The affidavit of an FBI special agent, and the Russian documents attached to it, offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a vast Russian network of disinformation.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two Russians — both employees of state broadcaster RT — accused of illegally funnelling $9.7 million into a Tennessee media company.

The unsealed indictment said the founders of the unidentified company — widely reported to be Tenet Media — knew their funding came from “the Russians.” Far-right influencers hired by the company, including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, have said they were unwitting “victims” of the alleged scheme.

The indictment and its associated documents show a side of Russian influence operations people in the West rarely see, said Roman Osadchuk of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington.

Normally, he said, “we’re looking at something that surfaces, the open side of things, like what’s being published on social media. Here we definitely see something from the inside.

“So this was unique.”

The affidavit also reveals the growing sophistication of Russia’s disinformation methods, said Robert English, a Russia expert at the University of Southern California at Annenberg.

“It’s on the cusp of becoming, you know, a really disturbing, distorting actor in global politics,” he said.

WATCH: Canadian influencers allegedly played ‘key’ role in Russian campaign  

Canadian influencers allegedly ‘key’ to Russian election propaganda scheme | Power & Politics

Two Canadians have been caught up in an alleged Russian disinformation campaign that used Canadian and American social media influencers in an attempt to sway the upcoming U.S. election. Power & Politics hears from a Russian foreign interference and disinformation expert.

While the indictment doesn’t name the Tennessee-based outlet, details in the court document match those of Tenet Media, a company founded by Canadian far-right commentator Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan.

The affidavit supports the the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for the seizure of 32 internet domains and includes descriptions of Russian disinformation projects in both their original Russian and in English.

The Department of Justice alleges that the author of at least some of the descriptions is Ilya Gambashidze, founder of two companies — the Social Design Agency and Structura — that worked directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office to create a series of influence campaigns. The Social Design Agency created the content, while Structura focused on dissemination.

Gambashidze’s writings, cited at length in the U.S. Department of Justice documents, reveal a keen understanding of political dynamics in the West, through the eyes of a man looking for pressure points to exploit.

They also show Gambashidze understood something that Russian propagandists have known since Communist times — that it’s a waste of time to try openly to promote Russia’s cause in the West.

When dealing with a U.S. audience, “there is no point in justifying Russia and no one to justify it to,” Gambashidze wrote in a project proposal called “Project Good Old USA,” which was among the supporting documents released by Washington.

A long history of spreading conspiracies

As a former KGB officer, Putin has always appreciated the value of working in the shadows.

“What amazed me most was how one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not,” he wrote in his autobiography.

If he’s comparing the lacklustre performance of the Russian Army in Ukraine to the success of Russia’s internet influencers, he could be forgiven for believing that today more than ever.

The KGB’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections go as far back as 1968. It attempted to popularize the slogan “Reagan means War” in 1980, and in 1985 staged the successful disinformation campaign Operation Denver — the conspiracy theory that HIV was created in a CIA lab.

The FBI alleges that Putin charged one of his most trusted deputies, Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, with shepherding disinformation projects aimed at Germany, France, Mexico, Israel and the U.S. presidential election.

“What’s happened in Canada or the U.S. is already disturbing but not yet critical,” said English. “In Europe, and also everywhere from Qatar to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan in particular, we have seen [the Russians] swing elections. We have seen them turn committee decisions in the European Parliament and other institutions of the European Union. No doubt it has been more effective there.

“And with AI and with ways of multiplying their impact through technology, the future is pretty grim. And that’s not even taking into account the use of deep fakes and fabricated evidence.”

Plans for a ‘guerrilla media campaign’

In his 2022 proposal for a “Guerilla Media Campaign in the U.S.,” cited in the Department of Justice documents, Gambashidze compares the two parties on the American political scene. The department redacted the names but there is no doubt which party is which.

Democrats, he writes, are “far-left globalists who advocate for perversion of traditional moral and religious values, while supporters of the [Republican Party] are normal people whose priority is to preserve traditions of the American way of life.”

In the same document, Gambashidze zeroes in on race.

Democrats, he writes, “are also people of color and supporters of ‘affirmative action’ and ‘reverse discrimination’, i.e. infringement on the rights of the white population of the United States, while [Republicans] are the victims of discrimination by people of color.”

