NEWS FORCE—Chapter 1
RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE
March 4, 2022
Rich Palmer was getting ready to go to bed after a long day, when a notification on his phone popped up. On the other side of the Atlantic it was already the early morning of the 24th of February, and Putin had just announced a special operation on Ukrainian soil.
‘Son of a bitch!’
‘What is it, honey?’ said Sally, his dear wife, as she got under the covers. She was a soccer mom of three kids who regarded her job as more stressful and important than her husband’s. She didn’t know and didn’t care about the details of his work. It just paid the bills.
‘Russia just invaded Ukraine.’
‘Sure. I’m going to sleep now; the baby will wake up in a couple hours. I’m exhausted,’ she kissed him on the cheek and turned around, apparently falling asleep instantly.
His wife had said sure. If Sally was the average American citizen, perhaps that war was already lost.
The phone rang, it was his boss. He ran out of the room. He didn’t want to wake up Sally.
‘Palmer, did you see that?’
‘Yes, I did, madam.’
‘Tomorrow, we’ll be working from the Pentagon. We’re having a meeting with the Committee at 6am. The car will pick you up at 5, get some shuteye. It’s going to be a long month.’
‘Got it.’
And then Sylvia O’Riley hung up. She wasn’t known for chitchatting.
He poured himself a glass of bourbon to check out the headlines before getting a few hours of sleep, when he got a message on the chat group they had with Hao Xi and Smolov.
HAO XI: Hello, my friends. China had more medals than US or Russia. I won.
PALMER: No!! Norway won the Olympics. Our bet was on our countries winning the Olympics, not on who had more medals. Nice try.
HAO XI: Ok. But Kamila Valieva got cleared from the scandal, you owe me 500 dollars.
PALMER: She lost, that doesn’t mean she got cleared.
HAO XI: She didn’t get banned from the competition. There’s no scandal in the news. You pay!
Palmer didn’t know what to reply. He didn’t have a good argument and he wouldn’t have one either when Sally found out he had lost one thousand bucks gambling with the enemy. Then Smolov joined the chat.
SMOLOV: Yes, pay first and then we talk about Ukraine ;-)
A smiley? What a pity he didn’t know how to say fuck you in Russian.
PALMER: Fine, I’ll make the transfer tomorrow. I’m going to bed now. I have a long day tomorrow since one of you assholes invaded your neighbour!
He downed the bourbon and went to sleep. The following day was going to be a shit storm.
Sylvia O’Riley and Rich Palmer arrived at the Pentagon together but went different ways once they entered the building. She went to a high-level meeting, while he had to wait in a large meeting room with mid-level staff from different branches of the military.
Palmer was the only person not wearing a uniform. At a subconscious level, that was one of the reasons why the other members of the Multi-force Committee didn’t respect him. The conscious reason for not liking him was that he had a smug air about him. He hadn’t gone through the hard training the others had to endure to secure their jobs, and yet he thought he was smarter than the rest.
He walked up to the oval table, large enough to sit 50 or 60 people, and found an empty chair. He didn’t sit, he placed both hands on the table and said, ‘You’ve always told me the News Force is bullshit.’
’Cause it is, you moron!’ someone shouted and the rest began to laugh and whistle.
He waited for the racket to come down.
‘But to repel the invasion of Ukraine, none of you will get to use your weapons and your toys. Sorry. We will win this war with news. Welcome to the 21st Century. It’s called an information war, you motherfuckers.’
The rest booed him and called him names.
Sylvia O’Riley and her peers from the other branches of the military walked in the meeting room an hour later. When she began explaining the situation, Palmer wondered how come she, working in the same branch as him, commanded respect from the same audience that a moment earlier had been mocking him.
‘We can’t risk a nuclear war with Russia, not now and not over Ukraine. It’s not part of NATO and well, it’s Ukraine. Anyways, our response is going to be in three fronts. First, sanctions, we’re going to nuke their economy, but that’s out of the scope of everyone in this room. Second, weapons, we’ll be sending tons of those in the coming weeks. That will make Russia’s war more expensive, both financially and in terms of body bags. The last front is the news war. Make no mistake, we are in the middle of a cold war, and our mission is to tilt the world’s public opinion in our favour.’
