Medea Benjamin, Code Pink:
US motto: "Do as I say, not as I do." Russian interference in US elections and
civil society is unacceptable, but Congress wants to spend a humongous $1.6
billion for anti-China propaganda
-------------------------------------
MARCUS STANLEY
SEP 11, 2024
House passes $1.6 billion to deliver anti-China propaganda overseas
"Somehow it’s a crime when Russia does it to us, but good 'information ops'
when we want to discredit Beijing’s Belt & Road initiatives worldwide
Since at least 2016, foreign interference in American elections and civil society
have become central to American political discourse. The issue is taken
extremely seriously by the U.S. government, which has levied sanctions and
called out foreign adversaries for sowing “discord and chaos” through their
propaganda efforts.
But apparently Washington takes a different view when it comes to American
propaganda operations in foreign countries. On Monday, the House passed HR
1157, the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund,” by a bipartisan 351-36
majority. This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State
Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes,
subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter
Chinese “malign influence” globally.
That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating
expenditure of CNN. If passed into law it would also represent a large increase
in federal spending on international influence operations. While it’s hard to total
all of the spending on U.S. influence operations across agencies, the main
coordinating body for U.S. information efforts, the State Department’s Global
Engagement Center (GEC), has an annual budget of less than $100 million.
There is obviously no issue with the U.S. government presenting its own public
view of what China is doing around the world, and doing so as forcefully as
needed. But this bill goes beyond that by subsidizing “independent media and
civil society” and other information operations in foreign countries. Indeed, this
is already routine. The Global Engagement Center, which will likely play a strong
role in implementing the bill, spends more than half its budget on such grants,
and USAID, which will also play a lead role, makes grants to foreign media and
civil society organizations a key part of its efforts. HR 1157 would supercharge
these programs.
Crucially, HR 1157 doesn’t seem to contain any requirement that U.S.
government financing to foreign media be made transparent to citizens of
foreign countries (although there is a requirement to report grants to certain
U.S. congressional committees). Thus, it’s possible that the program could in
some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging in a manner
similar to the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian
messaging by U.S. media influencers.
Such anti-Chinese messaging could cover a wide range of bread-and-butter
political issues in foreign countries. The definition of “malign influence” in the
bill is extremely broad. For example, program funds could support any effort to
highlight the “negative impact” of Chinese economic and infrastructure
investment in a foreign country. Or it could fund political messaging against
Chinese contractors involved in building a port, road, or hospital, for example as
part of Beijing’s globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative.
Because some dimensions of U.S. information operations could be classified, it
can be difficult to get a complete picture of the full range of what they look like
on the ground. But a 2021 “vision document” on psychological operations and
civil affairs from the First Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg gives a
fascinating glimpse.
The document provides a case study (or “competition vignette”) of what an
integrated effort to counter Chinese influence could look like in the fictional
African country of Naruvu. In the vignette, members of a Special Forces Civil
Affairs team spot a billboard with a picture of a port and Chinese characters.
Quickly determining that the Chinese are investing in a new deep-water port in
Naruvu, the 8th Psyop Group at Fort Bragg’s Information Warfare Center (IWC)
works with local and U.S. government partners to immediately develop an
influence campaign to “discredit Chinese activities.”
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The influence campaign “empowered IWTF [Information Warfare Task Force], in
coordination with the JIIM [local and U.S. government partners] to inflame
long-standing friction between Naruvian workers and Chinese corporations.
Within days, protests supported by the CFT’s ODA [Special Forces Operations
Detachment Alpha], erupted around Chinese business headquarters and their
embassy in Ajuba. Simultaneously, the IWC-led social media campaign
illuminated the controversy.”
Faced with a combined propaganda campaign and intense labor unrest, the
Chinese company is forced to back down from its planned port. (Although the
vignette continues to an even more Hollywood-ready ending in which U.S.
special forces break into the construction company’s offices, confiscate
blueprints for the port, and discover that it is actually a Chinese plot to emplace
long-range missiles in Naruvu to threaten U.S. Atlantic shipping).
This case study illustrates the extremes information warfare could reach. But of
course it is fictional, and most operations funded to counter Chinese influence
will be far more mundane and less cinematic. Indeed, some will probably look
similar to the activities the U.S. government has bitterly condemned when
foreign governments financed them in the U.S. civil society space, such as
making social media buys or funding organizations sympathetic to
Washington’s perspective.
But it’s still worth thinking about the consequences of such efforts. They are of
course likely to make U.S. protests against similar foreign government activities
look hypocritical. Beyond that, pumping a flood of potentially undisclosed U.S.
government money into anti-Chinese messaging worldwide could backfire by
making any organic opposition to Chinese influence appear to be covertly
funded U.S. government propaganda rather than genuine expressions of local
concern.
