Tag Archives: Espionage

World

Havana Syndrome Attacks Widen With CIA Officer’s Evacuation From Serbia

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WASHINGTON—The CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia in recent weeks who suffered serious injuries consistent with the neurological attacks known as Havana Syndrome, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The incident in the Balkans, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest in what the officials describe as a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some sort of directed-energy source.

Still more suspected attacks have occurred overseas and in the U.S., the current and former officials said, along with recently reported ones in India and Vietnam.

“In the past 60 to 90 days, there have been a number of other reported cases” on U.S. soil and globally, said

Dr. James Giordano,

a Georgetown University professor of neurology who is advising the U.S. government on the issue. “They are seen as valid reports with verified health indicators.”

The continuing attacks, which may cause dizziness, memory loss and other health issues, have sparked frustration within the U.S. government and sapped morale at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, the current and former officials said. Some professional diplomats and spies have become reluctant to take overseas postings for themselves and their families, the officials said.

CIA Director William Burns has tripled the number of medical staff focused on Havana Syndrome, the agency says.



Photo:

jim lo scalzo/Shutterstock

“The lights are blinking red now. This is a crisis for VIP travel, officers overseas,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA operations officer who retired from the CIA in 2019 due to persisting symptoms he suffered following a 2017 visit to Moscow and has been critical of the federal government’s response.

Overall, the Biden administration has made finding the source of the attacks a “top priority,” an administration official said. Spokespersons for the CIA and State Department also said the issue was a primary concern and declined to discuss the Serbian case or other specific incidents.

“We take each report we receive extremely seriously and are working to ensure that affected employees get the care and support they need,” the State Department spokesman said.

The CIA spokesperson said that the agency is doing all it can to protect its officers. CIA Director William Burns has made leadership changes in the agency’s Office of Medical Services and tripled the number of medical staff focused on the issue, the spokesperson said. This summer, he tapped a veteran of the agency’s decadelong hunt for

Osama bin Laden

to lead a task force searching for the cause of the incidents.

The CIA in recent weeks also recalled the chief of the agency’s station in Vienna, where a large number of attacks have taken place, over management issues, including the individual’s handling of personnel who believe they had been struck, a source familiar with the issue said. The Washington Post first reported the recall.

Some recent attacks have come close to the top echelons of the Biden administration. When Mr. Burns traveled to India earlier this month, a member of his team reported symptoms consistent with Havana Syndrome and received medical attention, a U.S. official said. The incident was first reported by CNN.

In August, Vice President Kamala Harris temporarily delayed her arrival in Vietnam after the State Department made her office aware of a “possible anomalous health incident”—the U.S. government’s formal name for Havana Syndrome—in Hanoi.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited in Hanoi, Vietnam, in August after a temporary delay due to concerns over Havana Syndrome.



Photo:

evelyn hockstein/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The unexplained health incidents are known as Havana Syndrome because they first surfaced among U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in Cuba in late 2016. The symptoms include dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive difficulties and memory loss.

Since then, attacks have been reported in China, Colombia, Austria and Germany, along with those in Serbia, India and Vietnam. While about 200 U.S. government employees have been affected, officials caution that a precise count is difficult to determine because each case must be medically verified and some individuals’ symptoms end up having other explanations.

Five years after the first symptoms emerged, the U.S. government has yet to determine who is behind the attacks and what mechanism or mechanisms are being used.

“In terms of have we gotten closer? I think the answer is yes—but not close enough to make the analytic judgment that people are waiting for,” CIA Deputy Director

David Cohen

said earlier this month at the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit.

In December, a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that the abrupt onset of symptoms was most consistent with “a directed radio frequency (RF) energy attack” rather than inadvertent or environmental exposure. But it also said that more research was needed.

Director of National Intelligence

Avril Haines

has convened a task force made up of intelligence officers and outside scientists to try to pinpoint the mechanism or device used in the attacks. Its report is due later this fall, although it is unclear what will be made public.

Georgetown’s Dr. Giordano said the culprit could be some form of ultrasonic or acoustic device; a rapidly-pulsed microwave; or a laser-based system. The intent of those using it is also unclear, he said. They could be employing an electronic surveillance system with unusual side effects, or “a discrete form of disruptive instrument,” Dr. Giordano said.

“That’s a nice way of saying this is a weapon,” he said.

