Chapter 28: Information Warfare

Martian Capitol Building, Suite 486

New Pittsburgh, Mars

Tuesday, October 8, 2154

Harold Mitsuki enjoyed Project Dezinformatsiya much more than he ever expected. Dezinformatsiya was Russian for disinformation, black propaganda, spreading lies to your enemy as truth and confusing them as to what was actually happening. Mitsuki was the managing director of MarsGroup News, the independent Martian news organization that was very popular on Mars. When he had been approached by the Director of Martian Planetary Intelligence about creating a disinformation campaign, the veteran newsman had rebelled against the idea. For a true journalist, the idea of lying to the public was anathema. Only the assurances by the MPI, backed up by the Governor and the Legislature, that they didn’t plan to lie to Mars but only to WestHem allowed him to work with them with a clear conscience.

The MPI’s first planned attempt had involved a fake report about a crashed prototype bomber. The report showed that the bomber had crashed into an office building killing dozens. In reality, the pilots had managed to land the plane safely, killing nobody. Mitsuki had taken one look and laughed at the pathetic quality of the ruse. Challenged to do the job better, he had risen to the task.

Project Dezinformatsiya became a large endeavor, with MarsGroup News providing technical and broadcast talent in front of and behind the camera. It wasn’t enough to simply come up with the idea of a disinformation report. No, to sell the story they needed a professional reporter to tell the story, a face that was well known to the MarsGroup audience. They needed makeup people, sound editors, vid editors, writers, and producers; in short, they needed all the people necessary to create realistic news reports. Then the reports had to be slipped into real MarsGroup broadcasts aimed at the WestHem audience. MarsGroup wasn’t allowed to be shown to WestHem audiences, but the WestHem government, military, and intelligence organizations followed it religiously.

Mitsuki built the project team from MarsGroup staff he knew well. Jordan Bancroft was one of their most trusted news anchors and had been for years. What Harold knew was that Jordan’s son had died with the MPG in the Jutfield Gap during Martian Hammer and he hated WestHem with a cold passion. Kelly Clucker was a longtime MarsGroup producer and investigator; her daughter served with the Martian Navy at Triad Naval Base. The entire Dezinformatsiya team was built from MarsGroup staffers with journalistic integrity but no love for WestHem. Overseeing the project was Mitsuki, who had spent a lifetime, going back years before the Revolution, as one of MarsGroup’s first employees.

One of the things he kept harping on to Joe Ducksass, the MPI’s Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and his boss on the project, was that a single story wouldn’t be sufficient for what they wanted. They needed to build a campaign, a set of stories that told a larger tale. It wasn’t enough for MarsGroup to report on a problem or a crime, that crime needed to build to a conclusion. That conclusion was something that played into WestHem’s biases and inherent beliefs.

Those biases and beliefs were at the very foundation of what WestHem thought about the Greenies. It started with the nickname itself, Greenies, derived from the centuries-old name for aliens from outer space, Little Green Men. It was demeaning, as was the other nickname, vermin. The Martian colony was originally populated by the lower classes of WestHem, people from the ghettos of Earth who went to Mars for a new start. To the WestHem ruling class, Martians came from scum, were still scum, and would always be scum. They were ungovernable and the fact that they had revolted was proof that they were being led astray by malevolent actors. A longtime joke about the Martians was, ‘The Greenies are revolting!’, to which the response was, ‘They certainly are!’

So, with that first effort at disinformation, it wasn’t enough to report the lie about a prototype bomber crashing and killing people. It had to feed into what WestHem wanted to believe. The crash had to be a disaster, caused by incompetent Martian engineers and designers, and killing not dozens but hundreds of innocent people. In addition, there had to be a coverup by the Martian government, which was incapable of governing, and was violating their constitution in doing so. A series of reports and broadcasts would be needed, though without any satisfactory conclusion.

Every time a fifth column activity was discovered, either after it was committed or after the blackmail victim reported the attempt to the MPI, it became the basis of a new series of broadcasts. Crimes were being committed, criminals were being covered for, the Martian government and the Martian Planetary Guard were being corruptly run. In the eighteen months since the first reports were made, over a dozen ‘scandals’ were discovered by the ‘Special Investigation Team’.

Harold enjoyed the program immensely, if simply for the perverse pleasure he gained from lying to a gullible audience. He spent at least one day a week in Suite 486 of the Martian Capitol Building, an office on the forty-eighth floor of the building which had been outfitted as a duplicate of the main MarsGroup broadcast studio. When it came time to create a phony broadcast, it would be indistinguishable from a real MarsGroup broadcast.

That was where Joe Ducksass found Harold Mitsuki. “Morning, Joe. What’s on the menu for today?”

Ducksass sat down across from Mitsuki. “We’re getting close to the launch date for Martian Vengeance. It’s time to ratchet up the bullshit. We want it peaking at the launch date, January One.”

“What’s the focus?” Mitsuki said, “You already have them believing the Martian government is on the verge of collapsing. What’s next?”

“The MPG and the Navy. They’ve become paper tigers, barely able to defend a cookie jar, let alone a planet.”

“Why?”

Ducksass answered, “We want the Marines and the WestHem Navy to think Martian Vengeance is going to be a walkover. We want them cocky and confident.”

“So, when you hit them, you’ll really hammer them.”

“More than hammer them. We need to annihilate them! We want this nonsense to end. We can’t keep fighting a new invasion every four or five years. We have to stop this. What happens when some asshole decides to teach us a lesson by dropping a nuke somewhere? Even World War III didn’t involve nukes!”

“You’re talking a major increase in the disinformation.”

“We have twelve weeks. What can you do in twelve weeks?”

New Pentagon, Military Headquarters

Denver, WestHem

Tuesday, December 10, 2154

“What do you have for me today, Colonel?” asked Major General Willister Finch of WestHem Military Intelligence.

Lieutenant Colonel John Amos smiled. He had recently been promoted based on the quality of the intelligence he was discovering on Mars. It had started with a blackmail campaign aimed at creating a fifth column among the abandoned Marines and Navy personnel left behind after the Martian Revolution, Martian Hammer, and Martian Justice. The fifth column idea never really panned out since it was so difficult to infiltrate agents into Mars and identify potential blackmail targets. The original idea had been to force the targets identified to commit crimes on Mars, the bloodier, the better. It rarely worked, and almost always burned an agent.

However, what really worked was forcing the target to provide intelligence. If the intelligence could be corroborated through publicly available sources, it was even better. “We’ve gotten some new info out of Triad. A wife of an ex-Marine works in the Naval Base and has access to ship maintenance schedules. One of their Owls has a blown engine. They’re going to have to rebuild it and the assembly line is being rebuilt. It’s going to be unavailable until April. They’ve also got problems with their Seattles. Two are sidelined in Rhea and they are sending a couple from Triad to Rhea. The Greenies are very worried about EastHem going back to Saturn.”