As the publics in many nations are likely to be suspicious of U.S. as well as
Chinese involvement in their internal affairs, this could easily discredit genuine
grassroots opposition to Chinese influence. A historical example is
Washington’s funding of Russian civil society groups that criticized the integrity
of Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. This backfired by allowing Putin to
depict the opposition as tools in a U.S. plot and resulted in sharp restrictions on
U.S. activity in Russia, including the expulsion of USAID.
Another problem raised by the proposed legislation is the possibility that anti-
Chinese propaganda financed by this program will flow back into the American
media space and influence American audiences, without any disclosure of its
initial source of funding. Protections against U.S. government targeting of
domestic audiences are already weak, and what protections do exist are almost
impossible to enforce in a networked world where information in other countries
is just a click away from U.S. audiences.
It’s easy to imagine U.S.-funded foreign media being used as evidence in
domestic debates about China’s international role, or even to attack U.S. voices
that advocate for a different view of China that is propagated by a hawkish U.S.
government. During the Trump presidency, the State Department’s Global
Engagement Center (GEC), a likely recipient of many of these funds, supported
attacks on U.S. critics of Trump’s Iran policy. More recently, congressional
conservatives have claimed the GEC has advocated for censorship of
conservative voices who disagree with Biden’s foreign policies.
The overwhelming bipartisan majority for HR 1157 is a snapshot of a culture in
Washington that seems not to see the risk to U.S. values and interests when we
engage in the same covert activities that we criticize in other countries."
Marcus Stanley
Marcus Stanley is the Director of Studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft. Prior to joining the Quincy Institute, he spent a decade at Americans
for Financial Reform. He has a PhD in public policy from Harvard, with a focus
on economics.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily
reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
|
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last 2 paragraphs:
Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to
continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals
wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and
Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives
disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust
by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign –
General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue
providing clandestine influence services for the military.
A REUTERS INVESTIGATION:
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
"The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to
discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame
Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts
say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
By CHRIS BING and JOEL SCHECTMAN Filed June 14, 2024T
WASHINGTON, DC
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret
campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the
Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. color="Maroon">It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of
vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters
investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate
Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign.
Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first
vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac
inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched
descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines
operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the
slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design
of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former
and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the
account as fake and removed it.
TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG
#ChinaIsTheVirus
Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China
(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo
Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands,
POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators,
online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black
sand refers to a type of mining.)
“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust
China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next
to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections.
Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the
Coronavirus is real.”
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After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed
the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based
on activity patterns and internal data.
The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded
beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters
determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across
Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake
social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines
among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of
people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention
that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be
considered forbidden under Islamic law.
The military program started under former President Donald Trump and
continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after
alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the
Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White
House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also
disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an
internal review, Reuters found.
“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and
disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”
Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of
Medicine.
The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and
Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.
Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment
about the clandestine program.
A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged
in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but
the official declined to provide details.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms,
including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the
U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a
“disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of
COVID-19.”
In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long
maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads
misinformation.
Manila’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including
whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the
Philippines Department of Health, however, said the “findings by Reuters
deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the
involved countries.” Some aid workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S.
military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.
Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some
American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put
civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win
hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.
“I don’t think it’s defensible,” said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist
at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “I’m extremely dismayed,
disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,”
said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the
2001 anthrax attacks.
The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall
public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that
became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines
were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and
Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not
respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Health workers and the government struggled to get Filipinos vaccinated
against COVID-19, despite mobile sites like this one, operating in May 2021 in
Taguig, Metro Manila, Philippines. At that time, the Philippines had one of the
worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. The primary vaccine available then
was Sinovac. REUTERS/Lisa Marie David
Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals
develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to
uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they
saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency
used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for
Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11,
2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio
vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to
the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.
“It should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people’s arms as
possible,” said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence
Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategy of Washington’s many spy
agencies. What the Pentagon did, Treverton said, “crosses a line.”
‘We were desperate’
Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of
followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the anti-
vax material and other Pentagon-planted disinformation was viewed, or to what
extent the posts may have caused COVID deaths by dissuading people from
getting vaccinated.
In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, however, then-Philippines President
Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be
inoculated that he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.
“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in a
televised address in June 2021. “There is a crisis in this country … I’m just
exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.”
Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the
COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked
Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.
When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst
inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens
were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the
time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000
Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population
contributed to the worst death rate in the region.
A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an
interview.
Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by
Reuters were shocked by the U.S. anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an
already vulnerable citizenry. Public concerns about a Dengue fever vaccine,
rolled out in the Philippines in 2016, had led to broad skepticism toward
inoculations overall, said Lulu Bravo, executive director of the Philippine
Foundation for Vaccination. The Pentagon campaign preyed on those fears.
“Why did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate,” said Dr. Nina
Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and
Philippines government during the pandemic. “We don’t have our own vaccine
capacity,” she noted, and the U.S. propaganda effort “contributed even more
salt into the wound.”
The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a
longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior
by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to
trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March
2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S.
military’s secret operation.
“I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need
to die from COVID,” she said.
To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong
objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found.
Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the
program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa,
Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on
innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior
military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag
China through the mud.”
As the COVID pandemic swept through the Philippines, a man lit a candle atop
a tomb in a flooded cemetery there in October 2021. Many citizens were
hesitant to be vaccinated. REUTERS/Lisa Marie David
A new disinformation war
In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than
two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media
analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and
Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social
media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five
years.
Clandestine psychological operations are among the government’s most highly
sensitive programs. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of
people within U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are
treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign
alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.
Over the last decade, some U.S. national security officials have pushed for a
return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against
rivals that the United States’ wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016
U.S. presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and
leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.
In 2019, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a
clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion
in China against its government, Reuters reported in March. As part of that
effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread
disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping’s government.
COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against
China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a “bolt of
energy” that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China’s
influence war.
The Pentagon’s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China’s own efforts
to spread false information about the origins of COVID. The virus first emerged
in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed
without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an
American service member who participated in an international military sports
competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that
the virus may have originated in a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick,
Maryland. There’s no evidence for that assertion.
Mirroring Beijing’s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up
networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy,
according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint.
China’s messaging got Washington’s attention. Trump subsequently coined the
term “China virus” as a response to Beijing’s accusation that the U.S. military
exported COVID to Wuhan.
“That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, ‘I have to call it
where it came from,’” Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. “It did
come from China.”
President Donald Trump explained his repeated use of the terms “Chinese
virus” and “China virus” during a White House COVID briefing in March 2020.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
China’s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed “actions to politicize
the origins question and stigmatize China.” The ministry had no comment
about the Justice Department’s complaint.
Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an
ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks,
ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling
countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing
would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine
accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary
vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines
became more widely available there in early 2022.
Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored
inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what
pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the
remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the
companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept
high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown
University who has worked with the World Health Organization.
The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said.
“The United States took a very determined America First approach.”
To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical
playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where
the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the
pandemic.
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The U.S. relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the
bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to
cancel a key pact that allows the U.S. military to maintain legal jurisdiction over
American troops stationed in the country.
Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the
Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in
the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s
aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security
understanding Manila had long held with Washington.
“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.”
Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”
Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s
plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral
relations.”
China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the
secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military
officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So
what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”
As part of its secret anti-vax propaganda campaign, the U.S. military used
phony accounts meant to resemble real people.
TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG
Vaccine from China might be a rat killer. #ChinaIsTheVirus
Military trumped diplomats
U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda
could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia,
closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.
A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special
Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in
Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three
former Pentagon officials.
A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia in 2020, then-
Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pushed for the
Pentagon’s secret propaganda campaign. (U.S. Army photo by Brooke Nevins.)
Handout via Reuters
The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The
goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of COVID while promoting
skepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country
that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.
A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.
At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region
objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or
anger through a psychological operation, or psyop, they argued during Zoom
calls with the Pentagon.
“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said
a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the
military operation.
While the Pentagon saw Washington’s rapidly diminishing influence in the
Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats
to plead for caution.
The secret U.S. military campaign extended beyond the Philippines and sought
to heighten fears about vaccines made by Russia and China.
TRANSLATION FROM ARABIC
This is what the #United_States is offering to help countries, including Arab
countries, obtain #Coronavirus (#Covid_19) vaccines and mitigate the
secondary effects of the pandemic. Compare this with #Russia and #China
using the pandemic excuse to expand their influence and profit even though
the Russian vaccine is ineffective and the Chinese vaccine contains pork
gelatin
“The relationship is hanging from a thread,” another former senior U.S. diplomat
recounted. “Is this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it
worth the risk?”
In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal
to the program. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of
embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country,
often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing’s
messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.
But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense
Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the
U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s
competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling
commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops
against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress
that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence
operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper shakes hands with his Philippine
counterpart Delfin Lorenzana during a news conference in the Philippines in
November 2019. That same year, Esper signed a secret order that later paved
the way for the launch of the U.S. military’s clandestine anti-vax propaganda
campaign. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez
Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department
spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.
