Exclusive: U.S. Army simulated exploiting The Taipei Times, Buddhist monks, and surgeons through online propaganda in context of Chinese invasion of Taiwan
During the April 2023 CAPEX event, 4th Psychological Operations Group identified vulnerabilities of an anti-communist publisher, Buddhist monk, and surgeon to exploit through modern info warfare tool.
In late April of last year, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) released a video of soldiers from its 75th Ranger Regiment rappelling down from a Boeing Chinook helicopter flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, an elite Army aviation unit known as the Night Stalkers which forms a core component of Joint Special Operations Command. The picturesque demonstration at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) was part of USASOC’s yearly capabilities exercise, known as CAPEX, and local newspaper The Fayetteville Observer would soon after publish an exclusive that the event involved a simulated response to “a full-scale Chinese invasion of the island of Tawain [sic]…while pro-Chinese propaganda circulated.”
As noted by The Observer, CAPEX ‘23 featured a significant amount of information warfare, including “a simulated scenario of a pro-People’s Republic of China party running for national office in Tawain [sic] and alleging election fraud.” The Observer would further quote Army Special Operations Command leader LTG Jonathan P. Braga — albeit with the incorrect and elevated title of “commander of U.S. Special Operations Command” — regarding some spectators being disturbed by the mass casualty portion of the simulation.
Revealed here for the first time, CAPEX ‘23 further involved USASOC’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) — also known as ‘Dark Horse’ — simulating the manipulation of the psychological vulnerabilities of several Taipei-based anti-communist personalities, including mock-ups of: a publisher of Taiwan’s only English print newspaper, The Taipei Times, an emergency surgeon, a Buddhist monk, and a Buddhist truck driver. The primary tool for the psychological warfare exercise would be the Pulse platform of the Virginia-based firm Two Six Technologies. And each of the four profiles would be loosely based upon a member of the chain of command from Dark Horse up through the entirety of U.S. Special Operations Command, beginning with then-commander of the 4th Psychological Operations Group, Christopher D. Stangle, being transformed into a Buddhist, Taiwanese nationalist truck driver named ‘Genki Stangle’.
According to Genki’s profile, his psychological vulnerabilities included being “will[ing] to make sacrifices to pay for [his] kids’ education,” and his influences included "FM radio stations in the Taipei area.” Similarly, Richard E. Angle, who was then commander of 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) — the organization which has housed the 4th and 8th Psychological Operations Groups alongside Green Berets and Civil Affairs units since 2014 — was transformed into “Chang Angle”, a publisher of The Taipei Times whose vulnerabilities were said to include a desire to “increase income for [his] family” and a hatred of “the censorship in mainland China.”
One step further up the chain of command was LTG Braga, who has led Army Special Operations Command since August 2021 and was transformed into the “Pro Taiwanese Independence”, anti-communist emergency surgeon “Dr. Chow Braga”. In addition to Dark Horse identifying Dr. Chow’s desire for an independent Taiwan as a psychological vulnerability, so too was his willingness to “make sacrifices to care for and keep his patients safe.” And one of the influences listed for Dr. Chow was Taiwanese news networks, presumably including Chang Angle’s Taipei Times.
Lastly, U.S. Special Operations Command head General Bryan P. Fenton became the anti-communist Buddhist monk “Bao Fenton”, who was said to be influenced by the Tai Chi community and vulnerable to a desire to become a social media influencer. In each of the four cases, Dark Horse summarized the target’s “pattern of life” alongside a listing of their known Twitter, Facebook, GMail, and YouTube accounts. The pattern-of-life analysis of fictional Taipei Times publisher Chang Angle claimed that he spent 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday at 399 Ruiguang Road in the Neihu district of Taipei — the actual address of Taipei Times.
