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Author’s Note: This guest post by disinformation analyst Alex Alvarova has been translated to English from the original Czech. Alvarova writes the substack, Alex’s Diary / Mutiny of Mayhem Mother, where she writes from the perspective of growing up under Soviet rule in what is now the Czech Republic. Her report on ex-cop and Marine John Mark Dougan is deeply personal, as you will learn in this post where she reveals how he targeted her home country with terrible lies.—hsc
Traitor for Hire: How an American Cop Became the Voice of Moscow — and Then Beijing
by Alex Alvarova
At first glance, the story of John Mark Dougan reads like a pulp spy novel. I first came across him in Craig Unger’s book American Kompromat, and his story has proved to be a gift that keeps on giving. It is like a Russian matryoshka in reverse: every doll you open reveals a bigger one inside, with bigger and sharper teeth. What it shows is the story of our own gradual, creeping defeat — by old methods and new technologies alike.
Dougan is a textbook case of the unstable, troubled cop who becomes easy prey for hostile subversion.
Every seasoned grey wolf of the Cold War who fought on the invisible front against Soviet subversion knew — and had learned it from older colleagues before them — that the easiest targets in the West were the disaffected and the unstable. Dougan was a man who wandered the world with a target on his back.
Like so many others, his path led from a troubled youth through a scandal-ridden career to a post as a sheriff’s deputy, where he faced some eleven internal investigations and was eventually forced out. The moment a man fails in his profession and loses his place in the sun is precisely the moment the Russians have always chosen to make their move.
We do not know exactly when the cooperation began — toward the end of his American career or right at its start. What we do know is that his biography resembles a great many others who took the Faustian deal.
After leaving the police, he founded a website called PBSOtalk, where other embittered, disillusioned officers could anonymously post what they disliked about the force and where, in their view, colleagues or superiors were breaking the law. Let’s be honest: this is where spy novelists start rubbing their hands. The site could have served as the perfect recruiting ground for other aggrieved cops. When public servants become that disillusioned, they begin to hate their own state. And once they hate their state, they are only a short step away from betraying it — or taking out their resentments on it.
One day the founder of PBSOtalk was approached by Joseph Recarey, the detective who had investigated Jeffrey Epstein. As we now know from writers such as Craig Unger and Julie K. Brown, Recarey had come under intense pressure from his superiors during the investigation — including pressure from the very top — which he understood as a push to shut the case down. But reports suggest that Recarey was an honest cop and had no intention of letting it go. He reportedly grew suspicious that someone would try to tamper with the investigation and make the seized compromising material “disappear”. So he turned to John Mark Dougan, whose website was said to protect its disgruntled police sources reliably.
Dougan later claimed, repeatedly, that Recarey had entrusted him with Epstein’s kompromat on the most powerful people in America and Europe, in the form of recordings. Recarey can no longer confirm or deny it: he died suddenly in 2018. The cause of his death was never made public. And Dougan has never produced a shred of evidence that he actually has the tapes.
In February 2013, roughly three years after he supposedly obtained the material from Recarey, Dougan travelled to Moscow for the first time. About a week after landing, he posted a photo on Facebook of a lunch at Moscow’s Bison Steakhouse. His companion at the table was Pavel Borodin, the former keeper of the Kremlin’s piggy bank, whom the American press dubbed “Putin’s mentor”. It was Borodin — the majordomo of the Kremlin’s criminal inner circle — who in 1996 brought Vladimir Putin into the Kremlin and gave him an important post. Dougan insisted it was an innocent meeting with a Facebook friend. Former KGB major Yuri Shvets told Unger that such an encounter was like two needles meeting in a haystack. The photo was later deleted from Facebook.
What we do know is that his troubled career then began to escalate. The FBI opened an investigation into unspecified extortion, hacking and the publication of confidential data on thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges.
Intelligence Exfiltration?
In 2016, suddenly, without a word of goodbye and disguised in a blond wig, Dougan left for Moscow. In 2017, Florida prosecutors charged him with 21 counts of extortion and illegal wiretapping. Craig Unger, who chronicles the story in American Kompromat, quotes the London-based intelligence consultant Neil Barnett, who says the manner of Dougan’s departure bore all the hallmarks of an intelligence exfiltration.
In Moscow, Dougan initially proved exceptionally useful. Here was an American, a former cop and Marine, who spoke the language of the American conservative right — exactly what Russia needed.