Gambashidze identifies the cost of living as a key pressure point. Americans, he writes, are “suffering from rising prices, primarily for gasoline, historically high inflation and the actual impoverishment of white taxpayers, a significant part of the middle class. Under these circumstances, the recipients of public assistance, unemployed people of color and residents of large cities end up being privileged groups of the population.”

Those white Americans, he adds, “are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream’. It is these sentiments that should be exploited.”

The first goal of the “guerilla media” program, Gambashidze writes, is “to secure victory of the Republican Party candidate” and the top themes to be used in that effort are inflation and “unaffordable prices for food and essential goods … risk of job loss for white Americans” and “privileges for people of color, perverts and the disabled.”

The campaign’s secondary goals, Gambashidze adds, are “to increase the percentage of Americans who believe that the US ‘has been doing way too much to support Ukraine’ to 51%” from 41%, to raise the number who believe the war should be ended soon even if it means Ukraine surrenders territory from 43% to 53%, and to drive [U.S. President Joe] Biden’s approval rating down to 29%.”

But Gambashidze also warns Russian propagandists to take care not to harp too much on Ukraine or Russia-specific matters that could attract attention: “The amount of the highly resonant content and hot topics should not exceed 20 percent of the total volume of all publications.”

Sleepers on the internet

Russia is famous for its use of “illegals” or long-term sleeper agents, a Cold War tradition that continues to this day.

That same tradecraft appears in the Department of Justice indictment and its associated documents. They describe a disinformation scheme — dubbed Operation Doppleganger by the DoJ — that allegedly used sleeper cells of influencers whose job was to quietly generate a following, without flagging themselves as overly political.

One of the documents released by Washington is Gambashidze’s original written proposal for Doppleganger. 

Producers of Doppleganger material would masquerade as regional news groups, he wrote in Russian. Their target audiences would include swing-state voters, voters in a small group of very red states, “U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent, American Jews, Community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan (the ‘backbone’ of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet).”

“The objective,” he continued, “is to create and for at least five months moderately promote news groups in swing states through Facebook, Reddit and X (Twitter) — a total of 18 communities, one community per media outlet in six states: Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

“While in a ‘sleeping’ state, communities attract an audience through targeted advertising, planting, and organic reaches. At the right moment, ‘upon gaining momentum’, these communities become an important instrument of influencing the public opinion in critically important states and portals used by the Russian side to distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.”

Those bogus stories — entirely fake webpages not searchable by Google that mimic websites for legitimate news organization like the Washington Post’s — gave Doppelganger its name.

The goal: spread anxiety and conflict

Doppleganger posts mimicking both U.S. and European media outlets have been appearing online since 2022.

While some of those fake pages have conveyed key Russian messages about Ukraine — such as a phoney Fox News story titled “Sad Outcome and Tragic Finale: Zelensky Loses in War and Diplomacy” — others just sought to generate anxiety and discontent.

Those anxiety-inducing fake posts include one titled “Young Americans Face a Poverty-Stricken Old Age,” about the supposed future collapse of medicare and social security.

It may not seem obvious what benefit Russia derives from scaring U.S. millennials about their retirement prospects, but Russia’s themes always connect back to its objectives.

Gambashidze’s written proposal suggests a fake reader comment that could be appended to a Doppleganger story to sound an isolationist note: “Our country should solve its own problems and let other countries solve their own problems.”

It also pitches a “text factory” that would churn out content linking support for Ukraine with domestic economic pressures for U.S.-based influencers to repeat. Gambashidze’s pitch offers one suggested message for the text factory: “Last night, the House of Representatives approved the allocation of 40 billion dollars to Ukraine, while American families have to do without baby food.”

The message there, said Osadchuk, is that “it’s not your war. Here is problem X,Y and Z and you should be focusing on them instead of helping other countries.”

Taking both sides of an issue

During the Cold War, the nations of the West also aimed propaganda messages at the Soviet Bloc. But there was an important distinction between those messages and Soviet propaganda, at least in theory: Western governments held that it was important that the messages be consistent, because it would undermine their credibility to be seen speaking out of both sides of their mouths.

