THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 29 Some Major Successes In my three years at the GEC (2021–2024), I served as a senior adviser, acting deputy coordinator, and supervisor of our Russia, Iran, and counterterrorism teams. I watched the GEC evolve from a small and often misunderstood office into an engine of creative outside-the-box thinking. Many of our staff came on details from other agencies or were contractors, bringing in new tools, resources, and perspectives. We hosted one of the few coveted security compartmented information facilities (SCIFs) at Main State, necessary because of our need for close coordination with the intelligence community to monitor adversary state communications. We had some major successes that, for security reasons, we could not publicize at the time, including the downfall of ISIS leader Amir Muhammad Sa’id al-Rahman al-Mawla, who was later known internally as the Canary Caliph because of a GECenabled campaign to expose his past collaboration with the U.S. military in Iraq. We traced the post–Osama bin Laden leadership to Iran, where they were hiding in plain sight. We published oftquoted exposés on the behindthe-scenes pillars of Russian and Chinese global disinformation networks, including their distortion of truth about the COVID-19 virus and about human rights. I am particularly proud of the GEC’s efforts to inspire international coalitions of like-minded nations to combat online information manipulation and interference. In Eastern Europe, GEC teams helped identify troll networks operating in local languages to disrupt parliamentary elections, and our analyses helped host governments ensure that outside actors could not sway voters by pretending to be fellow citizens. When the GEC began, few countries were aware of the disinformation threat from within, and even fewer were tracking it. Today, the European Union, NATO, and more than 30 nations in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Africa dedicate personnel to addressing this issue, and they cooperate closely with one another to trace and expose new trolls. Sadly, with the demise of the GEC, the United States is no longer part of that framework coalition. As the GEC’s exposure of disinformation grew, so did misperceptions that the center was engaged in censoring free speech. When Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) in October 2022, he tweeted that he had found the real “Deep State ... the GEC,” calling us “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship and media manipulation.” In multiple testimonies to Congress and in interviews afterward, GEC leadership repeatedly explained how all our efforts were focused overseas, and how the organization strictly enforced its mandate and worked to avoid any monitoring or interaction with U.S. citizens or organizations. But, as eight years of global disinformation analysis by the GEC (from 2016 to 2024) repeatedly demonstrated, sensational accusations often make a more lasting impression on consumers than subsequent data-driven rebuttals. In December 2024, the U.S. Congress chose to not extend the GEC’s mandate to operate, and the new Trump administration shut down the remaining office focused on countering FIMI in early 2025. Most GEC staff members were terminated then, or during the department-wide reductions in force (RIFs) in July 2025. What the GEC Taught As Doug Wake writes in this edition (see page 22), among the most pressing election monitoring issues in 2026 are “foreign interference and disinformation, deepfakes, AI, and online harassment.” Does the continued threat mean that the GEC was a failure? Our inability to articulate to the public the importance of our work, and its effectiveness, is certainly a failure, although one might say the same today about USAID or many other components of the State Department. In one sense we were successful: After years of trying to raise awareness about the rising threat of disinformation, recent data shows that the public is increasingly concerned about the issue (in a 2025 Pew Research Center poll, a majority of citizens in 20 nations identified “fake news” as the greatest threat to their nation’s security). But in making the concern more tangible, we also inspired some in today’s politically polarized climate to blame the doctor for the disease diagnosis. For many of us, our mobile phone is the first thing we check when we wake up and the last thing we look at before we sleep. It is the source of our news and weather, our favorite way to chat with distant relatives and friends, where we go for entertainment and music, the easel for our creativity, and our mobile encyclopedia, guidance counselor, and spiritual adviser (and AI-driven personal valet) all rolled into one. MARIA CARLUCCIO/THE I SPOT
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