Avril Haines, the director of National Intelligence, has convened a task force to try to pinpoint the method of attack that causes Havana Syndrome.



Photo:

Bill Clark/Zuma Press

Earlier this month, the House passed and sent Mr. Biden legislation to sign which authorizes the CIA and State Department to provide financial compensation to employees who suffer brain injuries while on assignment.

“For so long, we suffered the moral injury of a silent wound, where the [U.S. government] medical staff did not believe us. This all changes now, and it is a watershed moment for the victims,” Mr. Polymeropoulos said.

The bill, he said, offers both a statement by the U.S. government that the attacks are real and remuneration “for victims who have spent thousands of dollars out of pocket for healthcare.”

The Biden administration’s efforts in dealing with the attacks include ensuring “any affected individuals get the care they need,” the administration official said. “In certain cases, these incidents have upended the lives of U.S. personnel who have devoted their careers to serving our country.”

A thorny question, the officials and policy specialists said, is how Washington should react if it pins the blame on a foreign adversary. Some current and former officials say they suspect Russia is behind the attacks, although no public evidence of that has emerged and Moscow has denied the allegations.

Jason Killmeyer, a counterterrorism and foreign policy expert formerly with Deloitte Consulting LLP, said the U.S. should act now and not wait for attribution. He called for increasing defensive measures, making Havana Syndrome a bigger issue in its diplomacy and upping the pressure on adversary intelligence services to see how they react.

“We’re five years into this thing,” he said. “There’s no ‘smoking gun’ coming.”

Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

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World

Putin Rebuffed U.S. Plans for Bases Near Afghanistan at Summit With Biden

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries, senior U.S. and Russian officials said, undercutting U.S. plans to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.

The previously unreported exchange between the U.S. and Russian leaders complicated Biden administration hopes of basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan. That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.

The exchange also indicates that Moscow is more determined to try to maintain Central Asia as a sphere of influence than to expand cooperation with a new American president over the turmoil in Afghanistan, former and current U.S. officials said.

“The Russians have no interest in having the U.S. back in there,” said Paul Goble, a former State Department expert on Eurasia.

The U.S. requirement for what the Pentagon calls an “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan has grown substantially in recent days with the Taliban takeover.

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US

Biden Administration Blames Hackers Tied to China for Microsoft Cyberattack Spree

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WASHINGTON—The Biden administration Monday publicly blamed hackers affiliated with China’s main intelligence service for a far-reaching cyberattack on Microsoft Corp. email software this year, part of a global effort to condemn Beijing’s malicious cyber activities.

In addition, four Chinese nationals, including three intelligence officers, were indicted over separate hacking activity.

The U.S. government has “high confidence” that hackers tied to the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, carried out the unusually indiscriminate hack of Microsoft Exchange Server software that emerged in March, senior officials said.

“The United States and countries around the world are holding the People’s Republic of China (PRC) accountable for its pattern of irresponsible, disruptive, and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace, which poses a major threat to our economic and national security,” Secretary of State

Antony Blinken

said. The MSS, he added, had “fostered an ecosystem of criminal contract hackers who carry out both state-sponsored activities and cybercrime for their own financial gain.”

The U.K. and European Union joined in the attribution of the Microsoft email hack, which rendered an estimated hundreds of thousands of mostly small businesses and organizations vulnerable to cyber intrusion. But the public shaming did not include punitive measures, such as sanctions or diplomatic expulsions, a contrast with how the administration recently punished Russia for a range of alleged malicious cyber activity.

The U.S.-led announcement is the most significant action from the Biden administration to date concerning China’s yearslong campaign of cyberattacks against the U.S. government and American companies, often involving routine nation-state espionage and the theft of valuable intellectual property such as naval technology and coronavirus-vaccine data.

The Microsoft hack made an estimated hundreds of thousands of mostly small businesses and organizations vulnerable to cyber intrusion.



Photo:

Steven Senne/Associated Press

The Justice Department made public Monday a grand jury indictment from May that charged four Chinese nationals and residents working with the Ministry of State Security of being engaged in a hacking campaign from 2011 to 2018 intended to benefit China’s companies and commercial sectors by stealing intellectual property and business information. The indictment didn’t appear directly related to the Microsoft Exchange Server breach, but accused the hackers of stealing information from companies and universities about Ebola virus research and other topics to benefit the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

Attributing the Microsoft hack to China was part of a broader global censure Monday of Beijing’s cyberattacks by the U.S., the European Union, the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. While statements varied, the international cohort generally called out China for engaging in harmful cyber activity, including intellectual property theft. Some accused the MSS of using criminal contractors to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally, including for their own personal profit.

