Information Wars

How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It

Richard Stengel

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780802147998
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Propaganda politica

A "well-told" insider account of the State Department's twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation ( The Washington Post ). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. "[A] refreshingly frank account... revealing." — Kirkus Reviews "This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired." — Library Journal

PART I

Welcome to State

The Turnstile

When you walk into the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, you have to show your ID to the uniformed guards standing outside the building. They peer down at your card to check the tiny expiration date in the upper left-hand corner before waving you through, exactly the way they have been doing it since the Korean War.

Once you’re past the guards, you have to pass through two tall, automated metal doors. To get them to open, you step onto a four-by-six-inch magnetic carpet in front of them. Some mornings you just had to touch the carpet and the doors would spring open. Sometimes you had to jump up and down. And sometimes you had to open the doors yourself. On many mornings, you would see diplomats in sensible suits hopping up and down before putting their shoulders to what must have been a two-hundred-fifty-pound door.

Once you were through the double doors and into the lobby, you needed to pass through one of five clunky-looking metal turnstiles that probably didn’t look modern when they were installed 25 years ago. You inserted your card in a horizontal slot in the main part of the turnstile and then entered your PIN on the keypad. The problem was the keypad. It was loose and soggy, and the smudged protective plastic cover made typing hard. About a third of the time when you typed in your number, it didn’t register. When that happened, you moved over to the next turnstile and started all over again.

So, each morning, as you entered what everyone always called “the Building” to do your day’s work for American diplomacy, there were a series of small fraught negotiations that failed about as often as they succeeded.

The Lobby

That eastern entrance to the State Department was the main entrance when the Building opened in 1941. It was designed in the late 1930s to be the home of the War Department. But a few years after construction started, the War Department realized that it had already outgrown the building’s capacity and commenced work on what would become the Pentagon. It was decided that the new building would house the State Department.¹ The site, in a part of the District known as Foggy Bottom, was not a very glamorous location, then or now. For the employees of the State Department, who had been in the ornate Old Executive Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was like moving to a much less desirable zip code.

Established in 1789 under President George Washington, the State Department was the first cabinet-level agency to be created under the new executive branch. It was responsible—then and now—for managing the foreign affairs of the U.S. government. The first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had a staff of one chief clerk, three subordinate clerks, a translator, and a messenger. There were just two diplomatic posts, London and Paris. Today, the department has more than 40,000 employees, over 200 diplomatic posts, and a budget of $50 billion. In addition to the high-level diplomacy conducted by ambassadors and envoys, the State Department does more prosaic tasks, like issuing passports for American citizens and visas for foreigners traveling to the United States.

The architecture of the State Department is not what most people think of when they imagine Washington, D.C. With its unadorned limestone art moderne exterior and its portico of rectangular columns that look like a giant sideways sans serif letter E, State’s new headquarters owes more to Mussolini than to Pierre L’Enfant. When you enter the two-story terrazzo lobby, with its floor-to-ceiling pink Tennessee marble, you are greeted by an enormous 50-foot-wide mural called Defense of Human Freedoms, which was designed for the War Department. At the center of the painting, four panels depict small-town American life and Roosevelt’s four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. These freedoms are defended by American GIs on the left side of the panel in gas masks and on the right side by American infantrymen in helmets firing M16s. Across the top of the mural stretches the wingspan of a B52 bomber. In 1954, the diplomats of the State Department found it to be too warlike for an agency dedicated to peace, and the mural was covered up by plywood and draperies, which were only removed two decades later.²

The Marshall Office

My office was on the fifth floor of the original building. I shouldn’t say “my office”—it was the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and it was a plum. In fact, it had been the office of Secretary of State George Marshall when the building first opened. The ceiling is 25 feet high (when my youngest son first saw it, he said, “Dad, you could have two basketball hoops on top of each other”) and featured three enormous, round lights that looked exactly like the flying saucers in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The office was a strategic asset in a city of beautiful offices. After all, people did make a correlation (inaccurate though it might be) between the size of one’s office and how much power one had. For that reason, I liked to have meetings with foreign ambassadors and ministers in my office, where I would serve tea and coffee and let them take it all in. (The office came with its own State Department china.)

