Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Qatari Influence Ops

A few months ago was the first time I heard about Operation SIG: a KGB operation designed to seed Nazi-style antisemitism across the Arab world after the Six-Day War. However, when looking for more evidence about this operation, I found out it didn’t actually exist—sort of.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian intelligence defector, first wrote about Operation SIG in a magazine article in 2006. He then wrote a book, which got positive reviews, but the specific claims in it have not survived the fact-checking. I couldn’t find a single historian confirming the existence of Operation SIG.

But what my research did lead me to is the Mitrokhin Archive, and it does name KGB operations against Jews and Israel.

Vasili Mitrokhin spent years copying KGB files by hand. He then smuggled them out and defected to Britain in 1992. It’s the best archival record of Soviet active measures that exists.

Although Operation SIG is not in it, a long list of operations are.

Operation Simon: In 1972, a KGB operative walked into the World Jewish Congress offices in Paris, photocopied the member and donor lists, and walked back out the same day. Then in 1973, forged documents from a fictitious group calling itself the Union of Young Zionists accused the World Jewish Congress, the World Zionist Organization, and the Jewish Agency of stealing donations meant for Israel.

Other operations in the archive:

• In 1969 the KGB sent threatening letters to Arab diplomats at the United Nations and signed them in the name of the Jewish Defense League.

• In 1978 the KGB distributed a libelous book called the White Book of Zionism across thirty-two countries.

• In 1979 it ran a campaign against Sharansky that included producing a film.

• In 1982, after a conference in Leningrad, it adopted formal work plans for fighting Zionism running through 1986.

Operation PANDORA: On July 25, 1971, the head of the KGB’s North American department instructed the New York station to plant an explosive device in a Black neighborhood of New York City, preferably at a historically Black college. Afterward, the station was to telephone two or three Black organizations and tell them the Jewish Defense League had done it.

The archive contains orders of the instructions going out, but it doesn’t establish that anybody executed them. Regardless, the KGB devised a false flag attack against Black Americans to pin it on Jewish Americans to sow division between them.

So why does everybody hear about SIG and nobody knows about PANDORA?

I think it’s because SIG captures the complete picture, whereas PANDORA only explains a part. SIG is a single operation that accounts for the entire last sixty years of anti-Israel politics; PANDORA is a bureaucratic order from one department without any confirmation of its execution.

The archive is full of PANDORAS.

The Soviets never needed a secret operation anyway, because most of what they did was published openly with the USSR’s name on the cover.

Start with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the foundation of nearly every Jewish conspiracy theory still in circulation, including the ones I used to push. Both Hitler and Henry Ford, although they weren’t sure of its authenticity, believed the Jews were following its plan—many others had the same position as them.

According to the State Department’s own January 2024 report on the Kremlin’s use of antisemitism, the Tsarist security service fabricated it in the early 1900s.

In 1963, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published 12,000 copies of a book by Trofim Kichko called Judaism Without Embellishment. It argued for a worldwide Jewish conspiracy running through Judaism, Jewish bankers, Zionism, and Western capitalism (sound familiar?). Its illustrations were caricatures in the same style as the Nazis’ Der Stürmer, and the cover had a hook-nosed rabbi holding a sack of gold coins.

In 1975, a Soviet-Arab bloc pushed the General Assembly to pass Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism. It stood for sixteen years and was revoked in December 1991, after the United States spent most of a decade pushing for it. The Soviets did not lead that repeal.

In 1983, the Central Committee Secretariat approved a standing body called the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public and announced it in Pravda that April. This was a committee with a budget and letterhead whose job was producing anti-Zionist material.

Russia’s history of anti-Zionist countermeasures is an archive full of operations, a state publishing house, a UN resolution, and a committee you could’ve mailed a letter to. And I am convinced that Russia continues to push antisemitism and anti-Zionism today to weaken the alliance between America and Israel.

I believe that Russia, and other adversaries, use internet influencers and alt-media figures to spread their narratives. For example, I’ve been hosted on programs such as Russia Today (RT) and others supported by Sputnik Radio during my time as an anti-war activist. They love to promote American useful idiots for their propaganda. What’s interesting is that once I wised up to what was going on and started criticizing Russia a little, I was never invited again.

But I was just one of the many.

In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two RT employees over what the indictment describes as a ten-million-dollar scheme routed through a company, Tenet Media, which paid American commentators to make videos: nearly 2,000 videos with over sixteen million views on YouTube alone. Several of the commentators said they were told the money came from a private investor named Eduard Grigoriann—no such person exists. Internal messages show the company calling its client “the Russians.”

The same week the DOJ seized thirty-two domains belonging to an operation called Doppelganger, which had built working replicas of Fox News and the Washington Post, bylined the articles with the names and photos of real journalists, and even bought ads to push them. The supporting affidavit ran 277 pages and included notes from meetings inside the Russian Presidential Administration.

