Speculation about a US armed forces exercise that led some Texans to fear that the Obama administration was plotting martial law was stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign, according to a former director of the CIA.



Russian bots were so successful in planting wild ideas during a military exercise called Jade Helm in 2015 that Russian social media bandits launched another offensive the following year, attempting to influence the presidential election itself, Michael Hayden told MSNBC.



“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most – many – Texans that Obama planned to round up political dissidents, and it got so much traction that the governor of Texas had to call up the [state guard] to observe the federal exercise to keep the population calm,” said Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 after serving as director of the National Security Agency.



“At that point I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time.’ And at that point I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process,” Hayden said on Morning Joe on Wednesday.

The two-month summer exercise across multiple states was described as a large but routine realistic training event by the military, but it drew particular scepticism in Texas. The state, home to some of the country’s largest bases, was designated as “hostile” territory for the purposes of the exercise.

Michael Hayden: ‘I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time’ … I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process.’ Photograph: Luis Alvarez/AP

Rumours spread over the internet, now revealed as apparently fuelled by Russian bots, or fake social media accounts controlled by individuals or software applications. These were not discouraged by high-profile figures including Ted Cruz, the US senator, who said he understood “the reason for concern and uncertainty”, and the actor Chuck Norris, who described it as “likely more than a military exercise”.

Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas who serves on a homeland security subcommittee, also voiced suspicion. “Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile’ ,‘permissive’ and ‘uncertain’ states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, who ‘cling to their guns and religion’ and believe in the sanctity of the United States constitution,” he said, echoing a jibe by Barack Obama at small-town voters during his 2008 election campaign.

Gohmert continued: “When the federal government begins, even in practice, games or exercises, to consider any US city or state in ‘hostile’ control and trying to retake it, the message becomes extremely calloused and suspicious.”

Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, lent a veneer of legitimacy to the growing hysteria when he ordered the Texas state guard to monitor Jade Helm “to safeguard Texans’ constitutional rights, private property and civil liberties”.

Among the most extreme theories were that empty Walmarts would be turned into concentration camps and ice cream trucks used as portable morgues. The exercise, though, passed off without incident.

