The Pizzagate playbook: Same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories. Pizza anyone?

This is an anti-Islam protest outside a mosque in the heart of downtown.

And literally across the street, a counter rally.

But not a single person here, on either side of the street realises they've been duped.

They've been brought here, same place, same time, by 2 separate Facebook events.

Posts which we now know both came from the same source, thousands of miles outside Texas, in Russia.

Cold war style active measures in the American heartland in 2016.

The same techniques, the same origin, even the same perpetrators.

When the Soviet Union fell In 1991, pretty much everyone assumed that its disinformation apparatus died too.

Our government's view was problem solved.

No more active measures, no more disinformation.

It also meant the end of Vladimir Putin's KGB career.

But within a decade, he was back, first as head of the renamed KGB, the FSB, and not long after, as the president.

He spent years in the KGB being evaluated every year according to the active measures and disinformation he produced.

As soon as he took office, Putin got right to work.

His first few years were spent testing disinformation inside Russia on Russians.

But then he took it overseas, launching Russia Today, a global English language news channel.

It was soon available in millions of American homes with a memorable slogan and familiar faces.

Conflicts with Georgia and then the Ukraine gave Putin a chance to practice disinformation on a bigger stage.

And he also started funding something called the Internet Research Agency, slowly putting his pieces into place.

But Putin isn't sowing all this chaos just for fun.

See, in terms of population and GDP, Russia is actually a pretty small country, especially when compared to a unified Western world.

But Putin knows that if he can pit the West against itself and break up our alliances, Russia is suddenly much more powerful and can take on other countries 1 by 1.

He's trying to reshape the world order in his favor, and disinformation is 1 of his favorite tools.

Now to do this, he's using a carefully crafted game plan, a playbook of sorts, that he deploys again and again.

That playbook is designed to achieve a change in the behavior, perception, and viewpoints of foreign audiences and governments.

Both Todd Leventhal and Kathleen Bailey fought Moscow's disinformation more than 30 years ago for the US government.

And if you thought convincing millions of people that the US government created AIDS as a biological weapon was audacious, wait till you see what they're up to today.

But first, we need to take a super quick timeout here because there's an awkward question you might be asking yourself.

Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?

Yes, America is no stranger to interfering in other countries.

The US has attempted to influence elections around the world for years.

But when it comes to disinformation, Russia is in a class by itself with unmatched scale and sophistication.

And unlike the US with its myriad of investigations, Russia does it without even a shred of public or historical accountability.

We must never allow the end to justify the means.

The 1 about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor?

It was everywhere just a few weeks before the 2016 election, and even inspired a believer to turn up at the restaurant with a gun.

A shooting in a DC pizza restaurant that was tied to a fake news story.

But that whole story was a classic Soviet-style con, straight out of the playbook.

Look, there's the playbook, and it's been a playbook that's been around for a very long time.

And so they're using that toolbox in order to try and get what they want.

So it's a textbook thing that they've known about for 20, 30 years and actually taught as part of their tradecraft.

So this textbook, toolbox, playbook thing, whatever you want to call it, the experts we spoke to kept talking about it on these terms.

Ed Lucas has studied Russia for decades, first as a journalist and now as a disinformation analyst.

Claire Wardle is an authority on internet verification at Harvard.

She's been tracking online lies since 2008.

And this is Clint Watts, former FBI and military.

He's been shouting from the rooftops about disinformation for years.

With the help of our experts, not to mention our spies and our detectives, we've reverse-engineered the 7 commandments of Russian disinformation.

A time-tested, step-by-step recipe to creating the perfect fake news story.

So, rule number 1, look for cracks in the target society, social divisions you can exploit and wedge open.

They look for economic, social, demographic, linguistic, regional, ethnic, any sort of division.

And how can we actually emphasize those divisions and actually make people lose trust in 1 another?

Oh, he's got a bad knee, he's got a sore hip, He's got a disease that causes weakness here.

But instead of trying to make it better, we try to make everything worse.

Something so outrageous, no 1 could possibly believe it was made up.