U.S. authorities have accused China of widespread hacking targeting American businesses and government agencies for years. China has historically denied the allegations. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Exchange Server hack was disclosed by Microsoft in March alongside a software patch to fix the bugs being exploited in the attack. Microsoft at the time identified the culprits as a Chinese cyber-espionage group with state ties that it refers to as Hafnium, an assessment that was supported by other cybersecurity researchers. The Biden administration hadn’t offered attribution until now, and is essentially agreeing with the conclusions of the private sector and providing a more detailed identification.

The attack on the Exchange Server systems began slowly and stealthily in early January by hackers who in the past had targeted infectious-disease researchers, law firms and universities, according to cybersecurity officials and analysts. But the operational tempo appeared to intensify as other China-linked hacking groups became involved, infecting thousands of servers as Microsoft worked to send its customers a software patch in early March.

Also on Monday, the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency jointly published technical details of more than 50 tactics and techniques favored by hackers linked to the Chinese government, the official said. The release of such lists is common when the U.S. exposes or highlights malicious hacking campaigns and is intended to help businesses and critical infrastructure operators better protect their computer systems.

“
‘Failure to sanction any PRC-affiliated actors has been one of the most prolific and baffling failures of our China policy that has transcended administrations.’
”


— Dmitri Alperovitch, Silverado Policy Accelerator

Cybersecurity experts have been pressing the Biden administration for months to respond to China’s alleged involvement in the Microsoft email hack. Cybersecurity expert

Dmitri Alperovitch,

with the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, said the coordinated global condemnation of China was a welcome and overdue development.

“The Microsoft Exchange hacks by MSS contractors is the most reckless cyber operation we have yet seen from the Chinese actors—much more dangerous than the Russian

SolarWinds

hacks,” said Mr. Alperovitch, referring to the widespread cyber-espionage campaign detected last December that, along with other alleged activities, prompted a suite of punitive measures against Moscow.

Mr. Alperovitch criticized the lack of any sanctions being levied against China and said it raised questions about why Beijing appeared to be evading harsher penalties, especially compared with those slapped on Russia.

“Failure to sanction any PRC-affiliated actors has been one of the most prolific and baffling failures of our China policy that has transcended administrations,” Mr. Alperovitch said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Monday’s public shaming without further punishment “looks like a double standard compared with actions against Russian actors. We treat China with kid gloves.”

The senior administration official said the Biden administration was aware that no single action was capable of changing the Chinese government’s malicious cyber behavior, and that the focus was on bringing countries together in a unified stance against Beijing. The list of nations condemning China on Monday was “unprecedented,” the official said, noting it was the first time NATO itself had specifically done so.

“We’ve made clear that we’ll continue to take actions to protect the American people from malicious cyber activity, no matter who’s responsible,” the official said. “And we’re not ruling out further actions to hold the PRC accountable.”

The new indictment said that members of a provincial branch of China’s intelligence service in the southern Hainan Province created a front company that described itself as an information security company and directed its employees to hack dozens of victims in the U.S., Austria, Cambodia and several other countries.

The defendants, three of whom are described as intelligence officers, aren’t in U.S. custody. Some cybersecurity experts have said indictments against foreign state-backed hackers often have little impact, because the accused are rarely brought before an American courtroom. U.S. officials have defended the practice, saying it helps convince allied governments, the private sector and others about the scope of the problem.

The group is accused of hacking into dozens of schools, companies, and government agencies around the world, ranging from a research facility in California and Florida focused on virus treatments and vaccines, to a Swiss chemicals company that produces maritime paints, to a Pennsylvania university with a robotics engineering program and the National Institutes of Health, to two Saudi Arabian government ministries. The companies and universities aren’t named in the indictment.

The hackers allegedly used fake spear-phishing emails and stored stolen data on GitHub, the indictment said. They coordinated with professors at a Chinese university, including to identify and recruit hackers for their campaign, it said. The alleged NIH breach dates to August 2013, the indictment said.

