How Influence Operations Spread

A forged letter lands on a desk in Whitehall, or a rumour appears on a Telegram channel in Warsaw, Taipei or Washington. Hours later, respectable people repeat it as fact. That is how influence operations spread - not by hypnotising whole populations, but by exploiting trust, fear, grievance and the speed of modern communications.

Readers of espionage fiction often imagine influence work as a side plot to the real business of spying. In truth, services have long treated it as a core instrument of power. Intelligence is not only about stealing secrets. It is also about shaping what opponents, allies and publics believe to be true, possible or inevitable. Sometimes the aim is panic. Sometimes paralysis. Sometimes it is only to muddy the water so thoroughly that no one knows what to believe.

How influence operations spread in the real world

The phrase covers a broad field, and precision matters. An influence operation is a planned effort to alter perception, decision-making or behaviour in a target audience. It may use disinformation, which is false material planted on purpose, but it can also rely on selective truths, leaks, front organisations, forged documents, covert media relationships or the amplification of existing divisions.

That last point matters. The strongest operations rarely invent a grievance from nothing. They find a crack that already exists and drive a wedge into it. Soviet active measures during the Cold War worked this way. The KGB used forged papers, controlled press placements and agents of influence to deepen suspicion inside rival states. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s The Mitrokhin Archive remains one of the clearest demonstrations of how seriously Moscow took this craft. The object was not always to persuade everyone. It was enough to split elites, discredit institutions and slow an adversary’s response.

The modern information environment rewards the same method. Digital platforms have changed speed and scale, but not the underlying tradecraft. A hostile service identifies a social fault line, introduces a provocative claim, finds willing or unwitting amplifiers, then watches domestic actors do much of the work. By the time officials deny the story, the denial itself becomes part of the argument.

The mechanism: seeding, laundering, repetition

Most successful campaigns move through three stages.

First comes seeding. The origin may be a fringe website, a cut-out account, an influencer with opaque funding, a compromised journalist or a fabricated document leaked at the right moment. During the Cold War this might have meant a story placed through a sympathetic newspaper in a third country. Today it might begin with a cluster of anonymous social media accounts, bot assistance and a video edited to strip away context.

Next comes laundering. This is the crucial phase. Raw propaganda seldom travels far on its own. It needs cleaning. A rumour repeated by a seemingly independent commentator acquires a trace of credibility. A forged memo discussed on a podcast gains reach. A state television channel cites social media chatter as if it were organic public concern. The source becomes harder to trace, and each repetition makes the claim look less like a plant and more like common knowledge.

Then comes repetition. Repetition is not crude because people are stupid. It works because familiarity can feel like truth, especially in a fast crisis. Intelligence services understand this well. So do political operators, troll farms and ideological fellow travellers. Richard J. Aldrich’s work on GCHQ shows how intelligence agencies learned to think in systems and networks. Influence follows the same logic. Information moves across human and technical channels together.

Why some targets are easier than others

Not every society is equally vulnerable. Nor is every moment ripe for manipulation. Operations spread fastest when three conditions align: low trust, high emotion and weak gatekeeping.

Low trust means the target already doubts government, press, police, courts or electoral systems. In those conditions, even absurd claims can gain traction if they flatter prior beliefs. High emotion means a war scare, terrorist attack, migration crisis, pandemic or election campaign has put people on edge. Weak gatekeeping means editors, platforms, institutions and citizens fail to check provenance before passing material on.

This is why influence work often clusters around shocks. Russia’s intelligence services - above all the Federal Security Service or FSB, the Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, and military intelligence, the GRU - have shown repeated skill in exploiting confusion at moments of strain. The objective is not always to make the target love Moscow. More often it is to make coherent policy harder. If voters, ministers and allies cannot agree on what is happening, response time lengthens. In security terms, delay can be victory enough.

Russian and Chinese practice

Russian services inherit much from Soviet active measures, though the tools have changed. The internet has given Moscow deniability and volume. False personas, proxy media outlets, hack-and-leak operations and orchestrated outrage can all be mixed and matched. The blend matters. A leak of genuine material, edited with false context, can be more potent than a pure fabrication. It gives journalists and political activists something solid to hold while slipping poison into the bloodstream.

Chinese influence operations often work differently, though not always. The Ministry of State Security, or MSS, known as the Guoanbu, has traditionally shown patience. Rather than chasing spectacle, Chinese state actors have often sought long-term advantage through elite networks, business links, diaspora pressure, academic access, united front activity and media shaping. Richard Faligot’s Chinese Spies and more recent reporting on MSS activity suggest a model built on persistence, deniability and strategic discipline.

That does not make Chinese operations less dangerous. It makes them harder to see. A loud Russian campaign may produce immediate headlines. A Chinese campaign may shape the climate in which decisions are made over years, especially where commercial dependence, political vanity or institutional complacency create openings. On Taiwan, South China Sea issues and technology policy, Beijing has every reason to influence the language through which the West understands risk.

Real examples and hard lessons

One of the most infamous Soviet disinformation efforts was the claim that AIDS had been created by the United States. It began as a planted falsehood and travelled widely because it exploited fear, anti-American sentiment and weak verification. The story persisted long after the original fabrication was exposed. That is a brutal lesson in how influence operations spread. Exposure does not always kill the lie.

A different lesson comes from the Venlo incident of 1939, one of the great intelligence failures. German intelligence lured two British Secret Intelligence Service officers into a trap near the Dutch border. Venlo was not simply an operational debacle. It also fed German propaganda and confusion at a critical moment. Intelligence success and influence effect often sit side by side. A captured officer, a stolen file or a manipulated meeting can generate both immediate gains and a larger narrative of enemy weakness.

Philby offers another warning. Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends captures the human damage of his betrayal, but the strategic point matters too. Penetration of a service does not only lose secrets. It distorts judgement. It creates false confidence, wrecks liaison trust and poisons internal culture. The best influence operations are often helped by human agents inside institutions because those agents know which story will be believed.

Why thrillers get this right - and wrong

Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Len Deighton and Graham Greene all understood that manipulation often matters more than gunfire. The most convincing espionage fiction knows that public narrative is a battlespace. What novels sometimes simplify is tempo. In reality, influence work can be glacial. A service may spend years building a source, cultivating a journalist, funding a front or waiting for a crisis that makes dormant assets useful.

That patience is why democratic states struggle. Ministers want immediate answers. News cycles reward speed. Security services such as MI5, Britain’s Security Service, MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency or NSA can detect pieces of a campaign without being able to disclose them cleanly. Evidence may be classified. Attribution may be partial. The adversary exploits that hesitation.

Can democracies stop it?

Yes, but not with slogans. Resilience is built through boring, disciplined habits. Better counter-intelligence helps. So does serious media literacy, though that phrase can sound bloodless. More useful is a simple test: who benefits, who sourced it, and why now? Editors, officials and readers should ask those questions before they amplify a sensational claim.

There is also a trade-off. States can counter hostile influence with more aggressive information operations of their own, but democracies pay a price if they become careless with truth. That is not softness. It is strategy. Once a government gains a reputation for manipulating its own public, hostile services find the ground already prepared.

Influence operations spread because they attach themselves to human weakness and institutional vanity. The method changes with technology, but the principle is old. Someone offers a story that explains too much, flatters a grievance, or gives chaos a villain. Then others carry it forward, often believing they act freely.

If that world interests you, subscribe and download a free copy of Emperor from the Homepage. It is fiction, certainly, but fiction built on the hard logic of intelligence, power and the stories states tell to move nations towards conflict.