It was always thus
A STAR REPORTERâS BREAK WITH REALITY
Lara Logan was once a respected 60 Minutes correspondent. Now she trades in conspiracy theories that even far-right media disavow. What happened?
Illustrations by Alicia Tatone
The footage is shown before she takes the stage: Lara Logan in a headscarf, addressing the camera from the streets of Mogadishu. Logan ducking for cover as bullets crack overhead in Afghanistan. Logan interrogating a trophy hunter in Texas. Logan walking with Christine Lagarde, Justin Trudeau, Mark Wahlberg, Jane Goodall.
It is a tour through Loganâs past life as a journalist for CBSâs 60 Minutes, a glimpse at the various exchanges and explosions that earned her the awards and a âprominent spot,â as her former network once put it, âamong the worldâs best foreign correspondents.â Then, three minutes and one second later, it is over. Cut to right now, February 27, 2023, in Fredericksburg, Texas: Logan looking out at 200 people gathered in a creaking church auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Gillespie County chapter of Moms for Liberty.
âIf you want to know why itâs called social media,â Logan says, âIâll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of controlâthatâs all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all.â
She goes on, picking up on the title of a recent book by a friend of hers, retired General Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and a far-right conspiracy theorist: âSo what does fifth-generation warfare really mean?â It means that âyouâre meant to believe the narrative, regardless of the truth.â
For the next 45 minutes, Logan, wearing a floral wrap dress and a cream-colored cardigan, lays out what she sees as the true narrative: for instance, that by aiding Ukraine, America is arming Nazis; that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection at all. Turning to The New York Times to understand this moment, Logan warns, is âlike being in the battle of Normandy, on the beaches of Normandy, Dunkirk, and going on your knees every day and crawling over to the Nazi lines and asking them to please write nice things about your side in German propaganda.â Her dress is decorated with two identical navy-blue stickers reading stop woke indoctrination.
In October, during an appearance on Newsmax, Logan declared that the global elite âwant us eating insectsâ while they âdine on the blood of children.â
As Logan talks, her words at times eliciting applause, the final frame of the introductory footage hovers ghostlike in the background. Loganâs success at events like thisâshe now features at manyâturns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the âlittle puppetâ Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of âgenocide by government,â or how President Joe Bidenâs administration has been âparticipating in the trafficking of kids,â it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of Americaâs wars.
Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this âwar against humanity.â And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.
First CBS, and then Fox News. Not even the far-right Newsmax wants journalists who risk piercing the narrative. In October, during an appearance on that network, Logan declared that âthe open border is Satanâs way of taking control of the worldâ and that the global elite âwant us eating insectsâ while they âdine on the blood of children.â Newsmax condemned her remarks and announced that it had no plans to invite Logan on its shows again.
Loganâs life has been rife with personal trauma, some of it well known. In 2011, she was gang-raped in Cairoâs Tahrir Square. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2013, a story she reported for 60 Minutes was publicly disavowed. I went to Fredericksburg, where Logan now lives, on that February evening because I wanted to know what had happened in the decade since. I wanted to understand how, after years of association with the tick-tick-tick of 60 Minutes, she had slipped into a world bracketed by MyPillow discount codes and LaraLoganGold.com. How a career built on pursuing the truth had become so unmoored from it.
When I had contacted Logan about an interview, her response, via text message, was: âUnfortunately I have no doubt this is another hit piece desperately seeking to discredit several decades of award-winning work at 60 Minutes, CBS, ABC, NBC and beyond and you are only seeking my voice to add legitimacy to the anonymous cowards you will use to attack me once again. Feel free to use this statement if you are sincere.â She then shared a screenshot of our exchange with her 530,000 Twitter followers.
And so I braced for an unpleasant encounter when I approached Logan at the end of the night, after the long line of grandmothers and mothers and teenage girls who wanted a photo with her had finally dwindled. I introduced myself and said that I had seen probably every story she had ever done for 60 Minutes. âBut here youâve come,â she said. âHere youâve come to destroy it all.â
She has been described in terms of hazardous weather. A tornado whipped through Midtown Manhattan and there suddenly was Lara Logan, June 2008, striding high-heeled from the wings of The Daily Show. âShe is the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News,â Jon Stewart announced, the studio audience cheering as he shook Loganâs hand and guided her to center stage. âYou remind me of a young Ted Koppel,â he said.
Logan tilted her head back and laughed. âDan Rather used to say that about me!â
Logan had begun her career as a full-time journalist 16 years earlier, fresh out of college and with a rĂ©sumĂ© consisting of two part-time newspaper gigs in her hometown of Durban, South Africa, along with a bit of swimsuit modeling. In her first days covering the post-apartheid landscape as a producer at Reuters Television in Johannesburg, Logan, then in her early 20s, had not exactly reminded anyone of a young Ted Koppel. âThe word bimbo came up a lot,â one of Loganâs former Reuters colleagues told me. But opinions began to shift once fellow journalists saw her in the field. âIt was a very, very intense time ⊠Sheâs a fucking hard worker, and she takes risks,â the former colleague said. âShe had incredible guts.â (This person, like most of the nearly three dozen other onetime colleagues or friends of Loganâs I interviewed, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.)
By 30, Logan was a correspondent for the British morning show GMTV. She was working out of London on 9/11, and within days she was pleading with an embassy clerk for a fast-track visa to Afghanistan. At first, GMTV management seemed unsure what to make of it, this young woman apparently desperate to embed herself in al-Qaeda territory. Where would she sleep? What about a driver, security? Sheâd figure it out. She was en route to Kabul shortly after the first American air strikes that October.
It didnât take long for Loganâs superiors to recognize the opportunity before them, the potential for their coverage of the biggest story on Earth to become an event unto itself. This was not just because Logan was a woman but because she was attractive. It is prudent to address this now, because the fact of Loganâs attractiveness would soon become unavoidable, the gathering resonance of her journalism inextricable from the publicâs gathering interest in her appearance.
