Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  Internally, there was a local telephone network for campus administration, roughly a half dozen phones for every 120 cadets. Internal phone lines were for official business only, or so they said. But for my friends and me, they were a way to have a little fun, to subvert the authoritarian system governing us.

  Prank calls started out simple. We’d use them to dupe our friends into silly mundane tasks—needlessly convincing classmates to sweep the hallways for an impromptu commandant inspection that would never come or assembling teams of “Plebes” (freshmen) to gather packages and correspondence that never arrived. The endless rounds of pranks created such mistrust of the phone networks that those on cadet guard duty never really knew what to think or do.

  My roommates and I were evil geniuses, and one was a particularly savvy computer and communications master. One day, he dug through the unlocked telephone network box in the hallway and quickly figured out how to wire a phone for our room, one that piggybacked like a party line on another cadet company’s admin-room phone line. We located an old telephone from a basement storage closet, and we were in business. We had our own ghost phone line accessing the entire academy from our room. The fun began.

  Most days, my buddies and I congregated in our room around the ghost phone for an hour or so of prank calls. I’d take out the West Point internal phone book and scroll through the alphabetical listings trying to figure out how to aggravate each of the academy’s services. I’d dog-ear the page I’d left off at the previous day, progressing from A through Z, dialing and ringing anyone who would answer.

  At first we’d laugh just when I got someone agitated to the point that they would hang up on me. But that got boring over time. The real challenge came when I attempted to create a real-world outcome from the prank call, what I’d later learn to call a “behavior change” in the influence business. For example, I once successfully convinced West Point’s ridiculously expansive, elaborate, and effective snowplow operation to attempt to clear a large parade field in anticipation of President George H. W. Bush’s helicopter landing that same morning. (No such visit was planned.)

  I figured out that the more I made the prank fit the organization I was targeting, the better the effect I could achieve. That’s why the meat plant operation’s organizational chart I discovered in the stairway was so valuable. The names, ranks, and phone numbers provided me needed reconnaissance to make my pranks seem plausible, generating real outcomes.

  “Carfizzi!” I shouted into the phone, my first of what would be hundreds of phone calls to this number over the next several years.

  “Yeah, who is this?” a gruff, grumpy older man retorted on the end of the line. I’d connected with the head of West Point’s meat plant operation, and in just a few words I knew he fit my needs precisely. His speech, his affect—it was angry, tired, frustrated. Perfect. This was going to be just perfect.

  “You know who this is. This is Perez.” I impersonated one of his shift leaders from the board. It was a gamble, but if it worked, I knew I’d be far more successful at making this guy crazy.

  “Perez, what are you doing?” Carfizzi seemed confused, but he didn’t discount me entirely.

  “You know what I’m doing. We need more chicken patties up here. We’re short, so get them up here fast.” I knew that chicken patties and corn chowder, a cadet favorite lunch in winter, were on the menu that day.

  “What are you talking about?” Carfizzi said.

  “Shut up, old man, I’m tired of covering for you.” I challenged him in a way a subordinate should never talk to his boss.

  “Hey, you can’t talk to me like that,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to you however I want—everyone knows I run the show. Now stop messing around; get those damn patties up here or I’m going to tell everyone the truth about who runs this place.” I hung up the phone and we all burst out laughing, assuming that Perez would receive a talking-to later from his frustrated boss.

  The next day, same time, I dialed Carfizzi back, impersonating another worker at the meat plant. Same result: he went for it. Several days went by, then I hit Carfizzi at the same number and impersonated another name from the organizational chart I’d copied down. After a week or two, I’d burned through all of Carfizzi’s employees and I returned back to the top of the list.

  “Carfizzi!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Who is this?”

  “Perez!” I shouted back.

  “Oh, really? Because Perez is standing right here next to me.” The game was up for that day.

  “Shut up, old man—I’ll kick your ass,” I trolled Carfizzi a little, knowing his blood ran hot, that any challenge to his seniority and strength drove him crazy.