There was another anomaly about the office, one that was not necessarily an advantage: it wasn’t on the seventh floor. The seventh floor was where the Secretary sat, as well as his two deputies and all the Under Secretaries except one: me. Yes, the seventh floor was a physical space, but it was also the mythic locus of power in the Building. The phrase “the seventh floor” was uttered hundreds of times a day at the State Department: “The seventh floor isn’t happy.” “The seventh floor wants to do the deal.” “The seventh floor is going up against the NSC.” Just as the phrase “the White House” is shorthand for the President, “the seventh floor” represented the Secretary of State.

My office was on the fifth floor and not the seventh thanks to the astute real estate sense of one of my predecessors, Judith McHale, who was Under Secretary for Hillary Clinton. In 2008, after she was sworn in, she was shown the dark, rather grotty office on the seventh floor where the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy normally sat. At the same time, someone mentioned that the Marshall office on the fifth floor in the old State building had just finished its renovations and was available. Judith chose beauty over proximity to power, and almost every morning when I walked into that lovely space, I silently thanked her.

But because I was not physically on the seventh floor, I was constantly walking or trotting—and sometimes sprinting—to it for meetings. And it was a hike. The State Department was the most nonintuitive, mazelike structure I’ve ever worked in. One reason is that when the building was expanded in 1961, the new parts were grafted on to the old building in a completely inorganic way. To remedy that, the hallways were numbered and marked with a rainbow of colors. The legend was that Henry Kissinger had the halls painted different colors so that he could find his way around—though the idea that Secretary Kissinger was wandering the halls of the Harry S. Truman Building strikes me as implausible. I would leave early for meetings to factor in the time I would be lost. What helped one navigate is that there were enormous posters from different countries at the end of each hall. So I always remembered that my office was at the juncture of the picture from Thailand (a boy walking across a rope bridge over a river) and one of a Hindu temple in India, and that when I was going up to the seventh floor, I turned left at the picture of a snowy St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Even after a decade in the building, foreign service officers would still get lost. But at least after a few months I stopped having to send text messages to my staff to come and rescue me. Like so many people there, I figured out a few different ways to get to where I had to go and then stuck to those paths religiously. It was a little like diplomacy.

The 8:30

Washington is an early-morning culture. When I was editor of Time, one of the first things I did was change the regular all-hands editorial meeting from 10 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. People were aghast. At State, meetings usually began at 8:30, but many started at 8, or even 7:30. But there was one meeting at the State Department that was the most exclusive in the building, and it was known only as “the 8:30.” It was the Secretary’s meeting.

When I first started talking to people about joining the State Department, some State veterans said to me, “You have to make sure that you’re at the 8:30.” Condoleezza Rice had an 8:30. Madeleine Albright had an 8:30. Secretary Clinton had an 8:30. For all I know, Thomas Jefferson had an 8:30. Secretary Kerry continued the tradition. This was an invitation-only meeting from the Secretary for about a dozen senior staff, and it set the tone—and much of the action—for the day. It was a chance to see and hear the Secretary first thing. In the building, the 8:30 was something of a mystery. Not everyone knew about it. It was a little like a secret society. And like any good secret society, it had its rules and protocols.

My day did not actually begin with the 8:30, but it was because of the 8:30 that I scheduled an 8. After I had gone to a few of the Secretary’s meetings, I realized that I needed to be briefed about what was happening. So I started a small meeting in my office at 8 to go over what might come up and what public diplomacy equities would be useful to talk about. On my staff at State, I had four “special assistants.” These were bright young foreign service officers who were like my eyes and ears on what was going on in the world and, more important, in the Building. They each “covered” geographical areas as well as policy functions. So, one might handle Asia, refugees, and legal affairs. Another handled South America, educational exchanges, and consular services. Each morning, one of the “specials” would meet me at 8 to go over material before the 8:30. Usually, they stood in front of my desk (young foreign service officers will always stand unless you tell them to sit) and gave me an overview of what the Secretary was doing that day, what had happened in the news that might affect some of our issues, and what to look out for.