Logan had been in Kabul less than a month when her Independent Television News competitor Julian Manyon suggested in a Spectator essay that the âdelectableâ correspondentâs swift infiltration of Bagram Airfield and the upper ranks of the Northern Alliance was due to her âconsiderable physical charms.â Logan, he wrote, âexploits her God-given advantages with a skill that Mata Hari might envy.â Responding in a short dispatch for The Guardian, Logan parried adroitly. âIf General Babajan smiles around me, perhaps it is because I offer him respect and attempt, at least, to talk to him in a non-demanding manner,â she wrote. âItâs not rocket science.â
The British tabloids, delighted to have located the sex in jihad so quickly, scrambled to build on the story. In the course of interviewing Loganâs mother at her home in Durban, a reporter got access to the swimsuit photos for which Logan had posed to earn extra cash while in high school and university. The photos soon appeared on the front pages of the Daily Record and The Mirror. At first Logan was furious, embarrassed. But then she decided to lean in, to fashion herself as the rare emblem of both harrowing journalism and unabashed femininity. The tip for the next Mirror splash (âHereâs a sight that would stop the Taliban in its tracks. War reporter Lara Logan relaxes on a deck chair in a sizzling swimsuitâ) reportedly came from Logan herself. âShe was the first field correspondent I ever met who sort of understood her brand, which was a really new thing at the time,â a producer at a rival network told me.
As her profile grew, Logan charmed feature writers with her willingness to talk, to play ball when they asked her about things as personal as the last time sheâd had a âgood snog.â She argued that not using her looks would be malpractice. âThere isnât a journalist alive who wonât admit to you they use every advantage they have,â she told The New York Times.
More fundamental to Loganâs success in Afghanistan, however, was the simple fact that she showed up when others didnât. In addition to her GMTV job, Logan worked as a stringer for CBS News Radio, and just a few weeks after arriving in Kabul, she found herself the only CBS-affiliated reporter on hand to cover the Talibanâs rapid unraveling. The network aired her prime-time debut from the capital.
This was when Dan Rather saw a young Ted Koppel. An article in Vogue described Rather as the first to urge CBS to hire Logan full-time. He marveled at her ability to âget through the glass,â as he told the magazine. âThe good ones,â he said, âalways want the worst assignments.â By spring 2002, Logan had a $1 million contract with the network.
Her new colleagues understood the appeal. âShe knows how to position herself, she knows how to relate to the cameraâsheâs incredibly good at that,â Philip Ittner, a former CBS producer who worked with Logan, told me. âShe was also very good under fire. Even in a very bad firefight or something, after an IED exploded, she would get in front of the camera, and sheâd be able to deliver.â
But then there was the tornado of it all. âShe likes to stir stuff up, unconsciously,â the former Reuters colleague told me. âWherever she goes, thereâs a lot of kinetic energy thatâs not necessarily net positive.â
Logan grew up one of three children in a well-off white family in apartheid South Africa. She enjoyed snacks prepared by housekeepers and a swimming pool in the backyard and the tacit belief that her parents had only ever existed, and indeed would only ever exist, in relation to each other. And then one morning when she was 8, her father pulled into the driveway and Logan raced out to greet him and there in the car was a 5-year-old girl she had never seen before. Say hello to your sister, her father said. He was leaving to be with this other daughter and her mother.
In 2005, The New York Times christened her the âWar Zone âIt Girlâ â; in 2006, CBS elevated her to chief foreign correspondent.
âIt was such a shock, such a traumatic experience,â Logan later recalled. After the divorce, she watched her mother struggle to reassemble the pieces of her life. Yolanda Logan moved her young children into a small apartment and found work as a sales representative at a glass company, never remarrying. âI learned about betrayal and dishonesty,â Logan told the Sunday Mirror soon after returning to London from Kabul. âWhen I looked at Mum, I saw a woman who thought she was secure and safe in her marriage suddenly alone.â
That was how Logan explained it when the Mirror reporter asked why she was so willing to pitch herself into danger as a journalist. âIâm afraid of being seen as vulnerable,â she said. âAll my life, Iâve been fighting to prove that Iâm not weak.â
She refused orders from CBS to keep out of Iraq during the American invasion in 2003, hiring local fixers to sneak her across the Jordanian border. On the drive into Baghdad, she played Van Morrison. With virtually every other American television broadcaster evacuated from the city, âshock and aweâ was hers. One of Loganâs early segments for the relatively short-lived Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes showed a Humvee she was in flip over when it hit a land mine; in a Sunday segment, viewers saw Logan defy a vehicle commanderâs orders to stay put as he went to inspect an unexploded bomb. In 2005, the Times christened her the âWar Zone âIt Girlâ â; in 2006, CBS elevated her to chief foreign correspondent.
Whether Logan was daring or heedless depended on whom you askedâand, as is typical in the environs of television news, a great many of her colleagues enjoyed being asked. Some felt that Logan showed undue deference to the military line; others groused about what they saw as stubbornness and self-absorption. Still others watched Logan peer down at an unexploded bomb and saw not bravery as much as recklessness. At a certain point, âa lot of people refused to produce her,â one of her former producers told me.