The Microsoft Hack

More WSJ coverage of Exchange Server cyberattack, selected by the editors.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com

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World

Top NATO Scientist with Security Clearance Busted Spying for China

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TALLINN, Estonia—Chinese military intelligence recruited an Estonian national working at a NATO research institution focused on maritime and submarine research, The Daily Beast has learned.

The spy, Tarmo Kõuts, renowned in the Estonian scientific community for his research, was convicted last week and sentenced to three years in prison. The Baltic country’s intelligence services had warned for years of the growing Chinese threat, but the conviction was the first of its kind. So far, Estonia’s counterintelligence service, known domestically by its acronym KAPO, has been praised for its success in catching spies recruited and run by Russia.

According to Aleksander Toots, the deputy director of KAPO and Tallinn’s top counterintelligence official, Kõuts was recruited in 2018 by China’s Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission—as Beijing’s military intelligence agency is known—along with an alleged accomplice who is yet to be tried in court. Both were arrested on September 9, 2020, with no publicity or discussion of the case in the Estonian media.

Kõuts pleaded guilty to conducting intelligence activities against the Republic of Estonia on behalf of a foreign state. The charges were one stop short of treason. He was sentenced to three years in prison.

Kõuts was recruited on Chinese territory, said Toots, who spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast and Estonia’s Delfi newspaper: “He was motivated by traditional human weaknesses, such as money and need of recognition.”

Toots added that Kõuts received cash payments from his Chinese handlers as well as paid trips to various Asian countries, with luxury accommodations and dinners at Michelin star restaurants. The intelligence operatives handling him were operating under cover of a think tank. Inna Ombler, the prosecutor handling the case confirmed that Kõuts earned €17,000 — a little over $20,000 — for his espionage, which the Estonian government has since seized from him.

Kõuts, who earned his doctorate in environmental physics in 1999, had worked for years at Tallinn Technical University’s Maritime Institute where he specialized in geophysics and operational oceanography. His research led to marine scientists successfully predicting a damaging winter storm with rapidly rising sea levels in Estonia in 2005. Kõuts was also part of a scientific research group that was awarded the Estonian National Science Prize in 2002 for finding the best location for a seaport on the island of Saaremaa. Although officially designed to accept cruise ships, the port needed to be able to host NATO vessels.

From 2006, Kõuts became directly involved in the national defense sector. He was named a member of the Estonian Ministry of Defense’s Scientific Committee, which oversees the country’s military research and development initiatives. As part of that secondment he also became a member of the Scientific Committee of the NATO Undersea Research Center based in La Spezia, Italy and even served, from 2018 to 2020, as the vice president of that organization, which is now known as the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). According to its website, the CMRE “conducts relevant, state-of-the-art scientific research in ocean science, modelling and simulation, acoustics and other disciplines.”

Kõuts’s public Facebook account shows he checked-in at Lerici, Italy— from La Spezia—in April 2018, the year of his recruitment by China. His role at the NATO center gave Kõuts direct access to Estonia’s and NATO’s confidential military intelligence. At the time of his arrest, he had a state secret permit as well as NATO security clearance dating back fourteen years. In the three years Kõuts worked for Chinese military intelligence, confined his espionage to observations and anecdotes about his top-level work but did not, according to Toots, yet pass on any confidential military information.

“That he had such security clearances was one of the reasons we decided to put a stop to his collaboration [with the Chinese] so early,” Toots said. It might have saved him from a much stricter sentence that would have followed if he’d been charged with treason, which he would have been if Kõuts had passed on state or NATO secrets.

Indeed, the biggest espionage breach NATO ever had was an Estonian one, just four years after the Baltic state joined the military alliance. In 2008, KAPO arrested Herman Simm, the head of the Ministry of Defense’s Security Department. Simm’s job was to coordinate the protection of state secrets, issue security clearances and act as a liaison between the Estonian Ministry of Defense and NATO. He’d been working for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, for the entirety of his tenure. Simm was sentenced to twelve and a half years imprisonment and he additionally needed to pay €1.3 million—$1.8 million in today’s dollar value—in damages. He was released from prison on Christmas 2019.

Since that scandal, Estonia has become one of the foremost Russian spy-catchers. “I’m continually amazed,” Toomas Henrik Ilves, Estonia’s former president, said. “We must be the only country the Kremlin seems to be interested in since we’re the only ones catching all their agents. What makes us so special?”

