The ghosts of soviet past stalk the streets of Estonia again.
NATO troops line borders against emboldened Russia.
And in these part, the information battle lines have already been crossed.
The old Viru hotel.
Once KGB controlled.
A soviet symbol that screams: Information is power.
The rooms and restaurants bugged to blackmail heady days and nights.
Recorded to Compromise.
We're going to the hotels 23rd floor.
That's right the 23rd floor.
The KGB control room.
The switchboard for a network of tiny microphones.
These old wires, the medium of Russian influence.
Nowadays the wires are fibre optic.
Another hotel in Tallinn.
We meet a member of the group Propastop.
The new breed of information activist.
He's asked for anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russian hackers.
Our story starts with a Facebook post he wants to show us.
It will end, he says, with the Kremlin.
The FaceBook post tells the tale of a group of British troops with the NATO mission to
Estonia.
According to the post, the soldiers were rude to an elderly lady in a hospital waiting room
in Tallinn.
She didn’t have a seat, they wouldn’t give her theres.
At which point our plucky story-teller confronts the troops and ends up with the following
flurry - in English.
I'm an agent of Putin, she says, and we are everywhere.
The strange little tale was shared a few times with friends and then disappeared into the
ether.
Not so much.
It was in fact picked up by the Baltic States news portal BaltNews.
It went viral.
With 100s of British troops en route to the Baltic states, the subtext of the story, NATO
troops are not only coming to bullying mother Russia with tanks on the border.
They are also bullying your Granny.
The problem.with the BaltNews story:
The MOD told us that when the article was published, there were about five British military
personnel in Tallinn, including a general and a handful of officials.
Also the original facebook source has deleted the post, has not responded to our request
for more detail and is quoted in other similar type stories on the BaltNews.
This is one example.
There are others.
Even some real news.
On Balt News.
It Popped up 2 years ago.
It's Estonian office is here in an industrial estate in Tallinn.
So this is the office block where the registered offices of Balt News/ Balt Media are - and
it’s 205, is the number where it’s registered, which is down here.
A sister company called Alt Media is also registered here.
Hello, how are you doing?
Is this Balt News?
Is Mr Kornilov in there?
Do you produce Russian propaganda here?
And have the police been here?
Is that what this tape is?
The police were here for the boss.
Alexander Kornilov.
"Hello, is that Mr Kornilov....."
We've temporarily commandeered the old KGB control room to track him down.
The man who runs Balt News and Alt media was arrested last year by police on suspicion
of tax fraud.
It's alleged that he didn't pay the requisite taxes on money his organisation received from
Moscow.
Its one of the ways the Estonian equivalent to MI5 is clamping down on what they call
Subversive Russian Influences.
The Intelligence Services here are in no doubt about the endgame/
The goal is to make Russia great again or make it a superpower again.
We started with BaltNews and Alexander Kornilov.
He’s a pro-Kremlin activist, I wouldn’t call him a journalist.
-Does he call himself a journalist?
Sure.
-Is he?
They call themselves journalists, yeah.
They are coordinated from Russia and -
-How do you know they’re coordinated from Russia?
This is - I cannot go into details on that.
But we know.
-Is it money?
Yeah, they get money.
Yeah.
-From Moscow?
Yes.
Kornilov wouldn't do an interview on camera.
But told us he's standing by his journalism - and said the tax case against him was politically
motivated.
There is another layer to our story.
For that we travel south to Riga, Latvia.
This is the NATO agency that monitors fake news.
Yes, such a thing exists and the UK is a contributing partner.
We started with mechanics.
Now for the big picture.
A new trend, according to NATO, for Russian money to buy existing clickbait sites, and
bit by bit transform them.
That, sort of clickbait business, they introduce the sentiments, the news.
-So are you saying to me, Janis, that pro-Russian businessmen are buying up entertainment websites
and changing them into Russian propaganda organisation?
They’ve exposed themselves, being part of the pro-Russian political forces.
A second trend.
For Russian funded think tanks in the West to basically launder fake news.
To give it a veneer of academic credibility.
A thin sheet of solid ice on top of the slush.
So, it's sophisticated and, according to NATO, designed to drive a wedge - first between
the ethnically Russian community and the Baltic states they live in.
But, ultimately, to do the same to organisations like the EU.
You don’t need tanks.
You might actually achieve your goals if you change the perception of a given society in
a way that corresponds to your interests and the society starts to act how you want them
to act.
This is the NATO perspective of course - and it's worth remembering that Propaganda changes
to News and vice versa depending on your world view.
Fake News nothing new in the Baltic States.
There's history here.
Take the barricades in Riga in ‘91.
The threat of Soviet aggression prompted thousands to surround government buildings and the radio
and television stations.
7 people were killed.
People who wanted to protect the independence of the narrative.
In other words, they formed a human shield around, believe it or not, the mainstream
media.
For these people, fake news wasn’t something you liked or disliked on Facebook.
It was something worth laying your life on the line for to stop.