Why covert propaganda networks can hide in plain sight

CNN reported at the weekend that Russia’s FSB is conducting covert influence operations against the United States, by using private citizens to disseminate propaganda themes through unwitting Americans.

At this stage, a lot of people would be more surprised if something like this wasn’t happening, yet the source of the story is surprisingly opaque.

The official declined to offer specifics to back up the intelligence community’s assertions that the FSB is funding this kind of operation but noted that once officials were able establish FSB backing, it is easy to trace the narratives they are pushing in open-source materials.

“Once you’re aware of who these people are and their association with the FSB, by nature of what they’re doing, they have very, very public personas,” the official said. “And so I would just say it’s not really difficult to kind of follow the strings.” (ref 1).

Given the evidence, it is easy to follow the trail, but we are not given the evidence. In its absence, the temptation is to simply look for what we take to be pro-Russian arguments, and join the dots between those making them.

Apart from one being dangerously McCarthyite, this approach is likely to lead us astray. US intelligence itself claims that one of the goals of the FSB operation is to have the propaganda amplified by those unaware of the original source.

Compared to the truly clandestine business of espionage, propaganda is inherently public, and yet the role of covert propaganda networks is often easy to infer, but difficult to prove.

There is no substitute for a smoking gun, direct evidence of control or funding. Such things occasionally do turn up. A few years ago, I came across a Wikileaks cable in which a lawyer admitted her NGO took direction from the Israeli National Security Council (ref 3). Things are not usually so simple.

The reality of propaganda networks is often subtler than the language of ‘front organisations’ or ‘proxies’ might suggest, though the rhetoric of control has been as dear to intelligence officers as to conspiracy theorists. The CIA’s Frank Wisner famously described his network as a ‘mighty wurlitzer’, implying it would play any tune he wished.

Yet that network included organisations like the American Federation of Labor, which had an often fractious relationship with the CIA. Even the true fronts such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were often staffed by people who had done similar work independently.

In his primer on covert action, Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards, Roy Godson wrote that ‘the best covert action campaigns help people to do what they want to do more effectively than they could without such assistance’ (ref 3, p.12).

If covert action assists people in doing what they would have done anyway, it follows that one cannot infer the existence of covert action from the fact of their doing it.

What this means in practice is illustrated by the example of British Security Co-ordination during World War Two. Even before Pearl Harbour, many groups in the US had an organic affinity for the Allies. One did not need to infer covert action to understand the motives of American anti-fascists, of Anglophile members of the East Coast elite, or of immigrants and refugees from European countries over-run by the Nazis. Yet the British did resort to covert methods to organise and support these groups. The facts only became public years later, when insiders began to write about their involvement.

Sometimes insiders talk when the ideologies that sustained networks begin to break down. This arguably happened to the early Cold War CIA in the post-Vietnam/post Watergate era. Authoritarian states are not immune from this, at least in their overseas networks. A number of skilled anti-fascist propagandists associated with the Comintern gravitated towards the Western Allies after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not seem to have produced such insider defections so far, but it may be too early to draw a definitive conclusion.

While US intelligence did not give CNN a smoking gun, it did provide them with ‘open source materials’, in the apparent shape of a Daily Beast article about the alt-right TV channel One America News Network.

Moscow’s latest disinformation blitz is all about a report produced by the “Foundation for the Study of Democracy”, a Russian NGO headed by one Maxim Grigoriev. On April 25, Russian diplomats brought Grigoriev into the UN, where he presented his report in a a plenary room in the basement. Then they took him to Washington, D.C. for a press conference at the Russian embassy four days later.

In Wednesday’s segment, OANN correspondent Pearson Sharp mentions the UN briefing for institutional gravitas, but doesn’t mention which country brought Grigoriev into the room (ref 4).

Scholars of covert action traditionally distinguish between different shades of white, grey and black propaganda. White propaganda consists of openly avowed statements from sources that are clearly linked to a given government. Black propaganda conceals that source. Whether the propaganda in question is true or disinformation is a separate issue. Black propaganda may be chosen to preserve the credibility of the sponsor, or conversely because the sponsor lacks credibility with the target audience.

What’s striking about the OANN story is that the involvement of Russian diplomats makes for a fairly light shade of grey. That might suggest that the question of intelligence penetration is secondary to the organic affinity of many American conservatives for Russia’s brand of nationalism. While both issues are real, rationalising the latter too much in terms of the former may blind us to the very conditions which allow propaganda to succeed.

References

Ref 1: Katie Bo Lillis, Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners, CNN, 26 August 2023.

Ref 2: ISRAELI NGO SUES TERRORISTS, TIES UP PA MONEY, US Embassy Tel Aviv, 30 August 2007, archived by Wikileaks.

Ref 3: Roy Godson, Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: US Covert Action and Counterintelligence, Transaction Publishers, 2001. Godson’s expertise on the subject is not merely academic, and his relationship with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra Affair illustrates a number of points made here.

Ref 4: Kevin Poulsen, Trump’s New Favorite Network Embraces Russian Propaganda, Daily Beast, 4 May 2019.