Information Wars. Richard Stengel

the Freedom News Network), and I knew there were some people in government who thought that’s what the United States Information Agency had done (they were mistaken), but my overwhelming conviction was that this would do more to hurt America’s image than to help it.

      And that wasn’t even the main reason that it was a dumb idea. The main reason was: don’t compete against yourself. No, we didn’t have an exact equivalent of Russia Today, but we had CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and CBS and the Discovery Channel and PBS and the National Geographic channel and on and on and on. We had Facebook and Google and Instagram. We had Game of Thrones for chrissakes. Someone had earlier mentioned to me that Russia Today got about the same rating in the U.K. as CNN. I went and checked and that was true. But RT was literally the only Russian channel in the top 100 channels watched in the U.K.—and the U.S. had more than 40, everything from Lifetime to the Cartoon Network. I wouldn’t trade that for a U.S. version of RT. America’s soft power in terms of TV, movies, and pop music far outweighed in influence, scope, and power anything the American government could create, much less Russia Today. RT didn’t have enough viewers in the U.S. to even qualify for a Nielsen rating.

      One of the things I’d noticed in government is that people who had never been in media, who had never written a story or produced one, who didn’t know about design or graphics, who didn’t understand audiences or what they liked, seemed to think it was easy to create content. People had the illusion that because they consumed something, they understood how it worked.

      I didn’t say much to Jaden about the idea before the meeting began. I had a place setting about two-thirds of the way down the table from where the President sat. Ben was sitting directly to the President’s left and spoke first. He very briefly and graciously introduced me. The President said, “Hi, Rick,” but in a completely businesslike way. When Ben called on me, I went straight to the nitty-gritty of the State Department’s relationship to BBG and why it wasn’t working. I mentioned that I was the first PD Under Secretary in memory who had actually gone to the board meetings. That the “editorials” that State did on Voice of America and other services were a waste of time. I made the case that the BBG entities, instead of spending all their time creating content, should actually aggregate U.S. news coverage and present that to foreign audiences. Voice of America should be Choice of America. (That got a couple of smiles.) I mentioned what I used to say about Time’s website, which was smaller than those of our big competitors: curate more, create less. If we simply showed people around the world the reporting that American journalists already were doing, we would also get credit for how we cover ourselves. It would be a model. See, that’s what the First Amendment is all about. Try it! In short, I was saying pretty clearly, Let’s not create a gigantic American-government news network.

      When I finished, the President leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, and went up to 30,000 feet himself. He’d obviously thought about all this and proceeded to engage in a Socratic dialogue, mostly with himself.

      “What’s the problem we’re trying to address here?” he asked.

      His answer was pretty simple: we want people around the world to be able to get our point of view on things.

      “What is it that we want them to have?”

      His answer: “Usable information.”

      “Who do we want to reach?”

      I want to speak to a global audience, he said, but what I’m most interested in is reaching 15 or so countries. We talk about global public opinion, but I’m more interested in public opinion in a few specific places. I want to talk to the man in the barbershop in Istanbul. The young woman teacher in São Paolo. The businessman in Abu Dhabi. The factory worker in Munich. He was frustrated that our image was more negative than it should be.

      He conspicuously did not mention Russia. Russia wasn’t among the top 15 countries he wanted to reach.

      “What are the tools to do that?”

      He asked whether we could license or commission local content in those countries. And what’s the best content to give them? Is it news or is it game shows or reality TV? He said we needed to do more market research.

      I had the sense then—which I would have a number of times while I was at State—that the President had thought more about the issues being talked about than anyone else in the room, knew more about those issues, and had come up with better answers than anyone else. This was both a good and a not-so-good thing.

      Ben then called on Jaden. Jaden was backbenching, sitting against the wall, and stood up and sketched out the idea of the Freedom News Network. He essentially gave the same presentation he had done for me a little earlier. I was prepared to weigh in on this if no one else did.

      Everyone could see from the President’s body language that he wasn’t very taken with the idea. He had twisted himself into a pretzel. He was quiet. He wasn’t looking at Jaden. He then perfunctorily asked a couple of very small questions, and then said, Let’s move on. It just wasn’t an Obama kind of fix. I always hated it when people would say at meetings, “There are no bad ideas.” Unfortunately, there are—a lot of them. I wish that just once I had heard someone say, “You know what, that’s a really terrible idea.”

      As I saw Obama again in other similar situations, I came to believe that he was essentially a small c, Edmund Burke kind of conservative. That is, the first thing he did in every situation was to look at whether doing something was actually going to make the situation worse than doing nothing. And often he came to the conclusion that, yes, it would. Plus, he only ever wanted to use as much wrench as necessary to turn the bolt. It was the Occam’s razor school of foreign policy: the solution shouldn’t be more complex than the problem. Keep it simple. Don’t fix things that aren’t broken. Don’t do dumb stuff. Spending three-quarters of a billion dollars to start up a global U.S. government news network to reach a 24-year-old sitting in a barber’s chair in Istanbul was not the simplest solution to the problem.

      The president ended the discussion by saying, with a tone of frustration, “We’ve been talking about this for five years.”

PART IV

      Putin’s Pulp Fictions

      First, there were the little green men.

      That’s how early news reports referred to the masked men in unmarked uniforms who suddenly appeared in strategic locations around Crimea at the end of February 2014.¹

      On February 27, these units took over Crimea’s Supreme Council—its parliament—as well as critical locations like airports and military bases and television stations.²

      The green men were Spetsnaz—Russian special operations forces. Putin vehemently denied they were Russian troops, claiming instead they were patriotic local militias defending the rights of ethnic Russians in Crimea. How local militias had Russian PKP machine guns, Russian composite helmets, and Russian tactical vests was not explained. These troops were accompanied by digital forces, as Russian internet trolls and bots echoed the message that they were local militias.

      At a press conference a week later, Putin was asked if there were Russian troops in Crimea. He said, “No.”³ Putin asserted that “there were no Russian troops in Crimea.”

      This was an unblinking lie. It was a lie without any verbal hedges or ambiguity, a direct knowing lie on the world stage about one country invading another.

      Within days, Putin had engineered the installation of a pro-Russian government. The new council declared the Republic of Crimea to be an independent entity, and a referendum was to be held on March 16 in which voters would choose whether or not to join the Russian Federation.⁴ The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of joining.⁵ On March 18, a treaty was signed in the Kremlin between Crimea and Russia to formally bring Crimea into the Russian Federation.⁶

      The White House condemned the violation of the sovereignty of Crimea