A dozen years in the past, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Seashore County, Fla., despatched voters an e mail posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.
He later masqueraded on-line as a Russian tech employee with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential data in violation of state regulation, fooling officers in Florida who thought they had been coping with a foreigner.
He additionally posed as a fictional New York Metropolis heiress he referred to as Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Seashore County Sheriff’s Workplace into divulging improper conduct by the division.
“And boy, did he ever spill ALL of the beans,” Mr. Dougan stated in a written response to questions for this text, during which he confirmed his position in these episodes.
These subterfuges in the US, it turned out, had been solely a prelude to a extra distinguished and probably extra ominous marketing campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia.
Mr. Dougan, 51, who acquired political asylum in Moscow, is now a key participant in Russia’s disinformation operations towards the West. Again in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered within the American presidential election, a military of pc trolls toiled for hours in an workplace constructing in St. Petersburg to attempt to idiot Individuals on-line.
In the present day Mr. Dougan could also be carrying out a lot the identical process largely by himself, in line with American and European authorities officers and researchers from firms and organizations which have tracked his actions since August. The teams embody NewsGuard, an organization that critiques the reliability of reports and data on-line; Recorded Future, a risk intelligence firm; and Clemson College’s Media Forensics Hub.
Working from an house crowded with servers and different pc gear, Mr. Dougan has constructed an ever-growing community of greater than 160 faux web sites that mimic information shops in the US, Britain and France.
With the assistance of commercially out there synthetic intelligence instruments, together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has crammed the websites with tens of hundreds of articles, many primarily based on precise information occasions. Interspersed amongst them are additionally bespoke fabrications that officers in the US and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence businesses or the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Between September and Might, Mr. Dougan’s shops have been cited or referred to in information articles or social media posts almost 8,000 instances, and seen by greater than 37 million folks in 16 languages, in line with a report back to be launched Wednesday by NewsGuard.
The fakes have lately included a baseless article on a faux San Francisco Chronicle web site that stated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had smuggled 300 kilograms of cocaine from Argentina. One other false narrative appeared final month within the sham Chronicle and on one other web site, referred to as The Boston Instances, claiming that the C.I.A. was working with Ukrainians to undermine Donald J. Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.
Mr. Dougan, in a collection of textual content exchanges and one phone interview with The New York Instances, denied working the websites. A digital path of clues, together with net domains and web protocol addresses, suggests in any other case, the officers and researchers say.
A pal in Florida who has recognized Mr. Dougan for 20 years, Jose Lambiet, additionally stated in a phone interview that Mr. Dougan instructed him in January that he had created the websites.
Steven Brill, a founding father of NewsGuard, which has spent months monitoring Mr. Dougan’s work, stated he represented “a large incursion into the American information ecosystem.”
“It’s not just a few man sitting in his basement in New Jersey tapping out a phony web site,” he added.
Mr. Dougan’s emergence as a weapon of the Kremlin’s propaganda battle follows a troubled life in the US that included residence foreclosures and chapter. As a regulation enforcement officer in Florida and Maine, he confronted accusations of extreme use of power and sexual harassment that resulted in pricey lawsuits towards the departments he labored for.
He faces an arrest warrant in Florida — its information sealed by courtroom order — on 21 felony expenses of extortion and wiretapping that resulted from a long-running feud with the sheriff of Palm Seashore County.
Mr. Dougan’s actions from Moscow, the place he fled in 2016 one step forward of these expenses, proceed to attract scrutiny from the authorities in the US. Final 12 months, he impersonated an F.B.I. agent in a phone name to Mr. Brill, in line with an account by Mr. Brill to be printed subsequent week in a brand new e book, “The Demise of Fact.”
Mr. Dougan, who acknowledged making the decision in a textual content message this week, had been angered by a NewsGuard report in February 2023 that criticized YouTube for permitting movies parroting Russian propaganda concerning the battle in Ukraine, together with some by Mr. Dougan.
In a rambling, profanity-laced video in response on YouTube final 12 months, Mr. Dougan posted excepts of the decision with Mr. Brill and confirmed a Google Earth satellite tv for pc {photograph} of his residence in Westchester County, a suburb of New York Metropolis — “simply down the street from the Clinton crime household,” as Mr. Dougan put it, referring to the house of former President Invoice Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The decision prompted an F.B.I. investigation that, in line with Mr. Brill, traced the decision to Mr. Dougan’s phone in Russia. (A spokeswoman for the bureau didn’t reply to a request for touch upon the investigation or Mr. Dougan’s earlier actions.)
