Washington
CNN
—
The Central Intelligence Agency has launched a new effort to seize what US intelligence officials believe is an “unprecedented” opportunity to win over Russians unhappy about the war in Ukraine and the life in Russia to share their secrets, posting a cinematic recruiting video online. Monday.
The push includes a new CIA channel activated telegram, the social media network that is a very popular source of unfiltered news in Russia. The CIA first posted the video on Telegram, which ends with instructions on how to contact the CIA anonymously and securely. The video is also posted on their other social media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
CIA officials involved in the project said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a historic opening “for the Russians to come to us and give us the information that the United States needs.” It also comes after a previous recruitment drive after the launch of the invasion that officials said was successful, with one “contact”.
The message, one official said, they hope Russians working in sensitive fields with access to valuable information will hear now is: “We understand you, maybe better than you think.”
“We wanted to convey to the Russians in their own language that we know what they are going through,” added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive project.
The official insisted the video was “absolutely not” intended to be inflammatory or fuel unrest among the general population, where Russian President Vladimir Putin still enjoys a high level of support, but was aimed at people who may be on the fence and “demystify”. the process of contacting the CIA. Putin doesn’t even mention the Ukraine war, partly because it would be “redundant” but also because they argue it is based on “timeless” issues that have long convinced disaffected Russians to contact the CIA.
“Ukraine is the main thing, but this is more or less a symptom of something bigger,” one of the officials said. “There are always people in Russia who identify with what we have to say here.”
What the spy agency believes the Russians are going through, what they believe could convince the Russians to become active, is self-doubt, lack of purpose, and oppression. He appeals to his sense of patriotism and plays with Russian culture, quoting lines from Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
“We will live with dignity, thanks to my actions,” says the narrator in Russian as a woman in her car uses her phone to contact the CIA, before the agency’s logo and contact instructions appear.
The moving two-minute video shows different Russians going about their lives, appearing to contemplate important decisions. The theme of family runs throughout, showing a girl in a hospital bed with a lady who appears to be her mother. The target audience is clear: a woman works on what appears to be a government computer and a man walks into a government building, shows his ID before sitting down at a desk full of files.
Monday’s video reflects a little more forcefully dissemination on social networks by the CIA a year ago, two months after the war in Ukraine. Those posts included similar step-by-step instructions for potential Russian informants on how to avoid detection by Russia’s security services by using virtual private networks, or VPNs, and the Tor web browser to contact the agency anonymously and through encryption. -called the Dark Web.
A lot has happened in a year of war, CIA officials said, noting the crackdown on opposition voices, independent journalism and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands more Russian men sent to the front.
“[Putin’s] the army continues to suffer heavy losses in manpower and material. When it undertook a partial mobilization late last year, far more Russians of military age fled the country than the Kremlin managed to round up and send to the front as cannon fodder,” said CIA director, William Burns, in a speech last month. “War disaffection will continue to gnaw at the Russian leadership under a steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression.”
The target of the video is a group of Russians that the CIA believes to be thousands or even tens of thousands, in Russia and abroad, who might have valuable information to share. Individuals who are outside the daily “spy-versus-spy” competition of the US and Russian security services and intelligence agencies, the officials said, working in fields such as cybersecurity, technology, finance, the ‘army and diplomacy.
Many of these people may not know how to contact the CIA or simply may not be aware that what they know is of interest, officials said. The success they saw with last year’s previous effort to try to get the Russians in touch has been good enough to encourage them to make a more aggressive push with video.
“If it was not successful, we would not attempt a similar effort,” one official said while declining to offer any details on which or how many informants they have managed to recruit over the past 15 months.
Since Russia launched its war on Ukraine last February, the US intelligence community has been “open for business,” according to CIA Director of Operations David Marlowe.
“We’re looking around the world for Russians who are as disgusted with this as we are,” Marlowe told George Mason University’s Hayden Center in November.
A former CIA counterintelligence chief, James Olson, praised the social media efforts and agreed that today is “probably the best period for recruiting Russians that we’ve had.”
“There are a lot of unhappy Russians now,” he said, “they are ashamed and disgusted by what [Putin is] making his Slavic brothers in Ukraine. It is destroying Russia. He’s killing Russian boys. And there are good people in Russia, including intelligence officers, who want to strike back.”
As the CIA searches for Russians abroad, the FBI launched a similar project targeting Russians in the United States, including specifically targeting the cell phones of those traveling to and from the embassy in Washington. This was also happening before the war in Ukraine, CNN reported.
The FBI ad used a quote from Putin and told readers, in Russian, “We are ready to listen.”
The embassy responded by tweeting that “attempts to sow confusion and organize desertion among the staff of the [embassy] they are ridiculous”.
“We’re going to cast the net as wide as possible, we’re going to take everybody,” Olson added. “We can offer them protection. We can offer them security. We can offer them complete anonymity. And we can offer them a package that corresponds to the value of the information they provide.”