Unlike other NATO members, this Baltic country has a tendency to name and shame those it captures. It also rarely trades spies for its own captured assets. A much publicized exception to this rule was the case of Eston Kohver, a KAPO officer who was captured in 2014 by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service, on the Estonian side of the Estonian-Russian border while conducting an operation to interdict cross-border smuggling. Kohver was traded, Bridge of Spies-style, in 2015 for Aleksei Dressen, a Russian agent the FSB recruited from within KAPO’s own ranks years earlier.

Aleksander Toots oversaw both counterintelligence investigations that led to Simm’s and Dressen’s arrests. And despite his pedigree in snaring agents from Estonia’s next-door neighbor and former occupying power, Toots now sees a rising threat from farther east.

Over the last three years, KAPO and Välisluureamet, Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, have raised the alarm about the rising threat of Chinese espionage. Last year Välisluureamet warned that Estonians who traveled to China were susceptible to influence operations and recruitment. “To this end, Chinese special services may use various methods and pretexts, such as establishing first contact or job offers over the internet. At home, Chinese special services can operate almost risk-free,” Välisluureamet explained in their annual security environment assessment. Politicians, public servants and scientists who hold political or defense-related clearances were named as possible recruitment targets.

KAPO added that it first detected an increase in the interest of Chinese intelligence services after Estonia joined the EU and NATO in 2004 but lately that interest had intensified. The Chinese, Estonian counterintelligence concluded, are particularly interested in “decisions on global issues, be it the Arctic, climate or trade.”

Tarmo Kõuts’ recruitment fits that category exactly, as his scientific research concentrated heavily on the maritime impact of climate change and some of his scholarly papers focused squarely on the Arctic region.

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World

Russian Disinformation Campaign Aims to Undermine Confidence in Pfizer, Other Covid-19 Vaccines, U.S. Officials Say

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WASHINGTON—Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in

Pfizer Inc.’s

and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines’ development and safety, U.S. officials said.

An official with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence.

The websites played up the vaccines’ risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims.

Though the outlets’ readership is small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media.

The Sputnik V vaccine being administered at a site in Saint Petersburg, Russia, last month.



Photo:

anton vaganov/Reuters

“We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services,” the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign. “They’re all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States. They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they’re all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem.”

In addition, Russian state media and Russian government

Twitter

accounts have made overt efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine in what experts outside the U.S. government say is an effort to promote the sale of Russia’s rival Sputnik V vaccine.

“The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” says a forthcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and that is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank.

The foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep-seated anxieties about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some communities in the U.S. and internationally. Concern about side effects is a major reason for vaccine hesitancy, according to U.S. Census Bureau data made public last month.

Kremlin spokesman

Dmitry Peskov

denied that Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines and said U.S. officials were mischaracterizing the broad international debate over vaccines as a Russian plot.

“It’s nonsense. Russian special services have nothing to do with any criticism against vaccines,” Mr. Peskov said in a telephone interview from Moscow. “If we treat every negative publication against the Sputnik V vaccine as a result of efforts by American special services, then we will go crazy because we see it every day, every hour and in every Anglo-Saxon media.”

The State Department GEC official said that four publications had direct links to Russian intelligence and were used by the Russian government to mislead international opinion on a range of issues.

New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review, the official said, are directed and controlled by the SVR, or Russia’s foreign intelligence service. They present themselves as academic publications and are aimed at the Middle East, Asia and Africa, offering comment on the U.S.’s role in the world. The State Department said in an August report that New Eastern Outlook was linked to “state-funded institutions” in Russia.

Another publication, News Front, is guided by the FSB, a security service that succeeded the KGB, the official said. It is based in Crimea, produces information in 10 languages, and had nearly nine million page visits between February and April 2020, the official added. In August, the State Department was less explicit, saying that News Front reportedly had ties to Russia security services and Kremlin funding.

To counter skepticism over its Covid-19 vaccine, Russia has built a big public-relations effort at home and abroad. WSJ’s Georgi Kantchev explains why the success of Sputnik V is so important for the Kremlin. Photo: Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images

Rebel Inside, the fourth publication, has been controlled by the GRU, which is an intelligence directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff. It covered riots and protests and now appears dormant, the GEC official said.

The State Department had previously not gone so far as to say that these outlets were controlled or guided by Russian intelligence agencies—an assertion that generally relies on U.S. classified intelligence.

