Washington's indictment shines a bright light on the dark corners of Russian disinformation operations
Evan Dyer | CBC News | Posted: September 11, 2024 7:44 PM | Last Updated: September 11
The documents describe a system more focused on scaring people than convincing them
The affidavit of an FBI special agent, and the Russian documents attached to it, offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a vast Russian network of disinformation.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two Russians — both employees of state broadcaster RT — accused of illegally funnelling $9.7 million into a Tennessee media company.
The unsealed indictment said the founders of the unidentified company — widely reported to be Tenet Media — knew their funding came from "the Russians." Far-right influencers hired by the company, including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, have said they were unwitting "victims" of the alleged scheme.
The indictment and its associated documents show a side of Russian influence operations people in the West rarely see, said Roman Osadchuk of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington.
Normally, he said, "we're looking at something that surfaces, the open side of things, like what's being published on social media. Here we definitely see something from the inside.
"So this was unique."
The affidavit also reveals the growing sophistication of Russia's disinformation methods, said Robert English, a Russia expert at the University of Southern California at Annenberg.
"It's on the cusp of becoming, you know, a really disturbing, distorting actor in global politics," he said.
WATCH: Canadian influencers allegedly played 'key' role in Russian campaign
While the indictment doesn't name the Tennessee-based outlet, details in the court document match those of Tenet Media, a company founded by Canadian far-right commentator Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan.
The affidavit supports the the U.S. Department of Justice's request for the seizure of 32 internet domains and includes descriptions of Russian disinformation projects in both their original Russian and in English.
The Department of Justice alleges that the author of at least some of the descriptions is Ilya Gambashidze, founder of two companies — the Social Design Agency and Structura — that worked directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin's office to create a series of influence campaigns. The Social Design Agency created the content, while Structura focused on dissemination.
Gambashidze's writings, cited at length in the U.S. Department of Justice documents, reveal a keen understanding of political dynamics in the West, through the eyes of a man looking for pressure points to exploit.
They also show Gambashidze understood something that Russian propagandists have known since Communist times — that it's a waste of time to try openly to promote Russia's cause in the West.
When dealing with a U.S. audience, "there is no point in justifying Russia and no one to justify it to," Gambashidze wrote in a project proposal called "Project Good Old USA," which was among the supporting documents released by Washington.
A long history of spreading conspiracies
As a former KGB officer, Putin has always appreciated the value of working in the shadows.
"What amazed me most was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not," he wrote in his autobiography.
If he's comparing the lacklustre performance of the Russian Army in Ukraine to the success of Russia's internet influencers, he could be forgiven for believing that today more than ever.
The KGB's efforts to interfere in U.S. elections go as far back as 1968. It attempted to popularize the slogan "Reagan means War" in 1980, and in 1985 staged the successful disinformation campaign Operation Denver — the conspiracy theory that HIV was created in a CIA lab.
The FBI alleges that Putin charged one of his most trusted deputies, Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, with shepherding disinformation projects aimed at Germany, France, Mexico, Israel and the U.S. presidential election.
"What's happened in Canada or the U.S. is already disturbing but not yet critical," said English. "In Europe, and also everywhere from Qatar to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan in particular, we have seen [the Russians] swing elections. We have seen them turn committee decisions in the European Parliament and other institutions of the European Union. No doubt it has been more effective there.
"And with AI and with ways of multiplying their impact through technology, the future is pretty grim. And that's not even taking into account the use of deep fakes and fabricated evidence."
Plans for a 'guerrilla media campaign'
In his 2022 proposal for a "Guerilla Media Campaign in the U.S.," cited in the Department of Justice documents, Gambashidze compares the two parties on the American political scene. The department redacted the names but there is no doubt which party is which.
Democrats, he writes, are "far-left globalists who advocate for perversion of traditional moral and religious values, while supporters of the [Republican Party] are normal people whose priority is to preserve traditions of the American way of life."
In the same document, Gambashidze zeroes in on race.
Democrats, he writes, "are also people of color and supporters of 'affirmative action' and 'reverse discrimination', i.e. infringement on the rights of the white population of the United States, while [Republicans] are the victims of discrimination by people of color."
Gambashidze identifies the cost of living as a key pressure point. Americans, he writes, are "suffering from rising prices, primarily for gasoline, historically high inflation and the actual impoverishment of white taxpayers, a significant part of the middle class. Under these circumstances, the recipients of public assistance, unemployed people of color and residents of large cities end up being privileged groups of the population."
Those white Americans, he adds, "are afraid of losing the American way of life and the 'American dream'. It is these sentiments that should be exploited."
The first goal of the "guerilla media" program, Gambashidze writes, is "to secure victory of the Republican Party candidate" and the top themes to be used in that effort are inflation and "unaffordable prices for food and essential goods ... risk of job loss for white Americans" and "privileges for people of color, perverts and the disabled."
The campaign's secondary goals, Gambashidze adds, are "to increase the percentage of Americans who believe that the US 'has been doing way too much to support Ukraine' to 51%" from 41%, to raise the number who believe the war should be ended soon even if it means Ukraine surrenders territory from 43% to 53%, and to drive [U.S. President Joe] Biden's approval rating down to 29%."
