EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — Just two months before the November 5 U.S. election, Russian disinformation operations appear to be in full swing. Having warned all year that such operations would take aim at the American electorate, the U.S. has issued indictments against employees of the Russian state media network RT, charging them with covertly funding and directing a U.S. company to produce content to influence American voters.
The 32-page indictment said the employees used shell companies to pay $10 million to a Tennessee entity to create online videos that would amplify political divisions in the U.S. According to the charges, the company, Tenet, used influential conservative social media figures to push extreme – and often false – narratives about election fraud, the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
The U.S. Treasury and State departments have announced separate actions targeting RT itself, including the network's top editor, Margarita Simonyan, who ranks among the Kremlin’s leading propagandists.
The Russians have done this before – in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns – but by many accounts they are getting more sophisticated about it. And they are not alone.
"We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia and Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor, (to) interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke about the indictments and the wider ramifications of Russia's disinformation efforts with Nick Fishwick, a Cipher Brief expert and former senior member of the British Foreign Office. Fishwick has had extensive experience with Russian covert operations and Russian disinformation campaigns – which he says have become a threat to the American “way of life” and “a threat to their greatest values.”
That threat, Fishwick said, endangers the “ability to have free elections, elections that (Americans) can rely on, media that they can rely on, and therefore a shared culture, which is what Western democracy should have.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: You've been dealing with this in the UK for decades. What is it that you think Americans need to know about how active these measures really are?
Fishwick: I think they need to know that it's a threat to their way of life. It's a threat to their society. It's a threat to their deepest values. I think one of the deepest values that we share in common with the United States and our European partners and other countries as well, is a belief in democracy and a knowledge that democracy is fair and it works, and the Russians are trying to undermine that. I've looked at this for many years. We know that going right back to the early days of the Soviet Union, the 1920s and before, the Russians were actively using propaganda attempts to influence public opinion to undermine our democracy. But I think now it's more serious than it's been at any stage, at least since the 1950s, because I think the Putin regime is under more threat than it's been before. Therefore, the Russians see it as more of an existential battle, (looking for) any way that they can hurt us. They think that's an automatic gain for them. And because Putin is under so much pressure now, he's fighting harder and he's fighting dirtier.
And so I think people need to remember that this will affect their way of life. It will affect their ability to have free elections, elections that they can rely on, media that they can rely on, and therefore a shared culture, which is what Western democracy should have.
The Cipher Brief: There are allegations in this latest indictment that Russia is bringing in people unwittingly, who might not even know that Russia is funding these operations. How are they so successful at this, time after time?
Fishwick: Well, I would think that using people unwittingly increases your scope of influence. The number of people who are going to do this willingly is, thank God, quite low. Therefore, what you're going to do is to try and broaden that network by using people who don’t know what's happening, who think they're getting some moral or financial support from media organizations that they're running, or somebody who happens to believe in the same thing as them, without asking questions about where the person that's offering this wonderful help is coming from. So using people who are not aware that it's under Russian government control enhances the scope for the Russians to use more people to influence our views.
The Cipher Brief: And it's difficult as the consumer of information, to know what questions to ask about where you are getting your sources of information. How do you think about it from the information consumer perspective? What do you think about, when you're trying to critically assess your sources of information?
Fishwick: Number one, I would ask critical questions about the media that I'm relying on. So if I'm looking online at most newspapers, British and American and European newspapers, I know what I'm dealing with and I know there's a basic respect for truth. It does vary a bit from newspaper to newspaper, but I know that’s the case with the BBC and other leading western media organizations.
Some are less clear than that. If I was relying on them, I'd just do a bit of research into who they are, who controls them, where they're based. I'd also just use my own antenna.
What British school children are taught to do now is to try and be critical when they read things. As in, why are they being told this? Why are these particular words being used? So even schoolchildren are being taught to develop their critical faculties, to ask questions about whether what's in front of them is reliable or not. Does something strike you as being strange? Is it likely to be in somebody's interest that their story is being told there? You can doctor photographs in incredibly sophisticated ways these days – so if a photograph seems a bit weird, I would ask a question about whether that photograph is genuine or not.
The Cipher Brief: One of the other measures that Russians have been known to use is not necessarily creating chaos or division, but simply exploiting chaos or division that already exists. What lessons do you have from how you've seen that play out here in the UK?
Fishwick: Number one, they will target people who are saying things which they think are not necessarily in their interest, but which are against our interest. And they will try and manipulate things that they're saying to cause disruption. They will use quite a substantial amount of money to do that if they think it's going to have a real impact. And they will try and hide the source of that money. It won't come in a big swag bag with SVR (Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service) written all over it. It'll be harder to spot than that. So there are lots of different things that they can do. And also, of course, the media that they use is way more diverse than it was when I was a young person working for the British government. So they will use lots of different media as receptacles for money, for influence, for people who they insert or they unwittingly use to advance the messages that they want to get over.
The Cipher Brief: I don't know if this is an easy answer or not – I'm guessing not – but how do you stop this as a government?
Fishwick: We started this conversation by you asking me about whether people are taking it seriously enough. I think they're not, and I think government has a responsibility – Western European governments and governments like the U.S. and other allies – to make it clear what is at stake here. It's not a bit of niche influence or intelligence work by the Russians. It's going to the heart of our lives.
And I'd give you an example of what's worrying here, about politics in Britain and Europe. What people worry about is extreme right-wing politics. They worry about extreme left-wing politics as well, but we had riots in this country that seemed to be about nationalists who wanted to get their point of view across – in a few cases violently – and the Russians will be desperate to exploit that. And some of these extreme right political groups are getting support of different sorts from the Russians.
Now, I'm not saying those groups are invalid and illegitimate; they will have proper support by people who believe in whatever it is that those people are propagating. But there'll be lots of ways in which the Russians are trying to manipulate that.
And from my perspective and from many other people's perspectives, that is eroding the consensus and the center ground in Western politics. And that's eroding our ability to function as a democracy moving forward together. So people should be aware that extremist organizations in the UK, in Europe, in other parts of the world, probably in the U.S. as well, are being manipulated by the Russians and they're being manipulated as never before, using sources that have not been used before, using amounts of money that's not been available before. And by using media, that's much harder for Westerners to be aware of. So we need awareness, we need politicians to give a lead on this, to make speeches about it, to encourage the media to look into these things. Our consciousness needs to be raised.
The Cipher Brief: In the US, there was a congressionally appointed bipartisan group of national security experts and leaders who just filed a report saying that Americans in general really have no idea about the seriousness of the threats facing them today. Do you have a similar issue in the UK – and if so, what's the answer to that?
Fishwick: Yes, we do. We're a very cynical people, the British. So when people start talking about Russian influence, I think a lot of British people are suspicious, and young people particularly are disinclined to believe it. There's no dramatic answer to this, but I think the only answer that's going to work is it becoming an issue of policy, an issue of security – politicians talking about it, and there need to be debates about it in the House of Commons. There need to be articles about it in mainstream British media and other respectable media. We just need consciousness-raising, in lots of ways like that. Other people can think of smarter ways, smarter ideas than I've got. But we're going to keep facing extremist politics, undermining our ways of life. And that's playing absolutely into Putin's playbook.
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