Mike Benz used Telegram to overthrow the US governments

The United States and the CIA use “soft power” to stir up unrest and protest movements against foreign governments they deem undesirable through the encrypted social media application Telegram, said Mike Benz, a former official of the Trump administration and freedom of speech activist.

Benz made the comments in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on his show on Wednesday. Benz, who served as a official in the State Department under former President Donald Trump, currently heads the Foundation for Freedom Online, an organization focused on freedom of speech.

Carlson asked Benz about the potential American role in the recent arrest of Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of Telegram in France last week. A Paris court charged Durov on Wednesday with complicity in several crimes committed through the application and failure to cooperate with French authorities.

Although the former diplomat did not speculate, he noted that Durov’s arrest fits into the pattern of “soft power” tactics used by the US in the past.

For decades, the United States has globally supported freedom of speech, “largely” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or semi-military movements “in countries where the US Department of State seeks political control,” the former official said.

“Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media application, Telegram, played a significant role in these efforts,” Benz claimed.

“26 American government-funded civil organizations” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 because “the US State Department used Telegram,” exploiting its encryption and local popularity to “stir up protests and unrest within Russia— as it did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and also attempted in China,” the former State Department official said.

The encryption of the application is an effective tool to bypass state media control, allowing “politically funded groups backed by the United States or independent thinkers to gather tens of thousands of supporters relatively unpunished,” he added.

Benz claimed that Telegram was the “main channel” when the US “essentially staged a color revolution in Belarus in 2020.”

“The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) actually paid the main administrators of Telegram channels that orchestrated those rebellions—and called the NED ‘one of the most prolific CIA intermediaries in the arsenal,'” he said.

Benz believes this practice is part of a longstanding campaign by the US, the United Kingdom, and other NATO allies to gain political control over the former Soviet territories and their resources.

He concluded that Telegram was “the favorite of the CIA, the State Department, and USAID” for political operations worldwide, thanks to its nearly one billion users and the ease with which they can be directed to the necessary recruitment channels.