It was also useful because it gave me something to do while I attempted to log on to State’s outdated computer system, which was impossibly slow and required two automated fobs plus several passwords. And that was not even for the classified computer system, the so-called high side, which took even longer. On a good day, this process took 7 to 8 minutes; but on many mornings, it could take half an hour, especially if you had to call IT, which was not infrequent. I hadn’t seen a computer system like that since the 1990s. I sometimes used to try to calculate how many millions of dollars a year the American taxpayer was paying for State employees to wait for their computers to boot.

Like so many in government, I had gotten used to communicating with the staff and department on Gmail, which was faster, easier to use and search, and didn’t take an eternity to get on. This started during the nomination and confirmation process—when you didn’t yet have a government account—and continued pretty much until the end. While the State system was not so clunky that I’d resort to a private server, I completely understood why so many people used alternative means for unclassified communication. Although you weren’t supposed to use Gmail for official business because of the Presidential Records Act, which mandated the preservation of all federal emails, few of the politicals followed that rule. What most people did was then send the Gmail chain to their federal email address. I know I did.

At 8:20, I would dash out of my office for the trek to the seventh floor. After walking up the staircase (it was much faster than the elevators, which were often shut down for dignitaries), I went through a side door that took you to what was known as “Mahogany Row.” Mahogany Row is the rather claustrophobic suite of offices where the Secretary and the two deputies sit. It got its name from the dark wood paneling, but to my inexpert eye, it looked, well, fake. In fact, almost everything on Mahogany Row was fake. When the suite of offices was first opened in the new State Department building in 1961, it looked more like a 1950s motel with sliding glass doors, wall-to-wall carpeting, and acousticaltile ceilings. When the wife of then Secretary of State Christian Herter arrived for a diplomatic reception for Queen Frederika of Greece and saw it for the first time, she burst into tears.

Over the next 25 years, money was privately raised to turn the reception rooms and the executive suite into a space that looked like it was from the early Federal period. In came the Hepplewhite chairs, the Duncan Phyfe tables, and somber oil portraits of all the former Secretaries. Mahogany Row was finally finished in the mid-1980s. When I first visited there to meet with Secretary Kerry, it gave me a kind of historical vertigo. After entering the building through the modern 1960s deco entrance lobby on the south side, you took the elevator to the seventh floor, where you stepped back into the 19th century.

When visitors go to Mahogany Row, they have to check in at an imposingly high desk, where security guards verify your name and take your cell phone. They take your phone because Mahogany Row is a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility, always pronounced “skiff,” like the boat. A SCIF is a secure area protected from electronic surveillance where you could review classified information. In the early security briefings I had at the department, I was told by State security that you were liable to be spied on by a hostile foreign power in any part of the Building that was not a SCIF.

Outside the side door to Mahogany Row were a couple of Victorian-looking cubbyholes for State employees to store their phones. You put your phone in a small compartment and got a tiny key. One of the unintended benefits of being in meetings on Mahogany Row is that people weren’t surreptitiously checking their phones. A few times in those early weeks, I was sitting in a meeting on the seventh floor and felt my BlackBerry buzz in my pocket. I would instantly leap up, excuse myself, and dash outside to lock it up, praying all the while that I had not allowed the Russians or the Chinese to penetrate the seventh floor.

