Overt Propaganda and Covert “Fake News” Playbooks
Democratic governments have long run dual-track propaganda operations – overt strategic communications and covert psychological warfare – to shape narratives at home and abroad. Institutions like the BBC World Service (UK) and Voice of America (US) were traditional overt outlets, broadcasting state-sponsored viewpoints globally as instruments of “public diplomacy”. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies and military psyops units engaged in deniable “black” operations: planting false stories, running sockpuppet personas online, and orchestrating astroturf campaigns to manipulate public opinion. These tactics, refined over decades, show systemic continuity from the 1990s to today’s AI-driven info wars.
To trace this evolution, we begin in the Gulf War era, when orchestrated propaganda like the infamous “Kuwaiti incubator baby” hoax helped justify war, and follow through the Iraq War and War on Terror, where military and intelligence services blurred lines between truth and deception. We then examine the social media battleground of the 2010s, including data-driven psy-ops (e.g. Cambridge Analytica) and secret units like GCHQ’s JTRIG, culminating in today’s AI-enabled cognitive warfare doctrines. Along the way, we identify key agencies, military units, private contractors, techniques, budgets, and narratives – highlighting how Western governments’ “fake news” playbooks have adapted with technology yet persisted across administrations.
1990s: Gulf War PR Stunts and Early Disinformation Campaigns
The Gulf War (1990–91) set the template for modern strategic deception. In October 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti known as “Nayirah” gave tearful testimony to the U.S. Congress claiming Iraqi troops had ripped babies from incubators in Kuwait – a shocking atrocity story that was entirely fabricated.
It was later revealed Nayirah was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, coached by PR giant Hill & Knowlton under a $10–12 million contract from Kuwait’s government-in-exil. The firm’s focus groups had found that atrocity propaganda — especially the image of infants left to die — would be the most effective way to sway U.S. public opinion to support war. President George H.W. Bush repeated the incubator tale numerous times as rationale for intervention (en.wikipedia.org).
As Harper’s publisher John MacArthur, who exposed the ruse, explained: “Hill & Knowlton selected her as a persuasive witness… it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein into Adolf Hitler. They felt they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this.” (democracynow.org). The Gulf War featured tightly controlled media, military press pools, and PSYOP teams shaping coverage – foreshadowing the fusion of PR with military info-war.
Question: which other US President was peddling a fake story about 40 beheaded babies as recently as 2024? (en.wikipedia.org)
Meanwhile, overt channels like VOA and BBC World Service played their soft-power role. The BBC World Service (funded by the UK Foreign Office) and Voice of America (under the U.S. Information Agency) broadcast pro-Western news globally, legitimizing coalition actions. But covert manipulation lurked behind mainstream media as well. In 1999, during NATO’s Kosovo campaign, CNN and NPR hosted interns from the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group inside their newsrooms. Though the networks claimed the soldiers only did “menial tasks,” critics noted the ethical peril of military propaganda staff embedded in media during wartime. This blurred media-military line showed how information warriors tried to influence news at source – a practice that sparked outrage once revealed and was quickly halted (theguardian.com).
By the late 1990s, Western intelligence agencies were running covert influence campaigns to set the stage for future conflicts. Notably, Britain’s MI6 orchestrated “Operation Mass Appeal” – a secret propaganda drive to seed news stories about Iraq’s supposed WMD programs. Starting in 1997, MI6 agents selectively passed dubious intelligence about Saddam’s chemical and nuclear weapons to media outlets worldwide, aiming to “gain public support for sanctions or military action in Iraq.” A senior UK official later admitted MI6 was “at the heart” of this campaign (though he euphemistically claimed the goal was only to publicize facts the “public needed to know” about Saddam’s arsenal).
