While the title might be misleading, this book was pretty informative. Richard Stengel, a former Under Secretary of State, brings to light details on his life as Under Secretary - some that I thought could be used against the department (mostly security related as room locations were given, and everything in the building seemed old) - sharing how in the past the US Government is/was.

There are sections on his travels and dealings with ISIS, Russians and Trump, and again I feel like some sections have not been edited or approved by those involved, but nevertheless, Richard shares his point of view, good or bad (eg, he complains about the lack of talent of some musicians opening up a ceremony).
Since the book is more of a memoir, he goes over some mistakes he made, and his thoughts on how things should have been done highlighting that the intention was good. This book definitely seemed to be an opportunity to shine some light on his behaviours.
Again, not exactly what the title indicates, but entertaining.

By turns eye opening, maddening, fascinating, and humorous.

I haven't been sucked in by a book (let alone a nonfiction book) like this in a while. Read in just a couple of sittings.

Highly recommended for fans of memoirs, politics, and current affairs.

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It by Richard Stengel is a non-fiction book about disinformation and how we fight it on the new front of social media. Mr. Stengel, former editor of Time magazine, was at the frontlines in this new type of warfare while serving in the Obama administration as an Under Secretary of State.

Information and disinformation wars are as old as time, however with the rise of social media it has been easier than ever before to muddy the water with disinformation designed to confuse the populace. In his book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It author Richard Stengel writes of a firsthand account he had being an Under Secretary of State trying to figure out how to build a counter narrative.

The author writes about the Russian fascist, strategist and political analyst Aleksandr Dugin who wrote the “playbook” that Russia has been using the past several decades for their information warfare:

“Alexander Dugin is especially scary, he is known as Putin’s Resputin and has advocated the rise of conservative strongmen in the West, as Russia works to replace liberalism by the conservative superstate of Russia. “He has said all truth is relative and a question of belief; that freedom and democracy are not universal values but peculiarly Western ones; and that the U.S. must be dislodged as a hyperpower through destabilizing American democracy and the encouragement of American isolationism.”

Mr. Stengel makes an excellent case about the first part of his subtitle, but sadly the second part “what can we do about it” is not convincing. Mostly because of the government bureaucracies, slow moving administrative machinery, and simply the way democracies work. After moving from Time magazine to the State Department, Mr. Stengel “found government too big, too slow, too bureaucratic. It constantly gets in its own way.”

The government is not the answer, the author believes, but it is part of the solution. He calls for the media to be more responsible, check before they report. But that’s not enough, he adds, consumers of media need to also use reasoning and critical thinking before pressing the “share” button, disseminating disinformation to hundreds, if not thousands of people.
It only takes 10 to 30 seconds for most of those.

The book was a bit choppy, but fascinating nonetheless, and somewhat disturbing. Mr. Stengel does drive in the point that disinformation is dangerous to democracy, and has been weaponized by our geopolitical enemies to great effect.

Former TIME editor and Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs discusses his times, challenges and experiences during his three-year stint in the State Department under John Kerry.
During his time he, the department and the Obama administration dealt with the challenges combating ISIS's information campaign, the Russian attacks, and disinformation on Twitter and Facebook, the rise of Trump and much more.
I found the book to be an interesting look behind the curtains, the problems with diplomacy and fighting against opponents that don't abide by conventional rules.

Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky a Russian political scientist and a self-proclaimed “political technologist”) once famously exclaimed that to get people to vote the way you want, “you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.” Who better to assimilate this fact than Richard Stengel. Mr. Stengel, in his capacity as the longest serving Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in American history (2013-16) spent his entire tenure directing all resources at his disposal to counter the threat of global disinformation.

In a hard-as-nails, quasi memoir Mr. Stengel regales his readers as in a quest to combat the plague of disinformation, he unwittingly locks horns with two of the deadliest purveyors of the tradecraft of disinformation. No.55 Savushkin Street in St Petersburg, four story limestone building with neither razzmatazz nor name was the very motherlode of disinformation. The machines of propaganda were lubricated and greased in this otherwise nondescript building. No.55 Savushkin was Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “troll factory.” Registered to the “Internet Research Agency”, “a shadowy Russian company that seems to do everything from creating sock puppets to practicing cyber vandalism…every day, in two shifts, a few hundred young people spend their time writing blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, VKontakte posts and much more.” Spewing out thousands of content or rather malcontent at a speed which would put the reproduction of rabbits to utter shame, this troll farm was the veritable synonym of malicious disinformation.

As Mr. Stengel reveals in startling detail, the other most insidious source of disinformation emanated from a less tranquil but unlikeliest of settings. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Iraq and Levant (“ISIL” a.k.a “ISIS”) may not strike one as popular mediums of news enjoying stellar ratings. Yet, the two most murderous terror outfits wreaking mayhem across the globe, also double up as genius peddlers of disinformation. As Mr. Stengler, was briefed by a senior intelligence officer, who employed an element of morbid humour for added effect, “ISIS is a distributed network. Al-Qaeda is Yahoo. ISIS is Google.” As Mr. Stengel explains, the twin kingpins of terror while not slaughtering civilians in Syria or reducing cities to a rubble in Iraq, were busy circulating English language magazines. While Al-Qaeda’s online publication was – ironically titled “Inspire”, ISIS’s competing offering was named “Dabiq.” Writing about Dabiq, Mr. Stengel says, “it was a digital publication…it actually had a pretty sophisticated layout and decent pictures…. the two publications debated each other about Islamic theory. They were like the Time and Newsweek of medieval Islamic theology.” Incidentally before accepting a job with the State, Mr. Stengel was Time ‘s 16th Managing Editor from 2006 to 2013.

