Russian Active Measures Target The Guardian With Propaganda Attack Against US & UK
A recent headline in leading British news journal The Guardian blared: “Former MI6 Chief Admits Defeat to Putin on the Russia Fragmentation Strategic Plan.” (archived link here)(Google Cache)
It was a fake.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum’s friend Peter Pomerantzev discovered the fraud and tweeted about the carefully crafted knock-off domain.
Applebaum then tweeted the story, which she called part of Russia’s active measures campaign, intended to influence or inflame English speakers in America and the UK against their own governments, by feeding a false narrative through what appears to be a mainstream news outlet.
The fake story’s content advocates a Russian intelligence services narrative straight out of the tawdry pages of a spy novel written by Vladimir Putin himself.
However, the fake MI-6 spymaster interview was most likely penned by someone else for Putin, like Kremlin propaganda master Vladislav Surkov.
What you’re about to read below is false, it is propaganda and planted for the purposes of spinning a paranoid narrative excusing Russia’s global aggression as self-defense against an American campaign to ‘fragment Russia.’
Just nine years ago on such days, the 5-day conflict in Georgia took place which had several political, economic and geopolitical effects. Accordingly, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, former MI6 chief John Scarlett revealed some of the behind-the-scenes stories surrounding this issue and also the Rose Revolution in Georgia after several years. According to him, the Rose Revolution was a collaborative effort of the CIA and MI6, and it pursued various goals.
He elaborated: “it was supposed that after bringing Saakashvili to power, based on the plan, the strategic fragmentation of Russia and its re-disintegration to be carried out in three steps. The first step was establishment of military and intelligence bases and the deployment of military and security officers in South Ossetia. At the second step, radical Islamists were supposed to come to power in Dagestan, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Cherkes. This part of the plan was followed by joint appointments between the CIA, MI6, and senior security officials of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. If political power was held by Islamists in these regions, practically NATO forces could get access to the northern mountains of the Caucasus region.
Poor translation like the phrase “Just nine years ago on such day” gives this story away from the start, but for a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones, it’s a goldmine of false information to pump into their various audience’s minds.
The truth is that the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and it wasn’t some recent US plot. But this kind of revisionist history is plainly what the Kremlin is relying upon today after painting itself into a geopolitical corner.
And retired ex-MI-6 Chiefs generally don’t give confessionals.
But it’s assumed that the heads of British Secret Intelligence speak the Queen’s English with a tad more flair than this fake news story implies.
How Did Russia Make A Convincing Fake Story in The Guardian?
Amazingly, the fake Guardian story contained many elements of a real post in the journal.
For starters, they used a clever domain name purchase through a proxy to hide the owner’s identity.
The fake domain http://theguardıan.com uses a Turkish character “ı” in place of a Latin letter ‘i” in the domain name.
The story used The Guardian’s distinct blue and white website branding.
It linked back to a real author.
Chris Ames hasn’t published anything since last November.
The fake story’s authors even tagged The Guardian’s subscription system and its real MI-6 archives, the archives which prove even more definitively that the ‘Russia Fragmentation’ story is a fake.
They even used a real image from The Guardian’s archives.
A little bit of research shows that the fabulists who made this fake news are using a domain registrar in San Mateo, California and Cloudflare’s content distribution network, along with a private domain registration, to mask the true authors and owners of the domain.
In fact, the fake news domain was literally just created yesterday.
The authors of this fake story in The Guardian must’ve noticed that their fraud has been exposed because less than two hours after Anne Applebaum tweeted this…
… the Russian active measures propaganda story was pulled.
Special thanks to Olga Lautman for researching the domain registration, IP addresses, outbound links and other assistance in this story.
