On November 18, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia claimed that the United States had used prominent Russian LGBTI activist Nikolai Alekseyev to portray Russian officials as gay, with the intent to discredit the Russians in the eyes of the public.
As evidence, Izvestia cites alleged correspondence to Alekseyev from U.S. Department of State officials, including Randy Berry, the U.S. special envoy for LGBTI rights. The letters direct Alekseyev to take specific actions, making him seem like an American puppet and U.S. officials like intruders in others’ affairs.
But the letters cited by Izvestia are obvious forgeries. Purportedly published on a website for hackers called CyberGuerilla.org, the letters contain numerous “spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors … ranging from missing articles to incorrect titles and acronyms,” according to an independent news organization, Meduza.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow posted an annotated version of one of the letters on its Twitter feed. The embassy marks the most glaring mistakes in red ink and then jokingly offers Izvestia assistance. “Next time you’re going to use phony letters, send them to us first, and we’d be happy to help correct all the mistakes.”
Old habits die hard
Forgeries were once a staple of the Soviet Union’s “active measures” — covert or deceptive operations that include disinformation, or the deliberate dissemination of lies. In 1989, the U.S. Department of State reported that Soviet forgeries were “designed to manipulate public opinion” and “sow suspicions of U.S. policies.” That report also characterizes the forgeries as blatant distortions of fact with linguistic and textual inconsistencies and formatting errors.
More than two and a half decades later, pro-Kremlin media still use forgeries to spread disinformation. One common false narrative is that the individuals who challenge the Kremlin’s dominance (such as Alekseyev) are controlled by the United States.
“Nowadays, production of false information [by the media] in Russia is almost an industry. It’s not a case of casual inaccuracies or distorted perceptions, it’s a deliberate process of creating fakes, and it’s only gaining speed,” said Alexei Kovalyov to the Moscow Times. Kovalyov runs a website devoted to exposing inaccuracies in pro-Kremlin reports.
Meddlesome U.S. officials pulling strings of puppets?
There are other recent examples of hoaxes trying to discredit Kremlin opponents as U.S. stooges. In September 2015, the Kremlin-linked media outlet Ren TV falsely reported that U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Tefft had participated in an opposition rally in the Moscow suburb of Marino. To back its claims, Ren TV tweeted a photograph supposedly showing Tefft talking to reporters at the protest.
Bloggers and other media quickly pointed out that the Ren TV image of Tefft had been photoshopped. U.S. embassy spokesman Will Stevens confirmed this, noting that the doctored image was based on a photo of Tefft speaking to reporters on February 28 at the site where opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered.
“Ambassador Tefft spent Sunday [the September day he was supposedly at an opposition rally] … at home enjoying a well-deserved day off. These reports of his visit to a meeting in Marino are 100-percent false. They are based on a clearly doctored photo,” Stevens said. The U.S. embassy ridiculed the fake Ren TV tweet on its official Twitter feed with doctored shots of its own, including one showing Tefft at the historic Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
In another hoax, the Kremlin’s foreign-facing media outlet Sputnik published an article based on a forged letter also traced to CyberGuerilla.org. The letter, purportedly from U.S. Senator Richard Durbin to Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, instructs the prime minister on which members of his government to fire or retain.
Ben Marter, a spokesman for Durbin, said he first learned about the hoax when Russian state-owned media contacted him for comment. Although the letter appears to be printed on the senator’s official letterhead, Durbin’s title is not correct — it reads “Assistant Minority Leader” instead of “Assistant Democratic Leader.” An examination of the text also reveals frequent omissions of the English definite article “the,” a common grammatical error attributed to non-native English speakers.
“This letter is a forgery and was obviously written by somebody with a tenuous grasp of the English language,” Marter said.