Attempting to combat the pernicious princes of fake news, let alone conquering them, as Mr. Stengel realised was an unenviable if not an insurmountable task. To add insult to injury, the weapons available in his arsenal was turning out to be woefully inadequate. The State was grossly ill-quipped to deal with the sophistry and chicanery of both the Russians and the reprehensible terrorists. As Mr. Stengel elucidates, the actual canary in the coal mine was not the physical war and bloodshed but the information war that was engulfing and enveloping the digital world in a sweep, all encompassing. When Putin’s special Spetsnaz forces invaded Crimea, backed by a narrative of white lies and brazen denial, they were merely paying obeisance to the principles of Igor Panarin and Alexander Dugin, Russia’s two primary theorists of information warfare. Dugin, popularly known as “Putin’s Rasputin” coined the term “netcentric warfare”, a military line of effort. Hand in glove with the digital propaganda machine was RT the English language Russian TV channel. Conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin, and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s press spokesperson Aleksei Gromov, RT in the words of Mr. Stengel, “used all the traditional tricks of tabloid TV: attractive anchors, colourful graphics, wacky guests, sensational chyrons.” Even Julian Assange was provided a TV segment for his hosting. However, at the helm of all this glitz and glamour is Margarita Simonovna Simonyan, editor-in-chief and master orchestrator of the disinformation campaign.

Similar was the strategy adopted by ISIS. Their suave imagery, magnetic resonance and the affiliation towards a cause acted as an irresistible lure to the youth to either join them in their homicidal escapades or to essay the role of Lone Rangers in wreaking havoc through individual acts of mindless mass shooting and suicide bombings. Someone even termed ISIS the Muslim version of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

With a view to countering the “Russification”, and radicalization of the world, Mr. Stengel undertakes some bold and ingenious steps. In addition to creating and overseeing the Global Engagement Center, the United States’ only stand-alone anti-ISIL messaging entity., he also co-opted foreign allies in establishing the Sawab Center in Abu Dhabi. Initially nursing honest ambitions, the Sawab Centre has become a model organization for disseminating anti-ISIL messages and campaigns. The Under Secretary also oversaw the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program is a competitive. This was a merit-based scholarship program funded by the U.S. Department of State. FLEX students who pass multiple rounds of testing earn a scholarship to spend an academic year in the United States living with a volunteer host family and attending a U.S. high school. Unfortunately, Russia prohibited its students from enrolling in the FLEX programme following a false allegation of the abduction of a Russian boy, who was part of the FLEX programme.

Even while dealing with a subject as serious as that of disinformation, Mr. Stengel juxtaposes a blend of sardonic wit with dollops of wisdom. For example, while describing the filtering process to which Mr. Stengel was subjected to before being cleared for service as the Under Secretary of State. “For the SF86 and the Senate Foreign Relations Questionnaire, you have to list every foreign trip you have taken over the past 14 years, every significant relationship you had with any foreign national on the trip, and to the best of your ability, an estimate of how much you drank on these trips, Oh, and whether you had any illegal drugs.”

Mr. Stengel also recounts a painfully embarrassing personal encounter while experimenting with 140 characters on Twitter. Tweeting in a fit of fury about the downing of MH-17, a Malaysian Airlines commercial jet with 298 passengers aboard, by Ukraine separatists, who fired a Russian made BUK missile at it, Mr. Stengler overcome by rage, expresses his disgust on the incident. However instead of employing the hash tag #UnitedForUkraine, he falls prey to the auto-complete function and chooses the first hash tag to appear on screen. Thus #UnitedforGaza instead of #UnitedforUkraine. As may be expected, even though he deletes the tweet subsequently, he gets panned on Twitter by Twitterati, of silly and sublime breed alike.

So long as there are warring factions with entrenched beliefs in their ideologies however manic or senseless, the armoury of disinformation will not be lacking in myriad weapons. This has been evidenced in eviscerating detail by the Trump campaign and the Russian involvement in it. However, hope quelling maliciousness is brought to bear, courtesy, the indefatigable efforts of intrepid people, the likes of Richard Stengel.

Richard Stengel has written a very interesting book in Information Wars in that it’s part memoir of his time in the Obama Administration as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs where one of his most pressing challenges was confronting the rise of global disinformation from both Russia and ISIS and part diagnostic. The first fifty or so pages are spent describing how government works and operates. The reader may find him/her self wondering why this matters. Bear with him, he’s explaining why government may not be the best at fighting disinformation.

A majority of the book is then spent chronicling the efforts the Obama Administration or wanted to undertake to fight ISIS and Russia. These efforts were frustrated by government processes outlined by Stengel. I’m not going to go into the prescriptive sections of the book because individuals can only do so much to fight the global behemoth of disinformation, but they seem fairly commonsensical.

It was a very easy read if you have an interest in how policy can get made or unmade.

A well researched and well written book that helped me to understand the information world and what is going on behind the scene.
it's one of those books that are seminal for understanding what is going on in the contemporary world.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This book gives some great behind the scenes information about how the White House and its cabinet works and some insights into information as a weapon in the 21st century.