If, for Logan, this was not cause for introspection, it was perhaps because her approach was winning a lot of awards. (In her first six years at CBS, she picked up Gracie Awards and Murrow Awards and an Emmy.) And if, for Logan, the New York Post article headlined âSexty Minutesâ had not been cause for alarm, it was perhaps because Jeff Fager, then the executive producer of 60 Minutes, had hung a framed copy of the article in his office. âItâs hard to judge what Lara Logan is going to be in 10 years,â Fager told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in the fall of 2008. âBut boy, sheâs made a mark in a short period of time.â
And yet, for as long as Logan had craved precisely this level of success, she also seemed uncomfortable with having actually attained itâas if to accept life as it presented itself to her, the way her mother once had, risked revealing it to be a trick of the light. She spoke sometimes of unspecified plans to derail her career. âIâm sure people are interested in seeing me fail,â she said shortly after joining CBS. She detected threats where no threats were intended. In 2006, when reviewing Katie Couricâs premiere as the first solo female anchor on a major-network evening news show, the Times pronounced that âthe woman who stood out the mostâ was not Couric herself, but rather the âexperienced and unusually prettyâ CBS war correspondent. The unwanted comparison with her senior colleague seemed only to reinforce Loganâs inchoate sense of being conspired against. âI always think it is some kind of secret plot to destroy me,â she told Vogue in 2007. âI mean, to disparage the anchor at my expense?â
This dim, diffuse paranoia would sharpen, according to some colleagues, after the start of Loganâs relationship with the man who is now her husband, Joe Burkett.
Logan was married for the first time in 1998âto Jason Siemon, an American who played professional basketball in the United Kingdom. She met Joseph Washington Burkett IV, a Texas native and an Army sergeant who was also married, a few years later, while reporting in Kabul. Early 2008 found them working again in the same city, this time Baghdad. Logan was now in the final stages of a divorce and Burkett was newly estranged from his wife. He quickly became a regular presence in the press compound outside the Green Zone.
It was not clear to Loganâs colleagues what Burkett did for a living, and Burkett seemed to prefer it that way. He cultivated an air of secrecy, dropping hints that he was involved in clandestine operations. Logan seemed drawn in by the mystery of Burkett and his âvery secretive job,â as she once called it. It was a while before Loganâs colleagues learned that Burkett had been in Baghdad on behalf of the Lincoln Group, a now-defunct firm quietly contracted by the Pentagon to disseminate pro-America propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. But they needed only a few conversations to register his penchant for conspiracy theories.
As Loganâs relationship with Burkett progressed, some of her colleagues noticed slight shifts in her story ideas. âAs much as she would occasionally come up with loony tunes stuff on her own, it would always be more of, like, âHey, letâs go right into the most dangerous part ofâ whatever environment they were currently covering,â Philip Ittner told me. âBut when Burkett came on the scene, it was likeâand this is a hypotheticalââClearly the CIA is bringing in hallucinogens to put into the water supply of Baghdad; we really need to dig into this.â â (Logan declined to answer questions about herself, her husband, or other topics related to this article. In response to a list of factual queries and requests for comment that The Atlantic sent her, Logan wrote, âYou are a hundred percent wrong on everything.â)
Logan and Burkett were wed in November 2008; Logan was seven months pregnant with their first child. They began married life in a house they bought in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
On the evening of February 11, 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, Logan threaded through the congested streets of Cairo. She, her cameraman, her security guard, and her producer had come straight from the airport, as she later recounted on 60 Minutes, having landed just moments after President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. âIt was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt,â she recalled.
Loganâs agent, Carole Cooper, had advised against the trip; only a week earlier, Logan and her crew had been detained overnight by Egyptian officials targeting journalists. But now, in Tahrir Square, thousands of people were singing, chanting, unfurling flags. For more than an hour she reported from the crowd, people smiling and waving at the camera. Then the cameraâs battery went dead. The light illuminating Logan and the people around her was suddenly gone. A few moments later, Logan felt hands on her body. She thought that if she screamed loud enough, the assault would stop, but it didnât.
The mob tore off her clothes. For a few minutes she managed to hold on to her security guardâs arm, but then, like everyone else in her crew, he was beaten back. This was when Logan thought she was going to die. Later she would recall for Newsweek how the men raped her with their hands, with sticks, with flagpoles. Onlookers took photos with their cellphones. The assault lasted at least 25 minutes before a group of Egyptian women intervened. They were able to cover Logan until soldiers managed to reach her and get her to her hotel, where she was seen by a doctor.
The next morning, Logan was on a flight home to her husband and two young children in Washington. She would spend four days in the hospital. People from all over the world sent flowers and letters. President Barack Obama called her to share his support. Loganâs eventual decision to talk openly about what happened inspired other women in journalism to share their own stories of being sexually assaulted while on the job. After she spoke out, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched a major effort to survey the problem and stigma of sexual violence in the field.
Over time, the most obvious reminders of Loganâs assaultâthe hand-shaped bruises all over her bodyâfaded. For years afterward, however, as she told the Toronto Star, Logan would continue to cope with internal injuriesâsevere pelvic pain, a hysterectomy that failed to heal. And there was the emotional damage. Logan talked about problems of intimacy with her husband, the dark memories that could sweep over her with a single touch.
A little over a year after the assault, Logan, at 41, was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer; she underwent a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation, then went into remission. It was during this period of her life, Logan would say, that she âwanted to come apart.â She felt herself in a situation where ânobody could see it and nobody could see me and nobody understood.â She began suffering panic attacks. She tried therapy.
Through it all, Logan found refuge in her career. In April 2013, a little more than two years after the assault, The Hollywood Reporter published a glowing feature on executive producer Jeff Fagerâs 60 Minutes. The article depicted Logan as a confident correspondent striding into a screening for her next story, settling in beside Fager as he prepared to mark up the script. His verdict: âTerrific.â She could always make it back to terrific.
Until, that is, she couldnât.
Not long after the Hollywood Reporter article, Simon & Schuster reached out to CBS with a pitch. A conservative imprint within the publishing company had a book coming out in the fallâThe Embassy Houseâabout Benghazi: the âreal story,â as the prologue promised, of the deadly attack on the American compound and CIA annex in September 2012, as recounted by âthe only man in a position to tell the full story.â
The manâs name was Dylan Davies, but he was writing under a pseudonymâfor his safety, the book explained, and also because he had âno interest in seeking official recognition.â
Davies, a British-military veteran from Wales, was a security officer whose employer, Blue Mountain, had been hired by the State Department to help protect the Special Mission in Benghazi. In his book, he described how, on the night of the attack, he had scaled the compoundâs 12-foot wall to try to save the Americans trapped inside, rifle-butting a terrorist in the process. He also said that he had seen Ambassador J. Christopher Stevensâs body at the hospital.
Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, agreed to consider The Embassy House for a feature on 60 Minutes. The basics of Daviesâs biography appeared to check out; email correspondence that Davies shared with Logan seemed to confirm, as he claimed, that he had been interviewed by officials from across the U.S. government, including the FBI, about everything he had seen and heard and done that night. Over the next few months, Logan and McClellan put together a Benghazi segment featuring Daviesâs story as well as original reporting on the attack. After the screening of the finished product, CBS and 60 Minutes leadership, including Fager, green-lighted the broadcast for air.
Some of Loganâs reporting broke significant ground. No journalist had yet substantiated, for example, the role of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, an Ansar alâSharia leader and former GuantĂĄnamo Bay detainee, in the Benghazi attack; the Obama administration did not publicly announce his involvement until the next year. But the segmentâs revelations were framed almost as sideshows to the Rambo-esque account of Davies, whose view of the attack comprised the majority of the reportâs 15 and a half minutes.
Within days of the broadcast, his story began to unravel. The Washington Post reported that Davies had told his employer he wasnât at the compound that nightâsomething 60 Minutes had known but did not mention, accepting Daviesâs explanation that he had lied to his employer. A week later, The New York Times revealed that Davies had also told the FBI that he wasnât at the compound. Logan and McClellan knew that Davies had been interviewed by the FBI; they had not checked what he actually said. And when, after the Times report, they tried to reach Davies to demand answers, they couldnât find himâThe Daily Beast later reported that he had emailed his publisher saying that because of a threat against his family, he was going dark.
I was recently able to reach Davies via email. He claimed without evidence that his sonâs life had been threatened by âthe US state department (Clinton)â after the 60 Minutes report. (A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton denied the allegation and noted that Clinton had stepped down as secretary of state several months before the Benghazi report aired.) When I pressed him on whether he had told the FBI and 60 Minutes different versions of his story, he replied that he didnât âwant anything to do with Benghaziâ and asked what was wrong with me.
Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group founded by the Clinton ally David Brock, seized on the controversy immediately, publishing no fewer than 36 stories highlighting problems in Loganâs reporting. Other outlets would point to a speech Logan had given a year earlier, in which she accused the Obama administration of perpetuating a âmajor lieâ about the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda, as evidence of political bias.
On November 8, 2013, for the first time in her career, Logan went on air to announce the retraction of a story. âWe were wrong,â she said. Simon & Schuster withdrew The Embassy House from sale later that day. For CBS, and Fager in particular, it was a colossal embarrassmentâthe programâs âworst mistake on my 10-year watch,â he wrote in a 2017 book. Logan would later say that a nondisclosure agreement she and McClellan had signed with the publisher had prevented them from checking Daviesâs story with the FBI. It was an odd line of defenseâLogan arguing that she had given up the right to verify key points. An internal CBS review concluded that problems with Daviesâs account were âknowable before the piece aired.â Logan and McClellan agreed to take indefinite leaves of absence. (CBS News declined to comment on the Benghazi report and its aftermath.)
Sitting in her home in Cleveland Park during the leave of absence, Logan took calls from colleagues and tried to make sense of things. For the first time in her career, she was losing control of the narrative.
Logan soon learned that Joe Hagan, a writer at New York magazine, was working on a profile of her. Haganâs article, titled âBenghazi and the Bombshell,â was published in May 2014. Hagan attributed the Benghazi mistake to a âproverbial perfect stormâ of factors, including Loganâs reputed personal sympathies with the Republican line on the attack, and the âoutsize powerâ she enjoyed at 60 Minutes thanks to Fager.
Logan would later file a lawsuit against Hagan and *New Yorkâ*a suit quickly dismissed by a federal judge. The complaint alleged that prior to publication of the âHagan Hit Piece,â as Logan called it, Fager and CBS Chair Les Moonves had come up with a âspecific and detailed planâ for her to return to 60 Minutes. According to the lawsuit, after the article appeared Moonves felt that he and Fager had been painted as Loganâs âlapdogsâ and decided to shift course; Fager then informed her that she would return to the program in a âdrastically altered role.â When she went back to work in June, her relationship with him was, she claimed in the suit, âirreparably damaged.â âShe really felt hung out to dry,â a person formerly close to Logan told me. (Neither Fager nor Moonves responded to requests for comment.)
For Logan, reckoning frankly with the circumstances in which she now found herself would have meant accepting her own responsibility for creating themâaccepting, in other words, the unextraordinary truth of the human capacity for poor judgment. But in the fall of 2014, a movie came out that helped Logan rewrite her narrative.
Based on a book by the journalist Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger tells the story of Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News journalist who, in 1996, published a blockbuster investigation that linked the CIA to Americaâs crack-cocaine epidemic by way of its relationship with the Nicaraguan contras. Although much of the reporting was solid, Webbâs âDark Allianceâ series also had serious flaws; the Mercury News eventually determined that the series âdid not meet our standardsâ in several ways. Webb resigned from the paper not long afterward. He died by suicide in 2004. In the movieâs telling, the various news outlets that called Webbâs work into question were motivated less by a desire to correct the record than by petty jealousies and a longtime deference to the CIA.
Itâs unclear whether Logan had ever heard of Webb before she saw the film. In many respects, their experiences were utterly unalike. Nevertheless, Logan seemed to cling to Webb as a kind of life raft, and would later invoke his name and story in interviews about her Benghazi report. (She also questioned whether Webbâs death had truly been a suicide.) Logan ultimately decided that Media Matters, in an effort to discredit the âsubstanceâ of the Benghazi reportâabout security flaws at the compoundâhad worked in concert with various media outlets to silence her. The problem, as she now saw it, was not that she had put an unverified account on air. It was that her report had dared to criticize the Obama administration. To use Webbâs own formulationâone that Logan repeats to this dayâshe had told a story âimportant enough to suppress.â
In mid-2015, when Loganâs contract was coming up for renewal, CBS offered, and Logan accepted, a part-time correspondent role on 60 Minutes. Shortly after the contract was signed, she, her husband, and their children packed up their house in Washington and moved to Burkettâs hometown of Fredericksburg, Texas.