The Russians had never come to terms with losing the Cold War, a defeat inflicted on them by American conservative circles, and they correctly grasped that every nation is most vulnerable in its shared mental consensus about how to interpret reality and derive meaning — in what we correctly call its narrative. So they decided to hitch a ride on the propagandistically polished, pro-libertarian American conservative narrative, amplify it and hijack it for their own ends. With their money, thoroughly laundered through several countries and a web of Western banks, companies and schemes, they filled old narrative with new meaning. In this new story, Russia was suddenly a values-driven capitalist ally, and the new enemies were neo-Marxists, students, the far left, refugees, LGBT people and anyone whose views did not match what American conservatism had once stood for. Thanks to heavy investment in Silicon Valley, they managed to put this mental hook into operation, and, dressed in the jersey of American conservative rhetoric, they set about subverting the United States and its NATO allies.
Subversion Schemes
Dougan became one of the most diligent executors of this strategy. According to NewsGuard, The Washington Post and other outlets, he was behind a network of more than 160 fake news sites in the United States posing as local newspapers — the DC Weekly, the Miami Chronicle and the Chicago Chronicle among them.
His first viral hit was a fabricated story that Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, had spent more than a million dollars on jewellery at Cartier in New York. A similar lie spread about Volodymyr Zelensky’s supposed luxury yachts — one repeated by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, his operation, which Microsoft tracks as Storm-1516, turned its sights on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. According to The Washington Post, Dougan worked directly with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, and his smears of the candidates reached at least 64 million people.
After the American election, he shifted his attention to Germany. Just nine days after snap elections were called in the autumn of 2024, he began registering dozens of domains, according to CORRECTIV and NewsGuard, eventually building a network of 102 German-language sites. Some bore the names of defunct German newspapers and spread fabrications such as claims that Germany would bring in 1.9 million African workers, or that the Bundeswehr was preparing to mobilise half a million men.
Mentally Bent
Dougan’s handlers in Russia soon realised, however, that fake websites need not target human readers alone. At a conference of Russian officials in January 2025, Dougan boasted that by pushing Russian narratives one could influence and turn artificial intelligence around the world. The principle is one every programmer knows as “garbage in, garbage out”: what goes into the system is what comes out. Files leaked from his computer show that he was generating tens of thousands of pro-Russian articles a month with a single aim — to have them ingested by large language models so that their answers would be “mentally bent in Russia’s favour”.
LLM Grooming
Researchers call this organised poisoning of the sources American chatbots learn from “LLM grooming”, or data poisoning. To write the propaganda, Dougan even used the American models themselves, including Anthropic’s Claude, in breach of their terms of use.
But in time, John Mark Dougan met the fate of every traitor who ever defected to the Soviet Union or to Russia. Reality.
The encounter with Russian reality is something entirely different from what such a traitor imagines. Kim Philby, the greatest known villain in the history of British intelligence, had to face it too: after arriving in Moscow he sank into depression and drink once he realised where he had emigrated and whom he was dealing with. As is their custom, the Russians did not treat Dougan kindly either. He was neither the first nor the last to meet this fate.
An Unexpected Leak
Just how the Russians treated him came to light in November 2026 through an unexpected leak. Hackers — most likely Ukrainian, according to reports so far — broke into Dougan’s computer and published his emails, his Signal and Telegram messages, and even the prompts he had typed into AI chatbots. His compromised account on X also posted an apology for having helped spread Kremlin disinformation. Dougan confirmed the leaked data was authentic, remarking that truly anyone can be hacked.
The archive was analysed by The Insider, the Russian investigative outlet in exile, together with Germany’s CORRECTIV. It confirms that his work was funded by the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise, run by Alexander Dugin, and that the money for running the fake news sites was sent by a man whom earlier reports have linked to GRU Unit 29155 — the unit responsible for sabotage and influence operations, including the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the explosion at the Vrbětice ammunition depot in the Czech Republic, which killed two people. Far more telling, though, is the portrait that emerges from the correspondence: the eager adventurer has become a bitter, burnt-out man who complains about his Russian superiors, about not being paid for his work, and about Russian internet censorship that left him unable to do properly the very thing Moscow once paid him for. The Insider describes him as a man the Russians squeezed like a lemon and then tossed aside.
