2016, US news organizations, including CNN, reported the details of many of the hacked emails. Critics argued that by doing so, the media was helping hackers achieve their goal; the media argued that the materials were in the public interest.
The Russian government denied their involvement in the hacks.
If real reporters don’t bite the hook, the Internet allows the creation of fake reporters. In 2016, the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) used a fake person named “Alice Donovan”, the investigation by Special Adviser Robert Mueller found. The same person is believed to have published articles on a popular independent American website.
And while Kalugin’s KGB comrades had to recruit Americans to draw swastikas in synagogues, the Internet allows for a more sustained and widespread way of removing marijuana. In 2016, Russians posed as true online American activists, even recruiting unconscious Americans to help organize protests and stunts in US cities around presidential elections and divisive issues like race. In a known case, Russian groups helped organize two opposing protests to be held at the same time in the same place in Texas. Images resulting from events like these were used to further propagate Russia’s undercover online campaigns.
Brush, floss, rinse, repeat. This playbook is not particularly difficult to emulate, and other groups are trying.
In fact, the 1983 CNN report included details on how the audio of an alleged call between then President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was, according to the United States government, the work of the Soviets. The report showed how Reagan’s audio had been cut from elsewhere and spliced to make the counterfeit tape sound compelling.
But the following year, the British newspaper The Observer reported that Crass, a British punk rock band, had claimed responsibility for the tape.
In the dark world of deception, misinformation about disinformation is not unusual.
At the height of this summer’s national protests against racial inequality in the United States, a Twitter account claiming to be Antifa, far-left activists, called for violence on the streets of the United States. The account was withheld by President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. to support claims that Antifa is dangerous.
It later emerged that the account was run not by Antifa at all, but by white supremacists who were apparently seeking to wreak havoc, just as the Russians have long done.
These efforts essentially follow a long history of misinformation that goes back far beyond what many people may realize, according to Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Rid, who detailed the history of disinformation in his book “Active Measures,” told CNN that the institutions have been engaging in disinformation campaigns for centuries and that many of the deceptive tactics used by the KGB and now online are earlier. to the Soviet Union.
He warned that there is currently a culture of mistrust in the main institutions: privileged conditions to spread disinformation. Along with technological developments that make it easier to create and spread counterfeit documents and fake news, it is almost, he said, a “perfect storm.”
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