Former UN inspector Scott Ritter, whom MI6 tried to recruit, said the goal was clearly to “convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was” by feeding journalists exaggerated reports from “western intelligence” sources. Many of those planted stories – e.g. lurid claims of underground WMD labs – turned out to be “garbage” falsehoods. This black propaganda effort to hype the Iraqi threat in the late ‘90s shows early use of fake news by Five Eyes intelligence to shape a pro-war narrative – a direct precursor to the flawed WMD dossier controversy in 2002/03 (archive.globalpolicy.org).
Key Players & Techniques (1990s): The Gulf War demonstrated the power of outsourced propaganda specialists (Hill & Knowlton, Rendon Group) working with government clients to create viral lies. Intelligence services refined “public diplomacy” vs. “black ops” duality – funding reputable broadcasts on one hand, while secretly feeding disinformationto news outlets on the other. In this era, influence operations still relied on traditional media (TV, print) and human dramatization (staged testimony), but the template of deceptive strategic communications had been set.
2000s: War on Terror – Information Operations Go Covert and Contracted
After 9/11, the U.S. and UK dramatically expanded their psychological operations (PSYOPS) and propaganda budgets under the banner of the “War on Terror.” New agencies and military units were created to wage an “Information War” against Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi regime, and other targets – often blurring truth and fiction. In late 2001 the Pentagon stood up the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), a specialized department to coordinate global psyops in support of the War on Terror. OSI’s mandate included influencing foreign media and audiences with messaging – even planting “black propaganda”(misleading information) abroad, which could then “be picked up by American newspapers” and influence the U.S. public as well.
After press leaks in 2002 that OSI might spread false stories, an embarrassed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced OSI’s closure – but then pointedly remarked that he only killed the name, not the mission. “I’ll give you the corpse... You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done,” Rumsfeld said. True to that vow, the Pentagon’s influence operations continued unabated under other guises. (Indeed, by 2005 it emerged the U.S. military was secretly paying Iraqi journalists to run pro-American stories, vindicating Rumsfeld’s wink that OSI’s work never really stopped (en.wikipedia.org).
During the U.S.-led Iraq War (2003–2011), psychological warfare went into overdrive. Both Washington and London disseminated questionable intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion (e.g. Tony Blair’s notorious “dodgy dossier” on Iraqi WMD). Once the war began, the Pentagon and UK Ministry of Defence enlisted private PR contractors to manage and manipulate the news. The Rendon Group – a PR firm that had helped create the Iraqi National Congress – was hired to handle media for the Iraq interim authority. Another contractor, the Lincoln Group, received multi-million Pentagon contracts to secretly plant U.S.-authored articles in Iraqi newspapers praising coalition achievements.
These stories, written by American military “information operations” teams, were translated into Arabic and passed off as independent journalism – a covert propaganda effort masking U.S. government authorship. Dozens of such articles – e.g. “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism” – ran in Iraqi media, often with paid placement. Internal Pentagon critics warned this violated core principles of a free press and blurred the line between factual Public Affairs and deceptive PsyOps. An unnamed senior Pentagon official lamented: “We’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing this” (latimes.com).
Yet the Information Operations Task Force in Baghdad defended the program as vital to counter insurgent propaganda. This militarization of the marketplace of ideas prompted investigations, and the Pentagon inspector general eventually (in 2006) ordered a stop to covertly paying for Iraqi news coverage (en.wikipedia.org).
The UK government ran parallel efforts. In Basra and southern Iraq, British military “Media Ops” teams worked to shape local sentiment (for example, setting up local radio stations and placing friendly content). Britain’s covert propaganda from the late ’90s (Mass Appeal) had helped lay the groundwork for public support of the war (archive.globalpolicy.org). During the conflict, London relied on both internal resources (psychological operations units of the British Army) and contractors. One extraordinary example was the Pentagon’s hiring of Bell Pottinger, a British PR firm known for shady clients, to execute a top-secret propaganda campaign in Iraq.
