Zlatko Kovach is one of them. Just blocks from the White House, the 48-year-old editor runs the Washington office of Sputnik, which styles itself as a straight news service that aspires to compete with the Associated Press and Reuters. Three of Kovach’s fellow ex-Pentagon contract workers joined him. Two have moved on, but Sputnik is actively recruiting others.
Kovach, a naturalized American citizen, doesn’t see his move as unpatriotic but rather as economically justified. “Despite the big superpower relations, the media has developed in such a way as that’s the nature of the market,” he said. “It isn’t harming the U.S.”
Sputnik is part of a news and information outlet known in the United States as RT, the initials of its parent entity, Russia Today, which operates under the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media in Moscow. With State Department approval, RT opened the Washington office of Sputnik last year just as civilian contractors who shaped U.S. military messaging overseas were put out of work when Congress shut down most of a $22 million program.
They practiced what used to be called psychological operations, or PSYOP, a name that was changed to something more benign-sounding in the Pentagon’s alphabet soup of acronyms: MISO, for “military information support operations.”
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