The Russians don’t appear to care much about consistency. Because their goal is to spark conflict and polarize societies, they are often active on both sides of the most controversial issues.

In the DOJ affadavit, Gambashidze presents a plan for a social media campaign targeting Israeli and American Jews. The stated goal of the campaign, aimed at right-wing Israelis, “is to rip Israel out of the general Western anti-Russian agenda.”

“The right-wingers also want better relations with Russia,” Gambashidze writes, adding that “the current head of Israeli government is considered a ‘friend of Putin.'”

The document proposes to boost the Israeli right. “Influencing the public opinion of Israel will impact the public opinion of Jewish voters in the U.S. prior to the 2024 Presidential Elections,” Gambashidze writes.

WATCH | Russia accused of using influencers to meddle in the 2024 U.S. election

Russia accused of using influencers to meddle in the 2024 U.S. election

Washington has accused Moscow of running a covert propaganda campaign to meddle in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with documents revealing a connection to Canadian far-right influencers Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan.

But at the same time, Russia appears to support some of the loudest anti-Israel voices on social media, such as pro-Putin U.S. influencer Jackson Hinkle, who has spread false negative stories about Ukraine, appeared as a speaker at pro-Russia rallies and is sometimes retweeted by Russian official sources.

The same is true of left and right. While Russian disinformation in North America and Europe currently tends to push right-wing and white supremacist themes, in Africa it pushes anti-colonialist narratives that present the West as an arrogant white exploiter.

Russian disinformation appears equally happy promoting the far-left and the far-right, since the goal is to weaken the centre.

“The idea to make people disrespect, hate and basically not speak to each other from both of the wings,” said Osadchuk. “Basically, making society more polarized, unstable and thus not able to come to some conclusion that would be beneficial for both of the wings for the whole country.”

While Doppelganger is clearly aimed at energizing and radicalizing U.S. Republicans or those leaning Republican, he said, there may be other Russian disinformation programs that seek to push Democrats further to the left. “The whole scope is unknown,” he told CBC News.

English said that closing websites is not a long-term solution, since the same content will soon pop up elsewhere.

“We also just have to inculcate internet hygiene and critical reading and thinking skills. Because there’ll always be one more way to reproduce, to create some new kind of content to get around some technical technological block or some legal obstacle,” he said.

“As long as our people are basically dumb, are being more and more dumbed-down and take things at face value, only read what they like and wallow in all of these websites, Instagram, when their main source of news is Twitter … I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to get a handle on this until we have more intelligent media consumers again.”

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled “Our Changing Planet” to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.

This week:

• How oceans could be used for carbon capture on a big scale
• Dam! Beavers pose a methane problem in the Arctic
• Humidity makes a sweltering apartment that much harder to live in

How oceans could be used for carbon capture on a big scale

Scientists have said we’re poised to overshoot the 1.5 C warming target enshrined in the Paris Agreement, and that in order to return to 1.5 C by 2100, we would need to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Carbon capture from smokestacks or the air, using technology and tree planting, has received a lot of attention and funding. But last week, a few hundred scientists around the world argued that more attention should be paid to carbon capture in the ocean.

“The ocean’s carbon content is 50 times larger than what is in the atmosphere. Its sheer size also means that ocean-based climate solutions can be scaled to significantly mitigate climate risk,” they wrote in a letter posted on the web page of Ocean Visions, a non-profit umbrella group for universities and oceanographic institutions focused on ocean-climate restoration solutions.

The problem? Even scientists know little about the effectiveness, risks or impacts of ocean carbon capture solutions. 

Kate Moran, president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada and a spokesperson for the scientists who wrote the letter, said more information is crucial for making policy decisions about ocean carbon capture.

“We do need to, as a collective community, get behind research needed to understand these issues, and it’s pretty urgent,” she said in an interview from the Canadian Coast Guard ship Tully off the coast of B.C., where she is doing some of that research.

The letter was signed by a number of scientists from the Canadian firm Planetary Technologies, including its chief ocean scientist, Will Burt. Planetary Technologies ran its first ocean tests of its carbon capture technology in Halifax harbour this week (see photo above).