Also so egregious that if they could get people to believe it, it would be totally damning.

Rule number 3, wrap that line around a kernel of truth.

Propaganda is most effective when there's a little bit of truth in it.

The most successful operations of that kind contain some truthful element so that the disinformation is eventually accepted as a whole.

Conceal your hand, making it seem like the story came from somewhere else.

Useful idiots are essentially people they would identify who unwittingly will take the Kremlin's message and push it into the target audience, the foreign population they want to reach.

They were idiots in that they didn't see what was obvious and they were very useful.

And what happens when those pesky truth-seekers try and debunk your fake story?

They will bluster their way out of things because they've realised that our attention span is quite short.

And finally, and this is a really important 1, play the long game.

Russia's willing to play a long game and put large resources into things that may not bear fruit for many years to

The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact.

And if you think about it as a drip on a rock, today the drip doesn't have any impact.

If that drip hits for a long period of time, years, there will be a hole in the rock.

These 7 simple rules were a powerful weapon for the KGB and they applied them again and again and again.

But then something came along which changed the game entirely.

The internet has brought anonymity, ubiquity and immediacy in combinations that we didn't have in the era of telex machines and shortwave radio and rotary printing presses.

During the time of my involvement, 1 operation can reach maybe

people if the paper had a nice circulation.

And with the internet's help, Russia has scored some big wins.

The explosion at the Louisiana chemical plant that was caused by ISIS.

The deadly phosphorus leak in American Falls, Idaho, and the list goes on and on.

There's the claim MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets, the thousands of Americans who supposedly petitioned to return Alaska to Russia, there's the Queen warning of a third world war, the Syrian massacre that never happened, Sweden adopting the Islamic State flag, a made up attack on a US Air Force base, Roy Moore, Brexit, immigration, and in stories that will sound eerily familiar, there's the claims the US was behind the Ebola outbreak and the Zika virus.

From Black Lives Matter to the gun lobby, wherever there's been a division in society, Russia has used disinformation to pry it open, sowing chaos across the political spectrum.

And now that you know the rules of the playbook, you can see how effective a weapon it really is.

To understand what really happened here, we need to go back to March 19th, 2016, and just here, actually, Washington, D.C.

This is the time and the place where hackers got into the Gmail account of Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

So the Podesta emails were the information that powered the Pizzagate conspiracy.

And you can guess who was behind the hacking of

They're tied to the Russian intelligence services.

In fact, we now know the hacker worked directly for the GRU, Russia's CIA.

The divisive 2016 election was the perfect crack to wedge open with disinformation, and, well, the lies don't get much bigger than a presidential candidate running a child's sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor.

The playbook says you should mix little bits of truth into your lie, and John Podesta's emails provided loads of factual details to weave into the story.

Comet Pizzas are real place, and there were emails between Podesta and the restaurant's owner.

Rule 4 says you need a way to conceal your hand.

additional emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

Using Wikileaks was a genius idea, helping to keep its hackers in the shadows.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to push the story with fringe social media accounts, all run from the Internet Research Agency.

Over 50, 000 accounts communicating automatically in a synchronization we've never seen in the history of social media.

Meanwhile there were no shortage of useful idiots who were duped into backing up the lie.

Now the story should be laughably easy to debunk.

For a start, the pizza restaurant in question doesn't even have a basement.

So when intelligence exposed Russia's WikiLeaks connection, WikiLeaks and RT knew exactly what to do.

We can say that the Russian government is not the source.

Despite there being no evidence to prove this.

Isn't it nice to have your own TV channel?

If I had to rewrite RT's slogan, it'd be question more, answer less.

of their coverage is actually excellent coverage.

And because 80% of the time they're doing quality journalism, when 20% of the time they're not, then it enables people to say, well, no, look at this, we are journalists, we have policies, we know what we're doing.

With Days to go before the election, the story had taken on a life of its own, the magnificent long game beginning to pay off.

That said, even Russia couldn't have imagined what came next.

1 story took 6 years to take hold, the other barely 6 months.