For most of her professional life, Logan had not struck her peers as especially politicalââvery moderate,â one former colleague called her. She now began to shape a new worldview, one steeped in antagonism toward the media establishment she felt betrayed by, and toward the figures and institutions she believed it served. It was a worldview that offered both absolution and purpose. And it was soon to find a partisan expression in Donald Trump.
On-screen, over the next two years, Logan seemed much the same journalist and person sheâd always been. She continued to file stories from various countries for 60 Minutes. Off-screen, however, she was becoming closer to people like Ed Butowsky, a Fox News regular and Texas-based financial adviser of whom Logan was now a client. Butowsky would play a central role in the story of Seth Rich.
In July 2016, the murder of the Democratic National Committee stafferâin a botched robbery, police saidâproduced a torrent of right-wing conspiracy theories. Butowsky helped instigate an investigation that resulted in a Fox News story suggesting that Rich had been killed by Hillary Clinton associates in retaliation for supposedly leaking emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks. (Fox soon retracted the story and later settled a lawsuit brought by the Rich family. Butowsky settled a separate lawsuit brought against him by Richâs brother.)
According to Facebook messages shared with The Atlantic, Logan, too, had been suspicious of the botched-robbery line, and saw in the episode another instance of the elite media providing cover for the left. In an April 2017 exchange with Trevor FitzGibbon, a left-wing public-relations strategist whose firm had represented WikiLeaks, Logan wrote that she did not know âfor a factâ that Clintonâs associates were responsible for Richâs murder. âBut I would be stunned if it were not true.â No journalist had reported this, because âtheyââpresumably the Democratsââown the media,â she wrote, and pointed to the fallout from her Benghazi report. âThey saw me as a threat and went after me and the show.â A few months later, Joe Burkett attended a small gathering at Butowskyâs home at which, according to one attendeeâs sworn deposition, the possibility of wiretapping Richâs parentsâ house was raised. (Butowsky has denied that this was ever discussed.)
Toward the end of 2018, CBS declined to renew Loganâs contract. She was likely not surprised. Logan later characterized her final four years at the network as isolating; executives whoâd once supported her now treated her with âutter contempt.â (Fager and Moonves, as it happened, were both ousted at approximately the same timeâFager for sending a threatening text message to a CBS News reporter looking into #MeToo allegations against him and Moonves when a dozen women said he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. Both denied the sexual-misconduct allegations.)
In interviews, a number of Loganâs former colleagues expressed the belief that, in time, she would have been picked up by another network. Her 60 Minutes segment in 2015 on Christians in Iraq had won a Murrow Award; in 2017, she and her team won an Emmy for their report on the battle for Mosul. But what Loganâs messages with FitzGibbon seem to underscore is that, even if a continued career in mainstream media had been possible, she wasnât necessarily interested in pursuing one.
Logan was creating, in effect, a new brand for herself. She unveiled it in early 2019, sitting down for a three-and-a-half-hour podcast interview with the former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland, whom she had once interviewed for 60 Minutes. Logan related the story of her life and offered a blistering critique of the mainstream media she had chosen to leave behind. In speaking out against what she saw as the mediaâs liberal bias, Logan told Ritland, she was committing âprofessional suicide.â She likened right-wing outlets such as Breitbart News and Fox to the âtiny little spotâ where women are permitted to pray at Jerusalemâs Western Wall, while âCBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whateverââthe âliberalâ mediaâtook up the rest of the space, reserved for men. The interview went viral, and Sean Hannity invited her on his show for a follow-up. âI hope my bosses at Fox find a place for you,â the host told her.
By the start of 2020, Logan had a deal with Fox Newsâs streaming service Fox Nation, for a series called Lara Logan Has No Agenda. Along with reported segments on subjects including illegal immigration and the dangerous advance of socialism in America, Logan would use her new role to build on her criticism of the media. One of Loganâs former producers remembers calling her around this time. âI was like, âYou know, youâre talking about me ⊠Youâre talking about all these people whoâve worked with youâweâre part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Like, seriously, you believe that?â And she was like, âNo, you donât understand ⊠You may not know youâre complicitâbut youâre complicit.â â
As the months passed, Loganâs comments became more extreme. Eventually some of her closest friends from her former life could no longer stomach a phone call with her, knowing it might turn into a stem-winder on the virtues of Michael Flynn, who had admitted to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian ambassador. When Trump supporters mobilized to deny the results of the 2020 election, Logan was right there with them; she would work on a movie (financed by MyPillowâs Mike Lindell) about alleged voter fraud. After the January 6 insurrection, she rallied behind the people who were charged with taking part in it.
All of which seemed to culminate in an appearance on Fox Newsâin November 2021, as the country battled COVIDâduring which Logan compared Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fox stayed silent about the remarks but ultimately did not pursue a new season of Loganâs streaming show.
It was the sort of moment that those few friends left over from her old life thought might finally force a reckoning. Even her newer allies struggled to defend the remarks. (âAnytime you bring up a Nazi in anything, youâre kind of going off the reservation,â Ed Butowsky told me.) But by that point, Logan had come to seem firmly of the mind that setbacks, criticism, or a reproach of any sort were only evidence that she was doing something right. Carole Cooper, her agentâwho, according to people familiar with their long relationship, had been like a second mother to Loganâdropped her. Less than a year later, Newsmax, where Logan often appeared on the commentator Eric Bollingâs weeknight show, washed its hands of Logan, following her riff on the global blood-drinking elite.