Burt hopes the letter helps the public “build some confidence that what we’re doing is … widely believed scientifically to be worth exploring.”

WATCH | Scientists hope antacid could help relieve climate change

Scientists hope antacid could help relieve climate change

Halifax Harbour is getting a dose of Tums to see if that will help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Paul Withers has the story.

By now, you might be asking, “OK, but what kinds of solutions are we even talking about?” 

They fall into two main categories: biotic and abiotic.

Biotic ocean carbon removal is similar to planting trees on land to absorb CO2, except it involves marine or coastal ecosystems and plants. The carbon they store is called blue carbon, and it can involve:

Seaweed or “macroalgae” such as kelp. The carbon can later be sequestered — for example, by sinking it to the ocean floor. (That’s one of the solutions Moran was researching on the Tully last week.)

Microscopic organisms called microalgae or phytoplankton, encouraged to grow by fertilizing the ocean with nutrients such as iron.

Plants in coastal ecosystems, such as tidal salt marshes, mangrove forests or seagrass meadows. Restoring degraded coastal ecosystems doesn’t just store carbon, it also reduces emissions from sources like erosion.

Abiotic solutions include:

Ocean alkalinity enhancement. This is being tested by Planetary Technologies. It involves adding “antacids” made of rock dust, such as magnesium hydroxide, to the ocean to neutralize dissolved CO2. This converts the CO2 into stable minerals and salts, effectively removing it from the carbon cycle. Like a sponge that’s been squeezed out, the water regains the capacity to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. In the photo above, you can see Dalhousie University researchers taking measurements from a boat after the antacid was added to the water, along with a red dye that helps track how the antacid spreads. Burt says this technology should also reverse ocean acidification that harms coral reefs and shellfish.

Electrochemical ocean carbon dioxide removal. This technology uses electricity to separate seawater into acidic and alkaline solutions. Each of those solutions uses a different method to remove CO2 from seawater (one of them is very similar to ocean alkalinity enhancement). California-based Captura and Montreal-based Deep Sky plan to test this technology in eastern Quebec in 2024.

Planetary Technologies’ Burt said that while reducing emissions is by far the best tool for tackling climate change, “we’re going to need more than that.” 

Ocean carbon capture “could be a really key player.” 

— Emily Chung

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here. 

Check out our radio show and podcast. This week, meet the people doing the dirty work of planting millions of trees, one by one, across Canada. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

Watch the CBC video series Planet Wonder featuring our colleague Johanna Wagstaffe here.

Reader feedback

Gaille Musgrove responded to last week’s story on invasive species: 

“I live north of Toronto in a township called Adjala-Tosorontio. I love it here. Unfortunately, I have invasions of all kinds of plant species that I have never seen before. Something called ground clover (no relation to real clover) has spread all over my property. It choked out my grass and is invading my gardens. We also have something called dog strangling vine, which has pulled down a fence and killed many trees. 

“In the 46 years that we have lived here, we have lost all of our butternut trees, all of our beautiful beech trees and now something is eating our spruce trees. It is very distressful.”

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. 

Have a compelling personal story about climate change you want to share with CBC News? Pitch a First Person column here.

The Big Picture: Beavers pose methane problem in the Arctic

Climate change is helping beavers colonize the Arctic, and those beavers are in turn causing more climate change. A study by Alaskan researchers that looked at aerial and satellite photos of Alaska’s Arctic tundra between 1949 and 2019 (see below) found that dams built by beavers created 11,000 new ponds between 1980 and 2019.

A new study by the same team finds those ponds are releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, accelerating climate change. The methane is produced as vegetation flooded by the dams rots in the absence of oxygen, and as the spreading water thaws the surrounding permafrost. The researchers say this means beavers in the Arctic will initially increase the release of methane, although they don’t know what the long-term impacts will be.

Interestingly, while beavers may be bad for climate change in the North, they’re being recruited to protect against the impacts of wildfires and droughts in places like California. Research shows that areas with beavers are more resilient to wildfire impacts and have more open water during droughts compared to areas without beavers.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Filmmakers have launched a petition calling on Toronto’s International Film Festival to drop sponsorship from RBC, noting it’s one of the world’s biggest financiers of fossil fuels.