But they both share the same DNA, the same unmistakable trace of active measures and the same goal, to shift the world's balance of power by turning Western countries on themselves.

We're at war and we've got absolutely no idea.

And we're facing a sophisticated weapon designed to bring down democracies from the inside, just as the KGB envisioned all those years ago.

Fighting war on a battlefield is the most stupid and primitive way of fighting a war.

The highest art of warfare is not to fight at all, but to subvert anything of value in your enemy's country.

Put white against black, old against young, I don't know, wealth against poor, and so on.

As long as it disturbs society, as long as it cuts the moral fiber of a nation, it's good.

With an assault rifle targeting a Washington DC spot.

And then you just take this country, when everything is subverted, when the country is disoriented and confused, when it is demoralized and then destabilized, Then the crisis will come.


Speaker 0: May 21st, 2016 in Houston, Texas. This is an anti-Islam protest outside a mosque in the heart of downtown. And literally across the street, a counter rally. But not a single person here, on either side of the street realises they've been duped. They've been brought here, same place, same time, by 2 separate Facebook events.

Posts which we now know both came from the same source, thousands of miles outside Texas, in Russia. Cold war style active measures in the American heartland in 2016. The same techniques, the same origin, even the same perpetrators. When the Soviet Union fell In 1991, pretty much everyone assumed that its disinformation apparatus died too.

Speaker 1: Our government's view was problem solved. No more active measures, no more disinformation.

Speaker 0: It also meant the end of Vladimir Putin's KGB career. But within a decade, he was back, first as head of the renamed KGB, the FSB, and not long after, as the president.

Speaker 2: Putin is a child of the KGB. He spent years in the KGB being evaluated every year according to the active measures and disinformation he produced.

Speaker 0: As soon as he took office, Putin got right to work. His first few years were spent testing disinformation inside Russia on Russians. But then he took it overseas, launching Russia Today, a global English language news channel. It was soon available in millions of American homes with a memorable slogan and familiar faces.

Speaker 3: I've been reading about it.

Speaker 0: Conflicts with Georgia and then the Ukraine gave Putin a chance to practice disinformation on a bigger stage. And he also started funding something called the Internet Research Agency, slowly putting his pieces into place. But Putin isn't sowing all this chaos just for fun. All along, he's had a single goal. See, in terms of population and GDP, Russia is actually a pretty small country, especially when compared to a unified Western world.

But Putin knows that if he can pit the West against itself and break up our alliances, Russia is suddenly much more powerful and can take on other countries 1 by 1. He's trying to reshape the world order in his favor, and disinformation is 1 of his favorite tools. Now to do this, he's using a carefully crafted game plan, a playbook of sorts, that he deploys again and again.

Speaker 1: It's magnificent in its conception.

Speaker 4: That playbook is designed to achieve a change in the behavior, perception, and viewpoints of foreign audiences and governments.

Speaker 0: Both Todd Leventhal and Kathleen Bailey fought Moscow's disinformation more than 30 years ago for the US government.

Speaker 4: They are good.

Speaker 0: And if you thought convincing millions of people that the US government created AIDS as a biological weapon was audacious, wait till you see what they're up to today. But first, we need to take a super quick timeout here because there's an awkward question you might be asking yourself.

Speaker 4: Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?

Speaker 0: Mmm, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. Yes, America is no stranger to interfering in other countries.

Speaker 5: The US has attempted to influence elections around the world for years.

Speaker 0: But when it comes to disinformation, Russia is in a class by itself with unmatched scale and sophistication. And unlike the US with its myriad of investigations, Russia does it without even a shred of public or historical accountability.

Speaker 6: We must never allow the end to justify the means.

Speaker 0: Okay, time in. Now, do you remember Pizzagate? The 1 about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor? It was everywhere just a few weeks before the 2016 election, and even inspired a believer to turn up at the restaurant with a gun.

Speaker 6: A shooting in a DC pizza restaurant that was tied to a fake news story.