Between 2004 and 2008, Bell Pottinger was paid over $500 million by the US Department of Defense to produce television segments and Fake Extremist Videos. Working alongside U.S. military psyop officers at Camp Victory, Baghdad, Bell Pottinger’s team made spoof Al-Qaeda propaganda films and even scripted news segments in Arabic that were released to Middle Eastern media without attribution. One Bell Pottinger “black ops” project involved crafting fake Al-Qaeda recruitment videos – using actual insurgent footage – and distributing them on CDs for U.S. Marines to scatter during raids.
These CDs had a hidden code that pinged a Google Analytics account when played on a computer, allowing U.S. intel to track the location of viewers by IP address. If a disc “phoned home” from, say, Iran or Syria, it tipped off analysts to a potential extremist connection. Bell Pottinger’s covert content had to be approved by top U.S. commanders – Gen. David Petraeus and even the White House signed off on some products – underscoring the high-level coordination between private contractors and government in modern propaganda. (When this secret operation eventually leaked in 2016, it caused a scandal about the Pentagon outsourcing disinformation (thebureauinvestigates.com).
A note of caution: if you think the Pentagon does this only to “them,” you will be disappointed.
Building the Propaganda Machine: By the late 2000s, specialized military units and funds for influence warfare had grown exponentially. The U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (based at Ft. Bragg) and equivalent units in each command were active on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan – not only targeting local populations but sometimes U.S. audiences (despite legal prohibitions). In 2008 it emerged that the Pentagon had been feeding talking points to retired U.S. generals who appeared as “military analysts” on TV news – effectively paying U.S. pundits for favorable coverage, a practice the GAO condemned as “covert propaganda” (latimes.com).
Both the CIA and military also employed “perception management” tactics at home. A notable UK parallel was the revelation that MI6’s propaganda unit (possibly Joint Intelligence Committee’s “Rockingham cell”) had ties with certain journalists and even weapons expert Dr. David Kelly to push the Iraq WMD narrative (archive.globalpolicy.org). When Kelly died in 2003 under somewhat suspicious circumstances, amid the outing of the dodgy dossier, it highlighted the dangerous intersection of intelligence, propaganda, and politics. Former UK minister Norman Baker, whom I interviewed wrote a book about this case.
Budgets & Scale: Though much is classified, available figures hint at the scale. The Pentagon’s “information operations” budget reportedly hit $580 million by 2009, a huge jump from the 1990s (thebureauinvestigates.com). Bell Pottinger’s $500M contract and Lincoln Group’s multi-year contracts (one was $120M over 5 years) are proxies for how heavily the U.S. invested in propaganda in Iraq (thebureauinvestigates.com, latimes.com). The UK MOD’s spend was smaller but significant: e.g. a £40M media campaign to win hearts in Afghanistan, and quietly funding projects like the Integrity Initiative (covered below) with a few million pounds a year.
In summary, the 2000s War on Terror period saw overt messaging (“we’re bringing democracy”) accompanied by covert distortion. Governments relied on private firms as force multipliers – effectively mercenaries in the info-war. Many “plays” from the 1990s (false atrocity tales, planted news, front groups) were redeployed, just on a larger, digital-connected scale.
2010s: The Social Media Battlefield – From Sockpuppets to Cambridge Analytica
The rise of social media in the 2010s fundamentally changed the propaganda landscape. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube became the new battlegrounds for hearts and minds – and Five Eyes governments rushed to adapt. This era saw the creation of dedicated cyber influence units and the enlistment of Big Data analytics to conduct psychological operations with unprecedented precision. Techniques like behavioral microtargeting, bot swarms, and deep-fake trolling emerged, and practices once used only abroad started bleeding into domestic politics.
Pentagon’s Sockpuppet Army: In 2011, it came to light that the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had launched a program to manipulate social media discourse covertly. Dubbed Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), this initiative developed an “online persona management” software enabling each operator to control up to 10 fake identities on social platforms. The objective was to flood forums and social networks with pro-American commentary, counter anti-U.S. narratives, and create the illusion of grassroots support – a false consensus engineered by trolls on the U.S. payroll.