‘That should be easy, right?’ asked a captain from the Army, ‘Putin wanted a place in history close to Stalin and he’s got it. The thing is, everyone thinks Stalin was a psychopath.’
The people in the room applauded his comment.
‘We know that Western media and that of other partners around the world are going to hit Russia hard. But China is not going to do such thing. India will be moderate — they have close ties to Russia, and they blame us for being too friendly with Pakistan. Across the Middle East we don’t have the best of PR, you know why… Most of Latin America and Africa will report the invasion but regard it as something too distant to raise a brow.’
‘We need to paint Putin like Hitler,’ said Palmer.
O’Riley looked at him, ‘That’s a good start.’
Igor Smolov parked his car in front of a glass building in Mozhaysky District in West Moscow, where most of the tech industry in the city is based. His unit was posing as a tech startup, so their office was located in a flashy building. Personally, he liked it much better than the old building near the Kremlin because it was closer to his flat.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then put some drops on them. He had barely slept in the past two days and the invasion had just gotten started. He needed coffee. He went inside.
He gathered his small team around the meeting table, where stacks of files, hard drives and fast-food packaging summarised their lives better than words.
‘This will be our trench in the coming weeks. I want the storage room cleared after this meeting. They’re delivering a bunkbed this afternoon. We can take turns taking naps there. You’ll go home every other day or so.’
‘Fuck!’ said Valentina, who covered Western Europe.
‘It’s a war, what do you expect?’
‘I expect we will win,’ someone said.
‘The army has a good chance. Ours is a different story. We have two wars. One, we need to make sure every single person on Russian soil believes we’re entering Ukraine to rescue innocent Russian civilians from the fascist right controlling the Ukrainian government.’
He grabbed a laser pointer from the table and pointed towards the wall on the left, covered with pictures and newspaper clips. The red dot stopped at a picture of Russian police in riot gear containing a protest.
‘Some unpatriotic assholes are going to cry foul. They’re going to spread rumours and attack the government.’
‘No problem,’ said Danil, the US media specialist, ‘The police will crash them and throw them in jail until they chill.’
Smolov knew that was a no-brainer, but if the sanctions began to bite and people felt the pain in their pockets for a sustained period of time, that would be a different story. He didn’t want to scare his squad, thou. They’d cross that bridge when they got there.
‘War number two: the image of Putin and Russia is going to be tarnished. The West will say Russia is the evil empire invading poor little Ukraine. We must contain those attacks.’
‘We need to turn that around,’ said Valentina, ‘When the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe wasn’t outraged, they didn’t sanction Bush. We can shift the conversation to why it’s OK for them to invade a country, but Russia can’t, even if it has a legitimate reason.’
‘That’s not realistic. We don’t have that power,’ explained Smolov, ‘The Americans control de media discourse in the West, and they influence the rest of the world. Think about it, when there’s a BLM story or a high-speed chase on a highway in the US, Western media reports it. The American president chips a fingernail, and the whole world reports it. We must acknowledge that the Americans have an advantage. We can’t play by their rules.’
‘So what do we do?’
It was a good question. Smolov thought for a moment.
‘We take the punches. We survive the hardship, that’s what Russians do best. We are in a race against time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Time erases everything. Nobody talks about Syria anymore. A few years back, that’s all the media covered. Today, nobody gives a shit anymore. Most people think the war there is over. One day, Americans will go back to forgetting where Ukraine is on the map. Until then, we just need to discredit their stories.’
‘That’s what they’ve been doing with ours for the past months.’
‘Listen, in the global media, we might not come out of this as the good guys, but we can come out as the winners.’
Hao Xi, his girlfriend and some of their friends were in a KTV bar. About 12 people were crammed in a private room with two sofas and a long coffee table full of glasses and full ashtrays. They were taking turns to stand close to the flatscreen TV and scream their lungs out on the microphone while the others played drinking games.
It was a friend’s birthday and there was no reason to halt the celebration. For the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, the invasion of Ukraine was something they’ll hear about but not really get all the details. The Winter Paralympics and President Xi’s plan for economic recovery would continue to take all the top headlines.
