Dezinformatsiya Meets Americas Magaphone

KGB Headquarters, Lubyanka, Moscow

Which is more damaging to the health of America’s body politic: false information emanating from Russia that pollutes our social media —poisoning American minds — or our home-grown variety? Increasingly, it’s becoming more difficult to tell the difference.

A fundamental history lesson that is drilled into every U.S. intelligence analyst — if not (alas) their next-door neighbors — helps illuminate.

American and Russian intelligence agencies have always been, at their analytic cores, polar opposites. We are charged with speaking truth to power. They wouldn’t dare. No wonder. Stalin had truth tellers shot. Trying that with Putin risks falling out of a window.

That basic insight helps explain Russia’s historic analytic intelligence failures, from Stalin’s turning a deaf ear in 1939 when warned of Hitler’s intentions to invade the Soviet Union, to Putin’s mistaken belief in 2022 that taking Ukraine would be a cakewalk.

But there is one thing Russian intelligence has excelled in for more than a century: Desinformatsiya. Russian, for Disinformation. Lies spread to undermine public confidence in western democracies, with the Kremlin’s hand concealed. Moscow’s been at it since the early 1920s, when dictator Vladimir Lenin’ apparatchiks set up the Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first secret police and the continuing model for the Soviet KGB and onto today’s Russian intelligence services.

With their eyes on dividing and confusing public opinion in Moscow’s so-called Main Adversary today — the USA — the Kremlin’s spooks have certainly been persistent.

According to testimony by respected scholars Thomas Rid and Roy Godson before the Senate Intelligence Committee, there have been more than 10,000 Soviet/Russian disinformation operations over the years. Russian disinformation has exploited America’s racial divisions, spread lies about the origins of HIV-AIDS, more lies about the origins of the Covid virus, and so many more.

The most infamous — and still contentious — Russian disinformation operation involved Vladimir Putin’s social-media manipulations during America’s 2016 presidential elections.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, after an exhaustive investigation, reported in 2020 that the Russian disinformation had been aimed at “harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” (An awkward fact: the signatories to the Senate report included Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio. Cotton now chairs the intelligence committee, while Rubio is President Trump’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.)

These days, Trump and his top intelligence officials are still waging their own social media campaigns aimed at blaming, not the Russians, but so-called “Deep State” operatives in the CIA, FBI, and the Justice Department for election interference.

Just this week, Trump has even made the absurd accusation that a “treasonous” former President Barack Obama actually is the one who rigged both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections! Talk about classic misinformation. Trump knows many of his most ardent and who- he-presumes- to- be easily manipulated supporters will not question him.

The astonishing headline, where an American president falsely accused a predecessor of being a traitor, tended to get buried in the daily avalanche that comes with today’s 24-hour news cycle.

Meanwhile, some of America’s foreign friends have long perceived the disturbing similarities between the Russian – and American brands of false information. As a 2021 report to the European Parliament — just a few weeks after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol — found that “the lines between domestic and foreign attempts to undermine democracy are increasingly blurred.” Trump, the report concluded, “appears to have followed the Kremlin’s authoritarian playbook in using information to fan division and undermine trust” in electoral democracy before the Jan. 6 riots that left five people dead.

(Trump has pardoned nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 insurrectionists, including members of the Oath Keepers militia, and the Proud Boys. Meanwhile, the other day, Marco Rubio fired some 1,300 State Department employees who had been busy advancing a pro-democracy agenda.)

Need more evidence that the Russians have known exactly what’s going on, while (too) many Americans are sleeping?

Last September, the Biden Department of Justice released an indictment charging two employees of Russia’s government-backed propaganda outlet, RT (for Russia Today) of funneling nearly $10 million to several prominent American right-wing social media influencers. Seems the Russian money was channeled to the clueless MAGA influencers through a cutout in Tennessee. The influencers — Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern — each protested that they had been unaware of who their paymasters were. That’s believable. As Wired magazine reported in an analysis of the videos, the MAGA influencer’s focuses on America’s culture wars: “supposed racism toward white people,” “Elon Musk,” “illegal immigrants” and “free speech.” These are all divisive themes the influencers were already pursuing on their own; there would have been no need for direction from Moscow.

As for the historical differences between American and Russian intelligence core values, an update is needed. Under Donald Trump, while American intelligence truth-tellers aren’t being murdered, they are being fired.

Stay tuned for a (disconcerting) update.

Greg Rushford is a former congressional aide who conducted intelligence oversight, and a former Washington journalist. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 300 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.