A 2011 CENTCOM contract with a California tech company specified that each fake persona be “securely separated”(with unique backstory, IP address, language skills) so as to be “undetectable by even sophisticated adversaries.” Up to 50 U.S. operatives would engage 24/7 out of MacDill Air Force Base (home of CENTCOM), targeting online discussions in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and other languages – explicitly not English, as U.S. law bars propagandizing Americans.
The multi-year program, part of the expanded OEV, grew into a $200 million effort used across the Middle East and South Asia. CENTCOM brass defended it as vital to “counter extremist ideology and propaganda”, but critics noted the uncomfortable comparison to China’s “50-cent army” of Internet trolls. The precedent was set: the U.S. military openly acquired the ability to conduct secret social media psychological warfare, foreshadowing today’s bot-driven influence operations (theguardian.com).
GCHQ’s “Dirty Tricks” Bureau: Not to be outdone, the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ stood up the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) – a covert unit dedicated to offensive online operations. JTRIG’s mission, per leaked Snowden documents (2013), was to “destroy, deny, degrade and disrupt” enemies via the internet. Its toolbox included an array of “dirty tricks”: injecting false material onto the web to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks on activist forums, deploying “honey traps” (luring targets into compromising situations), and spreading deception by “pushing stories” on social media.
By 2010, JTRIG’s “Online Covert Action” propaganda was a “major part of GCHQ’s operations.” Slides published by journalists described how JTRIG could mass message on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr to plant narratives. In essence, a state-sponsored troll farm, JTRIG targeted not only hostile foreign actors (terror groups, Iran, etc.) but sometimes engaged in political interference at home. One known JTRIG target was the Anonymous hacktivist collective, which GCHQ attacked with the same DDoS methods Anonymous itself was accused of (en.wikipedia.org). The JTRIG revelations caused a stir because they confirmed Western agencies were using tactics indistinguishable from the authoritarian regimes they criticize – including false flag operations (posting material online and blaming it on someone else) and strategic forgeries.
As one commentator put it, “Who would trust a government to wield these techniques?” when they entail the very manipulation and deceit that undermine the integrity of the internet. Importantly, GCHQ operated JTRIG in close coordination with the NSA and other Five Eyes partners (network.progressivetech.org), suggesting that the U.S., Canada, Australia, and NZ had access to similar online manipulation capabilities.
UK’s 77th Brigade and Domestic Influence: The British Army in 2015 created the 77th Brigade, a dedicated “information warfare” unit drawing personnel from both regular and reserve forces. Operational from April 2015, 77th Brigade’s mandate is psychological operations and “non-lethal engagement.” It openly acknowledges using “social media such as Twitter and Facebook to influence populations and behavior.”
According to Prof David Miller, whom I interviewed and who studies British propaganda, the 77th is “involved in manipulation of the media, including using fake online profiles.” This unit notably blurs the foreign/domestic line. In theory, its efforts target hostile states and extremist ideologies abroad; in practice, leaks showed 77th Brigade soldiers monitored UK citizens’ social media posts about COVID-19 and Brexit. During the pandemic, 77th Brigade worked with the Cabinet Office Rapid Response Unit to combat “disinformation” – which included scraping public social media data of British citizens to gauge sentiment.
While the government insists no individuals were targeted and only “publicly available data” was used, civil liberties groups were alarmed at an army unit surveilling and intervening in domestic discourse. In one eyebrow-raising case, it emerged that a Twitter executive for Middle East news was also a 77th Brigade reservist, raising concerns of social media platforms being entangled with state psyops. Budget figures indicate how London ramped up info-war investment: 77th Brigade’s cost nearly doubled from £7.6M in 2015 to £14.5M by 2023. Alongside GCHQ’s JTRIG and MI6’s efforts, the 77th Brigade forms part of a matrix of British influence operationsspanning military, intelligence, and diplomatic organs (en.wikipedia.org).
