The encrypted app was the “darling of the CIA,” according to ex-State Department diplomat Mike Benz
The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm have used the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable, former Trump administration official and free speech activist Mike Benz has said.
The comments were made during an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on his show on Wednesday. Benz, a State Department official under the administration of former President Donald Trump, now runs the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online.
Carlson asked Benz about a potential US role in the arrest of Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov in France last week. A court in Paris charged Durov on Wednesday with complicity in several crimes perpetrated through his app, as well as failing to cooperate with the French authorities.
While the former diplomat did not speculate, he noted that Durov’s arrest aligns with the pattern of “soft power” tactics the US has pursued in the past.
The US has championed free speech globally for decades, “in large part” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or paramilitary movements “in countries where the US State Department seeks political control,” the former official said. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort, Benz claimed.
The reason “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 was that “the US State Department was using Telegram,” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” the former State Department official said.
The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” he added.
Benz claimed that Telegram was the “main channel” when the US was “effectively orchestrating a color revolution in Belarus” in 2020.
“The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was actually paying the main administrators of the Telegram channels that orchestrated those riots,” he said, calling the NED “one of the most prolific CIA cutouts in the arsenal.”
This practice is part of a long-running campaign by the US, UK, and other NATO partners to gain political control over the territories of the former Soviet Union and their resources, according to Benz.
He concluded that Telegram has been “the darling of the CIA, the State Department, and USAID” for political operations worldwide, due to its nearly billion users and the ease with which they can be directed to necessary channels for recruitment.
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