Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  America’s messenger problem gets even more complicated when we’re fighting Russian disinformation. Cold War U.S. information operations countering the Soviet Union employed American culture and art. Rock music blared from Voice of America, and Western news and television shows were piped past the Iron Curtain wherever possible. The messengers for America were its musicians, artists, and icons as much as its diplomats. The United States didn’t talk about American values; it showed them by being American. In social media, Russia has nimbly made the messenger for its modern active measures appear American—false personas that talk like and look like Americans and help recruit unwitting Americans to the Kremlin’s message. These false messengers attack, dispute, and degrade elected American officials who are the messengers for democracy against authoritarians. They’ve helped disable the credible voices America needs to preserve its system.

  Since the presidential election of 2016, a murky cyber group known as the Shadow Brokers has released stolen NSA hacking tools into the wild. Release of these cyber weapons occurred in parallel with the release of materials pilfered from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. Their tools appear on WikiLeaks in batches, under the names Vault7 and Vault8. In combination, these hacking tools have empowered criminals, hackers, and even nation-states worldwide to shut down hospitals and steal millions from the accounts of countries and corporations. The open release of these hacking tools—by suspected Russian intelligence operators or a Russian organized crime syndicate—has further hurt the capability of the NSA, but that’s nothing compared with the reputational damage to America. The Shadow Brokers pair their releases of cyber weapons dating back to August 2016 with social media taunts and public shaming on Twitter. Their tweets poke at the United States: “Is NSA chasing shadowses?” They also play to President Trump: “Don’t Forget Your Base,” “TheShadowBrokers is wanting to see you succeed. . . . TheShadowBrokers is wanting America to be great again.” Again, the United States suffers from catastrophic hacking that fuels a devastating influence campaign, harms the U.S. image, and damages the confidence of U.S. allies.

  The Shadow Brokers and Russia’s embassy in London have rightly pursued a human quality in their social media influence that American counternarrative campaigns just don’t seem to get or fear employing. Major Chirchir, the Kenya Defense Forces officer who notoriously refuted al-Shabaab on Twitter, wasn’t perfect in challenging terrorists, but he was far more effective, because he embodied the spirit and soul of a real human. Chirchir’s account isn’t a stuffy public affairs social media account posting scripted responses to current incidents or stale slogans with no meat.

  Whether it’s al-Shabaab, Major Chirchir, or fake Russian accounts meant to look like Americans, successful social media influence messengers must be human to be social, nimble to be effective, timely to be relevant, and adaptable to be successful. This is the appeal of President Donald Trump, whose personal Twitter posts, whether one likes them or hates them, effectively engage, enrage, and mobilize audiences. Sadly, no other American government leader or representative is given the autonomy to engage without scrutiny and joust without doubt the way the president does from his private platform. America’s official social media messengers are neutered from the outset.

  Beyond challenges with the message and the messenger, U.S. counterpropaganda struggles to seamlessly integrate all media in the way its adversaries do. The Islamic State, at its height, employed an entire media battalion that created, hosted, and distributed social media content at an unending pace. Twitter, Facebook, Telegram—the platform didn’t matter; the Islamic State surfaced if an opportunity arose. Russia explores and exploits the entire range of social media to perfectly blend its influence efforts into a dominating information package. Its social media operatives use sites like LinkedIn and Facebook for reconnaissance of target audiences, gaining their preferences and relationships. Russian state-sponsored news outlets, particularly RT, have successfully hosted and shared YouTube content that reaches audiences they could never engage with traditional television. With each click and share of their propaganda, they gain cookies, internet traffic data, and even distribution-list sign-ups for further targeting of specific audiences. Forgeries maligning Americans and their interests can be placed in an anonymous site like 4chan or Reddit and then shared across the entire information spectrum. Twitter—for Russia or any other influence effort—provides the single best way to propagate a message around the world. Finally, the Kremlin saturates American audiences with freedom-loving American personas on Facebook, Instagram, or even Pinterest, inundating, on a person-to-person level, key accounts, mobilizing mavens among like-minded audiences. Russian propagandists get to operate all social media seamlessly, without scrutiny, legal rulings, or bureaucratic boundaries.

  U.S. counterpropaganda efforts, depending on the agency, often treat these media as independent battle spaces. One organization may run a radio broadcast, another television, a third group social media perhaps. Bureaucratic program managers argue over their digital turf, and even try to develop resource allocations around social media platforms. During one early conversation at the time social media was emerging, after the Iranian Green Movement’s protests, a veteran information operations expert asked me, “How do I buy MySpace? How do I buy Twitter?” He didn’t mean that he wanted to buy the entire social media platform; he was simply trying to figure how to access these media. I was a bit confused. “There’s nothing to buy,” I said. “You just need to log in; it’s free.” This guy was one of the military’s best, by the way. He wasn’t trying to do anything wrong; he’d just grown up in a different era, under different authorities using wildly different methods.