But Gambashidze also warns Russian propagandists to take care not to harp too much on Ukraine or Russia-specific matters that could attract attention: "The amount of the highly resonant content and hot topics should not exceed 20 percent of the total volume of all publications."
Sleepers on the internet
Russia is famous for its use of "illegals" or long-term sleeper agents, a Cold War tradition that continues to this day.
That same tradecraft appears in the Department of Justice indictment and its associated documents. They describe a disinformation scheme — dubbed Operation Doppleganger by the DoJ — that allegedly used sleeper cells of influencers whose job was to quietly generate a following, without flagging themselves as overly political.
One of the documents released by Washington is Gambashidze's original written proposal for Doppleganger.
Producers of Doppleganger material would masquerade as regional news groups, he wrote in Russian. Their target audiences would include swing-state voters, voters in a small group of very red states, "U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent, American Jews, Community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan (the 'backbone' of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet)."
"The objective," he continued, "is to create and for at least five months moderately promote news groups in swing states through Facebook, Reddit and X (Twitter) — a total of 18 communities, one community per media outlet in six states: Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
"While in a 'sleeping' state, communities attract an audience through targeted advertising, planting, and organic reaches. At the right moment, 'upon gaining momentum', these communities become an important instrument of influencing the public opinion in critically important states and portals used by the Russian side to distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events."
Those bogus stories — entirely fake webpages not searchable by Google that mimic websites for legitimate news organization like the Washington Post's — gave Doppelganger its name.
The goal: spread anxiety and conflict
Doppleganger posts mimicking both U.S. and European media outlets have been appearing online since 2022.
While some of those fake pages have conveyed key Russian messages about Ukraine — such as a phoney Fox News story titled "Sad Outcome and Tragic Finale: Zelensky Loses in War and Diplomacy" — others just sought to generate anxiety and discontent.
Those anxiety-inducing fake posts include one titled "Young Americans Face a Poverty-Stricken Old Age," about the supposed future collapse of medicare and social security.
It may not seem obvious what benefit Russia derives from scaring U.S. millennials about their retirement prospects, but Russia's themes always connect back to its objectives.
Gambashidze's written proposal suggests a fake reader comment that could be appended to a Doppleganger story to sound an isolationist note: "Our country should solve its own problems and let other countries solve their own problems."
It also pitches a "text factory" that would churn out content linking support for Ukraine with domestic economic pressures for U.S.-based influencers to repeat. Gambashidze's pitch offers one suggested message for the text factory: "Last night, the House of Representatives approved the allocation of 40 billion dollars to Ukraine, while American families have to do without baby food."
The message there, said Osadchuk, is that "it's not your war. Here is problem X,Y and Z and you should be focusing on them instead of helping other countries."
Taking both sides of an issue
During the Cold War, the nations of the West also aimed propaganda messages at the Soviet Bloc. But there was an important distinction between those messages and Soviet propaganda, at least in theory: Western governments held that it was important that the messages be consistent, because it would undermine their credibility to be seen speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
The Russians don't appear to care much about consistency. Because their goal is to spark conflict and polarize societies, they are often active on both sides of the most controversial issues.
In the DOJ affadavit, Gambashidze presents a plan for a social media campaign targeting Israeli and American Jews. The stated goal of the campaign, aimed at right-wing Israelis, "is to rip Israel out of the general Western anti-Russian agenda."
"The right-wingers also want better relations with Russia," Gambashidze writes, adding that "the current head of Israeli government is considered a 'friend of Putin.'"
The document proposes to boost the Israeli right. "Influencing the public opinion of Israel will impact the public opinion of Jewish voters in the U.S. prior to the 2024 Presidential Elections," Gambashidze writes.
WATCH | Russia accused of using influencers to meddle in the 2024 U.S. election
But at the same time, Russia appears to support some of the loudest anti-Israel voices on social media, such as pro-Putin U.S. influencer Jackson Hinkle, who has spread false negative stories about Ukraine, appeared as a speaker at pro-Russia rallies and is sometimes retweeted by Russian official sources.
The same is true of left and right. While Russian disinformation in North America and Europe currently tends to push right-wing and white supremacist themes, in Africa it pushes anti-colonialist narratives that present the West as an arrogant white exploiter.
Russian disinformation appears equally happy promoting the far-left and the far-right, since the goal is to weaken the centre.
"The idea to make people disrespect, hate and basically not speak to each other from both of the wings," said Osadchuk. "Basically, making society more polarized, unstable and thus not able to come to some conclusion that would be beneficial for both of the wings for the whole country."
While Doppelganger is clearly aimed at energizing and radicalizing U.S. Republicans or those leaning Republican, he said, there may be other Russian disinformation programs that seek to push Democrats further to the left. "The whole scope is unknown," he told CBC News.
English said that closing websites is not a long-term solution, since the same content will soon pop up elsewhere.
"We also just have to inculcate internet hygiene and critical reading and thinking skills. Because there'll always be one more way to reproduce, to create some new kind of content to get around some technical technological block or some legal obstacle," he said.
"As long as our people are basically dumb, are being more and more dumbed-down and take things at face value, only read what they like and wallow in all of these websites, Instagram, when their main source of news is Twitter ... I don't know that we'll ever be able to get a handle on this until we have more intelligent media consumers again."