The Cambridge Analytica Bombshell: Perhaps the most consequential development of the 2010s was the weaponization of Facebook-driven “psychographic” propaganda in domestic elections, exemplified by Cambridge Analytica (CA). This UK-based data analytics firm (an offshoot of the longstanding defense contractor SCL Group) brought techniques “from established military methodology – information operations – and turned them on the US electorate.” CA harvested data on tens of millions of social media users and used it to micro-target political ads and messages based on individual psychological profiles. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who helped found CA, described it as Steve Bannon’s “psychological warfare mindf**k tool” built to exploit American voters’ fears and biases (theguardian.com).
This marked a disturbing boomerang of psyops: methods honed in counter-insurgency and marketing campaigns abroad were now deployed in Western democracies for electoral advantage. CA’s parent, SCL, had deep ties to Five Eyes militaries – it had run NATO PSYOP training and even held UK MoD contracts, with access to classified material. In 2012 SCL received glowing praise from a British Army psyops unit for training it delivered The MoD said it would “have no hesitation” hiring SCL again (theguardian.com).
Essentially, SCL functioned as a bridge between military psyops and political consulting. Cambridge Analytica (founded 2013-14 with funding from U.S. billionaire Robert Mercer) went on to work on the 2016 Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, claiming credit for swinging both. Internal documents showed CA had compiled psychological profiles on 230 million Americans and was pitching its capabilities to the U.S. Pentagon as well. “It’s like Nixon on steroids,” Wylie recalled thinking, alarmed that a private firm with “military-grade” psywar toolswas influencing elections and seeking defense contracts at the same time (theguardian.com).
CA became infamous when news broke in 2018 that it illicitly obtained Facebook data on 50+ million users to refine its targeting (theguardian.com). The scandal underscored how advanced computational propaganda – combining Big Data, behavioral science, and AI algorithms – had outpaced election laws and ethical norms. Western governments, which had fostered these techniques for counter-terror and foreign ops, seemed caught off guard when they hit home.
Five Eyes Collaboration & Imitation: Throughout the 2010s, the Five Eyes partners often worked in tandem on influence campaigns or mirrored each other’s initiatives. The Integrity Initiative, exposed in 2018, was a British-run but Western-wide network of academics, journalists, and former officials covertly funded to counter “disinformation” (mostly aimed at Russia). Leaked files showed this project, funded by the UK Foreign Office’s £100 million global fake news fund (medium.com), maintained clusters of influencers across Europe and North America and ran social media accounts that not only tackled Kremlin propaganda but also attacked UK opposition politicians it deemed too pro-Russia. The scandal embarrassed London – a state-funded “anti-fake news” unit itself engaged in partisan information warfare – and Integrity Initiative was reined in after revelations in Parliament (theguardian.com).
Canada too entered the fray: in 2017 Ottawa created a Rapid Response Mechanism to coordinate with G7 allies against foreign disinformation, and by 2020 the Canadian Forces were training propaganda officers in methods drawn from SCL/Cambridge Analytica. Shockingly, in 2020 Canadian military leadership planned a domestic propaganda initiative – without political authorization – aiming to “influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors” of Canadian citizens regarding the pandemic. They even carried out a trial run by forging a letter about wolves on the loose in Nova Scotia, which sparked public panic when locals believed a wolf threat was real. When these activities came to light, Canada’s top brass admitted “errors” and canceled the domestic psyop program. The episode illustrated how tools of influence honed in Afghanistan (the plan even included loudspeaker trucks blaring messages were being considered for use on home soil – a slippery slope that other Five Eyes nations have begun to navigate as well (pressprogress.ca).
