Pentagon ran secret anti-vax drive to undermine China during Covid-19 pandemic, Reuters probe shows – The Straits Times

To Washingtons alarm, Chinas 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.

The US relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of Mr Duterte.

A staunch critic of the US, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allowed the US military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.

Mr Duterte said in a July 2020 speech that he had made a plea to Mr Xi for the Philippines to 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 Beijings 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. Mr Duterte said. So, it is simple as that.

Days later, Chinas foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Mr Dutertes plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a new highlight in bilateral relations.

Chinas growing influence fuelled efforts by US military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.

We didnt do a good job sharing vaccines with partners, a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in South-east Asia told Reuters. So what was left to us was to throw shade on Chinas.

US military leaders feared that Chinas Covid-19 diplomacy and propaganda could draw other South-east Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.

A senior US military commander responsible for South-east 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 South-east Asia.

The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of Covid-19 while promoting scepticism towards 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.

Were 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 Washingtons rapidly diminishing influence in the Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats to plead for caution.

The relationship is hanging by 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 the approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to counter Beijings messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.

But in 2019, before Covid-19 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 Pentagons 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 authorised the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even outside of areas of active hostilities.

Mr Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

In spring 2020, special ops commander Gen Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijings Covid-19 efforts.

Colleagues say Gen Braga was a long-time advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition.

In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampas 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 Pentagons 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.

After the Al-Qaeda attacks of 2001, the US was fighting a borderless, shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA.

The Pentagon set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.

Unlike earlier psyop missions, which sought specific tactical advantage on the battlefield, the post-9/11 operations hoped to create broader change in public opinion across entire regions.

By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices themselves often secretly paid by the United States government.

As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump US-approved narratives into foreign countries.

Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.

Chinas efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Gen Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered, sources said.

By summer 2020, the militarys propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives.

In regions beyond South-east Asia, senior officers in the US Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the Covid-19 psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.

Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered haram, or forbidden under Islamic law.

Sinovac has said that the vaccine was manufactured free of porcine materials. Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life.

The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative.

As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by US Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.

Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram? read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.

The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.

One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar posts that traced back to US Central Command.

One showed a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes. In the centre is a man with syringes; on his back is the word China.

It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of Chinas vaccines and participated in human trials.

Translated into English, the X post read: China distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.

Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the militarys phony accounts, according to three former US officials and another person familiar with the matter.

The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebooks policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading Covid-19-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook.

Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Mr Biden took office.

Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Mr Bidens new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learnt. The discussion quickly became tense.

It was terrible, said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaigns pig-related posts. I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.

By spring 2021, the National Security Council (NSC) ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging.

We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines, said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the programme.

Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive Covid-19-related messaging that extended into that summer.

Reuters could not determine why the campaign didnt end immediately with the NSCs order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.

The senior Defence Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation.

The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was many, many leagues away from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate. The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report.

The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post, which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter Chinas message that Covid-19 came from the United States.

But the Post report did not reveal that the programme evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.

The senior defence official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Mr Espers 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of US ambassadors when waging psychological operations.

The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with US diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact.

The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at broad population messaging, such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during Covid-19.

The Pentagons audit concluded that the militarys primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review.

The review also found that military leaders didnt maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagons clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue.

In an unclassified strategy document in 2023, top Pentagon generals wrote that the US military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign General Dynamics IT won a US$493 million (S$667.5 million) contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military. REUTERS

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Pentagon ran secret anti-vax drive to undermine China during Covid-19 pandemic, Reuters probe shows - The Straits Times