American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show
Russian documents reviewed by The Post expose the workings of a Moscow network that has become a potent source of fake news targeting American voters.
John Mark Dougan poses for a portrait in a park near Moscow in 2016. (Olga Leonova)
By Catherine Belton
October 23, 2024 at 5:34 p.m. EDT
A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video.
Dougan’s liaison at the GRU is a senior figure in Russian military intelligence working under the cover name Yury Khoroshevsky, the documents show. The officer’s real name is Yury Khoroshenky, though he is referred to only as Khoroshevsky in the documents, and he serves in the GRU’s Unit 29155, which oversees sabotage, political interference operations and cyberwarfare targeting the West, according to two European security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The more than 150 documents — which were shared with The Post to demonstrate the extent of Russian interference through Dougan and focus mostly on the period between March 2021 and August 2024 — for the first time expose some of the inner workings of a network that researchers and intelligence officials say has become the most potent source of fake news emanating from Russia and targeting American voters over the past year.
Disinformation researchers say Dougan’s network was probably behind a recent viral fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday was created by Russia. It received nearly 5 million views on X in less than 24 hours, Microsoft said.
Since September 2023, posts, articles and videos generated by Dougan and some of the Russians who work with him have garnered 64 million views, said McKenzie Sadeghi, who has closely followed Dougan’s sites and is a researcher at NewsGuard, a company that tracks disinformation online.
“Compared with other Russian disinformation campaigns, Dougan has a clear understanding of what would resonate with Western audiences and the political atmosphere, which I think has made this more effective,” Sadeghi said.
The documents show that Dougan is also subsidized and directed by a Moscow institute founded by Alexander Dugin, a far-right imperialist ideologue sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” because of his influence on the revanchist thinking of the Russian president; Dugin’s ideas became a driving force behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One 2022 document shows that Dugin’s Eurasia movement, which promotes his theories of a Russian empire, “actively cooperates with the Russian Defense Ministry.”
Dougan’s contact at the Moscow institute, the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, is its head, Valery Korovin. According to Korovin’s social media page on the Russian version of Facebook, he was awarded a medal by President Vladimir Putin in 2023 for “services to the Fatherland” for “carrying out special tasks.” Korovin also works closely with Khoroshenky, who under his cover name serves as the institute’s deputy director, the documents show.
The documents show payments directly from Khoroshenky to Dougan’s bank account in Moscow starting in April 2022 and frequent meetings between Khoroshenky, Dougan and Korovin.
“We will not be beaten,” Khoroshenky said in one discussion with Korovin, according to the documents, after a new server was launched this summer allowing Dougan to add to the myriad sites he’d already created and to restart one of the domains that had been blocked.
Dougan is responsible for content on dozens of fake news sites with names such as DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle and Atlanta Observer, according to the documents and disinformation researchers. In the months that followed his reboot with the new GRU-facilitated server and AI generator, the sites and fake news videos spread by Dougan and his associates have produced some of the most viral Russian disinformation targeting Harris, according to Microsoft and NewsGuard, including a deepfake audio in August that purported to show Barack Obama implying that the Democrats had ordered the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Most recently, Dougan was the initial source for a false claim behind the viral fake video that alleged Walz abused a student at the high school where he taught, and NewsGuard believes Dougan’s network may be behind its further dissemination. Eleven days before a video appeared with what NewsGuard says was probably an AI-generated persona claiming to be a former Walz student, Dougan appeared on a podcast making a similar but separate false claim, presenting an anonymous man claiming to be a former exchange student from Kazakhstan.
Other Kremlin-directed efforts to sway the U.S. presidential election have included the Doppelgänger campaign run by Kremlin political strategists that was recently targeted by the Department of Justice for its cloning of legitimate news outlets, including Fox News and The Post — a Russian operation about which The Post had previously reported. The Justice Department has also accused RT, the Russian state media outlet, of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to American social media influencers to parrot Kremlin talking points.
In a telephone interview with The Post, Dougan denied being behind sites such as DC Weekly, and he said he didn’t know Korovin or Khoroshenky or have any connections with Russian military intelligence or the Russian government.
Dougan insisted he operated independently and said that “no one sends me money for anything.” He later claimed he worked as an IT consultant for an American company and said the documents The Post referred to must have been fabricated.