The directives Hao Xi had received were clear: China’s internal and external messaging had to be consistent with calling for a diplomatic solution, and casually pointing the fingers at the US for pushing the expansion of NATO. Despite its support for Russia in the UN Security Council, China was to proclaim its neutrality in the conflict. In short, Hao Xi’s task for the days ahead was making sure that all media in the country copy-pasted the same message over and over again.
Hao Xi understood the game. He didn’t need to have access to classified documents or to be on top of the giant Chinese political apparatus. He was a very smart guy, he had been hired precisely because he could find out things that weren’t published. The Ukrainian military operation was a win win game for China. On February 4, Putin and Xi Jinping had met. The Russian president must have shared his plans. The Chinese president offered support but must have demanded a few things. Don’t enter Ukraine during the Olympics, but the Paralympics would be fine. A fixed oil price for China, a good wildcard to have once the conflict sent the oil prices through the roof.
All in all, a win win situation. The US and its NATO allies would be focused on Russia and not China. Beijing could sit back and observe the West’s reaction and take notes for when the time came for a military operation in Taiwan. A high oil price would worsen inflation in the West, so China could push ahead with its post-pandemic economic recovery.
Hao Xi knew he could get properly hammered tonight. The first couple of days of Russia’s military operation would just entail international media tracking for him. He wouldn’t have to put out any fires, it wasn’t China’s war. After the initial blow, things might get bumpier, so he might have to overtime more then. But not the following day.
Hao Xi ordered more beer and baijiu. He was happy, he wanted to share with his friends. The way he saw it, Palmer was paying for the drinks.
The following day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sitting in his office browsing a document on his tablet. In front of him sat Aditi Choudhry, an Indian News Force officer. The night before she had produced the report he was looking at. His face was hermetic, not letting any emotion escape. When he finished, he put down the tablet and looked at her.
‘Well, you know what you have to do.’
‘Yes, sir. I will instruct our agents in the different media outlets to make sure there’s a consistent message: Russian troops are entering Ukraine, we call for a diplomatic solution, and India remains neutral.’
‘Good, but it can’t sound like we’re copying China. Make sure of that.’
‘Of course. We will report the Ukrainian casualties and the damage done by Russian forces — the Chinese will never do that. We will allow some opinion pieces to question Putin’s move and our relationship with Russia, but no frontal attacks. There’s a large community of Indian students in Ukraine, we’ll have plenty of stories about them.’
‘Don’t forget to highlight that Imran Khan was visiting Putin in Moscow as the Russian troops marched in Ukraine.’
That, indeed, was the perfect headline for India. It was an elegant way to highlight how nonchalant Putin was about invading a neighbouring country, and it made the prime minister of Pakistan an accomplice. It portrayed Khan as Putin’s bitch. The Russian media would parade Khan. He’d be bringing the good news that Pakistan would buy wheat and gas from Russia. A little something to distract the Russian people from what was happening on the border with Ukraine.
Prime Minister Modi erased his smile and looked down to immerse in his thoughts. He was a hard man to read, but Aditi Choudhry could bet that he was thinking Putin had gone too far and the shit was going to spray everyone. Modi knew that, as the war intensified in the following days, the US would make every country pick sides. And if you weren’t with them, they’d make sure the Western media would discredit you.
But Russia was India’s partner as much as America was. They bought a good share of their weapons and oil from Russia. But most importantly, India wanted respect. India was the second most populated country in the world, and it had the 6th largest economy. It had a young but daring space programme. India had a solid soft power propelled by their exports of film, music, literature and gurus. And yet, Washington saw them like nothing more than a second-rate country ranking low in their partner list. The US only approached India when they wanted to gang up on China — something they knew India would be interested since the border dispute got ugly in 2020. But whenever India had had issues with Pakistan or terrorist attacks, Uncle Sam was too busy to lend a hand. So, fuck them, India was nobody’s puppet.
‘We will handle it well, sir,’ Choudhry said, ‘We just need to hold tight. We have elections for the Assembly next week… and the Indian Premiere League starts at the end of March.’
‘Right, cricket.’
Read more at http://newsterati.com/news-force/