  Even if America did figure out the message, messenger, and medium it wanted to use to counter the Islamic State, Russia, or whatever comes next on social media, the method by which it conducts its influence business would fell even a perfectly designed effort. In the past decade, the government has not been able to figure out who will make the sausage and how it will be made.

  * * *

  After I landed at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, a short cab ride delivered me to a nondescript office building draped along the Potomac River. “We heard from some people you worked with at the Combating Terrorism Center that you were good at organizing counterterrorism research projects,” said a typical defense contractor bureaucrat, between self-aggrandizing anecdotal stories of his military bravery and cunning brilliance as a former military officer. Apparently, this retired military officer, who’ll be known hereafter as R.M.O., had been the mastermind behind all of America’s psychological and information operations since the end of Vietnam. Yet, through the injustice of the military personnel system, he was now perched here in Reston/Rosslyn/Crystal City/Pentagon City/Bethesda (just pick your favorite one; they’re all the same; the only difference is the commuting time). But it was all for the best, because he “got fed up with all the bullshit bureaucracy” and now he was “out here in the private sector,” where he could “make more money and have freedom to do all the things in government” that he “wanted to do but never could do.”

  As is typical with defense contractors, his company had won a job about ten months earlier to “leverage open-source information to understand the strategic thinking of violent extremist organizations,” or some other contemporary Pentagon jargon for terrorism.

  I heard the R.M.O. introduction often. I knew it, would listen, and then wait for my turn to speak: “Yes, I helped run some research teams at West Point, and while they were never of the scale you created while deployed, I think I can definitely help you out.” There it is, social engineering hook number 1: play to his ego. I can do this project, sir, but not nearly to the level of your mastery . . .

  R.M.O. replied, “Well, it sounds like you might be able to help us. I designed this project, but you know how it is—I don’t really have the time I’d like to devote to this effort. I’ve got so many other responsibilities keeping this
company afloat, with business development, proposal writing, security clearances . . .”

  I introduced my next play. “Look, you don’t have to explain it to me; I totally understand. These companies never have enough former military talent to go around, and that’s where I think I can help augment the great start you’ve already gotten on this project. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you need?”

  This was where I would reel him in. Next he was going to push blame for all the project’s problems onto a young analyst who he “thought could run the show” despite having no previous management experience or really any work experience at all, likely just serving in the company for only a year or so. Then he’d tell me how the project started off well, until the young analyst put in charge of it wanted “guidance.” Turns out the analyst wasn’t sure what was expected and had actually studied European politics rather than Middle East history, and spoke French or Spanish rather than the needed Arabic.

  R.M.O. would continue explaining how the analyst had steadily developed a “bad attitude” over about a six-month period as the project wore on. The analyst didn’t keep track of the budget, failed to turn in required updates, and then interviewed with a competitor contracting company and took a job with them, “on almost no notice,” for “more money, doing the same kind of work.”

  What this R.M.O. wasn’t going to tell me was that he could have hired me or someone similar to me to run this project ten months earlier. He may have even included my résumé in the proposal for the project, to help win the contract. But after winning, they decided to go with the cheaper, in-house “younger analyst.”

  R.M.O. began the pitch. “What we need is for you to review this project and see what can be salvaged, and make sure that we deliver to the client what we promised. I’d do this myself, but, with it being proposal season, I’ve got to be fully engaged in securing next year’s work so everyone here has a job.” That’s right, R.M.O. was a martyr, too, desperately applying his brilliance to paper, creating magic formulas to defeat al-Qaeda, writing project proposals for government contracts that would bring millions of dollars to the company and save these poor analysts in need of work.

  “This sounds like a great opportunity, a real challenge,” I said encouragingly, and within minutes R.M.O. would be guiding me back to the “analyst pen,” where a group of supersmart recent college grads were now being held hostage by their laptops, playing a passive-aggressive game of office Survivor, sitting amid dismal beige walls, stationed in cubicles like prisoners.

  These bright young analysts had come to D.C. to save the world. They wanted to serve their country and their egos, ultimately becoming a congressman, a noteworthy academic scholar, national security adviser to the president, or the next brilliant analyst at the CIA. But instead they were stuck in the purgatory of defense contracting, lacking recognition for their hard work, insecure about their own talents, and isolated despite being surrounded by a sea of peers.

  What the young analysts did love was their pay, and also telling their friends how they couldn’t talk about their work “because it’s sensitive.” The work wasn’t as sensitive as their egos, though. Their daily grind consisted largely of advanced Googling, followed by paraphrasing of things written by others. Inside their cubicle farms, the isolation from their managers and their peers drove them insane. To get onto the project they wanted or be promoted before their peers, they would engage in the usual office backstabbing. They’d sabotage the smartest challenger in the office, generally sullying their own image in the process. The analyst pen brought out the worst in them and those sitting to their left and right.