The 8:30 took place in the Secretary’s conference room, which was cattycorner to the entrance to his office suite. It was a narrow rectangular room with terrible acoustics. The Secretary was always the last to arrive—usually a few minutes late. He’d scoot into the room in shirtsleeves, sit down, and start talking. He moved fast and didn’t like to waste time. It was always a bit of a stream of consciousness—what was on his mind at that moment. By 8:30 he’d had his PDP—President’s Daily Brief—and perhaps even had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu or Sergei Lavrov. His engine was already revved. In fact, John Kerry had as much energy as any human being I’ve ever known. When I walked beside him down the long corridors of the State Department, I always had to skip a little to keep up. He’s permanently leaning forward. That was his attitude about the world as well. To plunge in, to move forward, to engage. There’s no knot he doesn’t think he can untie, no breach that he can’t heal. For him, the cost of doing nothing was always higher than that of trying something. As he often said, “If we don’t do it, it won’t happen.”

The Secretary sat at the head of a long, rectangular table. To his right was the Deputy Secretary of State for policy, and to his left was the Deputy Secretary of State for Management. Next to the Deputy for policy sat the Secretary’s chief of staff, and next to the Deputy for Management sat the Under Secretary for Political Affairs. The other regulars in the meeting were the Under Secretary for Management, the Secretary’s two deputy chiefs of staff, the assistant secretary for public affairs, legislative affairs, and the spokesperson. The assistant secretary for public affairs was the only assistant secretary there. Only three of the six Under Secretaries were invited. Even though there were no place cards at the table, there was a strict seating chart. Before I went to my first meeting, my chief of staff drew a makeshift diagram for me and said my chair was between those of the head of policy planning and the deputy chief of staff on the south side of the table. I sat in the wrong place my first couple of times, until someone kindly pointed out the correct seat.

The first words out of the Secretary’s mouth were almost always some version of, “A lot going on,” “Lots of balls in the air,” “A lot of crap happening.” (One morning he said with a smile, “When have I not said that? I’ve got to stop saying that!”) Some mornings the Secretary launched into a tour of the international waterfront. He would touch on half a dozen issues, from helping the Syrian “moderates” to the civil war in the Congo to an upcoming trip to Kazakhstan. He would often talk about what was bothering him, like the uselessness of Congress (“They have a complete inability to do their job”); the habitual leaks from meetings he attended at the White House (“With our usual discretion, there it is on the front page of the New York Times”); the fecklessness of certain world leaders (“He doesn’t understand the first thing about economics”); Americans’ lack of interest in international relations (“There are no exit polls on foreign policy”); and the vagaries of Washington (“This is a city of snow wimps!”). He understood that just hearing what was on his mind had value for us.

In general, people would speak rapidly and tell the Secretary something he ought to know (Sir, an American in our embassy in Lima was arrested for assault); or what they were doing (Sir, I’m meeting with the deputy foreign minister of Malaysia to discuss counterterrorism efforts); or just something he might find amusing or interesting (I once surprised him by saying that CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, had the biggest news bureau in Washington, with more than 350 people).

On mornings when something was bothering him or we were in the midst of one crisis or another, or he just seemed a little down, he would sidle into his chair and mumble something. That was a universally understood signal. Because when we went around the table, people would then say, “Nothing this morning, Sir.” There were days when almost the whole table of 15 people did that. Sometimes it’s diplomatic to say nothing. But even on those days, when the meeting ended, he would bound out of his chair and offer some exhortation, like “Go get ’em,” or “Let’s get it done.”

Comms and the 9:15

At State, and pretty much everywhere in Washington, “comms” is the standard shorthand for “communications,” which basically means any and all of the outward-facing stuff, from a local newspaper interview to a speech at the United Nations. After the 8:30, I jumped into the comms meeting, which was held just across the hall in the chief of staff’s office. The comms meeting was even smaller than the 8:30 and consisted of the chief of staff, the deputy chief of staff, the spokesperson, the assistant secretary for public affairs, and the chief speechwriter.

We sat at a round wooden table in a room that had a lovely view looking south toward the Lincoln Memorial. This was the most informal and candid meeting of t...