It's set up like a Hollywood film: a man, obviously an agent of the Russian secret service, sits alone in a dreary apartment, no - a dreary now, and thinks of the past: memories are played, marching soldiers, jets spray the colors of the Russian flag. He was proud of his time in the air force, the man reflects as he looks at a family photo, and after an accident he found a new calling in military intelligence. "At least that's what I thought." But today he knows: "The top leadership sold the land for palaces and yachts."
The CIA published the video in Russian. The US secret service uses social media to look for people in the country who are willing to reveal important information - and it offers what it says is a safe channel for sharing. The figure in the clip is obviously intended to help you make decisions. “Do I have enough courage?” the man first asks himself – before finally coming to the conclusion: “My wish is to save Russia. I will be the spark of truth for my son's sake."
It is not the first video that the CIA has published in the hope of persuading secret keepers in Russia to cooperate: last year, for example, there was a stylistically similar clip with the title: “Why I contacted the CIA – for myself ." What's new, however, is an aesthetic of patriotism: you see soldiers in action, flying combat helicopters, cosmonauts, national flags.
Apparently the clip is also about decoupling the patriotic elements from the current regime and making it clear: Russia is not Putin. The video penetrates the core of the target group's psyche, analyzes the Ukrainian blogger Igor Sushko. »The masterfully poetic script must have been written by a person who was born in the USSR.«
The Kremlin reacted negatively to the publication. "You know, this practice is widespread, secret services around the world often use the media and social networks to recruit new employees," said spokesman Dmitry Peskov, according to the Reuters news agency - and tried to ridicule the video . Someone needs to tell the CIA that the Russian network VKontakte is much more popular in his country than the banned .
Whether the CIA clip has the desired effect will probably never be known. Which secret service discloses the number of its informants? All one official revealed, according to Reuters, was that the video gave increased reach to intelligence agencies' websites in Russia.
sol/Reuters