A Historical past in Legislation Enforcement
Mr. Dougan started to hone the talents that he’s placing to make use of right now throughout a turbulent childhood in the US. Within the written responses to questions for this text, he stated he had struggled at residence and at school, bullied due to Tourette’s syndrome, however discovered a ardour in computer systems. When he was 8, he stated, the person who would grow to be his stepfather started educating him to jot down pc code.
“By the point I used to be 16,” he wrote in a single response, “I knew a dozen completely different programming languages.”
After a four-year stint within the Marine Corps, which he claims he supplied to hitch in lieu of a jail sentence for fleeing a police cease for rushing on a motorbike, he grew to become a police officer first in a small power in Mangonia Park, Fla., after which the Palm Seashore County Sheriff’s Workplace from 2005 to 2009.
In line with information reviews and his personal accounts over time, Mr. Dougan repeatedly clashed with superiors and colleagues, dealing with quite a few inside investigations that he stated had been retaliatory as a result of he objected to police misconduct, together with situations of racial bias.
In 2009, he moved briefly to Windham, Maine, to work in one other small-town police division. There he confronted a grievance of sexual harassment that resulted in his dismissal earlier than he accomplished his probationary interval.
Mr. Dougan began a web site referred to as WindhamTalk to defend himself. The web site foreshadowed others he would create, together with one dedicated to the Palm Seashore County Sheriff’s Workplace, PBSOTalk.
After shifting again to Florida, he used PBSOTalk to torment particularly the division’s elected sheriff, Ric L. Bradshaw, whom he accused of corruption. He posted the illegal recordings of “Jessica” chatting with a former detective commander, Mark Lewis, who, Mr. Dougan claimed, was investigating the sheriff’s critics, together with himself. As Mr. Dougan acknowledged in a video interview final 12 months, it’s unlawful in Florida to document a phone dialog with out permission.
In an announcement, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Workplace, Therese C. Barbera, stated Mr. Dougan was “a wished felon for cyberstalking utilizing unsubstantiated and fabricated claims which have NO factual foundation.”
In February 2016, PBSOTalk posted confidential details about hundreds of law enforcement officials, federal brokers and judges. The following month. F.B.I. brokers and native law enforcement officials searched Mr. Dougan’s residence, seizing all of his digital gear.
Fearing arrest, he stated, he made his solution to Canada and caught a flight to Moscow. He was indicted on the 21 Florida felony expenses the following 12 months.
Peddling Russia Propaganda
In Russia, Mr. Dougan refashioned himself as a type of journalist, documenting his travels across the nation, together with Lake Baikal in Siberia and Crimea, the peninsula in Ukraine that Russian annexed in 2014 in violation of worldwide regulation.
He posted images and movies from these journeys on YouTube, which suspended his channel after NewsGuard’s report final 12 months. He additionally appeared usually on state media, together with with two former intelligence operatives, Maria Butina, who penetrated Republican political circles, and Anna Chapman, one among 10 spies who impressed the tv collection “The Individuals.”
In 2021, as Mr. Putin started mobilizing the army forces that will invade Ukraine, Mr. Dougan posted a video that the Kremlin would cite as one justification for its assault. In it, he claimed that the US operated organic weapons factories in Ukraine, an accusation that Russia and its allies have pushed with out ever offering proof.
As soon as the battle began, Mr. Dougan recounted in his written responses to questions, he traveled to Ukraine 14 instances to report from the Russian facet of the entrance strains. He appeared in Russian authorities hearings purporting to show Ukraine’s transgressions, indicating some degree of cooperation with the federal government authorities.
He has confronted criticism for the reviews, together with in a profile in The Day by day Beast, that he posted on YouTube and different platforms. Mr. Dougan has portrayed the battle a lot as Russia’s propaganda has: as a righteous battle towards neo-Nazis backed by a decadent West, led by the US and NATO.
“The West has constantly lied about each side of this battle,” he wrote. “Why does just one facet get to inform their story?”
Faux Information Websites within the U.S.
In April 2021, Mr. Dougan revived a web site referred to as DC Weekly, which had been created 4 years earlier and printed faux articles concerning the Palm Seashore County Sheriff’s Workplace. In line with a report final December by Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, the area and web protocol tackle had been shared by PBSOTalk and Mr. Dougan’s private web site, in addition to two advertising books he wrote in exile and a safety agency he operated, Falcon Eye Tech, which supplied “offshore safety monitoring companies.”
