Russian Influence Operations and Victor in Trouble
Happy third anniversary to a book that hasn't aged a bit
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT!
My third novel, Victor in Trouble, came out three years ago. At the time, most people thought I was a panicked heretic who was either: a) overreacting to a “Russia hoax” (because Russia never actually did anything bad) or b) overreacting to what Russia did because, even if they did it, it had no real effect.
For those of you who haven’t read Victor in Trouble: why the fuck not? It’s got memetic warfare, a Russian oligarch with yacht envy, scooter-riding assassins, and a family values conference packed with prostitutes. Its Russian influence operations meets MAGA, with our hero, Victor Caro, stuck in between. You can read a summary of it here.
When I first set out to write the book, we knew about the Internet Research Agency and its million-dollar-a-month budget. We were starting to get a handle on trolls and bots and the distribution of malign information through social media. But very few people (except those of us researchers who were doing this for a living) understood the gravity of these operations, the total shift we were experiencing in the foundations of our information space.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, has compared Russia’s state-run propaganda machine to Russia’s ministry of defense. The Russian government considers the information space a battlefield in its war on the West. Information and speech are weapons in this war.
Where once the Internet Research Agency pumped out unsophisticated bots and trolls for different elections (sometimes the same ones for different elections: a hottie in a stars and stripes bikini who believed in conservative values and Donald Trump would suddenly tweet in French about her love for Marine LePen), their tactics have evolved. The Doppelgänger operation, which I wrote about here, created a network of spoofed sites of legitimate outlets, including the Washington Post, Spiegel, The Guardian, and more, helping spread false information from what looked like legitimate news outlets.
Politicians, journalists, and other influencers have also given a legitimate and local face to Kremlin malign information. We know of many who have been paid to write articles with Russia-friendly narratives (sometimes written by the individual’s Russian intelligence handler) or to introduce legislation to do friendly things for Russia. In Italy, for example, a regional legislator introduced a bill advocating the lifting of sanctions on Russia. It passed the regional legislature. The bill was written with input from a group with connections back to Russian intelligence. But all of this was delivered to an audience from a messenger with a local, legitimate face. Italian politicians and journalists in Italy. French politicians and journalists in France. And so on.
Russia looks set to grow these operations
For 2025, Russia has allocated $1.42 billion for influence operations, a 13 percent increase from 2024; $500 million of that is budgeted to fund “unofficial entities,” presumably that network of covertly funded outlets and individuals that help spread Russian narratives while claiming it’s really their honest personal opinion while failing to reveal they are paid to say those things.
Tenet media—home, until recently, to Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, among others—was a part of this network until its Russian financial backers were indicted by the US Department of Justice. Voice of Europe was, too. There are other media platforms out there. And plenty of individuals who are part of the game.
Russia is thinking ahead, too, finding ways to poison the information space for years to come. Under the direction of John Mark Dougan, an American former sheriff who fled to Russia, Russia is creating networks specifically to feed Russian disinformation, propaganda, and malign information into Western AI platforms, so the AI will “learn” that bad information as “fact.” According to research by
:By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.
The problem of Russian influence operations is also much wider than we tend to think of it. Anti-NATO stickers hung up around Brussels. Smashing the car windows of actual journalists to intimidate and shut them up. Graffiti. Vandalism. Sabotage. Intimidation. The list goes on. These all have an element of “influence” that goes with them.
What can we do?
Our allies who have more experience dealing directly with Russia are starting to get a better handle on this. As I wrote about here, Poland recently arrested a Russian propagandist and handed him over to Ukraine. "For the first time since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, a Russian agent who worked against our country in the media sector was handed over to Ukraine (from the EU) at the request of [Ukrainian security services, the SBU]," the SBU said in a statement. The propagandist has been called an “enemy agent” for working with Russian intelligence (the FSB) to undermine Ukraine.
A Polish court recently sentenced two Russians to five and a half years in prison for placing stickers with a QR code on them around Poland. Scanning the QR code led to a Wagner recruitment site. According to reporting from Meduza:
While putting up stickers can hardly be seen as an act of terror in itself, in her almost hour-long justification of the verdict, Judge Ewa Karp-Sieklucka was clear: it was the context that mattered. With the war grinding on in Ukraine, any action aimed at creating distrust in Poland’s ability to defend itself, disinforming the public, and spreading panic must be treated as an act against national security.
“The purpose of the above actions was to stir doubt in our country’s ability to ensure its security. Such actions were aimed at harming Poland and are an element of the so-called hybrid warfare conducted by the Russian security services,” Karp-Sieklucka explained.
The judge used the expression “hybrid war” seven times in her speech. And while she did not hand down the eight-year prison sentence the prosecution had requested, the verdict reflects a growing consensus that Russia’s meddling should be met with a definite response.
This is, of course, a very fine line to walk. No one is advocating for infringing on free speech. We need to focus not on substance and content, but on tactics and actions. Write and say what you want. But if it is found you did so because a foreign adversary directed and paid you to do so, that needs to be addressed as the national security threat it is. I explored this a few months ago, and I think it is worth another read.
It’s a difficult challenge, and a weighty one. So if you could use a good laugh: May I humbly recommend reading Victor in Trouble? It’s funny…and timely!
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
TRUMP AND DEMOCRACY
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? (New York Times)
RUSSIAN INFORMATION OPERATIONS
How a Russia-linked fake news campaign got a boost from Elon Musk (Washington Post)
EXCELLENT RESOURCES!
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
