Thread by @bellingcat

BREAKING: The second part of our series on Yevgeny Prigozhin's shadowy campaigns, this time focusing on his war on free media, In particular, a coordinated plan to surveil and discredit a CNN investigative team in the Central African Republic. bellingcat.com/news/africa/20…

In May 2019, a CNN team, including @clarissaward, arrived in Bangui to investigate Russian activity in the mineral-rich country. They did not know that there was already a plan in place -- see the attached memo we obtained -- for Prigozhin's team to run surveillance on them.

The "Convoy" group that would coordinate the surveillance is a St. Petersburg-based security group ran by Colonel Konstantin Pikalov, who spearheaded Russia's Africa interventions from a security and military perspective and was a liaison for the Russian Ministry of Defense.

While the CNN team was in Bangui, to investigate Prigozhin's activities in the CAR, @clarissaward and her team were monitored with hidden cameras in hotel rooms and men disguised as local journalists. These materials were later published on RIA FAN, Prigozhin's "news agency".

In one case, a man who later called himself "Iisus May" approached the CNN team and offered his help (they declined). In a return trip, this man was spotted in the hotel lobby photographing @clarissaward and beyond the restricted security area of the hotel upon CNN's arrival.

The CNN team was able to snap a couple of photographs of “Iisus” while he was monitoring them in their hotel lobby in Bangui. This same man later appeared in a report from RIA FAN, Prigozhin's "news agency", claiming that CNN offered to pay him for negative information on Russia.

This same RIA FAN report was the culmination of Prigozhin's surveillance of the CNN team and included a number of absurd allegations.

Two men pretending to be journalists (who, turns out, were with Prigozhin's team) asked for a selfie with @clarissaward in at her Bangui hotel.

RIA FAN edited this image to make it seem sinister, and invented a "casting call" of CNN recruiting locals to lie about Russia for $.

RIA FAN even published its surveillance footage of the CNN team, including -- most disturbingly -- footage from @clarissaward's room, likely taken after she left.

RIA FAN is not a "news agency", but Prigozhin's instrument for harassment and illegal surveillance

This behavior from Prigozhin and his team is not new, as he has ran surveillance on and harassed Russian journalists for almost a decade. As found in leaked emails from Prigozhin's team, they run a mini-spy agency against opposition journalists.

As we see with today's news about @navalny's poisoning, Russian opposition figures can experience tragedy very suddenly. In 2016, a little-known Pskov-based blogger died of a "heart attack". Prigozhin's team ran surveillance on him before his death, which was never investigated.

(You can read this blog, ran by Sergey Tikhonov, here: skobars.livejournal.com)

The same pattern of surveillance, harassment, and attempted discrediting can also be seen with @AdrianChen, who was in St. Petersburg in 2015 investigating the "troll factory" for the @nytimes. LIke with @clarissaward and CNN, RIA FAN published staged photos of him.

In a rare bit of first-person reporting, we can also say that Prigozhin and his empire have also tried to run the same playbook against us as they did with Adrian and Clarissa.

In the third and final part of this investigative series, we will report on Prigozhin's "Project Translator" -- his plan of interference actions with the 2020 US elections.

We received a copy of the corporate payroll of this operation and contacted some people on the list for right-of-reply to share their side of the story. See below for one of these (quite polite, we'd say) right-of-reply messages

RIA FAN fabricated correspondence loosely based on this right-of-reply message on WhatsApp. On the left -- our actual message. On the right -- what RIA FAN published, with the fabricated content highlighted in the red translation.

RIA FAN also fabricated DMs on Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp from one of our researchers, @hspvn, despite the fact that he didn't even know this story was being researched until the fake DMs were out. Here's a list of reasons why they were very badly crafted.

Like with the CNN crew and Adrian Chen, we were being accused of being instruments of Western security services to create unrest in Russia and fabricated content. A bit of projection going on there from Prigozhin's crew.

With most of RIAFAN's fabrications, links spread among ultra nationalist / pro-Kremlin sites, but largely stay within this nasty information ecosystem. With Prigozhin's fabrications of @hspvn, @Dpol_un (RU Deputy UN Ambassador) and the @mfa_russia shared the link to their readers

In the next and last installment from this three-part investigative series, we look at Prigozhin’s history of obsession with the United States, the evolution of his interference efforts in American politics, and his plans for influencing operations in the upcoming 2020 elections.

You can read this second installation of our Prigozhin's series here: bellingcat.com/news/africa/20…

And if you missed it, the first part here, focusing on the state-run structure of Prigozhin's activities, particularly in Africa: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…