
Forged letter alleged false flagĀ attack

This article is part of a series analyzing the various aspects of the suspected Russian intelligence operation. Our top post summarizes these findings.
Much of the Russian operationās content focused on European issues. One significant outlier was a story it launched on February 26, 2019, three days after clashes broke out over aid deliveries to Venezuela.
A False-Flag FalseĀ Flag
The story began on a Spanish-language forum, globedia.com. The article (archived here) claimed that the United States was planning a chemical attack in Venezuela to justify a military intervention, citing as proof a letter purportedly written by the Mission Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Colombia, Lawrence Sacks, to Venezuelaās interim president, Juan GuaidĆ³.

The letter was an obvious forgery. Setting aside USAIDās long history of humanitarian work, the essential implausibility of it plotting a war crime using chemical weapons, and the unlikelihood of plotting such a war crime in open language through an unencrypted channel, sentences such as āCurrent situation is jeopardizing our joint action directed against the regime of usurper Maduroā sound like they were written by a Bond villain rather than by a native English speaker.
The fake letter did not specify what sort of attack was intended; the author of the Spanish post wrote āit can be supposedā that it would chemical or biological.
Register, Post,Ā Repeat
The account behind the article, āGilbmedina84,ā was equally questionable: it was registered the same day the article was published; its profile page showed no personal information; it had no followers; and it only posted this one article.

The same day, an account with the same username posted the article to Spanish forum meneame and Spanish-language subreddits r/latinoamerica, r/notArgentina, r/mexico, r/Colombia, r/vzla, r/cuba, and r/chile. In each case, the account registered that day and never posted again.
Three days later, on March 1, newly registered, single-use accounts posted a German translation of the story to two sites: meinbezirk.at, an Austrian forum for local news, and ask1.org, a Berlin-based forum. Both versions attributed the article to globedia.com. The profile page on ask1.org confirmed that the account behind it never returned to the site after making its one post.

English, But Not as You KnowĀ It
Also on March 1, a user called āJoel Forsterā posted a translation of the story into non-native English on San Francisco forum indybay.org. This was the only article from this user, and it was full of curious turns of phrase:
āMr. Trump started to burst threatsā¦ā
āIn the view of the mentioned ānecessary componentsāā¦ā
āImmediately after that GuaidĆ³ will expose the bloody tyrant during the new phase of informational warā¦ā
āNow the U.S. uses the old good scheme proven by timeā¦ā
āInformational warāāāāas opposed to, say, āinformation warā or āinformation warfareāāāāis a non-native phrase regularly used by Russian speakers, including Ministry of Defense translators. There is a Russian idiom that refers to the āold good timesā and that is similar to English speakers referring to the āgood old days.ā
The same day, an identical article ran on a forum in South Africa, southafricatoday.net. It did not give an author name, or an English-language source, and the name āJoel Forsterā was not mentioned anywhere on the page. Nevertheless, a user called āAnna Mrocznaā cross-posted the article to beforeitsnews.com, a known vector for disinformation. The account attributed the story to South Africa Today but said that it was ātranslated from the Spanish by Joel Forster.ā The āAnna Mrocznaā persona was part of the operation, analyzed here.

Finally, on March 5, one of the accounts that Facebook exposed as being run from Russia picked up the German version of the story from meinbezirk.at with the comment, āVenezuela is the next candidate for U.S. democratization.ā This account posed as an Austrian nationalist and interspersed shares from pro-Kremlin outlets with a high number of articles posted by newly registered accounts to blog sites.

None of these posts gained significant traction or scored significant numbers of shares, views, or likes. The meinbezirk.at version was viewed 1,537 times but did not gain a single like; the ask1.org version only received one reaction, which called the post āsuch stupidity.ā Five of the subreddits removed the Spanish story for various violations, and it gained just five votes on the other subreddits combined. The indybay.org article was shared just once on Facebook. It is therefore highly unlikely that the story moved from one language to another as a result of viral interest.

Facebook confirmed that the āAustrian nationalistā account was run from Russia. The DFRLabās analysis further revealed that the forged USAID letter showed language errors characteristic of Russian speakers. The accounts that posted the fake storyāāāin Spanish, English, and Germanāāāwere newly created accounts that only posted once, while the English and German translations appeared on multiple platforms on the same day.
On that basis, it is most probable that the entire story, as well as its transmission from one language to the next, was the work of this Russian operation. Moreover, it appears likely that the purpose of the fake was to smear the reputation of the United States as the Venezuelan crisis reached its climax.
Follow along for more in-depth analysis from our #DigitalSherlocks.