Storm-1516 counts an American among its key operators: John Mark Dougan, a former Marine and Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Moscow in 2016. He facilitated the creation and promotion of hundreds of AI-built news sites with names engineered to sound familiar, publishing fabricated stories that get republished across the network and amplified by pro-Kremlin accounts, such as a fake Page Six report that Zelenskyy bought Bill Cosby’s townhouse for twenty-nine million dollars.

Now, let’s look at China.

China runs a different model, and it mostly fails. Meta’s 2023 takedown of the operation known as Spamouflage pulled 7,704 Facebook accounts and 954 Pages spread across more than fifty platforms, with links Meta traced to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement. It was the largest covert influence operation ever found. However, it failed to reach its target audience, and most of the 560,000 followers turned out to be spam accounts bought from Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Graphika, an American analysis company that tracks disinformation, found the accounts posing as ordinary Americans on X and TikTok and working both sides at once, attacking Democrats, attacking Republicans, questioning whether the elections were legitimate, and pushing material on gun control, homelessness, drug abuse, racial inequality, and Israel-Gaza.

In October 2024, the Washington Post reported Chinese-linked accounts running explicitly antisemitic attacks on down-ballot candidates. One of them was Rep. Barry Moore, who had supported sanctions on China. The posts called him “a Jewish dog,” even though he is a Baptist.

China has no theological position on Jews, nor does it have grievances with Israel. Like Russia, it uses antisemitism to divide Americans. And they don’t have to believe a word of it to use it on you.

Iran is different because Iran actually believes it.

Press TV, which I’ve also been a guest on, is Iranian state media, and it doesn’t hide that fact. It not only spreads anti-Zionism but also Holocaust denial. Soon after its launch, it ran a piece calling the Holocaust “scientifically impossible” and “the greatest lie ever told.” It has aired David Duke, who blamed Zionists for both 9/11 and the Iraq War. It promoted the claim that Israel spread Covid inside Iran. Its series Palestine Declassified pushed the recurring anti-Zionist themes: Zionists control world events, own the media, and groom children in schools and universities.

Press TV’s Facebook page has over 3.7 million followers, the website averages more than a million visits a month, and when researchers broke down the traffic, over twenty percent of it was American.

But notice what Iran did when it wanted to push anti-war narratives or the Israel-did-9/11 conspiracy: it booked White nationalists like me, and it didn’t have to pay any of us, because we thought we were telling the truth to a world audience.

Nobody has to recruit you. You only have to be a useful idiot.

Qatar is our ally, but it has a strange relationship with us. It doesn’t run bot farms, forge newspapers, or run Holocaust denial operations, but it buys access and influence, legally, under FARA.

Since 2016 it has spent close to $250 million on eighty-eight lobbying and PR firms. Its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with US political contacts between January 2021 and June 2025, more than any other country. It has given over nine million dollars to American think tanks in five years. The $6.25 billion it has given American universities since 2001—the number everyone quotes—mostly isn’t donations to Ivy League schools here in America. It pays for those universities’ branch campuses in Doha.

A Qatari royal and former government official invested about fifty million dollars in Newsmax in 2019 and 2020, and employees say they were told to soften coverage of Qatar.

Qatar pushes its anti-Zionist narratives mostly through Al Jazeera. Its Arabic channel has long run a harder line on Israel than its English one, and in 2019 its youth channel, AJ+ Arabic, posted a video promoting Holocaust revisionism. The network pulled it and suspended two journalists. Meanwhile, Qatar has hosted Hamas’ political leadership since 2012.

A 2025 ISGAP report alleges that Qatar Foundation International helped shape a K-12 curriculum at Brown Univesrity Choices Progam that drifted against Israel, which Brown denies.

So yes, there’s anti-Zionism coming from Qatar, but it reaches Americans through a TV network and a school foundation in the open, not through clandestine means Russia and China engage in.

The psyop against America and the West is that Zionists secretly control everything, when Zionist influence is actually out in the open.

Russia, China, and Iran are running three different operations to undermine our national security, our elections, and our alliance with Israel, to not only weaken us, but, as I believe, to make Americans antisemitic enough to want to cut off Israel, thus driving it into the arms of Russia or China. Qatar plays both sides, hosting our air base on one hand, while hosting Hamas and broadcasting against our ally in the region on the other.

I used to be one of the biggest antisemitic and anti-Zionist voices in America, and perhaps on the Internet, and I was able to break free and see what I do now. These operations are just the ones I’ve covered; there are certainly many more that I haven’t, and many more that haven’t been discovered.

The battle for the safety and prosperity of the West, for America, and for our allies starts with being informed. Too many people have been misinformed by these anti-American forces, because these operations are much easier to spread now thanks to social media and bot farms.

This is why you must be vigilant, and stand up to tell the truth, even if it turns everyone who has been convinced otherwise against you. Because if you don’t, your fellow citizens will continue to fall for narratives that are detrimental to us all.

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