A State Department spokesman didn’t provide specific evidence linking the publications to Russian intelligence but said the assessment was “a result of a joint interagency conclusion.”

“Russian intelligence services bear direct responsibility for using these four platforms to spread propaganda and lies,” the spokesman said. “From the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, we have seen Russia’s disinformation ecosystem develop and spread false narratives around the crisis.”

News Front, New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Social-media accounts affiliated with the four websites have largely been removed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and

Pinterest,

though some non-English-language accounts remained active earlier this year.

Highlighting reports in the international media, a January article in News Front played up the risk that a person who receives the Pfizer or

Moderna Inc.

vaccines could contract Bell’s palsy, in which facial muscles are paralyzed, while a February article focused on a man in California that it said tested positive for Covid-19 after receiving the Pfizer vaccination.

In each case, the Russian outlets were repeating actual news reports but overlooking contrary information about the general safety of the vaccine. Numerous studies and real-world data have shown the Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines to be safe and effective, and hospitalizations and deaths have begun to plummet in places like Israel where shots have been widely administered, though a small number of side effects have been reported.

“To date, millions of people have been vaccinated with our vaccine following the endorsement of regulators in multiple countries,” said Pamela Eisele, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, who added that individuals who have questions should consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website or their healthcare provider.

A spokeswoman for Moderna didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A November article in New Eastern Outlook said that the Pfizer vaccine’s use of mRNA gene editing was “radical experimental technology” that lacked “precision” and said it was rushed through the approval process with the help of billionaire philanthropist

Bill Gates

and Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the Covid-19 pandemic, both of whom the article accused of “playing fast and loose with human lives in their rush to get these experimental vaccines into our bodies.”

Some New Eastern Outlook articles have been republished by blogs and purported international news sites. One article from January alleged that the U.S. has biological labs around the world that may lead to outbreaks of infectious disease. The article was republished in full or part by websites in Bangladesh, Italy, Spain, France, Iran, Cuba and Sweden, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. has long accused Moscow of carrying out disinformation on medical issues.

Judy Twigg,

a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who is an expert on global health issues, said that the Soviet KGB had accused the CIA of spreading dengue fever in Cuba and malaria in Pakistan.

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“A persistent KGB campaign claimed that the U.S. Army’s former biological weapons labs at Fort Detrick had unleashed the AIDS epidemic,” she said. Soviet officials denied responsibility for this disinformation.

Thomas Rid, an expert on Russian disinformation at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed the websites cited by the State Department, said the articles were generally in line with Russia’s “rich history” of using communications technology to deceive both international and domestic audiences. He urged the U.S. government to do more to publicly explain how it has concluded the websites are controlled by specific Russian intelligence agencies.

With Russia and China seeking to sell their vaccines abroad, overt efforts to denigrate Pfizer have been well documented. The forthcoming German Marshall Fund report, which was reviewed by the Journal and is to be issued Monday, analyzed more than 35,000 Russian, Chinese and Iranian government and state media tweets on vaccine themes from early November to early February. “Russia provided by far the most negative coverage of Western vaccines.” it states, “with a remarkable 86% of surveyed Russian tweets mentioning Pfizer and 76% mentioning Moderna coded as negative.”

—Ann Simmons contributed to this article.

Investigating the Origin of Covid-19

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

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Health

The World Is Still Battling Polio. What That Warning Means for Covid-19.

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PESHAWAR, Pakistan—After decades of work, polio had been wiped out almost everywhere in the world. All that was left were pockets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Medical experts hoped 2020 would be the last year that the main form of the virus, which can permanently paralyze or cause death, posed a threat.

The coronavirus pandemic put a halt to that progress.

In March, house-to-house vaccination teams working across Pakistan were forced to stop their work because of Covid-19. As a result, polio resurged, including a mutated form of the virus. It has now been detected in samples taken from sewers in 74% of Pakistan in late 2020, up from just 13% in early 2018.

“Now the virus isn’t just in select pockets. The risk is everywhere” in the country, said Rana Safdar, the doctor in charge of Pakistan’s polio campaign.

The decadeslong battle to eradicate polio around the world is one of the most ambitious and expensive public-health campaigns in history. The mass-vaccination drive and its progress toward arresting a malady that has disabled or killed millions of people point to the success possible in the efforts to inoculate people around the world against Covid-19.

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