“I will tell you hypothetically, if they were my sites,” he said, “then I am merely fighting fire with fire because the West is f------ lying about everything that’s happening. They are lying about everything.”
Korovin said he was an academic who was interested only in thoughts, ideas and philosophy, adding that the claims related to the documents appear to represent “a collection of accidentally combined moments of information taken from who knows where, most of which seem absurd and ridiculous” and many of which he said he was “hearing for the first time.”
Dugin said, “Any suggestion about our supposed affiliation with the GRU or to any attempts to manipulate foreign journalists or influence the political landscape in the U.S. are completely unjustified.” He said his Eurasian movement did not participate in any official partnerships with Russian government organizations, including the Defense Ministry.
Khoroshenky did not respond to requests for comment.
A portable security tower of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office stands at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on April 1, 2023, in Palm Beach, Florida. (Alex Wong/Getty Images
Outlandish claims
Dougan’s use of websites to attack perceived enemies stretches back to his time in law enforcement in the United States. He said he clashed with people in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office after he complained about abuses by a sergeant in his unit who boasted on Facebook about beating people he arrested.
Dougan had worked at the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach from 2005 to 2008 and faced 11 internal affairs investigations before he left, according to the Palm Beach Post. A jury also awarded a fellow Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy $275,000 after it found that Dougan had pepper-sprayed and arrested the officer without cause. Dougan claimed the internal affairs investigations were a result of his blowing the whistle on the sergeant’s alleged assaults.
After Dougan resigned his post in Palm Beach, he moved to Maine, where he was soon dismissed from a police department over complaints alleging sexual harassment, officials in Maine said.
In the Marine Corps, he also had a checkered career. Dougan served from May 1996 to July 1998, an abbreviated stint as most Marines serve at least four years. He also left as a lance corporal, a rank most Marines attain after just a few months, and he never deployed, according to the Pentagon, which wouldn’t characterize his discharge status, citing privacy concerns. Dougan’s rank as he was discharged and the date at which he became a lance corporal, in April 1998, nearly two years into his time in uniform, are “indicative of the fact that the character of his service was incongruent with the Marine Corps’ expectations and standards,” said Yvonne Carlock, a service spokeswoman.
After returning to Florida from Maine, Dougan created PBSOTalk, a site he said he intended as a place to air complaints by other deputies about the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office but which soon became home to corruption allegations and smears involving his former superiors.
In 2016, Dougan posted confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges on PBSOTalk, prompting the FBI and local police to search Dougan’s home. The next year, he was indicted on 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping.
By then he had fled to Moscow, a city he said he had visited several times before after establishing an online relationship with a Russian woman. It’s not clear how Dougan first came to the attention of Russia’s propagandists, but some of the skills he honed in Florida are a hallmark of his work in Moscow, researchers say — using an online authentic gloss to make outlandish claims.
As early as June 2019 — more than two years before the invasion of Ukraine — Korovin had proposed in a letter to Russia’s Ministry of Defense that his center organize “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.”
“The possibilities posed by internet wars really are limitless, and only with their help can we assert complete strategic parity with our geopolitical opponents,” Korovin wrote in the letter, which was part of the trove of documents reviewed by The Post. Dugin, the Russian ideologue who is Korovin’s boss, had earlier called for “geopolitical war with America … to weaken, demoralize, deceive and, in the end, beat our opponent to the maximum,” the documents show.
Dozens of the documents show that Korovin’s center has worked closely with a string of “independent” foreign journalists who have wound up in Moscow, and it paid some of them, including Dougan. In March 2021, Korovin said he and Dougan were “one team” and that Korovin would provide as much support as possible, one of the documents shows. All the while, Khoroshenky sent instructions to Korovin outlining tasks for Dougan and other reporters’ coverage of the war in Ukraine. In one example, Khoroshenky demanded the journalists, including Dougan, publish “within one hour” reports stating that Russian troops had killed foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, the documents show. “Then we will give bonuses to everyone,” he said.