Dark Horse would also experiment with a different model of behavior for each of the four fabricated individuals: [Kurt] Lewin’s Equation for the truck driver Genki Stangle, Everett M. Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovation model for Taipei Times publisher Chang Angle, Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior for emergency surgeon Dr. Chow Braga, and the COM-B Model of Behavior for Buddhist monk Bao Fenton.1
On May 2, one day before The Fayetteville Observer published its account of CAPEX ‘23 and its psychological operations components, the 4th Psychological Operations Group released a highly stylized recruitment video branding Dark Horse members as “Ghosts in the Machine” who can turn anything they touch into “a weapon.” Opening with a requisite quote from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, the audio intersperses an ‘adult lullaby’ from the Nashville-based singer Danica Dora with clips of President Reagan demanding the fall of The Berlin Wall and a Cold War-era training segment on the basics of psychological warfare. The visuals, which are no less eclectic, were summarized by VICE’s Motherboard as: “a ghostly cartoon from the 1930s, a train car, Chinese troops marching, and American soldiers walking through the woods with white masks over their faces.”
When USASOC was reached for comment, Lt. Col. Mike Burns provided a statement that: “The USASOC CAPEX is meant to demonstrate how Army SOF [Special Operations Forces] operates [sic] across the spectrum during competition, crisis, and high end conflict […and] leverage[s] their unique abilities and equipment to support the National Defense Strategy.” Lt. Col. Burns further stated that CAPEX ‘23 is “an annual event and not in response to or in preparation for some contingency.”
Roughly three weeks before CAPEX ‘23, Burns had apologized to CNN in response to a bungled Army Special Operations Command and FBI exercise which involved detaining the wrong person in Boston’s Revere Hotel on April 4. According to CBS Boston News, Delta Force operators and the FBI broke into the room of a sleeping Delta Air Lines employee and then handcuffed and interrogated him in the bathroom for 45 minutes before realizing they had the wrong person.
Despite providing a generic summary of CAPEX, Army Special Operations Command did not respond to a question regarding the ethics of targeting newspaper publishers, medical personnel, and religious figures for offensive information operations.
The Pulse platform
As reported by Reuters earlier this month, a small team of operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency began creating fake online accounts under President Trump’s direction in 2019 in order to “spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets.” The narrative attacks, which at least historically would have come from the Political Action Group within the Special Activities Center of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, were said to focus on discrediting China’s ‘Belt and Road’ infrastructure initiative and promoting allegations that Chinese Communist Party members were hiding their wealth overseas. Echoing motifs from Dark Horse’s ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ recruitment video, a former CIA official told Reuters that “We wanted [Chinese leaders] chasing ghosts.”
Elizabeth Kimber, who was head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations during the time period Reuters reported the offensive information operations against China to have begun, would also be employed as Vice President of Intelligence Community Strategy for the company supplying Dark Horse’s information warfare tools for the CAPEX simulation of psychological attacks against Taipei-based anti-communists.
In November 2022, then commander of 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), Maj. Gen. Richard E. Angle, who roughly a decade earlier commanded the U.S. military’s elite spying unit known as Task Force Orange under the cover name of the U.S. Army Office of Military Support, co-authored an article on how the U.S. military can use “crowdsourcing” to encourage resistance in allied countries, particularly Ukraine and Taiwan. Opening with a World War II-era photo of the Office of Strategic Services teaching students how to construct radio antennas, Angle’s report would claim that the Ukrainian government fabrication of a supposed elite fighter pilot known as the “Ghost of Kyiv” had “resonated with people abroad—elements of truth were turned into powerful weapons.”2 Public procurement records and freedom of information requests from the author have shown that Angle’s 1st SFC(A) had already launched numerous “tactical information warfare” efforts over the previous two years on top of a social media-focused platform known as Pulse. Exclusively reported here for the first time, Pulse would be the tool used by 1st SFC’s Dark Horse in the CAPEX simulation of the targeting of Angle’s alter ego as the publisher of The Taipei Times, Chang Angle.