U.S. propaganda machine
In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of
psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing’s
COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the
use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat
buildings at a facility on Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, U.S. military personnel
and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other
social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains
the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory.
Psychological warfare has played a role in U.S. military operations for more than
a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-
called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting
role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping
leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.
After the al Qaeda attacks of 2001, the United States was fighting a borderless,
shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of
psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA. The Pentagon
set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes
funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant
groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.
Unlike earlier psyop missions, which sought specific tactical advantage on the
battlefield, the post-9/11 operations hoped to create broader change in public
opinion across entire regions.
In this post, created by the U.S. military, a Chinese flag conceals pigs from a
group of Muslims who are about to be vaccinated. The propaganda sought to
convince Muslims in Russian-speaking countries that China’s COVID vaccines
were “haram,” or forbidden.
TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN
Can China be trusted if it tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin, and
distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries, where many people
consider such a drug “haram”?
By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony
accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices – themselves often
secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web
of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump
U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a
sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly
placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to
current and former military officials.
China’s efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Braga
justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered,
sources said.
Workers unload boxes with medical and protective gear in 2020 sent from
China to help the fight against COVID-19 in Kazakhstan, one of the nations
targeted by a secret U.S. military propaganda operation designed to discredit
China. REUTERS/Pavel Mikheyev
Pork in the vaccine?
By summer 2020, the military’s propaganda campaign moved into new territory
and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media
executives.
In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command,
which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia,
launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials
told Reuters.
Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy
roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and
could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said
that the vaccine was “ manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic
religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork
gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save
human life.
The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig
derivative. As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company
used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts
that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors,
according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.
The secret U.S. military propaganda campaign intensified fears among Muslims
that the China-made vaccine was “haram,” or forbidden. Public health experts
say the messaging put lives at risk for geopolitical gain.
TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN
Muslim scientists from the Raza Academy in Mumbai reported that the Chinese
coronavirus vaccine contains gelatin from pork and recommended against
vaccination with the haram vaccine. China hides what exactly this drug is made
of, which causes mistrust among Muslims.
“Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin
and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many
people consider such a drug haram?” read an April 2021 tweet sent from a
military-controlled account identified by X.
The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram,
alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the
military accounts, according to former military officials.
One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of
syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar
posts that traced back to U.S. Central Command. One shows a Chinese flag as
a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine
syringes. In the center is a man with syringes; on his back is the word “China.” It
targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a
country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China’s vaccines and
participated in human trials. Translated into English, the X post reads: “China
distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.”
The U.S. military’s secret propaganda sought to sow doubt about China’s
efforts to help fight COVID in the Philippines, one of the hardest hit countries in
Southeast Asia.
TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG
WE SHOULD NOT TRUST THOSE MED SUPPLIES BY CHINA REALLY.
Everything is fake! Face mask, PPE, and test kits. There is a possibility that their
vaccine is fake…
COVID came from China. What if their vaccines are dangerous??
It’s normal for Filipinos not to trust China, given the number of problems they
gave us??
Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of
2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the
military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another
person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was
violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by
spreading COVID misinformation.
The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for
counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according
to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop
spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to
remain active on Facebook.
Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.
Central Asian countries such as Turkmenistan represented an influence
battleground between the United States and China, which arrived earlier than
America did with vaccines for the pandemic-plagued country.
TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN
Turkmenistan residents report that the Chinese vaccine causes severe side
effects. Those vaccinated with the Chinese drug experience severe nausea,
vomiting and diarrhea. Some called ambulance services and ended up in
intensive care.
Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials
arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden’s new National Security Council shortly
after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.
“It was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction
after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The
administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine
hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”
By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all
anti-vaccine messaging. “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all
vaccines,” said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program.
Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and
other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer.
Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn’t end immediately with the
NSC’s order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to
comment.
The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an
internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The
probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many
leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not
elaborate.
The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of
academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same
accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report. The high-level Pentagon
review was first reported by the Washington Post. which also reported that the
military used fake social media accounts to counter China’s message that
COVID came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the
program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by
Reuters.
The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper’s
2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S.
ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate
that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where
they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations
aimed at “broad population messaging,” such as those used to promote
vaccine hesitancy during COVID.
The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling
the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking
inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with
direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders
didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.
A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to
continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals
wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and
Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives
disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust
by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign –
General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue
providing clandestine influence services for the military."
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