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During his two years as president, Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, to undertake a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media to turn Chinese public opinion against its own government.
The discovery is made by 3 former senior officials with knowledge of the highly classified operation.
They tell the Reuters news agency that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used false identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government, while also leaking derogatory intelligence to various media overseas.
The effort, which started in 2019, was not reported earlier and was strongly condemned by China. The news about the CIA initiative shows how the US government uses spaces of public opinion and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.
Over the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global influence through military, trade and business deals with developed countries. The sources told Reuters that the CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding dirty money overseas and allegations that Beijing's "One Belt, One Road" initiative, which finances infrastructure projects around the world, was corrupt and wasteful.
Although US officials refuse to provide specific details about the operations, they say the denigrating narrative was based on facts, albeit secretly produced by CIA agents.
The efforts inside China were aimed at stoking paranoia among senior leaders there, forcing the government to expand resources to hunt down potential spies on the regime's tightly controlled Internet. "We wanted them to chase ghosts," said one of the former officials.
Chelsea Robinson, a spokeswoman for the CIA, declined to comment on the existence of the influence program, its goals or impacts, Reuters writes.
A spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said news of the CIA initiative shows that the US government uses "public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion".
The CIA operation came in response to years of China's aggressive covert efforts aimed at increasing its global influence, the sources said.
During his presidency, Trump made a tougher response to China than his predecessors. The CIA campaign signaled a return to the methods that marked Washington's war with the former Soviet Union. "The Cold War is back," said Tim Weiner, author of a book on the history of political warfare.
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