Throughout a series of ‘counter-disinformation’ contracts beginning in mid-2020 and involving both Joint Special Operations Command and various geographically focused components of 1st Special Forces Command, including Dark Horse itself and the bulk of the numbered Special Forces groups, Two Six Technologies’ Pulse platform has become perhaps the preeminent modern information warfare tool for U.S. Special Operations Forces. Born out of a classified Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) crowdsourcing program in Afghanistan known as ‘More Eyes’ which was operational circa 2011, former DARPA program manager Ryan Paterson would commercialize techniques for modernizing information operations out of Cold War-style radio programs and leaflets and into text message blasts and social media campaigns.
The ‘Pulse platform’ would be the flagship product of Paterson’s company Information Science Technology Research — which was abbreviated as IST Research — and the company began selling an expansion of the product to U.S. Special Operations Forces in mid-2020 under the label of a “tactical information warfare” toolkit. With a potential payout to IST Research of $316 million, contracting documents obtained by the author through Freedom of Information requests demonstrated that the basic text blasts and social media polling functionality had expanded into social media surveillance and commercially sourced cellphone location tracking.
Within a year of IST’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces kicking off, the company was acquired by private equity firm The Carlyle Group and merged with cybersecurity firm Two Six Labs to form Two Six Technologies. By mid-2022, Paterson would leave Two Six to become president of Unplugged Systems, which claims to begin delivering customers a state-of-the-art secure phone in May but is best known for its backing from Erik Prince, the founder of infamous private military contractor Blackwater.
Under the new leadership of former Booz Allen Hamilton executive Joseph Logue, Two Six would appoint former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell to its board and hire the CIA’s first female head of operations, Ms. Kimber, as a VP.3 Two Six also expanded its information warfare capabilities beyond IST’s Pulse by acquiring the Media Manipulation Monitor (M3) product of Thresher Ventures, whose co-founder Rebecca Fair spent a decade as a CIA officer.
Two Six Technologies did not respond to a detailed request for comment, including whether it would be comfortable allowing the U.S. military to use its Pulse platform to target newspaper publishers, medical personnel, and religious figures for offensive information operations. The Taipei Times similarly did not respond to a request for comment regarding Dark Horse simulating their publisher as a target.
As reported by the author earlier this week based upon public procurement documents, a former operative from Task Force Orange, which Maj. Gen. Richard Angle previously commanded, recently sold Fort Huachuca’s Human Intelligence Training Joint Center of Excellence (HT-JCOE) software to help teach U.S. soldiers to evade (Chinese) law enforcement and counterintelligence. And while a military training center teaching soldiers how to evade facial recognition and make use of hidden storage systems on their phones while being wiretapped by a competent intelligence service may at first seem unrelated to information warfare, human intelligence collection has always been central to narrative battles, as best evidenced by the profession of journalism.
The author thanks Sam Biddle for pointing out the recent Reuters exclusive on the CIA’s offensive information operations against China.
While Lewin’s 1951 model treats behavior as a function of a person and their environment — that is, B = f(P, E) — Ajzen’s 1991 Theory of Planned Behavior breaks down the determinative factors of behavior as: attitudes, social normative beliefs, and perceived behavioral control. The Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation Behavioral model, or COM-B, is instead inspired by the U.S. criminal system, with its defining paper stating: “Under US criminal law, in order to prove that someone is guilty of a crime one has to show three things: means or capability, opportunity, and motive.” The outlier of the four models is arguably Diffusion of Innovation, which instead focuses on how new ideas propagate through networks.
U.S. Army Special Operations command credits Maj. Gen. Robert A. McClure as the founder of its special warfare capabilities, especially in regards to psychological warfare. In addition to naming their Fort Bragg headquarters after McClure in January 2001, the former general was inducted into the Commando Hall of Honor in October 2010. In 1952, McClure founded Fort Bragg’s Psywar School, which ultimately became the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. After a stint as ‘Director of Psychological Operations Proponency’ at the JFK Special Warfare Center, Col. Rustie W. Kim succeeded Col. Stangle as commander of Dark Horse on June 1, 2023.
While former CIA director Gina C. Haspel was the CIA’s first female acting deputy director of operations circa February 28 to May 2013, Elizabeth Kimber was the first female to be confirmed into the position, which she held circa 2018 to June 2021.
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