After Russia’s assault on Ukraine started in 2022, the positioning carried articles concerning the battle.
Then, final August, the positioning started to publish articles primarily based on elaborate fabrications that the Western authorities officers and disinformation researchers stated got here from Russia’s propaganda items. They usually appeared first in movies or audio recordings on obscure X accounts or YouTube channels, then unfold to websites like DC Weekly after which to Russian state media as in the event that they had been genuine accusations, a course of researchers name “narrative laundering.”
The baseless narratives included claims that kinfolk or cronies of Ukraine’s chief secretly purchased luxurious properties, yachts or jewellery, and that Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles III of Britain, had kidnapped and abused kids throughout a secret go to to Ukraine.
Dozens of recent websites have appeared in latest months. They included ones made to appear like native information shops: The Chicago Chronicle, The Miami Chronicle, The Boston Instances, The Flagstaff Submit and The Houston Submit. Some hijacked names of precise information organizations, like The San Francisco Chronicle, or approximated them, within the case of 1 referred to as The New York Information Day by day.
When The New York Instances reported on the brand new websites in March, DC Weekly printed a prolonged response in a stilted model that indicated the usage of synthetic intelligence. It was written beneath the title Jessica Devlin, one of many fictitious journalists on the positioning. “I’m not a shadowy international actor,” the article stated.
On the finish, the article invited media inquiries at an e mail tackle with the area Falcon Eye Tech.
Two days later, Mr. Dougan answered.
103 New Websites in Two Days
Mr. Dougan, who grew to become a Russian citizen final 12 months and voted within the nation’s presidential election in March, stated in his messages to The Instances that he made a dwelling by promoting safety units he designed for a producer in China. He denied being paid by any Russian authorities, claiming he funds his actions himself.
His pal Mr. Lambiet, a personal investigator and former journalist, stated he thought-about Mr. Dougan man however cautioned that Mr. Dougan had a propensity to make issues up. “He’s like a Russian disinformation marketing campaign: It’s exhausting to know what’s true and what’s not,” he stated.
As proof of Mr. Dougan’s position within the information websites has emerged, he has shifted techniques. Recorded Future, the risk intelligence firm, launched a report this month that detailed his ties to businesses linked to the Russian disinformation. The report documented the in depth use of A.I., which one of many firm’s researchers, Clément Briens, estimated made Mr. Dougan’s work far cheaper than hiring a troll military.
On the time, Recorded Future recognized 57 domains that Mr. Dougan had created. In a two-day span after the report was printed, 103 new websites appeared, all on a server in California.
“He’s making an attempt to obfuscate the Russian hyperlinks,” Mr. Briens stated.
Mr. Dougan at instances treats his actions as a sport of cat and mouse. He spent months participating with a researcher at NewsGuard, McKenzie Sadeghi, revealing particulars of his life in Moscow whereas mocking her boss, Mr. Brill.
“He gave the impression to be toying with me, each to elicit my responses and, it appeared, to point out off his expertise for international on-line mischief, with out truly admitting something,” she wrote within the report back to be printed on Wednesday.
Whereas Mr. Dougan’s websites have centered on Russian narratives concerning the battle in Ukraine, the researchers and authorities officers say he has laid the inspiration for interference within the unusually giant confluence of elections going down around the globe this 12 months.
This implies a “threat of an expanded operation scope within the close to future, probably concentrating on numerous audiences and democratic programs in Europe and different Western nations for varied strategic goals.” the diplomatic service of the European Union wrote in a report final month when the community included solely 23 web sites.
In latest weeks, the websites have included themes that appear meant to stoke the partisan fires in the US earlier than November’s presidential election.
Final month, articles appeared on two of Mr. Dougan’s newer faux websites, The Houston Submit and The Flagstaff Submit, detailing a baseless declare that the F.B.I. had planted an eavesdropping gadget in Mr. Trump’s workplace at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
A number of the new websites have names, like Proper Evaluation and Pink State Report, that counsel a conservative political bent. In April, a web site that researchers additionally linked to Mr. Dougan supplied “main cryptocurrency rewards” for leaks of details about American officers, singling out two prosecutors and a decide concerned within the prison instances towards Mr. Trump.
“If the positioning was mine,” he wrote in response to a query about it, “I might need folks to provide paperwork on any soiled politician, Republican, Democrat or different.”