In sum, the 2010s witnessed a dramatic expansion of the propaganda playbook: from traditional media to social networks, from broad messaging to micro-targeted “psychographic” appeals, and from clear foreign targets to the gray zone of domestic influence. Key continuities persisted – government-affiliated “front” organizations, hired-gun PR firms, and intelligence units in the shadows – but now supercharged by data analytics and global connectivity. With these trends, the stage was set for the next frontier: AI-driven cognitive warfare.
2020s: Cognitive Warfare and AI – A New Era of Synthetic Propaganda
As of the mid-2020s, Five Eyes governments openly acknowledge that the “cognitive domain” – the realm of beliefs, perceptions, and decision-making – is a battlespace in its own right. NATO and allied militaries are developing formal doctrines for Cognitive Warfare, which NATO’s strategy office defines as operations to “affect attitudes and behaviours” by manipulating the information flows and perceptions of individuals and societies. In practice, this means integrating the tactics of cyber, psyops, influence and deception into a holistic approach to “weaponize brain processes.” A NATO-sponsored study in 2021 warned that “whole-of-society manipulation has become a new norm, with human cognition now a critical realm of warfare” (act.nato.int).
The U.S. Department of Defense stood up an Influence and Perception Management Office in 2022 to coordinate “sensitive messaging, deception and other operations in the information environment” (en.wikipedia.org). These moves suggest Western militaries anticipate facing – and possibly employing – AI-generated disinformation, deepfakes, and algorithmic propaganda in future conflicts, - against their own populations.
Already in recent years, we’ve seen glimpses of AI in influence ops. “Deepfake” videos (AI-generated synthetic media) have been used by adversaries – for instance, a deepfaked video of Ukraine’s president surrendering was briefly propagated by pro-Russian channels in 2022. To counter such threats, DARPA and similar Western R&D agencies are investing in deepfake detection and “semantic forensics.” But just as the West pioneers AI for defense, it may also leverage it for offense. Analysts speculate about AI-curated bot armies that can generate convincing personas at scale, tailored memes, or even engage targets one-on-one via chatbots – essentially automating the sockpuppet tactics of Operation Earnest Voice on a mass scale. Documents from the NATO Innovation Hub discuss using AI to identify cognitive vulnerabilities in target audiences and precisely exploit biases and “reflexive control” – a sign that both understanding and weaponizing the human psyche is on the agenda (act.nato.int, ie.edu).
Five Eyes states remain cagey about offensive AI psyops, but their focus on “cognitive security” is clear. Canada’s Defence Department, for example, published a paper on “Defending Canada against cognitive warfare,” noting that adversaries seek to “manipulate or control how people react to information” and urging democratic governments to strengthen societal resilience (canada.ca).
Implicit is the understanding that the same tools can be wielded by state actors. The UK and U.S. continue to run “influence exercises”: in 2022, Twitter disclosed it had removed networks of accounts attributed to U.S. and UK military info ops pushing Western narratives in the Middle East – a rare peek at covert campaigns that companies usually uncover tied to Russia or China. Clearly, some Five Eyes information efforts have spilled into public view in the social media space, prompting debates about oversight.
Yet, much remains secret. Budgets for these activities are often buried in classified annexes. We know that the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center now receives tens of millions annually to counter disinformation, and the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit similarly scans the infosphere – but what offensive ops continue under the radar? The continuity of institutions suggests an enduring capability. For instance, the U.S. Agency for Global Media(successor to the Cold War-era USIA) still runs VOA and Radio Free Europe with ~$800M/year funding, while the State Dept and CIA have quietly restarted influence programs in Central/Eastern Europe “to compete with Russian media”. The UK’s Foreign Office has funneled funds into projects in the Baltics and Balkans to “pre-bunk” disinfo and promote NATO narratives, often contracting the very same NGOs and firms involved in prior ops.