Logan was undeterred. The stakes, as she had come to see them, were simply too high. This is what she tries to communicate to people at the various local speaking gigs that now constitute much of her career, events such as the Park Cities Republican Women Christmas fundraising lunch in Texas, which she keynoted last year. âWe had to cut her off because she was going too long,â one member who helped arrange the lunch recalled. The message was: âThe world is on fireâ and âyour kids are being exposed to cats being rapedâ and âelections are stolenâ and âweâve lost our country.â The woman added, âItâs a Christmas lunch, mind you.â
The truth is that I had been nervous about approaching Logan on that February evening in Texas. Two weeks earlier, she had suggested on Twitter that I was engaged in a broader âstrategic hit jobâ involving an effort to frame her as a Mossad asset. I did not know how she would respond to my presence at the Moms for Liberty event, which I paid $10 to attend. After my initial exchange with Logan, her manner softened, though she would not speak with me on the record.
In the past several years, I have written about a number of public figures on the right who believe very few of the things they profess to believe, who talk in public about stolen elections and wink at the specter of global cabals, and then privately crack jokes about the people who applaud.
I donât think Logan is one of these figures. People who know her say the private person is also the public one. It was with sincere urgency that she recommended Flynnâs The Citizenâs Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare to her audience that evening. I Googled Flynnâs book as I waited to approach Logan. It is advertised almost as a self-help guide, the promotional copy encouraging Americans and âfreedom loving people everywhereâ to buy the volume to âunderstand the manipulation happening around youâ and âwhy you feel the way you do.â âWhen I just saw General Michael Flynn,â Logan had told the audience, âhe said to meâopening wordsââWeâve got maybe 18 months before we lose this country.â â She had nodded as many in the crowd vocalized their dismay. âThis is not something you can pick and choose about whether you want to do.â She declared, âIâm not going to surrender. Even if they throw me in a prison and execute meââtil my last breath, Iâm going to be fighting.â
In recent years, many Americans have embraced conspiracy theories as a way to give order and meaning to the worldâs chance cruelties. Lara Logan seems to have done the same, rewriting her story as a martyrdom epic in the war of narratives. Five years after Logan departed CBS, few tethers remain to the woman on the projector screen. Executives and journalists who were once her greatest advocates have long since stopped talking to her and would prefer not to talk about her, either. âRespectfully, I would like to pass speaking on this subject. Best wishes,â Dan Rather wrote in a Twitter message when I reached out to him. Former friends who remember Logan as empathetic and generous now fear incurring the vitriol of a woman who frequently trashes critics and perceived enemies as âevil,â âdisgusting,â âworthless.â The only former colleague of hers who was willing to be quoted by name in this article agreed to do so out of a sense of duty. âShe is spreading Kremlin propaganda,â Philip Ittner told me. âAnd as somebody who is here in Ukraine, trying to fight back against the Russian information warfare, I canât in good conscience just sit idly by.â It may be that saying nobody owns you, as Logan so often does, helps dull the reality that very few people claim you.
But the people at the event in Fredericksburg did claim her. After the speech was over, Logan talked one-on-one with dozens of audience members who seemed anxious to learn more about why they felt the way they did. She lingered until the very last person left the auditorium.
I think she stayed for as long as she did that night because she believes she has seen the light and wanted the people in the auditorium to see it too. I think she also stayed because the people there represent some of the only community she has left.
Worth a listen. Describes the descent of a guy called Mikki Willis into conspiracist nonsense. Willis is the producer of a series of conspiracist films called âPlandemicâ. Willis himself participates in the podcast.
There has always been conspiracy theories and their followers. I remember the Lyndon La Roueche crowd back in the 80s. I actually saw Alex Jonesâ show on a local public access cable TV channel way back when, just him ranting into a microphone, super low tech. People would stumble on it flicking through channels, and youâd watch it for a bit for the entertainment value.
But they were generally quite disparate, and oft times condraticdory of each other, very fragmented, with different groups of followers for different conspiracies. Like youâd meet someone whoâd believe in one crockpot theory, but theyâd scoff at others as plain ridiculous, like who would believe that, thatâs crazy. Whatâs interesting is that now they seem to have coalesced into a contiguous body where all parts are accepted en masse. The irony of course being there is an obvious group think element to it now. Itâs fascinating stuff to see how mainstream it has become.
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The new far right conspiracy theory is that the Creeslough explosion was a bomb and thereâs a state conspiracy to suppress the âtruthâ.
https://twitter.com/williamhboney1/status/1748472120273768749
There used to be people on this forum who completely ridiculed the idea of Russian disinformation campaigns. And @glenshane still posts.
âMore than 1m German-language posts were sent from an estimated 50,000 fake accounts, amounting to a rate of two every second.â
Betteridgeâs law does not apply in this case. The Depp v Heard case was a grotesque parable for our time, and we see it reflected in the (largely fake) online discourse about pretty much everything these days, where Trumpbots, Putinbots, Israelbots, Brexitbots, racistbots and anti-vaccinebots etc. etc. etc. run riot.
Did Saudi trolls help Johnny Depp win battle with Amber Heard? Thatâs the troubling question raised by a months-long investigation which analysed a million tweets, many of which trashed the actressâs reputation - and bolstered his
By ALEXI MOSTROUS FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 09:01, 27 February 2024 | UPDATED: 12:52, 27 February 2024
On the surface, they look like genuine Johnny Depp fans. Their social-media accounts are filled with pictures of the Hollywood star, and they tweet up to 20 times a day, praising Depp and trashing his former wife, Amber Heard.
âAmber is an abuser and a liar,â claims one. âSheâs a traitor.â Another says: Heard âdisgusts meâ, adding: âJohnny is innocent . . . heâs a legend.â
Except these accounts arenât run by genuine fans at all. The evidence suggests theyâre controlled by paid, human trolls â with links to the Saudi government.
