The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China\u2019s Sinovac inoculation \u2013 payback for Beijing\u2019s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By CHRIS BING<\/a> and JOEL SCHECTMAN<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Filed June 14, 2024, 9:45 a.m. GMT<\/p>\n\n\n\n WASHINGTON, DC<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China\u2019s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military\u2019s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines \u2013 China\u2019s Sinovac inoculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus \u2013 Tagalog for China is the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCOVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don\u2019t trust China!\u201d one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: \u201cFrom China \u2013 PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. military\u2019s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China\u2019s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China\u2019s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden\u2019s presidency, Reuters found \u2013 even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon\u2019s influence operation did so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China\u2019s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military \u201cuses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.\u201d She also noted that China had started a \u201cdisinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Manila\u2019s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the \u201cfindings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.\u201d Some aid workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S. military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Briefed on the Pentagon\u2019s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s defensible,\u201d said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth\u2019s Geisel School of Medicine. \u201cI\u2019m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,\u201d said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Academic research published recently<\/a> has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program<\/a> in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people\u2019s arms as possible,\u201d said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategy of Washington\u2019s many spy agencies. What the Pentagon did, Treverton said, \u201ccrosses a line.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018We were desperate\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the anti-vax material and other Pentagon-planted disinformation was viewed, or to what extent the posts may have caused COVID deaths by dissuading people from getting vaccinated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, however, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be inoculated that he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,\u201d a masked Duterte said in a televised address<\/a> in June 2021. \u201cThere is a crisis in this country \u2026 I\u2019m just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated \u2013 far short of the government\u2019s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by the U.S. anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an already vulnerable citizenry. Public concerns about a Dengue fever vaccine<\/a>, rolled out in the Philippines in 2016, had led to broad skepticism toward inoculations overall, said Lulu Bravo, executive director of the Philippine Foundation for Vaccination. The Pentagon campaign preyed on those fears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhy did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate,\u201d said Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and Philippines government during the pandemic. \u201cWe don\u2019t have our own vaccine capacity,\u201d she noted, and the U.S. propaganda effort \u201ccontributed even more salt into the wound.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China\u2019s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military\u2019s secret operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military\u2019s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe weren\u2019t looking at this from a public health perspective,\u201d said a senior military officer involved in the program. \u201cWe were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A new disinformation war<\/p>\n\n\n\n In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clandestine psychological operations are among the government\u2019s most highly sensitive programs. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of people within U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last decade, some U.S. national security officials have pushed for a return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against rivals that the United States\u2019 wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2019, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, Reuters reported in March<\/a>. As part of that effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping\u2019s government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a \u201cbolt of energy\u201d that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China\u2019s influence war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pentagon\u2019s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China\u2019s own efforts to spread false information about the origins of COVID. The virus first emerged in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that the virus may have originated in a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There\u2019s no evidence for that assertion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mirroring Beijing\u2019s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s messaging got Washington\u2019s attention. Trump subsequently coined the term \u201cChina virus\u201d as a response to Beijing\u2019s accusation that the U.S. military exported COVID to Wuhan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, \u2018I have to call it where it came from,\u2019\u201d Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. \u201cIt did come from China.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed \u201cactions to politicize the origins question and stigmatize China.\u201d The ministry had no comment about the Justice Department\u2019s complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beijing didn\u2019t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines \u2013 still being tested at the time \u2013 to struggling countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a \u201cglobal public good,\u201d and would ensure \u201cvaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.\u201d Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Washington\u2019s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to \u201cplay hardball\u201d with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The deal \u201csucked most of the supply out of the global market,\u201d Gostin said. \u201cThe United States took a very determined America First approach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Washington\u2019s alarm, China\u2019s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allows the U.S. military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Duterte said in a July 2020 speech<\/a> he had made \u201ca plea\u201d to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing\u2019s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cChina is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.\u201d Duterte said. \u201cSo, it is simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Days later, China\u2019s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte\u2019s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a \u201cnew highlight in bilateral relations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,\u201d a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. \u201cSo what was left to us was to throw shade on China\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Military trumped diplomats<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. military leaders feared that China\u2019s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three former Pentagon officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of COVID while promoting skepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation, or psyop, they argued during Zoom calls with the Pentagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,\u201d said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the Pentagon saw Washington\u2019s rapidly diminishing influence in the Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats to plead for caution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe relationship is hanging from a thread,\u201d another former senior U.S. diplomat recounted. \u201cIs this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it worth the risk?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal to the program. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing\u2019s messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon\u2019s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even \u201coutside of areas of active hostilities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. propaganda machine<\/p>\n\n\n\n In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing\u2019s COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampa\u2019s MacDill Air Force Base, U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains the Pentagon\u2019s clandestine propaganda factory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychological warfare has played a role in U.S. military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the al Qaeda attacks of 2001, the United States was fighting a borderless, shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA. The Pentagon set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike earlier psyop missions, which sought specific tactical advantage on the battlefield, the post-9\/11 operations hoped to create broader change in public opinion across entire regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices \u2013 themselves often secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered, sources said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pork in the vaccine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n By summer 2020, the military\u2019s propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered \u201charam,\u201d or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was \u201c manufactured free of porcine materials<\/a>.\u201d Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative. As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCan you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?\u201d read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar posts that traced back to U.S. Central Command. One shows a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes. In the center is a man with syringes; on his back is the word \u201cChina.\u201d It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China\u2019s vaccines and participated in human trials. Translated into English, the X post reads: \u201cChina distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military\u2019s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook\u2019s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading COVID misinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden\u2019s new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was terrible,\u201d said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign\u2019s pig-related posts. \u201cI was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging. \u201cWe were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,\u201d said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program. Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer. Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn\u2019t end immediately with the NSC\u2019s order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was \u201cmany, many leagues away\u201d from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report<\/a>. The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post<\/a>. which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter China\u2019s message that COVID came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper\u2019s 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at \u201cbroad population messaging,\u201d such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pentagon\u2019s audit concluded that the military\u2019s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn\u2019t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n