  “You better hope I never find you.” Carfizzi had had enough. I heard the frustration in his voice and knew I was under his skin. I hung up. Over the next several weeks, I continued calling Carfizzi, but the calls became routine. He’d answer, get angry, and quickly hang up. I needed a new route to disrupt him. I developed an approach I called the reverse prank call.

  Academy staff left like clockwork. By 6 p.m., West Point offices outside of the central cadet area were shuttered. All calls went straight to answering machines, which gave me a new method for driving Carfizzi crazy. I went down the academy phone book and called every number and left a message. On each message, I impersonated Carfizzi and left his phone number, always claiming that I needed to be contacted immediately. The health clinic, janitorial services, animal control, sports ticketing office—Carfizzi didn’t know it, but he had reached out to everyone on the base over a couple of nights, and during the daytime, I assumed, each one of these loyal civil servants was returning the desperate plea I left under his name. The entire reverse-prank-call operation took about a week to complete and numbered just shy of a hundred phone calls. Carfizzi had to answer about the “wild dogs running around the meat plant” and the “traumatized cadets” who fell ill from spoiled hamburgers. The snowplow operator may have shown up to clean off the loading dock, and the academy marching band followed up on a request to play at his retirement ceremony. I concocted dozens of bogus stories on these answering machine messages. A week later, I dialed my favorite number.

  “Carfizzi,” I shouted.

  Carfizzi responded, angry and almost saddened. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  * * *

  Carfizzi had a point. Why was I doing that to him? Prank calls were childish, devious, not right, but wonderfully fun. For me and my buddies, they provided an outlet for challenging the authoritarian system that denied us a life, a way to fight back against our oppressors, a telephonic insurgency against “the man.” At this point, I imagine you, the reader, might be a bit confused and disappointed, and have some questions. Yes, I’m sorry I prank-called Mr. Carfizzi; well, kind of sorry. Carfizzi, regretfully, took the brunt of my shenanigans, but he ultimately became the most useful military training I received at West Point—an informal course in social engineering, the backbone of cyberattacks and influence operations. Carfizzi provided me with essential practice to mess with my enemies—the hackers, terrorists, and Russian trolls I came to track on social media. Shenanigans helped me understand and investigate how bad people use ostensibly good mediums to do terrible things.

  I reckon you are also wondering how I went from prank-calling academy staff to tweeting with terrorists. How did I go from being an Airborne and Ranger School graduate and infantry officer serving in the 101st Airborne Division to tracking terrorists in a coffee shop in Boston? How did I transition from being a short-lived FBI agent on a joint terrorism task force to briefing the Senate Select Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the U.S. election? Well, it wasn’t by design—it doesn’t really make much sense, even—but somehow, I ended up being exactly where I needed to be when I needed to be there.

  Growing up in Missouri during the Cold War, we played four things in our neighborhood: baseball, basketball, football, and war. I lacked the height, wei
ght, speed, and talent to make it in the first three, so, beginning in my middle school years, I focused on the last of those. After watching The Right Stuff, I became obsessed with military aviation. I researched and memorized the specs of nearly every combat aircraft in history. In the cornfields behind my childhood home, I’d watch McDonnell Douglas test flights of military jets race through the river valleys and dream of becoming a fighter pilot. That is, up until I found out my vision sucked, disqualifying me from any pilot duty.

  I went back to the library and started reading every book they had about warfare. I could recite the history of World War II—both European and Pacific theaters—almost from memory. The Vietnam War came next. From there I consumed every book, movie, and television show imaginable on the Cold War, and this led me to tales of spies, espionage, the CIA, and the FBI. I loved them all, and I couldn’t wait to leave the suburbs of St. Louis and go serve my country. By high school I’d set my sights on West Point, and I announced to my mom one day in the kitchen, after reading about the Army Rangers, “I’m going to be an Airborne Ranger in the 101st Airborne Division.” A decade later, I reported to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and did just that.

