When he completed two years in office, Trump authorized the CIA to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media with the aim of turning public opinion in China once morest Xi Jinping’s government, according to sources interviewed by Reuters.
According to the account of three former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), heard by the British agency, the CIA created a small team of agents who used false identities on the Internet to spread negative narratives regarding the Chinese government, while leaking information derogatory to foreign media.
Media reports say the team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding illicit money abroad and called the New Silk Road, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, “corrupt and wasteful.”
The efforts inside China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to spend resources pursuing intrusions into Beijing’s controlled Internet, two former officials said.
“We wanted them to chase ghosts,” said one of those former employees. Reuters says it was unable to determine the impact of the covert operations or whether President Joe Biden’s administration maintained the CIA program.
However, it cites that two intelligence historians, in an interview with the agency, said that when the White House grants the CIA authority for covert actions, through an order known as a presidential conclusion, it often remains in force across all administrations.
In 2018, a year before the clandestine campaign once morest Beijing was authorized, Trump gave the CIA greater powers to launch offensive cyber operations once morest US adversaries.
However, the sources described the 2019 authorization as a more ambitious operation, as it allowed the CIA to act not only in China, but also in countries around the world where Washington and Beijing compete for influence.
Four former officials said the operation targeted public opinion in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific.
Covert propaganda campaigns were common during the Cold War, when the CIA planted 80 to 90 articles a day in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, recalled Loch Johnson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who studies the use of such tactics.
In the 1950s, for example, the CIA created an astrological magazine in East Germany to publish ominous predictions regarding communist leaders, according to declassified records.
According to the sources, the US operation once morest China came in response to years of secret Chinese efforts aimed at increasing its global influence.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, cited by Reuters, said news of the CIA initiative shows that the US government uses “public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate the international public opinion”.