Speaker 0: But that whole story was a classic Soviet-style con, straight out of the playbook.

Speaker 5: Look, there's the playbook, and it's been a playbook that's been around for a very long time.

Speaker 7: And so they're using that toolbox in order to try and get what they want.

Speaker 8: So it's a textbook thing that they've known about for 20, 30 years and actually taught as part of their tradecraft.

Speaker 0: So this textbook, toolbox, playbook thing, whatever you want to call it, the experts we spoke to kept talking about it on these terms. Ed Lucas has studied Russia for decades, first as a journalist and now as a disinformation analyst. Dr. Claire Wardle is an authority on internet verification at Harvard. She's been tracking online lies since 2008.

And this is Clint Watts, former FBI and military. He's been shouting from the rooftops about disinformation for years. With the help of our experts, not to mention our spies and our detectives, we've reverse-engineered the 7 commandments of Russian disinformation. A time-tested, step-by-step recipe to creating the perfect fake news story. So, rule number 1, look for cracks in the target society, social divisions you can exploit and wedge open.

Speaker 7: They look for economic, social, demographic, linguistic, regional, ethnic, any sort of division.

Speaker 5: And how can we actually emphasize those divisions and actually make people lose trust in 1 another?

Speaker 1: So it's like being a doctor. You have to understand a patient. Oh, he's got a bad knee, he's got a sore hip, He's got a disease that causes weakness here. But instead of trying to make it better, we try to make everything worse.

Speaker 0: Rule 2, create a big, bold lie. Something so outrageous, no 1 could possibly believe it was made up.

Speaker 4: Also so egregious that if they could get people to believe it, it would be totally damning.

Speaker 0: Rule number 3, wrap that line around a kernel of truth.

Speaker 7: Propaganda is most effective when there's a little bit of truth in it.

Speaker 2: The most successful operations of that kind contain some truthful element so that the disinformation is eventually accepted as a whole.

Speaker 0: Rule 4. Conceal your hand, making it seem like the story came from somewhere else. Yourself a useful idiot.

Speaker 8: Useful idiots are essentially people they would identify who unwittingly will take the Kremlin's message and push it into the target audience, the foreign population they want to reach.

Speaker 1: They were idiots in that they didn't see what was obvious and they were very useful.

Speaker 0: And what happens when those pesky truth-seekers try and debunk your fake story? Well, rule 6, as you covered.

Speaker 2: Deny, deny, deny. You know, the truth is obvious. Deny, deny, deny.

Speaker 7: They will bluster their way out of things because they've realised that our attention span is quite short.

Speaker 0: And finally, and this is a really important 1, play the long game.

Speaker 7: Russia's willing to play a long game and put large resources into things that may not bear fruit for many years to

Speaker 2: come. The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact.

Speaker 4: And if you think about it as a drip on a rock, today the drip doesn't have any impact. If that drip hits for a long period of time, years, there will be a hole in the rock. And they know that.

Speaker 0: These 7 simple rules were a powerful weapon for the KGB and they applied them again and again and again. But then something came along which changed the game entirely.

Speaker 7: The internet has brought anonymity, ubiquity and immediacy in combinations that we didn't have in the era of telex machines and shortwave radio and rotary printing presses.

Speaker 2: During the time of my involvement, 1 operation can reach maybe

Speaker 0: 100, 000

Speaker 2: people if the paper had a nice circulation. Now that's ridiculous.

Speaker 0: And with the internet's help, Russia has scored some big wins. The explosion at the Louisiana chemical plant that was caused by ISIS. The deadly phosphorus leak in American Falls, Idaho, and the list goes on and on. There's the claim MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets, the thousands of Americans who supposedly petitioned to return Alaska to Russia, there's the Queen warning of a third world war, the Syrian massacre that never happened, Sweden adopting the Islamic State flag, a made up attack on a US Air Force base, Roy Moore, Brexit, immigration, and in stories that will sound eerily familiar, there's the claims the US was behind the Ebola outbreak and the Zika virus. From Black Lives Matter to the gun lobby, wherever there's been a division in society, Russia has used disinformation to pry it open, sowing chaos across the political spectrum.