In 2022, Depp, 60, won a defamation case against Heard, 37, after a U.S. jury found she had made up allegations of domestic abuse against him. Deppâs victory was a stunning comeback for the actor.
Two years before, a UK court had reached the opposite conclusion, with a judge finding that Depp had abused Heard on 12 occasions.
Before the U.S. trial, thousands of pro-Depp accounts sprang up on social media. Heardâs team suspected someone had hired âbotsâ â automated accounts â to attack her and defend Depp, but they could never prove it.
Yet were they right after all?
For months, Iâve been investigating whether Heard was subjected to an organised trolling campaign and, if so, who was responsible. The results are released today in Who Trolled Amber?, a six-part podcast for Tortoise.
We have found evidence that, in the run-up to the trial, more than 50 per cent of all the tweets that criticised Amber Heard were âinauthenticâ.
That means they either came from bots, which are automated accounts able to pump out thousands of messages a day, or paid âtrollsâ â real people hired to post ugly messages online.
We examined more than one million tweets â the first large-scale analysis of its kind. The results suggest that bots and trolls played a significant role in turning public opinion â certainly online â against Heard.
Daniel Maki, a former spy who tracks disinformation campaigns, told me: âThereâs a 0.1 per cent chance this was all organic [occurring naturally without external output]. Thereâs no way that this was all organic. Iâll bet you $1 million.â
But thatâs not all.
As well as anti-Heard trolls, we found pro-Depp accounts â with links to Saudi Arabia.
Today, these accounts tweet in English, but I found hundreds of earlier, now-deleted tweets from the very same accounts, all in Arabic. None of them mentioned Depp nor any other celebrity. Instead, most praised the Saudi regime or its authoritarian ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known as MBS.
Saudi Arabia has a long history of using bots and trolls to promote its rulers and disparage its opponents. The regime even ran its own âtroll farmâ in the capital Riyadh, where workers were paid $3,000 (ÂŁ2,400) per month.
The Saudis are masters of online disinformation. Was it merely a coincidence that pro-Depp accounts on social media came from the country? Perhaps not.
âAuthoritarian states, including Saudi, have to have a means of controlling social media,â Marc Owen Jones, an expert in Middle Eastern disinformation, told me.
âThe Twitter accounts youâve identified exhibit indications [of] a rented bot network or a for-hire propaganda network.â
Why would people in Saudi Arabia want to spend time and money secretly supporting Johnny Depp online? Well, you might have read recently that Depp and MBS have developed a bizarre âbromanceâ.
Depp has visited Saudi Arabia on several occasions, staying on the royal yacht Serene â a 439ft Italian-made craft with seven decks, a submarine and a âsnow roomâ â and praising the country for its âblossoming film architectureâ. According to Bradley Hope, the author of a book about MBS, no subjects are off-limits between the two unlikely buddies.
They even discussed the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in an operation led by Saudi operatives in 2018. (MBS assured Depp that he didnât personally order Khashoggiâs killing â a conclusion flatly rebutted by Americaâs CIA.)
So, whatâs in this friendship for Depp? The answer is obvious. The actor, whose Hollywood career has badly faltered has an incentive to stay pals with the prince.
His two most recent films â Jeanne du Barry and Modi â have been partly financed by millions of dollars of Saudi money. But Depp is important to Saudi Arabia, too. Under MBSâs âVision 2030â plan, the country is investing hundreds of billions to transform itself into an entertainment and sporting hub. Securing Depp as an advocate of Saudi film is a big PR coup for the regime.
âWhat they both believe to be a lifelong relationship has begun,â Hope told me. âI think weâll be seeing Johnny Depp go to Saudi Arabia a lot.â
In 2018, after the Khashoggi murder, thousands of Saudi government-controlled bots flooded social media with messages playing down the killing and praising MBS. The bots became so widespread that experts came to call them âthe fliesâ.
Bradley Hope examined the pro-Depp tweets coming from Saudi Arabia and told me: âIt looks like these are from the flies. These are the Saudi âMinistry of Fliesâ accounts.â However, this doesnât mean that MBS sat down and personally decided to unleash the âfliesâ against Amber Heard.
âSomehow it became known that MBS had a new fascination with Johnny Depp and that he wanted to help him in some way,â Hope theorised. âSomebody gets the idea that this is the agenda and it becomes a sanctioned message to send through the fliesâ channels.â
Attribution is always tricky in cases of online disinformation.
Today, almost anyone can pay for bots and leave little trace of their actions. But the startling implication of what Iâd found was that Saudi government bots had been tasked to support Depp and troll his former wife â thereby helping to influence public opinion at a critical time for the fallen Hollywood legend.
THE Saudi link is far from the only troubling discovery I made while working on Who Trolled Amber.
I asked two data experts â Zhouhan Chen, of New York University, and Kaicheng Yang, of Northeastern University â to analyse our database of one million tweets about Depp and Heard. They found numerous examples of âinauthentic activityâ in this vast dataset.
These included: âbot networksâ in Thailand and Spain which tweeted large numbers of pro-Depp messages; fake pro-Depp accounts that used AI-generated profile pictures to provide a veneer of authenticity; and even accounts that worked together to coordinate anti-Amber hate.
In one case, more than 100 Twitter accounts sent 1,000 identical messages at exactly the same time to any company that had worked with Heard. The message read: âThis brand supports domestic violence against men.â
Some of the suspicious accounts appeared to be automated: bots set up to retweet popular hashtags or posts. But others behaved like humans, posting original content.
Chen, one of our researchers, explained further: âI identified multiple campaigns [against Heard]. Each campaign roughly consists of hundreds to thousands of accounts. I would say conservatively there are many thousands of accounts that are âinauthenticâ.â
Overall, Chenâs opinion was that more than 50 per cent of all the tweets in the database I obtained came from inauthentic accounts. If Chen is correct, it means that bots and trolls played more than a minor role in framing what social media thought about Heard.
And this matters.
