Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post, sfgate.com
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Excerpt:
The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an all-out information battle during the Cold War. But the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Bill Clinton administration and Congress in 1999 shuttered America's preeminent global information agency [JB -see].
"They thought it was all over and that we'd won the propaganda war," said Joseph D. Duffey, the last director of the U.S. Information Agency [JB -- see] , which was charged with influencing foreign populations.
When President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia began searching for ways to make up for its diminished military. Officials seized on influence campaigns and cyberwarfare as equalizers. Both were cheap, easy to deploy and hard for an open and networked society such as the United States to defend against.
Early warning signs of the growing Russian disinformation threat included the 2005 launch of RT, the Kremlin-funded TV network, and the 2007 cyberattacks that overwhelmed Estonia's banks, government ministries and newspapers. A year later, the Kremlin launched a digital blitz that temporarily shut down Georgia's broadcasters and defaced the website of its president.
Closer to home for Americans, Russian government trolls in 2012 went after a U.S. ambassador for the first time on social media, inundating his Twitter account with threats.
But for U.S. officials, the real wake-up call came in early 2014 when the Russians annexed Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. An intercepted Russian military intelligence report dated February 2014 documented how Moscow created fake personas to spread disinformation on social media to buttress its broader military campaign. ...
The Ukraine operation offered the Americans their first glimpse of the power of Russia's post-Cold War playbook.
In March 2014, Obama paid a visit to NATO headquarters, where he listened as unnerved allies warned him of the growing Russia threat. Aides wanted to give the president options to push back.
In the White House Situation Room a few weeks later, they pitched him on creating several global channels - in Russian, Mandarin and other languages - that would compete with RT. The proposed American versions would mix entertainment with news programing and pro-Western propaganda.
The president brushed aside the idea as politically impractical.
In the Situation Room that day was Richard Stengel, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, who, like Obama, disliked the idea. "There were all these guys in government who had never created one minute of TV content talking about creating a whole network," said Stengel, the former top editor at Time magazine. "I remember early on telling a friend of mine in TV that people don't like government content. And he said, 'No, they don't like bad content, and government content sucks.' "
So Stengel began to look for alternatives to counter the threat. Across Eastern Europe and Ukraine, Russian-language channels mixing entertainment, news and propaganda were spreading the Kremlin's message. Stengel wanted to help pro-Western stations on Russia's periphery steal back audiences from the Russian stations by giving them popular American television shows and movies.
Shortly after Obama nixed the idea of American-funded networks, Stengel traveled to Los Angeles in the hope that a patriotic appeal to Hollywood executives might persuade them to give him some blockbusters free.
Stengel's best bet was Michael M. Lynton, then the chairman of Sony Pictures, who had grown up in the Netherlands and immediately understood what Stengel was trying to do. He recalled how in the 1970s one Dutch political party sponsored episodes of "M.A.S.H." to portray America as sympathetic to the antiwar movement. A rival party bought the rights to "All in the Family" to send the message that U.S. cities were filled with bigots like Archie Bunker.
But Sony's agreements with broadcasters in the region prevented Lynton from giving away programming. Other studios also turned Stengel away.
Back in Washington, Stengel got Voice of America to launch a round-the-clock Russian-language news broadcast and found a few million dollars to translate PBS documentaries on the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War into Russian for broadcast in eastern Ukraine. He had wanted programing such as "Game of Thrones" but would instead have to settle for the likes of Ken Burns.
"We brought a tiny, little Swiss Army knife to a gunfight," he said. ...
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