Trump authorized a covert CIA operation in 2019 to spread negative stories on Chinese social media, including that Communist Party officials were stashing ill-gotten gains abroad
- According to multiple US officials, Trump ordered the CIA in 2019 to spread disparaging stories about the Chinese Communist Party
- The officials said the negative reports related to Chinese foreign policy and that CCP members were stashing ill-gotten gains in foreign bank accounts
- The operations were intended to make CCP officials paranoid and waste resources
Former President Donald Trump instructed the CIA in 2019 to spread damaging stories about the Chinese Communist Party on Chinese social media to turn public opinion against them, former US officials said.
Three former officials with direct knowledge of the CIA covert operation told the story Reuters that a team was set up to spread these stories through Chinese social media.
The small team used fake online identities to spread negative stories about Xi Jinping’s government on China’s highly regulated internet, which censors the publication and viewing of certain material.
Members of the CIA team amplified allegations that the country’s Belt and Road Initiative – which funds foreign infrastructure projects in developing countries – was wasteful and corrupt.
The team also broke stories about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials keeping suspicious amounts of money in foreign bank accounts, despite the country’s strict laws around international money transfers.
Former President Donald Trump authorized a CIA operation to discredit the CCP on Chinese social media platforms in an effort to sway public opinion against the government, three former US officials said
Some stories posted on Chinese social media accused top CCP officials of storing ill-gotten gains in foreign bank accounts
The program was overseen by the CIA and began in 2019, according to former officials
The officials did not provide additional details about how the operations were conducted, but did admit that the negative stories they spread were based on fact.
The mission was intended to cause paranoia among CCP leaders.
Another goal of the mission was to force the CCP to devote valuable resources to investigating how dissent was spread on China’s highly regulated Internet in the first place.
“We wanted them to chase ghosts,” one of the officials said.
A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said the revelation shows that US officials are using “public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.”
The clandestine efforts, officials said, came in response to years of China’s own aggressive intelligence and global influence operations.
However, China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing follows a “principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not interfere in the internal affairs of the United States.”
The CIA operations also targeted public opinion in countries outside China, according to the former officials.
Missions focused on public sentiment in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific, where many of China’s Belt and Road initiatives took place.
The CIA operation sought to sway public opinion in China and surrounding regions against the CCP leadership
“The feeling was that China was coming at us with steel baseball bats, while we were fighting back with wooden bats,” said a former national security official.
Matt Pottinger, then a senior official at the National Security Council, put together the authorization behind the operation, three former officials said.
That authorization cited allegations of theft of CCP intellectual property and military expansion as threats to U.S. national security.
Pottinger, however, did not comment on the “accuracy or inaccuracy of the allegations about U.S. intelligence activities.”