And now that you know the rules of the playbook, you can see how effective a weapon it really is. Pizza, anyone? To understand what really happened here, we need to go back to March 19th, 2016, and just here, actually, Washington, D.C. This is the time and the place where hackers got into the Gmail account of Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

Speaker 8: So the Podesta emails were the information that powered the Pizzagate conspiracy.

Speaker 0: And you can guess who was behind the hacking of

Speaker 8: those emails. They're tied to the Russian intelligence services.

Speaker 0: Big surprise. In fact, we now know the hacker worked directly for the GRU, Russia's CIA. The divisive 2016 election was the perfect crack to wedge open with disinformation, and, well, the lies don't get much bigger than a presidential candidate running a child's sex ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. The playbook says you should mix little bits of truth into your lie, and John Podesta's emails provided loads of factual details to weave into the story. Comet Pizzas are real place, and there were emails between Podesta and the restaurant's owner.

Rule 4 says you need a way to conceal your hand. Well, 6 months later...

Speaker 6: WikiLeaks posted more than

Speaker 0: 2, 000

Speaker 6: additional emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

Speaker 0: Using Wikileaks was a genius idea, helping to keep its hackers in the shadows. Meanwhile, Russia continues to push the story with fringe social media accounts, all run from the Internet Research Agency.

Speaker 8: Over 50, 000 accounts communicating automatically in a synchronization we've never seen in the history of social media.

Speaker 0: Meanwhile there were no shortage of useful idiots who were duped into backing up the lie.

Speaker 9: The pizza gate is real. The question is how real is it? What is it? Something's going on. Something's being covered up.

Speaker 0: Now the story should be laughably easy to debunk. For a start, the pizza restaurant in question doesn't even have a basement. But there's a rule for that.

Speaker 2: Deny, deny, deny.

Speaker 0: So when intelligence exposed Russia's WikiLeaks connection, WikiLeaks and RT knew exactly what to do. We can say that the Russian government is not the source.

Speaker 5: Despite there being no evidence to prove this.

Speaker 0: Isn't it nice to have your own TV channel?

Speaker 8: If I had to rewrite RT's slogan, it'd be question more, answer less.

Speaker 0: 80%

Speaker 5: of their coverage is actually excellent coverage. And because 80% of the time they're doing quality journalism, when 20% of the time they're not, then it enables people to say, well, no, look at this, we are journalists, we have policies, we know what we're doing.

Speaker 0: With Days to go before the election, the story had taken on a life of its own, the magnificent long game beginning to pay off. That said, even Russia couldn't have imagined what came next.

Speaker 6: A shooting in a DC pizza restaurant.

Speaker 0: 2 insane lies, 30 years apart. 1 story took 6 years to take hold, the other barely 6 months. But they both share the same DNA, the same unmistakable trace of active measures and the same goal, to shift the world's balance of power by turning Western countries on themselves. We're at war and we've got absolutely no idea.

Speaker 6: Those were Russians. They were not Russians. I don't go with the Russians.

Speaker 0: And we're facing a sophisticated weapon designed to bring down democracies from the inside, just as the KGB envisioned all those years ago.

Speaker 3: Fighting war on a battlefield is the most stupid and primitive way of fighting a war. The highest art of warfare is not to fight at all, but to subvert anything of value in your enemy's country. Anything. Put white against black, old against young, I don't know, wealth against poor, and so on. Doesn't matter.

As long as it disturbs society, as long as it cuts the moral fiber of a nation, it's good.

Speaker 2: The virus that causes AIDS, leak.

Speaker 4: With an assault rifle targeting a Washington DC spot.

Speaker 3: And then you just take this country, when everything is subverted, when the country is disoriented and confused, when it is demoralized and then destabilized, Then the crisis will come.

Speaker 0: You

See all By Adam B. Ellick, Adam Westbrook and Jonah M. Kessel transcripts on Nytimes

The Seven Commandments of Fake News