What has changed is the tempo and technology. Social media monitoring and AI sentiment analysis allow real-time tracking of narrative trends. Bots and troll farms can amplify messages or harass critics at scale (Western governments accuse adversaries of this, but have been caught using bots themselves). High-quality fake videos or audio can be produced on demand – potentially to impersonate leaders or stage events virtually. The ethical threshold for using such tactics is a subject of intense debate within democracies. If an AI-generated false story could prevent a population from opposing a war, would our governments deploy it? The existence of units like JTRIG and 77th Brigade – and their known exploits – indicates the hurdle isn’t whether to use deception, only how far to go.
Conclusion: Continuities and Questions
Over the span of 30+ years, UK, US, and allied (Five Eyes) information operations have evolved in form – from printed forgeries and TV spectacles to Twitter personas and deepfakes – yet the playbook shows striking continuities. Astroturfing, or creating a fake grassroots voice, appears in every era: from a bogus Kuwaiti girl witness (democracynow.org), to phantom online supporters of war policies (theguardian.com). Front organizations and contractors recur as well: cut-outs like “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” in 1990, the Lincoln Group in Iraq (latimes.com), or the Integrity Initiative in Europe (theguardian.com) allow governments to push narratives at arm’s length. There is a consistent pattern of narrative laundering – seeding information through ostensibly independent outlets (be it newspapers or Facebook pages) that actually trace back to state actors.
The institutional actors also show continuity. The U.S. CIA, Pentagon, and State Department have, in various combinations, driven these efforts since the Cold War – sometimes in turf battles with each other, but overall expanding the reach of “strategic influence.” The UK’s MI6, GCHQ, and Army psyops units likewise have adapted but never stopped their influence missions (even after periodic scandals). Notably, when one entity gets exposed (e.g. OSI in 2002 en.wikipedia.org, Integrity Initiative in 2018 theguardian.com), authorities tend to rebrand or relocate the function rather than end it. Rumsfeld’s candid admission – “I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done” (en.wikipedia.org) – could serve as a motto for this apparatus.
Narratives pushed by these operations have varied with geopolitical winds: humanitarian intervention in the ’90s (Kuwait incubators, Balkan atrocities), WMDs and War on Terror in the 2000s (Iraqi WMD lies archive.globalpolicy.org, “liberation” themes), counter-terror and counter-Russia/China in the 2010s, and now defense of democracy vs. autocracy in the 2020s. But underneath, the methods – selective truths, exaggerations, outright lies; amplification of fear; personal smears (e.g. labeling dissidents as foreign “useful idiots” (theguardian.com), and appealing to emotion over reason – remain fundamentally consistent. Even as officials publicly decry “fake news” and disinformation, their security agencies privately study how to perfect it.
This trajectory raises crucial questions: What oversight should exist for state-run psychological operations, especially when they target the domestic public or allied nations? How can one distinguish between legitimate strategic communications and unethical manipulation? In open societies, these activities walk a tightrope. Whistleblowers and investigative journalists have been key to exposing excesses – from the Nayirah hoax (democracynow.org) to the Facebook data scandal – yet much remains hidden under classification. The Five Eyes alliance, originally forged for signals intelligence sharing, has clearly extended into sharing of influence tactics and tools, making accountability even more complicated across borders.
As AI and cognitive warfare initiatives accelerate, the risk is a propaganda arms race where truth becomes ever harder to discern. Democratic governments argue their psychological operations are intended to protect citizens by countering extremist or foreign propaganda (act.nato.int), and that they uphold “truthful” information – as the Pentagon oddly claimed even of its covert Iraq propaganda (thebureauinvestigates.com).
But history shows many examples where they have crossed the line into deception and manipulation of their own people. The continuity of these playbooks suggests that once a tactic is normalized in war, it can migrate into use in peace – unless strong ethical firewalls exist.
