The Pentagon’s COVID Disinformation Ops: A Global Trust Crisis

This weekend, a disheartening story emerged from Reuters. The Pentagon, under the Trump administration, conducted an ill-conceived and appalling disinformation campaign that may have negatively impacted the global response to COVID-19 and vaccines, and severely damaged U.S. credibility worldwide.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military conducted a secret campaign to undermine China’s Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines. This operation, which began under the Trump administration and continued into Biden’s early tenure, aimed to discredit Chinese aid and vaccines through fake social media accounts. The campaign spread anti-vax messages, contributing to public mistrust in vaccines, including Sinovac, the primary vaccine available in the Philippines at the time. Public health experts criticized the campaign, stating it endangered lives and worsened vaccine hesitancy.

The campaign aimed to counter China’s influence in the Philippines by discrediting the Sinovac vaccine, thereby reducing China’s soft power, which was growing due to its vaccine diplomacy during the pandemic. The effort sought to highlight perceived risks and inefficacies of the Chinese vaccine to weaken China’s standing and promote distrust among Filipinos towards Chinese aid, ultimately serving the United States’ broader geopolitical goals of curbing China’s influence in the region.

Upon discovering the campaign, the US National Security Council under the Biden administration quickly moved to shut it down in spring 2021. New safeguards were implemented to ensure that any future propaganda efforts involving public health would require explicit State Department oversight and approval. This decision aimed to prevent the recurrence of such dangerous disinformation campaigns, and sought to restore trust in U.S. public health initiatives.

Anti-Vaccine Messaging: A Major Strategic Blunder

This policy of spreading anti-vax disinformation may have led to the deaths of Filipinos who were otherwise able to access the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, but may have been discouraged from doing so by the information they consumed. It’s unclear how effective this operation was, but such a campaign is as reckless as it is deplorable. The Pentagon and White House casually playing with lives is disheartening – especially since, if the campaign was successful, it may have fomented various elements of propaganda and misinformation within the broader global anti-vax movement, something which threatens us all on a potentially existential level.

This disinformation campaign severely undercuts the strategic communications goals that the U.S. and its allies have been working toward for decades. Those goals include:

• Establishing a perception of the U.S. and its allies as a force for good in the world.

• Fighting disinformation spread by hostile state and non-state actors.

• Partnering with governments and NGOs across the world to improve public health outcomes and decrease mortality.

• Supporting the logistics of global vaccine distribution to protect individuals and prevent future outbreaks.

• Rebuilding strategic alliances.

• Establishing the United States and its allies as the preferred path for global peace and prosperity, in opposition to growing autocracies across the world.

Before delving into how the United States’ Sinovac disinformation campaign has damaged those goals, it is essential to understand what strategic communications is, and how it is implemented on a domestic and global level.

Understanding Basic Strategic Communications

Between 2013 and 2017, I was called upon by members of the U.S. Department of State, NATO, and various NATO aspirant governments to advise them on strategic communications.

Strategic communications, or STRATCOM, is the coordinated effort to convey a specific message or set of messages to a target audience to achieve a desired outcome. It involves using various media and communications channels to inform, persuade, and influence public perception and behavior. This can include public relations, advertising, social media, and direct engagement, all designed to support organizational goals, shape public opinion, and enhance the credibility and reputation of the entity behind the communication. Essentially, strategic communications involves delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. Its deeper aim is to align the messaging with the actions of governments, ensuring that the message supports strategic outcomes and that these outcomes, in turn, reinforce the message.

For example, for a parent wanting children to eat vegetables, the messaging must be accurate, easy to understand, and omnipresent: “Vegetables taste good and are good for you” may work on adults, but such messaging should typically be tailored to the target audience. Telling a child that “veggies are yummy!” is better – and even more so if you can correlate this message with a point of familiarity, comfort, or safety, like animating a cartoon with vegetable characters (i.e. VeggieTales), or incorporating healthy habits into the traits of popular characters like Popeye and Bugs Bunny.

Actions must thus align with the message to bolster its outcome. Are children shopping with their parents for healthy fruits and vegetables? Are different types of vegetables being cooked and served in different ways? Are the parents eating them, too? Without executable actions, the message may soon be forgotten. Conversely, if actions undercut the message—if one parent says “eat your vegetables” but won’t eat vegetables themself—it could spell disaster for both the strategic message and for broader credibility of the parent.

Similarly, subversive messaging can be effective, but it is dishonest and broadly ineffectual if it works against open and direct messaging. If children are reinforced in the message that vegetables are healthy and important, but lied to during dinner-time and told the vegetables being served aren’t really vegetables, eventually they’ll find out, and two things will happen: they’ll stop eating vegetables, and they’ll lose trust in their parent.

In parenting, as well as in government, it is critical to do what you say and say what you do. There is a place for subversion, but if it goes against core values, those tactics will not only fail but backfire. So, too, has this factor negatively impacted critical U.S. government messaging over the years.

Growing Urgency Amid Years of Setbacks

In August and September of 2013, I was regularly publishing and giving extensive interviews about the August 21st chemical weapons attack on the Qaboun neighborhood in the Ghouta suburbs of eastern Damascus, Syria. All evidence clearly indicated that the Assad regime was behind the attack. I was contacted by a member of the State Department’s press office, who asked for an informal conversation on the issue. My work had been widely cited by international news agencies and accepted among the general public, but the State Department’s own statements to this same effect were met with skepticism. The question they asked was simple: why did my work garner so much attention, while their own statements were met with scorn? The answer was also simple, yet similarly complex: strategic communications.

