Targeted Ads
‘Speak Clearly’: So Hilariously FBI Annoys Russian Spies
The FBI has come up with a new approach to recruiting Russian informants
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Any information is useful in a war – even in Ukraine. The US Federal Police FBI has now come up with a particularly clever method of getting information from Russian sources. And also targeted the Russian colleagues.
How do you get important information that you really shouldn’t get your hands on? Secret services ask themselves this question every day. As part of the war in Ukraine, the FBI has now targeted a new group of people – and is trying to target Russian spies in the United States.
To do this, the agents use a simple trick: they address the spies directly with specially tailored advertisements on Facebook. In order to reach the right people, the FBI relies on a previously unused option – and simply places the advertising exclusively in the vicinity of Russian facilities.
Smart use of advertising
The operation was discovered by a Washington Post reporter. When he was near the Russian embassy in the US capital, Washington DC, the FBI’s Russian-language ad suddenly popped up in his smartphone’s Facebook feed. An experiment shows that this was no coincidence: as soon as he crossed the street, the advertising disappeared again. And returned with the renewed crossing. This is possible because Facebook and other networks allow advertising to be extremely geographically restricted.
According to the Post, the ads are aimed at dissatisfied Russian secret bearers. She is based on an uncomfortable situation of the Russian secret service chief Sergei Naryshkin. He appeared at a press conference with his boss Vladimir Putin a few weeks ago. Probably unsure of what exactly to say, he had stuttered and struggled a bit – and had been harshly attacked by Putin. “Speak clearly,” the president repeatedly told him.
The FBI is now doing this humiliation of the top secret in order to get its subordinates to talk. “Speak clearly. We’re listening,” the ad reads in Russian. If you click on the advertisement, you will be instructed on a website in Russian and English how to contact the FBI personally. And receives an assurance that the information will be treated confidentially. The embassy is likely to be a target because the diplomatic missions are usually also the basis for spying efforts between countries.
Recruit and tease
“It’s a brilliant strategy,” said former spy hunter Peter Lapp to the newspaper. “There must be a lot of people in the Russian government who are unhappy with Putin’s war right now. And this is a great opportunity to see if some of those unhappy can help us better understand Putin’s calculus.” At the same time, he sees the action as an opportunity to cause unrest in the embassy. In his view, the counter-spies should have even more to do with keeping their own people under control and preventing defections. “That alone is a victory for the FBI in counter-espionage,” Lapp is convinced.
Meanwhile, the Russian side is trying to dismiss the ad as a PR campaign. “It appears the Washington Post material was released at the behest of US intelligence agencies,” Russian ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov tried to discredit the report. The thought of causing confusion or even overflows with the report was “ridiculous,” he complained on Twitter. At least the provocation seems to have worked.
Swell:Washington Post, Twitter