In uncovering the secret US military operation, more than two dozen current and former US officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers were interviewed.
Journalists also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the US military. Some were active for more than five years.
Clandestine psychological operations are among the government’s most highly sensitive programmes. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of people within US intelligence and military agencies. Such programmes are treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.
Over the past decade, some US national security officials have pushed for a return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against rivals that the United States’ wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016 US presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.
In 2019, Trump authorised the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, it was reported in March. As part of that effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping’s government.
Covid-19 galvanised the drive to wage psychological operations against China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a “bolt of energy” that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China’s influence war.
The Pentagon’s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China’s own efforts to spread false information about the origins of Covid. The virus first emerged in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that the virus may have originated in a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There’s no evidence for that assertion.
Mirroring Beijing’s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a US Justice Department complaint. China’s messaging got Washington’s attention. Trump subsequently coined the term “China virus” as a response to Beijing’s accusation that the US military exported Covid to Wuhan.
“That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, ‘I have to call it where it came from,’” Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. “It did come from China.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed “actions to politicise the origins question and stigmatise China.” The ministry had no comment about the Justice Department’s complaint.
Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious Covid assistance programme that included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries.
In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until US-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.
Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favoured inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.
The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”
To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.
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The US relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allows the US military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.
Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.
“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms; we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”
Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”
China’s growing influence fuelled efforts by US military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia said. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”
As part of its secret anti-vax propaganda campaign, the US military used phony accounts meant to resemble real people. US military leaders feared that China’s Covid diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.
A senior US military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three former Pentagon officials.
The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of Covid while promoting scepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.
A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.
At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instil fear or anger through a psychological operation or psyop, they argued during Zoom calls with the Pentagon.
“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.
While the Pentagon saw Washington’s rapidly diminishing influence in the Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats to plead for caution. The secret US military campaign extended beyond the Philippines and sought to heighten fears about vaccines made by Russia and China.
This is what the #United_States is offering to help countries, including Arab countries, obtain #Coronavirus (#Covid_19) vaccines and mitigate the secondary effects of the pandemic. Compare this with #Russia and #China using the pandemic excuse to expand their influence and profit even though the Russian vaccine is ineffective and the Chinese vaccine contains pork gelatine
“The relationship is hanging from a thread,” another former senior US diplomat recounted. “Is this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it worth the risk?”
In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal to the programme. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing’s messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.
But in 2019, before Covid surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defence Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the US military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”
Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.
In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing’s COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, US military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory.
Psychological warfare has played a role in US military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.
- A Reuters report