As an independent grassroots journalist and early pioneer in what is now called open-source intelligence (OSINT), with no affiliation with any major news agencies or any governments, I felt the need to collect, analyze, and publicly dissect as much evidence as possible regarding the August 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons attack. My entire thought process, warts and all, was published in daily (and often hourly) updates on a small, geopolitical analysis-focused publication called EA Worldview. No one knew who I was before I started this work, and I had to back up every assertion I made. Furthermore, since I was typically publishing my entire chain of evidence, every piece of data was open to public debate—and there was always plenty of debate.

In contrast, the U.S. government’s record on information-sharing was less than stellar. Government statements were often built on classified information and intelligence, and many of those statements turned out to be incorrect to varying extents. This was barely a decade after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was a blow to U.S. credibility on multiple levels. Furthermore, when adversarial governments issued competing statements, there was no real way to compare the two claims, since neither side showed their work. Despite being flattered that the State Department would turn to me for advice, I was chagrined that they had also rebuffed many of my efforts for them to release the kinds of information which would advance my work.

I also raised another alarm during this conversation: disinformation campaigns launched by adversarial governments like Russia and Iran were proving to be extremely effective, in part because they manufactured, distorted, and amplified their own evidence, which dissenting global citizens used to fuel conspiracy theories and counter-narratives. The “trolls” were indeed becoming Legion, seeking out disaffected and disillusioned individuals and giving them the ammunition and vocabulary to fuel a real movement that was growing and spreading online. In my opinion, the State Department had become too obsessed with the obvious disinformation threats—state-controlled media outlets like RT (formerly Russia Today)—but was missing the work of the troll armies and useful idiots engaged in the mirror image of the work I was trying to do.

Major media outlets often provided the precise talking points used by these trolls, useful idiots, and other adversarial actors. RT, for example, often portrayed Western actions as imperialistic or inconsistent with their professed values of democracy and human rights. Common examples include criticizing the U.S. for carrying out military interventions in the Middle East while condemning Russian actions in Ukraine; highlighting police brutality and racial issues in the U.S. as a counter to criticisms of Russian domestic policies; and emphasizing Western economic and political corruption. Grassroots bloggers actively sought out evidence that supported these narratives, often cherry-picking information to attack the narrative of the West. As a result, faith in Western institutions reached an all-time low.

By 2014, this problem was evident to almost everyone, and over the next two years, I attended several conferences across Europe to discuss NATO’s strategic communications crisis. By this time, those working against institutions like NATO and the European Union were advancing their own robust narrative about “the West,” and they were so far ahead of the game that efforts launched by NATO and the EU felt like the counter-narrative.

Historically following World War II and throughout the Cold War, support for NATO and the EU grew, and those institutions were continuously strengthened through their alliances. Internally, however, neither organization spent enough time explaining to the public their purpose and how their actions and organizational outcomes benefited the people of Western Europe. As a result, by 2014-2015, Brexit was a very real possibility; some Western politicians like Donald Trump were attacking NATO and the traditional geopolitical order; and many NATO and EU citizens, when polled, couldn’t accurately describe what NATO or the EU actually were.

There were emergent problems with the amount of strategic communications these institutions were aiming at their own people, the kinds of communications being implemented, and the overall quality of these efforts. But there was a broader issue: strategic communications was too often an afterthought used to justify governmental actions, rather than being part of a broader strategic push to complement such actions. My message to NATO at the time was that it needed to align its actions and its communications, and launch a massive public education campaign that explained what these institutions do for the people, as well as how and why they do what they do. Furthermore, I suggested that those concerned with this mission should continue to press decision-makers in government and military to align the strategic goals of their organizations with the strategic communications goals. In fact, the STRATCOM folks needed a seat at the decision-making table.

Fragile Progress and Undone Outcomes

In the last ten years, decision-makers in the EU, U.S. government, and NATO have realized they are behind in both how they communicate and act. STRATCOM efforts have exploded, and many Western leaders have moved to a “back-to-basics” approach in governance. However, operations like the anti-vaccine disinformation campaign launched in the Philippines severely undermine those efforts. If the U.S. government is for truth, why are they lying? If they are for vaccines, why are they fighting against them? If they are against disinformation, why are they launching disinformation campaigns? And if they are a friend to the developing world, why are they attacking vaccines that could help the developing world?

It’s good to see that the Biden administration shut this effort down as soon as they learned about it, and it’s encouraging that the administration put more safeguards in place to ensure such things don’t happen again. On the other hand, it’s concerning, but not surprising, that the Trump administration would so quickly, eagerly, and thoroughly move against the advice of the State Department, which by and large remain the foremost experts on the various parts of the world in which they work.

This Pentagon problem has created real strategic communications issues that could haunt U.S. policymakers for a long time. It appears to be the kind of mistake that Trump and his allies are more than happy to make, and one which threatens to erase decades of STRATCOM progress. To avert this, there must be a sustained, multilateral shift towards alignment of messaging and outcomes – lest bad actors irreparably damage the reputation of these institutions on a global level.