Targeting the Czech Republic
But the leaked correspondence revealed one more trail — and it leads to my own country. I am Czech. According to findings published by the Czech news sites Seznam Zprávy and Voxpot, John Mark Dougan was hired — and here it gets interesting — by Roman Blaško, general secretary of the Communist Party, who has lived in Moscow since 2022. His assignments came from people linked to the Chinese Communist Party, above all Blaško’s partner, the Czech sinologist Denisa Petriláková, who works in Beijing for Chinese state propaganda media. Since February 2026, Dougan has been running the Czech disinformation website GNEWS.cz and four affiliated sites: he moved them to new servers, built them an app and set up automatic translation into eight languages. In May, the two Czechs visited him in Moscow and spent several days at his house. And according to the leaked messages, the money to run the sites comes not from Russia but from China: the sites republish articles from a Chinese state media group and receive thousands of dollars from the Chinese embassy in Prague for advertising banners.
A Deep Scar
The Czech Republic has been a member of NATO since 1999, yet Russian and Chinese propaganda have left a deep mark on the country’s psychological and cultural landscape, much as they have in Slovakia and Hungary. Poland faced the same informational subversion. There it was not openly pro-Russian; instead it was anti-refugee, faux-conservative, racist and antisemitic, and it split Polish society into small pieces.
Russian propaganda hit my country so hard that it was brought to its knees, confused and radicalized in the “American conservative way” and is now fighting for survival. The Czech Republic is probably the first NATO member state to have a subversive government that could fairly be called Russian-American. It is made up of three parties. One is wholly beholden to Russia and has documented ties directly to Moscow. The second is beholden to American MAGA conservatism and climate change denialism — that deeply faked conservatism. And the strongest party in the government represents Orbán-style organised criminal structure in the person of the oligarch Babiš, who has been wrongfully pocketing billions in subsidies from the Czech state and the European Union. As I write these lines, this government is purging the pro-Western leadership of the Czech armed forces — until now an exemplary NATO member.
Now look back and consider how American conservative circles, fed by Russian money and Russian propaganda, labelled their enemies. Kamala Harris was branded a communist. Yet it was John Mark Dougan who ran exactly that campaign against her — at the Russian Federation’s behest, with Russian money and under the ideological supervision of Alexander Dugin. Russia itself branded its enemies in the West as communists, eco-lunatics, antisemites, leftists, neo-Marxists and so on. And it used the same radicalisation, with the sign reversed, to infiltrate the left. And the very same Dougan who helped pin the communist label on American Democrats now serves Czech communists and their Chinese paymasters.
“I’ve had enough of Russia”
Dougan had no shame whatsoever. In the middle of his work for Moscow, he began toying with the idea of working for the Chinese Communist Party instead, because it paid better. Petriláková, who was by then already working for the Chinese Communist Party, was offering him better terms. The leaked correspondence analysed by the Czech news sites Voxpot and Seznam Zpravy makes clear that Dougan himself had reached a conclusion he summed up in a few words: “I’ve had enough of Russia.” According to Seznam Zpravy, however, Petriláková also wrote to him that, in return, weirdly, the Chinese wanted him to give up two CIA agents. A man who once, as an American police officer, swore to protect his country was now being offered the chance to betray it again — this time for a different master. Ideology never mattered to him. He was driven by disappointment, vanity and money. It is not clear which agents he was supposed to betray. The Chinese simply wanted insurance that he would not run.
Masters and Underdogs
And this unstable, embittered man, ready for any betrayal, was one of those who changed the face of America and Europe beyond recognition. Just like the young Donald Trump once did — a disappointed, unrecognised, many-times-bankrupt developer for the Italian mafia who could not make it in Manhattan’s cut-throat world and therefore succumbed to the call and flattery of the Russian sirens. Without money and loans he never repaid, he would have been nothing more than what he really is: a man playing far above his league. Even criminal leagues have masters and underdogs.
There are thousands of Dougans among us: embittered, unrecognised, convinced that their own country has wronged them and owes them something. And Russia — and now China too — knows how to find them before we even notice. It is a story as old as the history of war itself. Only now it is written by a ruling hand from Silicon Valley — by “stable” data overlords such as Jensen Huang or Elon Musk.—Alex Alvarova for Bette Dangerous
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Alex Alvarova is a Czech-Canadian author and communications expert. A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons, a political thriller on America, Russia and a Big Data coup. She hosts a Czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic brainwash and AI, with her co-host, Josef Holy, an expert on social media algorithms.
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