Russia involved Americans in spreading propaganda: US intelligence

According to recently declassified US intelligence, Russian intelligence is pursuing a systematic program of pro-Kremlin propaganda through private links between Russian operatives and unsuspecting US and Western targets. Writes about it CNN.

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US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is trying to influence government policy and public opinion in the West by instructing Russian citizens to build relationships with powerful individuals in the US and the West and then spread narratives that support the Kremlin's goals.

“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small in scale, and the overall goal is for the United States and people in the West to present these ideas as native,” said a U.S. official authorized to discuss the material. — Operations to influence agents on a community are based primarily on personal relationships. They build trust and can then use this to covertly advance the FSB's agenda."

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According to intelligence, these campaigns have sometimes been effective in spreading Russian stories in the Western press. Maksim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, repeatedly appeared at the UN presenting a false study alleging that the White Helmets humanitarian group operating in Syria operated a black market in human organs and staged chemical attacks on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with with which Russia is an ally. These allegations eventually found their way into a television report in the United States.

But the official stressed that the Western voices that eventually became the mouthpieces of Russian propaganda were almost certainly unaware of the role they played.

“In the end, this unwitting goal is to spread Russian propaganda among the target audience,” the American official noted. “Ultimately, many of them are unaware—they have no idea who is essentially spreading these stories.”

Intelligence provides several examples of how Russian civilian "accomplices" carried out the decrees of the FSB.

One man, Andriy Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn the “supposed truth” about what is happening in the region. In fact, according to declassified data, the FSB directed him and "almost certainly funded the project."

The US official cited Natalia Burlinova, founder of a Russian NGO that regularly coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts to influence Western thinking. In 2018, she held meetings and events at several US think tanks and universities in New York, Boston, and Washington, a work funded by the FSB, according to intelligence. Earlier this year, she was charged with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal Russian agent in the United States, although she remains at large in Russia.

Burlinova denied that her trips to the US in 2018 were funded by the FSB.

“All travel expenses were financed by a grant that we previously received from the Presidential Grants Fund, the main grant operator in Russia,” she assured. “The Russian FSB did not give me money for the trip.”

The official declined to provide specific details supporting the intelligence community's claims that the FSB is funding these types of operations, but noted that officials can easily track down the narratives Russia is promoting.

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“Once you find out who these people are and their connection to the FSB, they become very, very public figures,” the official noted. “And so I would just say that following the clues is not that difficult.”

The US official declined to say whether Russia used the same tactics in its attempt to influence the US election.

According to intelligence reports, the FSB does indeed use similar tactics to influence political opinion within Russia. In one case, Anton Tsvetkov, on instructions from the FSB, organized protests near embassies in Moscow, including the US Embassy. According to declassified intelligence, the protests advanced the Russian version of the war in Ukraine by "promoting the narrative of 'Ukrainian Nazis' and blaming the US and its allies for the deaths of children in the Donbass" while hiding the role of the Russian government.

“The purpose of these protests was actually to sell this to the Russian people,” the US official explained.

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