I went down a crazy rabbit hole yesterday and I’m not even sure anymore how I got there. I think it started out with me reading an editorial piece at the Washington Examiner that argued that Fani Willis’s indictments are “the biggest threat to democracy yet.” The editorial board was particularly incensed that former Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer was charged, and that caused me to go back to the Brookings Institute’s excellent November 2002 report on the Willis investigation. While I was there, I was sidetracked by their account of the “ItalyGate” conspiracy theory.

…the basic premise of this conspiracy theory promoted by Trump’s team is that “people connected to the Italian defense firm Leonardo used satellites to change the votes cast in the 2020 election from Trump to Biden.” An individual named Bradley Johnson, claiming to be a retired CIA officer, recorded and posted a video in December 2020 advancing a version of the claim.

That led me to Mr. Johnson’s LinkedIn page where I learned that he’s set up a think tank called Americans for Intelligence Reform. I quickly discovered that this organization has basically no money and doesn’t exist in any true sense of the term. But I found at least one other person who claimed to have a connection to it. That was man named Christopher Hull who works at the Institute of World Politics, an extremely dubious right-wing graduate program in Washington, DC set up by hardline anti-Soviet Republicans during the late stages of the Cold War. The following is from a May 23, 2022 IWP press release.

This spring, Dr. Christopher C. Hull is joining IWP as a public affairs consultant. In this role, Dr. Hull will lead IWP’s branding and marketing campaign. Dr. Hull had already been serving on the IWP faculty to teach International Relations, Statecraft, and Integrated Strategy (IWP 627). He has also taught a directed study on Europe and International Institutions for IWP’s doctoral program.
Dr. Hull brings more than 25 years of experience in politics, public policy, and government relations to IWP. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Americans for Intelligence Reform.

So now I was off on a mission to understand the IWP. Why are they employing a person who has a strange and tight connection to Bradley Johnson? I soon learned at Wikipedia that Sebastian Gorka is listed as former faculty. Confirmation of that is tricky, but I have some Instagram evidence and IWP does host a bio page for him. Like I said, this became a rabbit hole.

I began looking into John Lenczowski, the founder of the IWP and Ronald Reagan’s Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States National Security Council. From there, I discovered an extraordinary June 2012 paper from the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University (where Gorka definitely taught classes). The paper explores the role and history of a little known interagency organization from the Reagan years called the Active Measures Working Group. It was set up to track and counter Soviet disinformation, and was originally inspired by the Soviet’s campaign to convince the world that America created AIDS and released it as a bioweapon.

In 1983, the Patriot, a pro-Soviet Indian paper that often published pieces provided by KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) agents, released a story claiming that the U.S. military created the AIDS virus and released it as a weapon. For a couple of years, the story appeared in minor publications that were mostly KGB controlled or sympathetic to the Soviets. After this incubation period, the slander was picked up in 1985 by the official Soviet cultural weekly newspaper, the Literaturnaya Gazeta. After that, the story began to spread rapidly. In 1987 alone, it appeared over 40 times in the Soviet-controlled press and was reprinted or rebroadcast in over 80 countries in 30 languages.1 The AIDS virus was ter- rifying and not well understood at the time, so this piece of Soviet disinformation was especially damaging to the U.S. image.

I was struck by the Indian source of the AIDS story because a shady outlet called GreatGameIndia was responsible for promoting the ItalyGate story, including this piece from January 4, 2021. While I was chasing that down I encountered other disturbing misinformation outlets like Stillness in the Storm. Seriously, read their About Us page and consider that they’re in the Top 10 Google results for the ItalyGate story. I began to see how one can get sucked into something like QAnon. Did I mention that The Institute of World Politics awarded QAnon-linked Michael Flynn an “honorary doctorate of laws”?

And, of course, Michael Flynn used to head the Defense Intelligence Agency before Obama fired him and he went running to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s dinner table.

My digressions have digressions at this point, but that’s kind of my point. It can be very hard to get to the truth of the matter. Why are so many Americans seemingly immune to truthful reporting about Donald Trump’s character and crimes? I know the answer is in here somewhere, involving as it does veterans of the Cold War misinformation wars who have turned from hardline anti-Soviets into Putinphiles and Neo-fascists.

But it’s all a hall of mirrors. In the end, it results in things like the Washington Examiner writing that holding Trump accountable for an undemocratic coup attempt is the biggest threat to democracy yet. But the process by which this happened and the organizers behind it are networked in opaque and dizzying ways.