The Propaganda Playbook, Leaked

A Price List for the Information Environment

Most discussions of foreign influence operations stay vague by necessity. Intelligence agencies know things they can’t say. Journalists work with fragments. The public gets assertions.

Not this time.

In February 2026, Forbidden Stories and a consortium of international partners published findings from 1,431 pages of leaked internal documents from a Russian influence network now controlled by the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. The documents aren’t signals intelligence or anonymous tips. They’re operational planning materials: budget sheets, country analyses, media placement rates, and correspondence between the people running the operation.

For once, the propaganda machine left its receipts.

The Company

The network operates under a name that doesn’t announce what it does: Africa Politology, also referred to internally as “the Company.” It grew out of the influence apparatus built by Yevgeny Prigozhin — the Wagner Group’s political arm — before Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August 2023. That event, which might have ended the operation, didn’t. Within months, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service moved in and absorbed it.

The SVR officer overseeing the operation is General Dmitry Leonidovich Faddeev. The staff it inherited and expanded includes approximately 60 identified agents — journalists, sociologists, and specialists described internally as “poli-technologists” — plus nearly 100 consultants. Their collective mandate: political disruption in 30+ countries, with concentration in Africa, South America, and the Middle East.

The total budget documented in the leak: $8.6 million. Monthly spend on media placement alone: $300,000.

This isn’t a rogue operation or a speculative attribution. These are line items.

How the Three-Phase Playbook Works

The leaked documents describe a repeatable operational methodology that the Company applies across different national contexts. Understanding it requires looking at each phase not as isolated activity but as preparation for the next.

Phase One: Map the Terrain

Before any content is published, analysts inside the Company map a target country’s political landscape. Who are the opposition figures? What grievances exist — genuine, long-standing ones — that can be amplified? What is the state of anti-Western sentiment, and what historical events can be attached to it?

This phase looks like political research because it is. The Company employs sociologists and political scientists whose job is to understand a country well enough to manipulate it credibly. The output is a profile: here are the fault lines, here are the people who sit on them, here is what will resonate.

This is intelligence gathering in service of influence. The sophistication matters — generic anti-Western content doesn’t work as well as content that speaks to specific local grievances in the voice of local media.

Phase Two: Recruit the Journalists

Once the terrain is mapped, the Company recruits local journalists to place content. Not to create content for them — to place it through them, so it appears as genuine local journalism.

The price list in the leaked documents is explicit:

$600 per article in Benin
$10,000 per article in Libya

The rate varies by market and by the outlet’s reach and credibility. In August 2024 alone, 516 articles promoting pro-Russian narratives appeared in African media — at a total cost of roughly $340,000.

The readers of those articles saw bylines belonging to journalists they might know. They saw publications they had reason to trust. They did not see: “This article was commissioned and paid for by a network controlled by Russian intelligence.”

The term that has emerged for this model is “ghost reporters” — journalists who write propaganda with no acknowledgment of who is paying for it, or why. The label understates the manipulation. Ghost reporters produce content that occupies the same credibility position as real journalism. The contamination is invisible by design.

Phase Three: Co-opt the Opposition

The third phase moves from the information environment into direct political action. The Company establishes covert relationships with opposition politicians and activists — not through ideological alignment but through what the documents describe as “lobbying and bribery.”

The goal is to have figures with domestic legitimacy advancing Russian political objectives, often without their supporters knowing why. A local politician arguing against a Western military partnership or foreign investment deal may be doing so from genuine conviction, from Russian coaching, from Russian money, or some combination. The operational ambiguity is the point.

This phase targets the interpretation of events. Once a narrative is established in friendly media outlets (Phase Two), it can be amplified by politicians who appear to reach it independently. The coordination is concealed. The consensus looks organic.

The Namibia Election: A Case Study

The documents include specifics that illustrate how the phases combine in practice. Ahead of Namibia’s 2024 presidential election, Russian operatives produced and circulated a fake letter attributed to the United Kingdom.

The letter alleged that the UK was secretly financing the opposition in exchange for oil extraction rights. It was fabricated. But it was crafted to be credible — it named specific figures, referenced plausible interests, and was formatted as a document the UK government might produce.

The letter reached 1.7 million people online.

Consider what a piece of electoral disinformation needs to do: it needs to raise doubt about the legitimacy of the opposition, introduce a plausible foreign actor meddling in the election, and circulate widely enough to shape the information environment before the vote. A $600 article in Benin does one thing. A convincing fabricated document, seeded into media outlets already primed to carry it, does something considerably larger.