  I began listening to each of them as I made my way around the analyst pen. They described what they were working on, what they were trying to do. Each of them was smart and capable, but dying for direction. I offered some quick thoughts as I circled the pen with R.M.O. leering over my shoulder. He passed judgment on the analysts and imparted his knowledge and authority. Given only a little encouragement and a few comments, they seemed as if they’d been lifted up. Has anyone ever talked to these people? I thought to myself. In minutes, I’d become some sort of horse whisperer for intelligence analysts while doing absolutely nothing thus far.

  As I navigated through the analyst pen, I realized that this project was due in a matter of days and the company didn’t really have much of a plan. I also realized that I’d seen this project before. It was glaringly familiar. I pitched back to R.M.O., summarizing a way forward for the effort, and he gave me the nod.

  “Clint, that sounds great—I’m glad you’ll be able to help us, and if there is anything you need to get started, just let me know.” R.M.O. was closing the deal. Nice. What I wanted . . .

  Next I’d get the contract and start heading to the airport, and what R.M.O. didn’t know was that I already knew how to do this project because I’d helped invent this project. A year before, I had worked for his predecessor, the other R.M.O. before him, who had requested me on short notice to write the technical portion of a government proposal that ultimately became this project. That’s right, he didn’t even know or remember—it’s all a shell game, folks, a shell game of horseshit smuggling, and now I was returning to Reagan Airport to finish this project from a laptop computer perched at a coffee shop in your neighborhood.

  In a month, an Adobe file and supporting PowerPoint slides would be emailed through a series of nondescript office buildings around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. One contracting company would pass it to the next, until finally an officer eating lunch in the Pentagon got it in his Microsoft Outlook inbox. The project wouldn’t be groundbreaking, nor would it be awful; it would simply be sufficient for securing the defense contracting company’s next contract, and then immediately forgotten by everyone who received it. The electronic files would blend in with the thousands of other counterterrorism projects circulating through the U.S. government. These projects are indistinguishable from the analysis of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that you, the public, can discover on the internet, because more often than not they will be a summary of the internet. The project would go to the analysis graveyard, buried amid the hard drives of America’s military/intelligence/homeland security bureaucracy.

  * * *

  In real life, this story didn’t happen exactly this way. Have you ever watched Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon, where seemingly everything awful in the history of the military happens to Charlie Sheen during his year in Vietnam? That’s what I’ve done here: combined all of the worst aspects of my defense contracting time into a few pages. It’s an amalgamation of dozens of encounters I’ve had with dozens of defense contractors over a dozen years supporting the military/intelligence/homeland security industrial complex. Each of these things happened, but in different places, with different R.M.O.s running pens of different disgruntled intelligence analysts. Some of these contracting companies are quite good—better than the government entities they support—but many are downright awful. And don’t get me wrong: there are many great retired military officers doing exceptional work for their country. But this is a certain kind of character I frequently run into.

  What I describe above is the worst-case scenario of a bad industry—specifically, the contracting of counterterrorism analysis to that part of the private sector known largely as “intelligence support to information operations.” It’s what happens when the characters from the movie Office Space get placed in the TV show 24. It doesn’t work. I don’t know anything about other forms of defense contracting: weapons, maintenance, etc. The story above describes the circuitous spin of Microsoft PowerPoint slides and Word documents, funded by the American taxpayer, slowly coming together to inhibit rather than accelerate America’s counternarratives programs. The bulk of U.S. influence funding, distributed through roughly a dozen different agencies and military commands, ultimately routes to a set of defense contracting companies largely staffed by people who once worked in the same dozen or so agencies and military c
ommands that provide the funding.

  I learned one thing from my time working in the big defense contract system supporting psychological operations, information operations, and public affairs operations—a group I collectively and affectionately refer to as the Men Who Stare at Goats, after the 2004 movie, starring George Clooney, that showcased military psychological operations. Despite all the conceptual complications America faces in fighting an information war, the largest impediment may be structural—who is in charge of the messaging and who will do the work.

  During the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) served as America’s principal arm devoted to public diplomacy with the express mission, “to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions, and their counterparts abroad.”3 After the Soviet Union collapsed, the victorious United States didn’t have any foreign audiences that needed to be informed or influenced, or so they thought. Democracy and the West had won, and the USIA disbanded in 1999, placing its broadcasting functions into a new outfit called the Broadcasting Board of Governors and its non-broadcasting components into the new office of the under secretary of state for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

  As the USIA disbanded, al-Qaeda’s global message gained steam. Just two years later a global Muslim minority called al-Qaeda waged war on the U.S. homeland. Major military offenses were launched in Afghanistan and Iraq and the big budgets went to the Department of Defense. Within the military, influence operations were divided into different strata, partitioned confusingly between public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations (PSYOP). When military units are deployed, they traditionally employed their PSYOP troops for handing out pamphlets, dropping fliers, and radio broadcasts. Information operations planners at the brigade levels and above supported military operations through information campaigns—deliberate strategies to raise awareness of issues and change the mindsets of specified populations—while public affairs officers representing generals and high-level DoD officials conducted press briefings. Their efforts at the start of the war on terror weren’t bad, but they were small, limited in effect, oftentimes overlapping, and in the worst cases contradictory.