• A California high school is offering paid student internships for climate action with the aim of preparing the students for green jobs. Bonus: The students have saved their district $850,000 US on a $2.9-million energy budget.

Humidity makes a sweltering apartment that much harder to live in

On a hot summer day, the air in Sridharan Vankeepuram’s room can be nearly unbearable.

“It feels like a furnace inside,” he said.

His small bedroom — crammed with a single bed and desktop computer — doesn’t get much cooler at night, especially when it’s humid, as is often the case during a Montreal heat wave.

Vankeepuram has spent the past two years in an aging brick building on the western edge of Montreal’s downtown, while completing his MBA at Concordia University. One day in July, Vankeepuram’s room felt like it was 39 C when taking the humidity into account.

To better understand the challenges of living in extreme heat as the climate changes, this summer CBC News installed sensors in 50 homes that were either wholly or partly without air conditioning across five Canadian cities, including Montreal.

(CBC used “heat index” to measure the combination of air temperature and humidity, rather than humidex, a similar index developed in Canada.)

The sensors took temperature and humidity readings every 10 minutes. In some places — particularly in apartments in Toronto, Windsor and Montreal — the humidity made the residences feel much hotter. Winnipeg and Vancouver, which tend to have drier heat, were the other two cities featured in the project.

For half of the 56 days measured, Vankeepuram’s room didn’t drop below 26 C, the threshold considered dangerous for seniors and those with pre-existing conditions if they’re exposed to it for a prolonged period. And Vankeepuram’s room consistently felt even warmer, because of the humidity.

Knowing he would move out after graduating, Vankeepuram didn’t invest in an air conditioner. On the worst days, he took multiple showers or brought a bucket of ice water into his room.

For others, the consequences can be more dire. Humans cool down by sweating, but when the air is saturated with moisture, that doesn’t work as well.

“The more humid it is in the air, the harder it is for that process to occur,” said Prof. Daniel Gagnon, a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute. “We might still produce sweat, but instead of it evaporating, it will drip off onto the floor and then we lose all of its cooling power.”

Gagnon, an associate professor at the school of kinesiology and exercise science at the University of Montreal, reviewed CBC’s data and found it striking that although Montreal escaped the worst of the Canadian summer’s heat, the temperatures inside often felt like more than 30 C with the humidity factored in.

“We need to factor in humidity as well, because a given temperature might be comfortable if it’s very dry, but become very uncomfortable if it’s very humid, and the body’s response to those environments will also be different,” Gagnon said.

Research isn’t conclusive on whether humidity increases the likelihood of mortality in cases of extreme heat, but it nevertheless puts strain on the body. 

During a historic 2018 heat wave, 66 people died in Montreal — and 80 per cent of those people died in their homes.

Gregory Walton, a 51-year-old who lives in an apartment in Windsor, Ont., said nights are especially difficult. In his apartment, the temperature almost never dropped below 26 C during the period CBC monitored and, with the humidity, it felt like nearly 32 C on one particularly muggy day.

Overall, in Montreal, Toronto and Windsor, high rates of relative humidity sometimes added as much as five to seven degrees to how hot a residence felt.

Here are the highest heat index measures our sensors recorded, by city:

• Windsor: 39.

• Montreal: 39.

• Toronto: 38.

• Winnipeg: 37.

• Vancouver: 34.

Climate scientists say hotter, more humid summers are likely in the coming years, as the planet warms, largely because of the burning of fossil fuels.

According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, a humidex in the mid- to high-30s is when the average healthy person should be more careful. Above 40 is considered extremely high and all unnecessary physical activity should be avoided.

Dr. David Kaiser, associate medical director at Montreal Public Health, said over the long term, better urban planning and changes to housing will help bring down the heat — and humidity — indoors.

In the more immediate term, Kaiser said the most at-risk would benefit from having an air conditioner. British Columbia recently announced a $10-million program for free air conditioners for those most vulnerable to the heat.

“I think it’s important from a health perspective that if you have an air conditioner at home and it works, you’re not going to die in a heat wave,” Kaiser said.

— Benjamin Shingler

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