One Specific Project: “Confederation of Independence”

The leaked documents name individual projects. One, dated August 2023, is called the “Confederation of Independence.” Its explicit purpose: exploit anti-Western sentiment and criticize France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This project name is instructive because of what it reveals about strategy. The Company doesn’t invent grievances from nothing. France’s post-colonial presence in the Sahel, UK involvement in opposition politics, US military partnerships with African governments — these are real points of contention that exist in local political discourse. The Company amplifies them, attaches Russian-friendly frames to them, and uses local voices to carry the message.

The manipulation is most effective where real grievances exist. A population with legitimate complaints about Western policy is more susceptible to influence operations framed around those complaints — not because they’re foolish, but because some of what they’re being told is true. The false elements are nested inside accurate context.

The Influence Tactics Breakdown

The Propaganda Machine documents, read through a manipulation detection lens, activate several high-severity factors simultaneously:

Hidden Agency: Critical. The operation is constructed entirely around concealing its origins. Local journalists publish content without disclosing they’ve been paid. Opposition figures advance Russian positions without disclosing they’ve been funded. Readers receive content that appears indigenous and independent. Every layer of the operation is designed to make the source invisible.
Source Credibility Exploitation: Very High. The mechanism that makes the ghost reporter model work is borrowing the credibility of real journalists and real publications. The articles aren’t attributed to Russian intelligence. They’re attributed to people with standing in local communities. The Company pays for credibility it cannot generate directly.
Missing Information: Very High. Namibian readers did not know the letter about UK election interference was fabricated. Readers of the 516 August 2024 articles did not know those pieces were paid placements. The operation depends entirely on what is not disclosed.
Manufactured Legitimacy: High. The use of sociologists and “poli-technologists” creates the appearance of genuine political analysis. The research phase isn’t just preparation — it produces outputs that look like organic local political commentary, which can itself be placed as content.
Electoral Interference: High. The Namibia operation is the clearest example, but the documents describe work across political cycles in multiple countries. The Company specifically targets periods when populations are making decisions.

The Post-Prigozhin Upgrade

One detail from the Forbidden Stories investigation deserves particular attention: the operation got more capable after Prigozhin died.

Prigozhin’s influence network had visibility and reach but operated with the characteristic chaos of his other ventures. The SVR takeover brought structure: cleaner chains of command, professional intelligence tradecraft, and state backing that doesn’t depend on one oligarch’s survival.

The inheritance also included the relationships Prigozhin’s operation had built over years — local contacts, embedded journalists, political connections in dozens of countries. The SVR didn’t have to start over. It took over a running operation and made it more durable.

This is worth noting because a common assumption after Prigozhin’s death was that the operation would fragment. The leaked documents show the opposite happened. What Wagner built for Prigozhin became a more dangerous instrument once the state absorbed it.

What This Means for Media Consumers

The Propaganda Machine documents describe operations concentrated in Africa and Latin America, but the methodology is geography-agnostic. A three-phase approach that works in Mali works elsewhere. The economics differ — $600 per article in Benin isn’t the going rate in markets where media is more expensive — but the architecture is the same.

For anyone consuming information, a few things follow from what the documents reveal:

Attribution is not verification. An article carrying a real journalist’s name is not necessarily that journalist’s independent work. The ghost reporter model exists specifically to exploit the credibility that bylines confer.
Grievance-adjacent content warrants closer reading. The most effective foreign influence operations work by amplifying real grievances with false frames. Content that accurately identifies a problem and then provides a pre-packaged Russian-favorable explanation deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Scale indicates coordination. 516 articles in a single month on the same set of themes, across multiple outlets, is not organic. Coordination at that scale leaves patterns. Narrative uniformity across nominally independent sources is a signal worth attending to.
Elections are the target. The Company’s documented activity concentrates around electoral cycles. That’s when influence operations produce the highest return. The Namibia operation is a template, not an exception.

The Deeper Problem

The documents expose a specific operation. They don’t resolve the structural problem.

Journalism’s authority derives from the assumption that reporters are selecting and framing stories based on their professional judgment, not on instructions from a foreign intelligence service. The ghost reporter model attacks that assumption at its foundation — not by discrediting journalism but by parasitizing it, using its credibility to carry content journalism would never publish if the source were disclosed.

When the SVR pays a journalist in Benin $600 to publish a pro-Russian article in a local outlet, it isn’t attacking journalism. It’s wearing it.

The manipulation is difficult to detect precisely because it succeeds by appearing not to be manipulation. The price list in the leaked documents is damning. But for every document that leaks, the operations that don’t produce leaks continue. 1,431 pages of internal documents is a rare window into an apparatus that normally leaves nothing behind.

The machine ran for years before these documents surfaced. After the investigation, it keeps running.

This article is part of Decipon’s Manipulation Breakdown series, where we analyze real-world examples of influence tactics using the Decipon Influence Tactics Score methodology. Decipon doesn’t tell you what’s true — it shows you how content is trying to influence you.

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