Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 35

Sometimes knowledge can be a barrier to starting something new.

My very ignorance of how things worked at State actually helped me launch something we hadn’t done before.

I had looked around the department and I didn’t see any entity that could push back against all the Russian propaganda and disinformation surrounding Crimea and Ukraine. The European bureau was reticent—messaging of any kind was just not what they did.

There was one large, wonderful exception to State’s social media passivity: Geoff Pyatt, our ambassador to Ukraine. Geoff was all over social media: he was tweeting dozens of times a day, not only his own strong anti-Russian tweets but also regularly retweeting the reports of journalists and observers who were calling out Russia for its actions. Pyatt didn’t think Russian lies should go unchallenged.

I had a number of conversations with Pyatt, and he encouraged me to do something. I decided to call a meeting with representatives from EUR, PA, PD, and the spokesperson’s office to discuss the idea of starting an internal counter-Russian messaging hub. Actually, I didn’t quite say that. I said we were going to meet to discuss what could be done about Russian propaganda.

We had the meeting in the big conference room adjacent to my office. I had planned on opening with a discussion of the hub idea, but we happened to have a young public affairs officer from Kiev who was visiting. I thought it might be interesting to hear from him first. He was a burly, bearded, Russian-speaking foreign service officer who had been in Kiev for the past year. Before that, he had spent two years in Moscow. Like so many of the people serving in Ukraine, he was passionate about what he had seen.

“The Russians,” he said, “have a big engine. They are working overtime on building a compelling narrative—a narrative that undermines democracy in Ukraine. They say the same things day in and day out. These are the three big lies they repeat again and again: