by Ray Morgan, University of Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)/incoming PhD student
When the Trump administration shuttered the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/Fimi) hub in April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the closure as a victory for free speech. The move was grounded in Executive Order 14149, signed on the first day of Trump’s second term, which characterised previous counter-disinformation efforts as government infringement on constitutionally protected speech. Rubio claimed the office had spent taxpayer money “actively silencing and censoring the voices of Americans.” That this was factually inaccurate (R/Fimi and its predecessor the Global Engagement Center (GEC) had a foreign-only mandate and no authority over domestic speech) was largely beside the point. The closure was not driven by evidence of domestic censorship. It was driven by a political logic in which the very act of naming foreign disinformation had become ideologically suspect.
Eleven months later, a cable signed by Rubio and obtained by the Guardian directed every American embassy and consulate in the world to launch coordinated counterpropaganda campaigns, explicitly instructing staff to recruit local influencers, academics, and community leaders to carry American-funded narratives in ways “designed to make them feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.”
The juxtaposition is striking. But the more interesting analytical question is not whether this is hypocritical. It is why this pattern keeps recurring, and what it reveals about the structural position that disinformation’s definition occupies in modern information politics.
A Definition with a History
The concept of disinformation (or dezinformatsiya in its Soviet-era usage) was never a neutral descriptor. The term’s institutionalisation is conventionally traced to 1923, when the Bolshevik GPU reportedly called for “a special disinformation office to conduct active intelligence operations,” with Stalin giving it a French-sounding name to suggest the practice had Western origins. That attribution, however, rests largely on defector testimony, most influentially that of Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa, whose accounts of Soviet tradecraft were published in the 1980s at the height of Cold War information competition and have since been repeated as settled history. As a Media@LSE analysis of the term’s muddled history argues, the widely repeated claim that disinformation is essentially a Soviet invention is itself a product of Cold War framing, one that Western counter-disinformation bodies uncritically absorbed and that directed their scrutiny outward rather than inward. The point is not that the history is false but that the way it has been told has done political work: a definition shaped around foreign adversarial origins will tend to exempt its own practitioners from the scrutiny it applies to others. The Cold War binary that crystallised around the term, pitting democratic truth-telling against authoritarian deceit, has never fully dissolved. The GEC was built explicitly on this inheritance, framing its mandate as defending democratic information environments from state-backed manipulation, with Russia, China, and Iran as the primary subjects of scrutiny.
What that framework struggles to accommodate is the possibility that the practices it identifies and labels in adversarial actors might also describe its own operations. The Rubio cable makes that struggle visible.
The Technique and Its Double
The cable instructs American embassies to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behaviour, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story.” The method for elevating those local voices is worth examining closely. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry counter-propaganda messaging, with the explicit aim of making that messaging feel organic to its audience rather than centrally coordinated.
The Guardian’s own reporting noted, without apparent irony, that this is also “a triedand-true tactic deployed by the Kremlin,” and that the GEC had specifically exposed and named it as a disinformation operation when it documented Russia’s “African Initiative” in 2024. That State Department report described how the African Initiative recruited African journalists, bloggers, and community members to distribute Kremlin-funded narratives designed to appear grassroots, specifically to “launder the Kremlin’s disinformation to appear organic.” The technique is identical to what the Rubio cable now prescribes. The only variable is the directing authority.
This is not a coincidence or an oversight. It is a structural feature of how information operations work across state actors regardless of political system, and it points directly to one of the central questions the (Mis)Translating Deceit project asks: how are misleading narratives adapted to different audiences according to their cultural profiles, native languages, and political preferences, and in what cultural environments are their credibility claims bolstered? The cable’s instruction to translate and distribute content through local voices, to reposition American cultural centres as information hubs in countries where “anti-American propaganda is pervasive,” and to task embassies with distributing foreignlanguage media, describes a cross-cultural narrative adaptation strategy. The project’s analytical vocabulary applies here as readily as it does to the cases it was designed to study.
The Institutional Shell Game
The GEC had served as the formal coordination point between the State Department and the Pentagon’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO) unit for countering foreign disinformation. MISO, rebranded back to its original name, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), by a Pentagon directive in December 2025, has long deployed personnel directly to American embassies to support State Department public diplomacy efforts. When the GEC was defunded and R/Fimi subsequently closed, that coordination did not disappear. The Rubio cable redistributes it across all embassy and consular posts, directing them to work alongside what it calls “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations,” a formulation that carries its own significance: both the department name and the unit name have been changed back to more martial designations under the current administration. The restructuring stripped away dedicated budget lines, congressional reauthorisation requirements, and the oversight mechanisms the GEC framework, however imperfect, had established, making the operation simultaneously more pervasive and less institutionally visible.
This matters definitionally. One of the key features that Western frameworks use to distinguish legitimate public diplomacy from disinformation is transparency about source and intent. Overt attribution is a stated priority in the cable: embassies are told to use “prominent, flag-forward branding” so audiences know when aid comes from Washington. Yet the simultaneous instruction to make narrative messaging feel locally organic undermines that principle at the level of the information environment. The branded aid and the unbranded influencer campaign operate in the same space, and the second is designed to obscure its origin precisely to the degree that the first is designed to advertise it.
Definitional Power and Its Targets
Perhaps the most clarifying detail in the Guardian’s reporting on the cable is a separate but contemporaneous action by Sarah Rogers, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. In a report to Congress, Rogers identified Code Pink and several other leftwing activist organisations as vectors of Chinese influence operations inside the United States. The GEC was dismantled in part because critics alleged it was using foreign-interference framing to delegitimise domestic conservative speech. Within months, the same administration deployed an almost identical move against domestic political opponents on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The cable’s endorsement of Elon Musk’s platform X, explicitly identified as an “innovative” and “crowdsourced” instrument for “countering anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech,” adds a further layer. This endorsement arrived as the European Commission had just issued a €120 million fine against X under the Digital Services Act, finding that the platform’s paid verification badge, opaque advertising practices, and barriers to researcher access constituted deceptive design. The platform recommended as a tool for countering foreign manipulation is itself under regulatory sanction for manipulation. That Musk simultaneously held an advisory role in the Trump administration completes the circuit. Definitional capture (the process by which the authority to name disinformation is absorbed by actors whose own practices the definition would otherwise describe) is here operating in plain sight.
This is definitional power in its most transparent form: the category of disinformation does not describe a stable set of practices. It describes a set of practices that the naming authority has decided to make visible. The Cold War framework that shapes most Western counter-disinformation thinking built the Self/Other distinction into the definition from the beginning, associating disinformation with the adversary and public diplomacy with the self. What the Rubio cable illustrates is that this distinction is maintained not by the techniques involved but by the institutional position of whoever is deploying them.
The Deeper Question
The Rubio cable does not represent a departure from established counter-disinformation practice so much as a clarification of it. The operational logic, recruiting local voices, adapting messaging to cultural and linguistic context, laundering centrally directed narratives through apparently organic channels, has always been present on all sides of the information contest. What changes from administration to administration is not the technique but the institutional framing that determines whether those techniques are labelled public diplomacy or disinformation. That framing is never neutral. It is always a product of who holds the authority to name, and who is positioned to benefit from the label.
The more consequential question, then, is not whether the United States is engaged in information operations. It plainly is, as every major state actor is. The question is whether the frameworks used to analyse and contest disinformation are capable of applying their own criteria consistently, or whether they are structurally dependent on the Cold War binary that exempts democratic practitioners from the scrutiny directed at authoritarian ones. The Rubio cable, arriving eleven months after the dismantling of the last institutional body charged with that scrutiny, suggests the answer is the latter. It did not invent this problem. But it made it unusually easy to see.