  I loved the Army and the infantry, and I did pretty well. But most of my accomplishments in the infantry came not from being a great “grunt,” but from being a better intelligence officer. In school and at home, I enjoyed learning about Soviet mechanized doctrine, insurgents in El Salvador, and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, I thought I’d soon be leading an infantry company in Afghanistan, but instead I got a call from the FBI. I’d dropped a recruitment card in the mail in August 2001, and after the al-Qaeda attacks, the Bureau started hiring like they’d never hired before. The FBI lowered the bar for entry, and I slipped right over. I left for the Bureau in 2002, became a special agent on a joint terrorism task force in Portland, and . . . I hated it. My first stint in the FBI ended in 2003. I enjoyed counterterrorism, interview, interrogation, and source development, and served with a great squad of investigators who taught me a lot in a short time, but I could not stand the bureaucratic culture and particularly one senior boss. The FBI and I share equal responsibility for my quick departure. I’d transitioned from military life to civilian life too quickly, and the FBI in 2002 and 2003 was a bit of a shambles post-9/11.

  Disappointed over my first trip in the FBI, I set off for California, and, after a couple of months of substitute-teaching middle school pre-algebra, I began graduate school in Monterey. The entire time I sat in my international security and development classes at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, I thought, Man, I wish I had known these things in the Army and the FBI. After completing classes in 2005, I landed back at my alma mater and the relatively new Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (known as the CTC; not to be confused with the real CTC, the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA, which hunts terrorists around the world). The hybrid military-academic center bridged two communities: counterterrorism practitioners and civilian strategic thinkers from across the globe. We got to look at declassified al-Qaeda documents, build the best team in counterterrorism, interface with the entire global counterterrorism community, and even teach cadets—a fantastic setup for any academic. In yet another bizarre twist, a senior executive from the FBI stopped by the CTC at West Point looking for some counterterrorism instruction for his agents. A bit shocked to learn I’d been an agent less than three years earlier, he looked beyond my rapid departure and brought the CTC at West Point to train members of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, and me back to the FBI.

  In 2006, I walked back into the exact same FBI classroom in Seattle where I’d taken my first new-agent entry exam less than five years before. With a team of academics and military experts, I started my second stretch in the FBI supporting a range of counterterrorism and intelligence programs at FBI headquarters and the FBI Academy in several periods culminating at the end of 2012—none of which I’m at liberty to discuss nor will I mention in this book, by the way. (Sorry, this isn’t a super secret FBI Agent tell all book. That’s what we have the Navy SEALS for.)

  Thanks to a great leader and some excellent assignments, FBI round two proved far better, much more of what I thought it would be like the first time around. During this period, when not at the Bureau, I supported a range of military and intelligence projects generally referred to as influence operations, part of what is often touted as the “war of ideas.” The goal in each was to stem the growing tide of young men joining al-Qaeda and, later, the Islamic State. Each year, their recruitment moved more and more to the internet and social media, and I became engulfed in a series of U.S. and international efforts to counter violent extremism, known affectionately by the acronym CVE.

  I’m a high school career counselor’s nightmare. I work like crazy to get the most coveted position, and then I quit and go do something entirely different. My supporters think I’ve had an interesting career, and my enemies think I can’t hold down a job. The only two constants during my professional career have been curiosity and contempt for bureaucracy. When I learn new skills or read something intriguing, I don’t say, Oh, that’s interesting. I think, How I can use this? I read as much as I can, and I find myself drawn to books about personality types, behavioral economics, and machine learning as much as militant Islam and Soviet espionage. If I’m not learning and the daily work gets routine, I quickly get restless. I’m not disrespectful—I do what I’m told, follow the boss’s orders, and hit my marks. But internally, my mind drifts and I start trying to figure out new ways to do something, or dream up elaborate pranks on my colleagues.