Back in 2022, the Virginia jury in Depp v Heard wasnât âsequesteredâ â that is, they were sent home every night. This meant they could have theoretically logged on to the internet during the trial, even if they werenât supposed to.
If they had, they would have seen that social media had come to one conclusion: that Amber was lying about Deppâs abuse.
Between 2016 and 2022, more than 800,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag â#amberheardis anabuserâ. Only 15,000 tweets used the hashtag â#johnnydeppis anabuserâ, even though she was the one accusing him of abuse.
Tens of thousands of posts across social media also called Amber a âgold-diggerâ, a âwhoreâ and worse. But, you might still say: so what? Is it really significant if someone commissioned bots to attack an actress?
I believe it is. This case has wider ramifications than just an unedifying spat between two pampered Hollywood actors.
This year is the biggest election year in history. Billions of people in more than 50 countries â not least America and very likely Britain â will go to the polls. It feels like democracy itself is on the ballot.
At the same time, itâs becoming easier to pump out misinformation online. Only last weekend, Home Secretary James Cleverly warned that âmalign actorsâ could use âAI-generated contentâ to influence the outcome of a general election.
Countries like Russia are poised to try to disrupt elections in the West. Artificial-intelligence software including ChatGPT has made creating realistic bots a lot easier. And major social media companies like X/Twitter have cut staff and downsized online safety teams.
So, if you couldnât tell the difference between a real-life Johnny Depp fan and a bot in 2022, then you probably wonât be able to tell a Russian troll from a U.S. election official in 2024. And that represents a serious problem for the security of our democracies.
So much so that the World Economic Forum last month identified AI-fuelled misinformation as the greatest immediate risk to global leaders over the next two years.
AFTER I had the evidence that bots and trolls played a large role in the Amber Heard case, as well as strong suggestions that much of the trolling came from Saudi Arabia, I turned my attention to the role played by Adam Waldman, Deppâs longtime lawyer.
The brash Waldman, married to beauty magnate Dr Barbara Sturm, is a controversial figure who was kicked off the U.S. trial for leaking confidential material to the Press.
While I didnât find direct evidence that Waldman had commissioned a âbot armyâ to help his client, I did find evidence that he was willing to talk to real-life trolls.
In court, Waldman admitted speaking to three YouTubers â all of whom were virulently pro-Depp. In 2020, one of these YouTubers obtained a recording of a private argument between Depp and Heard, in which Heard appeared to admit physically assaulting Depp.
Itâs likely that Waldman, or someone close to him, passed the YouTuber the audio file (Waldman admitted giving a similar clip to MailOnline).
When YouTuber Brian McPherson, known as âThatBrianFellaâ, published the recording, seven minutes had been cut from the original audio, making Heard appear less sympathetic than in the full recording.
The edited recording was listened to around six million times and became one of the key moments when public sympathy moved away from Heard and towards Depp.
Then the more I looked into Waldmanâs background, the murkier things got.
I examined the Foreign Agent Registration Act (Fara) files that related to him â submitted by law by anyone in the U.S. who works for a âforeign agentâ.
Waldman had to file Fara papers for years, because he worked for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin.
The Fara papers show he advised Deripaska on everything from Press strategy to business deals. They also reveal that at one point Waldman and Deripaska holidayed together as friends.
But Deripaska wasnât even Adam Waldmanâs most controversial Russian client. From 2010 to 2017 he worked for Sergey Lavrov, Russiaâs foreign minister. Working for Lavrov is like working directly for the Russian state.
Intriguingly, Waldmanâs work for Lavrov coincided with a period when Waldman also represented Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder currently fighting extradition to the U.S. â and who has been widely accused of working with Russia, which he denies.
Waldman did not respond to a request for comment.
After I contacted him, he posted my request on Twitter, provoking some of Deppâs troll army to attack me online.
âThe sentient, alert humans you call âtrollsâ and âbotsâ are real people . . . who would like the truth, reality and the facts back,â Waldman wrote.
Johnny Depp and the Saudi embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
So, after months of investigation, where does that leave us?
Even when we can show that trolls and bots are part of a campaign of disinformation, itâs almost impossible to prove who is responsible and call them to account.
Yet I worry that, as these malign techniques become ever more popular in the hands of nefarious characters, the consequences will extend far beyond a single ugly divorce â and strike at the heart of our democracy.
In addition to crude bots/bot farm type set ups, I think the prevalence of âinfluencersâ with a huge public profile masquerading as independent journalists is increasingly apparent. Never mind the really important stuff like war, immigration, genocide, pandemicsâŠthese clowns have many strings to their bow(es) and you even have some of them all over things like sport now too. Setting whatever narrative whatever nation state or hedge fund has paid them to. That transfer guy Romano is a prime example. Heâll be constantly tweeting about the Chelsea project in favourable terms while theyâre embarrassing themselves on & off the pitch.
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Where womenâs fashion leads, football and geopolitics follow.
The INTERNET can be very lucrative if you sell your soul.
Do we have a GAA equivalent of these âinfluencersâ? I donât think Dick Clerkin fits the bill.
Ray Boyne
Irish twitter is on tenterhooks waiting for Buff Egan to wade in.
Influencers try harder
World War III might well be caused by a crazed fascist drug addict pushing fake news for kicks. Thatâs the way itâs gone.
Elon Muskâs X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. Xâs AI chatbot Grok made it up.
The AI-generated false headline was promoted by X in its official trending news section.
He might be crazed and a fascist but just because he uses drugs doesnât make him an addict. Youâre so judgemental.
This is nuts. You expect genuinely anti-Semitic propaganda accounts like âSyrian Girlâ to spread these lies, you donât expect it from a major TV news network.
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Rachel Riley is a deeply toxic presence in public discourse and has been for years.
https://twitter.com/RachelRileyRR/status/1779096111669506497
Sheâs a horrible bastard,is she Jewish or did she marry into it?