RT has been operating out of “KGB headquarters all this time,” the network joked on Friday, in response to a CNN report claiming that the US government is preparing to accuse it of espionage and “influence operations.”
According to the American broadcaster, the US State Department is set to release “declassified US intelligence findings” suggesting that the Russian government has “quietly embedded an intelligence-gathering unit within RT that is focused on influence operations globally,” with this unit’s activities going “beyond propaganda and covert influence operations to even include military procurement.”
Approached for comment by CNN, RT’s press office quipped: “We’ve been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time.”
“No, but seriously, we’re running out of popcorn to sit and watch what the US government will come up with next about us,” the response continued, before linking to a video containing “more details about how RT operates.”
Originally released in 2015, the video depicts RT’s creative director as a bear, its office cleaning ladies taking their orders “directly from the Kremlin,” and its foreign staffers chained up in a basement eating rations of McDonald’s hamburgers, delivered by Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan clad in a Red Army uniform.
CNN’s report comes just over a week after the US Justice Department indicted two individuals it identified as RT employees with alleged conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The two were accused of paying American content creators to produce videos aimed at amplifying “domestic divisions in the United States.”
The Justice Department claimed that the two suspects – named as Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, and Elena Afanasyeva – broke the law by not registering as foreign agents, and that paying for this content violated Washington’s economic sanctions on Moscow. However, the charges will likely never be contested in an American courtroom, as the two suspects are based in Moscow, and the US has no extradition treaty with Russia.
Shortly after the indictments were announced, Simonyan accused US officials and law enforcement agents of having no “other strategies except to scaremonger about the almighty RT.”
US intelligence agencies have issued sensationalist reports about RT before. Back in 2017, the US Department of Justice forced RT America to register as a foreign agent, after a number of outfits claimed that RT had helped to elect Donald Trump by publishing “negative coverage” of Hillary Clinton and criticizing the US’ “corrupt political establishment” in America.
According to CNN, the US will shortly unveil measures “making it much more difficult for RT to operate globally.” American officials will use the upcoming UN General Assembly “to try and build a coalition of countries to take on this challenge,” the report noted.