  The Department of Defense, the FBI, corporate America—they’re all great, and I can usually survive there for a bit, but ultimately I’ve got to get out and go mess around. If you need someone to gin up an insurgency or counterinsurgency, at home or abroad, on short notice, I’m your guy. But if you need me to run a metrics-driven delivery service for a decade, stick to a nine-to-five schedule of conference calls till retirement, I’m out. I need problems to challenge me, keep me calm and content. When I get onto something, like analyzing social media conversations, it’s not so much that I want to do it; it’s that I can’t not do it. I’m not sure if it’s a personality flaw, a gift, or both. I’m a pain in the ass, but a hardworking one with a mission, and underneath my sarcasm I’m legitimately concerned about terrorism, threats to democracy, and technology tearing up society.

  Just to clarify, before conspiracies emerge: the social media experiments I detail here in this book were performed at my home, in a coffee shop, at the gym, on the train, using a laptop or a cell phone. My conversations with terrorists on Twitter, my battle tracking of al-Qaeda versus ISIS on social media, my mapping of Russian trolls—they’re research-and-development projects for my mind. The U.S. government didn’t tell me to do this; I chose to do it on my own. I’ve learned in the past twenty-plus years in national security that I’m a lot poorer outside the government, but much happier and in many ways more dangerous. On the outside, I get to pick my own team and network with the world’s best, some of whom will make appearances in this book. I’m thankful for having the opportunity to serve my country, and still do, but I now prefer doing it on my own terms, which gives me much greater satisfaction and, I think, has a much more significant impact.

  * * *

  The internet brought people together, but today social media is tearing everyone apart. By sharing information, experiences, and opinions, social media was supposed to support free societies by connecting users who could collaboratively work through their differences—or so we were told. Initially, we laud each of these new platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat. Over time, though, each of these applications ultimately introduces unimagined negative outcomes. Not long after many across the world applauded Facebook for toppling dictators during the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010 and 2011, it proved to be a propaganda platform and oper
ational communications network for the largest terrorist mobilization in world history, bringing tens of thousands of foreign fighters under the Islamic State’s banner in Syria and Iraq.

  As social media platforms hit their stride, gaining sizable market share and audience engagement, bad actors move in to abuse the system for their own ends. Criminals, terrorists, and nation-states sour human interactions in what were initially wonderful virtual sanctuaries.

  Social media becomes anti-social media as the most motivated and best-resourced evildoers learn the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and turn the application to their advantage. Eerily similar to my prank calls at West Point, bad actors use social engineering—psychologically manipulating others to perform actions or divulge confidential information—to force people to unwittingly share their passwords, log-ins, identification numbers, bank records, and personal secrets. Criminals use this personal information to take people’s money, terrorists to strike fear in their adversaries, and nation-states, like Russia, to warp the minds of their opponents. Nowadays, hackers and propagandists don’t simply seek fame or money, but instead to influence an audience—to create a behavior change among those they target—hoping they might perpetrate a terrorist attack, vote for a candidate sympathetic to a foreign power, or maybe even ignite a civil war. The practical jokes I played twenty years ago are child’s play compared with the rapid cycling of schemes attempted on everyday users.

  I’m not surprised the #TrumpTrain overtook the American Republican Party, as it looks eerily similar to how the Islamic State overtook al-Qaeda on social media. My Twitter conversations with Omar revealed not just a new generational undercurrent for global jihad, but a wave of social-media-enabled zealots upending not only terrorist organizations but democracies. The quest to pull back the curtain on conspiracy, real or imagined, has pushed social media users to fall back on their biases, believe the impossible, overlook the obvious, and turn on their friends, family, and fellow citizens. None of this compares with what Vladimir Putin’s propagandists have been able to achieve in such a short time: a system of mind manipulation that authoritarians now duplicate, and, if left unchecked, it will be adopted by politicians everywhere to overwhelm democratic audiences with waves of conflicting information—fake news—designed to manipulate audiences for a hidden puppet master. The Russians initiated the wave, and now they ride the tide as America’s politicians adopt the playbook. Social media manipulation will only get worse as artificial intelligence maps users’ thoughts and arms propagandists with unprecedented speed and the power to endlessly amplify their message.