A small group of social media trolls are trying to pin last week’s accidental fire onboard a U.S. Navy ship on sabotage by “black separatists” within the U.S. military. One their key pieces of bogus evidence: a fake letter purporting to come from a possible Biden vice presidential pick. The trolls forged letterhead from Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office in order to falsely claim that the senator is concerned about the nonexistent threat of an insider attack and wants the Pentagon to investigate.
Duckworth’s campaign quickly reported the fakes to law enforcement and Twitter has since suspended the offending accounts. But the hoax artists behind the effort left a longer trail of fake news behind them. They’ve impersonated a reporter and an Israeli politician, forged phony screenshots about a fake coup plot in Iraq, and spoofed real news outlets with copycat websites. So what’s behind the disinformation campaign?
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Troll mail: The campaign began when a handful of Twitter accounts pretending to be a reporter and an Israeli politician began tweeting about: “The extremist black soldiers of the American army behind the explosion of assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard!”
In support of the claim, they posted a forged letter purporting to come from Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office.
“After meeting with the Commanding Officer of USS Bonhomme Richard, Capt. Gregory Scott Thoroman on July 13, 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom said that the USS Bonhomme Richard major fire was a sabotage operation carried out by Black Separatist Extremists, who had penetrated into the United States Navy,” the letter read. "The report and briefing provided to Congress on the aspects of the incident is incomplete and unacceptably vague."
The prose appears to have been written by an author with a poor command of the English language. It uses sentences with missing definite articles, inexplicable capitalizations, and strange word choices.
Duckworth’s office reported the forgery as soon as staffers became aware of it.
“Senator Duckworth’s office has notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities regarding this disinformation campaign but cannot comment on any investigation or activities related to the matter,” a Duckworth spokesman told The Daily Beast in a statement. “Special Counsel Mueller and the intelligence community have repeatedly warned that foreign disinformation campaigns like these—which constitute a direct national security threat—are continuing in the 2020 election.”
Accounts: One of the accounts involved in pushing the forgeries, @KellyJournalist aka “Kelly Turner,” falsely claimed to be a reporter for France’s state-funded news network, France24, and Ahval, a Turkey-focused news outlet critical of the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Her account, created in April 2020, focused primarily on fake news about the Middle East. In addition to the ship fire story, “Turner” also tweeted out a forged screenshot meant to look like it came from a real France24 journalist’s Twitter account. The fake tweet includes a made-up excerpt from a recent interview with former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, in which the ersatz Bolton claims that the Trump administration had planned for “the expulsion of Shiites from political power through a coup in Iraq after the attack on General [Qasem] Soleimani," the former head of Iran's Qods Force.
Another impersonated Lt. Col. Yoni Chetboun, a decorated Israeli Defense Forces special operations officer and member of the Knesset, and tweeted only a few times. Chetboun did not respond to requests from The Daily Beast for comment.
Twitter suspended both accounts after The Daily Beast shared its findings with the company.
A third account in the name of Victoria Orrick also tweeted the ship fire and was first flagged as suspicious by @wsquared58. Twitter suspended that account, as well.
Fake news copycats: At least two of the accounts pushing the fake ship fire story, “Victoria Orrick” and “Kelly Turner,” included links to a version of the article hosted at a fake news website designed to mimic a real Israeli news organization, Le Petit Hebdo.
The real Le Petit Hebdo is an Israeli French-language weekly hosted at lphinfo.com. The fake accounts tweeted out a link to a similar site hosted at the .org top level domain. The site, registered just two days before the accounts put the fake Duckworth letter up according to record in the DomainTools database, mimicked the real Le Petit Hebdo exactly except for the fake article about the Bonhomme Richard fire.
There was one notable difference between the fake ship fire story the accounts tweeted out and the one written up in the fake Le Petit Hebdo website. In article form, the authors added a twist claiming that Gov. Gavin Newsom claimed that the possibility of Iranian or Chinese involvement was “being investigated by experts from the United States military and The Central Intelligence Agency.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Le Petit Hebdo editors but did not receive a response.
The fake site didn’t copy the real Hebdo entirely. The only content hosted on the fake version is the single fake article formatted to look like it was hosted at the real site. When a reader clicks anywhere else on the fake site, it automatically redirects visitors to the real thing. The process is almost visually seamless—blink and you’ll miss the .org morphing into a .com in your URL bar.
The interview that never was: The “Kelly Turner” account appears to have used the same tactic in June when it tweeted out a spoofed link to another apparent fake news copycat site. The story—a fake account about how Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi was secretly under the influence of Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and U.K.—was hosted at a .org top level domain and created two weeks before “Kelly” tweeted it out. The site has since been deleted and no archives of it exist but the url is similar to a legitimate French-language news site, nouvelobs.com.
In a twist on the same URL game, both the Kelly Turner and Yoni Chetboun fake accounts used a slightly misspelled address for another French-language news outlet, La Provence, in order to trick readers into falling for a fake interview with the Israeli ambassador to France. Turner and Chetboun tweeted out links to the interview meant to look like they were hosted at the Marseille-based newspaper.
The fake La Provence story included a fictional interview with Ambassador Aliza Bin-Noun, Israel’s ambassador to France and Monaco. In the piece, the phony Ambassador Bin-Noun says that she “strongly supports” the MEK, a dissident cult that opposes Iran’s clerical regime, and the authors falsely claim that the envoy had tweeted that Israel’s intelligence services had “started to directly finance the efforts and operations of the organization.”
Echoes from Iran: The mention of Iran as a possible culprit in the fake Hebdo story echoes a conspiracy theory floated by Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, the head of Iran’s Qods Force covert operations arm. In a speech given on the same day the tweets were published, Ghaani falsely suggested that the Bonhomme Richard fire was an insider attack. “This incident that was a response to your crimes has taken place by your own elements. God would punish you with your own hands,” he told an audience of IRGC generals.
Iran has been under pressure recently as the U.S. and Israel have reportedly embarked on a campaign of covert sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program that has seen explosions at a key Iranian nuclear facility. The New York Times reported that Iranian officials speaking on background have blamed some of the fires on sabotage by unidentified parties.
Infowar flop: Like many influence operations on social media, the accounts’ attempts to convince readers and amplify its phony conspiracy theory appear to have failed—badly. The Twitter accounts were short-lived and never racked up more than a few dozen followers. No one appears to have linked to their fake news websites or otherwise taken their claims seriously.
The only source of engagement “Kelly Turner” ever received was mockery. “The fake was written by people who obviously have no idea about the political personalities named. It’s laughably fake,” one apt Twitter user noted.