Korovin and the GRU’s Khoroshenky ostensibly supported Dougan as he sought to parlay the political asylum he won in Russia in 2017 into Russian citizenship, while pointing out that since he was wanted in the United States, Dougan had few other options, the documents show. The process continued until summer 2023, when Dougan finally obtained citizenship; at one point a frustrated Dougan said he was on the verge of going to the Chinese embassy to seek Beijing’s support, the documents show.
“The time comes when it’s enough,” Dougan said, according to one document.
By then, Dougan felt he had established his worth. Before the Russian invasion, he had traveled to Ukraine and posted a video on YouTube that the United States was running bioweapons labs there, a false claim that Russia used as one of the pretexts for its war.
As Russian forces foundered in the first weeks of the invasion, Dougan told Korovin he felt he would be of greater assistance using his background in the Marines to train Russian troops. Korovin told him he would achieve more in securing “our victory” by promoting his fake biolabs report, the documents show.
That summer, Dougan traveled to Azovstal, the vast Ukrainian steel plant in Mariupol that was the scene of heavy Russian bombardment. Dougan produced a 30-minute report from the ruins as a foreign correspondent for “One America News,” the American far-right TV network. In the report, Dougan alleged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was to blame for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, saying “he betrayed his country for his U.S. masters.” Dougan suggested the death and destruction in the city was caused entirely by Ukrainian troops, without mentioning the relentless Russian bombing, or even its invasion of Ukraine. OAN ran a headline with his piece saying the Western media was covering up atrocities by Ukrainian troops against civilians.
A spokesperson for One America News said Dougan only appeared on the network once and was not paid for the report, adding that the network has since cut all ties with him.
His co-reporter on the trip was Daria Dugina, Dugin’s daughter, who claimed Ukrainians were “carpet-bombing their own people.” A few months later, Dugina was killed in a car bomb just outside Moscow. Dougan told The Post that Dugina was a “wonderful lady” while he agreed with many of the points made by her father about the necessity for a multipolar world in which the United States would not “dictate everything to everyone.”
By mid-2023, Dougan was generating material for the DC Weekly site, boasting to Korovin that it was already garnering hundreds of thousands of views every month, the documents show. He explained he was using artificial intelligence to populate the site with Russian news articles translated into English and to emphasize a tone critical of NATO and the U.S. government.
The quality is “superlative,” Dougan said.
In October 2023, he garnered his first viral hit: an article on DC Weekly alleging that Zelensky’s wife, Olena Zelenska, had spent $1.1 million in Cartier during an official visit to New York. He bragged to Korovin that the story had wide pickup. The article had cited a fake video interview with an alleged former employee of the Cartier shop who weeks later was identified as a St. Petersburg student and beauty salon manager. Another early fake article traced to Dougan said that Zelensky has used U.S. aid to buy two luxury yachts. The false claim was cited by several senior Republicans as a reason to halt funding for Ukraine.
But Dougan’s success also brought growing scrutiny. Researchers at Clemson University traced DC Weekly’s IP address back to other domains that it said were affiliated with Dougan, while disinformation researchers at Microsoft and NewsGuard were soon highlighting the links too.
By spring of this year, several of Dougan’s fake news sites were experiencing technical difficulties. One domain, the Chicago Chronicle, was blocked, and Dougan had to find a new domain for DC Weekly. Dougan began advocating with Korovin for funding to build a powerful new server that would generate its own AI content, ending dependence on Western technology.
Dougan “is experienced in the technical details of information technology and knows that the more his infrastructure and content is produced in-house, the less likely that he’ll be detected conducting his operations or restricted from using outside services,” said Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The new server led to an explosion of new output and an increase in the number of sites, while Dougan also began registering some new domains in Iceland to further conceal his fingerprints, Newsguard’s Sadeghi said. At the same time, audience reach grew dramatically from 37.7 million in May to 64 million by October, Sadeghi said. “The substantial increase in the network’s views and narratives shows that despite being repeatedly exposed and reported on, the falsehoods have continued to reach a large audience,” she said.
For now, Dougan and his associates appear to be focused on smearing Harris. But concerns are growing that they could soon switch to producing deepfakes that question the integrity of the U.S. election.
“If they shift from trying to influence the outcome of the election to interfering in the conduct of the election, this would be very concerning as Election Day nears,” Watts said.
Dan Lamothe and Cate Brown contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... on-harris/
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