In conducting this investigation, we see that “fake news” as a tool of statecraft did not begin with Russian trolls or the Trump era; Western democracies have been both victors and violators in the information war for decades. The techniques pioneered from the Gulf War through to Cambridge Analytica’s micro-targeting (theguardian.com) form a legacy that today’s information warriors – human and AI – continue to draw upon. Understanding this evolution is vital for citizens to critically evaluate media narratives and demand transparency. The past 30 years demonstrate that technologies change, but the aims of state-sponsored influence operations remain: to win hearts and minds by any means necessary – even at the cost of the truth.
One last thing:
No investigation into modern propaganda is complete without acknowledging **Unit 8200**, Israel’s elite signals intelligence corps. I could have included it, - but I didn’t because I didn’t want to make this report about Israel. Instead I will do a separate deep dive into this unit, which has become a blueprint in itself, – not just for electronic surveillance, but for information influence, behavioral engineering, and psychological warfare in the digital domain. Veterans of Unit 8200 now populate the top ranks of global cyber firms, AI startups, and predictive analytics companies.
The gravity of these facts can hardly be overstated and for me this justifies a focus report that has a closer look at Unit 8200. So all I can recommend is: stay tuned, subscribe and always look beyond the headlines.
Sources and References:
MacArthur, J. & Democracy Now, “How False Testimony and a Massive U.S. Propaganda Machine Bolstered the War on Iraq,” Dec 5, 2018
democracynow.orgWikipedia: “Nayirah testimony,” detailing the 1990 Kuwait incubator story hoax
en.wikipedia.orgGuardian (Borger), “CNN let army staff into newsroom,” April 2000 – on U.S. PSYOP interns at CNN during Kosovo
theguardian.comRufford, N. (Sunday Times), “MI6 organised Operation Mass Appeal,” Dec 2003 – British Iraq WMD media ops
archive.globalpolicy.orgWikipedia: “Office of Strategic Influence,” incl. Rumsfeld quote on shutting OSI “in name only”
en.wikipedia.orgLos Angeles Times (Mazzetti/ Daragahi), “US Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press,” Nov 30, 2005
latimes.comBureau of Investigative Journalism (Black & Fielding-Smith), “Fake News and False Flags: Pentagon paid UK PR firm $500M for Iraq propaganda,” Oct 2, 2016
thebureauinvestigates.comGuardian (Fielding-Smith), “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media,” Mar 17, 2011 – on Centcom’s online persona program
theguardian.comGCHQ JTRIG files via The Intercept (Greenwald), “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations,” Feb 2014
en.wikipedia.orgWikipedia: “77th Brigade (United Kingdom),” roles and activities in social media influence
en.wikipedia.orgGuardian (Sabbagh), “Cambridge Analytica parent had access to secret MoD files,” Mar 2018
theguardian.comGuardian (Cadwalladr), “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool”: Data whistleblower Wylie,’ Mar 2018
theguardian.comGuardian (Gayle), “Foreign Office denies funds went to anti-Corbyn Twitter account,” Dec 2018 – Integrity Initiative leak
theguardian.comPressProgress (Pugliese), “Military Admits ‘Errors’ in Aiming Propaganda at Canadians,” June 2021 – on Canadian Forces info ops
pressprogress.caNATO Allied Command Transformation, “Cognitive Warfare” briefing, 2021 act.nato.int
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This is a brilliant well researched piece. Thanks so much for sharing. So important to be aware of this stuff especially today. How will we ever know what’s true and what isn’t in the near future. A frightening thought.
Excellent summary of relatively recent cognitive warfare. Thanks! This issue goes back at least to the turn of the last century when Capitalists realised they needed to create a consumerist culture for their products and their profits. Propaganda, public relations, perception management, psychological operations, behavioural management, cognitive warfare... whatever you call it, it's the water we swim in, the air we breathe.
Trying to sift through the many layers of national (civilian and military) corporate and think tank produced bull crap is a full time job that most people can't sustain. The rule of thumb for me is...do I need this? Who benefits? Does this make me hate the 'other'? Are basic questions that usually help me figure things out.