The United States Embassy in Kampala, Uganda is actively involved in Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) activities targeting audiences in East Africa. This was the verdict of selected journalists who took part in a secret program it organised in Kampala last week, ostensibly to train them on countering what it terms ‘Russian propaganda and disinformation.’ The clandestine program – where participants were electronically surveiled to ensure they recorded nothing – took place between Monday 19 May and Friday 23 May, 2025 under the theme “Understanding and Countering Russian Propaganda and Disinformation in Uganda.”
Fully funded by the U.S. Embassy, the program was organised under the banner of the Kampala-based NGO, African Institute for Investigative Journalism, which receives funding from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAID, Open Society Foundations, the European Union, and other foreign funders linked to foreign intelligence networks. The participants were journalists drawn from Uganda and the East Africa subregion.
The non-Ugandan speakers and facilitators at the secret event were Public Affairs Counsellor at the U.S. Embassy Uganda, Ellen B Masi, Research Fellow at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Mark Duerksen, Director at the International Republic Institute Caitlin Dearing Scott, and Country Director at Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Anna Reismann. Each one of these names is currently active in the U.S. Secret Intelligence community.
Apart from Ellen Bienstock Masi who directly works for the U.S. State Department, Mark Duerksen works for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is a research institute under the U.S. Department of Defense.
Caitlin Dearing Scott’s International Republican Institute is a fully-funded subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout that was famously spun out of the CIA in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan to do what its first president Allen Weinstein described as work that “was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Anna Reismann’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung is a German political foundation which has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA since the Cold War era, according to the CIA’s internal records.
Sources who spoke to West Africa Weekly revealed that the ‘training’ was highly secretive and had a clear political agenda – to get participants into a habit of labelling any deviation from the preferred American narrative as “Russian disinformation”. A Ugandan participant told West Africa Weekly that participants were warned not to reveal anything discussed during the sessions, and all mobile phones and devices were “monitored with gadgets” to make sure that no videos or recordings were captured.
Speaking to West Africa Weekly Editor-in-Chief David Hundeyin, a participant said:
“We were warned to not in any way disclose the information or what happened at the training. Some of us were promised goodies and that we will be given trips to the U.S. soon.”
Other journalists who took part in the ‘training program’ also complained about aggressive monitoring and being “treated like animals” throughout the weeklong event, adding that they were vehemently discouraged from documenting anything they saw. The sessions focused heavily on Russian news platform RT and how to identify and oppose its narratives in Africa.
It will be recalled that a near-identical program was scheduled to take place in Nigeria earlier this year. In February, the U.S. Embassy in Abuja sponsored the Abuja-based NGO, International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) to put together a program, ostensibly to “train” 120 journalists, social media influencers, and civic actors drawn from Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones.
That programme, called “Countering AI-Enhanced Malign Influence in Nigeria,” was exposed by West Africa Weekly as a covert effort to reframe the #EndBadGovernance protests – sparked by widespread economic hardship caused by World Bank and IMF-imposed “shock doctrine” reforms – as “foreign interference” from Russia or China. Following the backlash generated by West Africa Weekly’s exposé, the program was abruptly cancelled.
It will further be recalled that in February 2025, West Africa Weekly exclusively exposed the details of a remarkably similar foreign interference effort linked to UK and US foreign intelligence agencies. The NGO involved in that instance, was the Centre For Information Resilience, a secretive London-based organisation founded in 2020 by MI6 agents Adam Rutland and Ross Burley, with former CIA officer Cindy Otis and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Nina Jankowicz on its board.
In a manner closely resembling last week’s events in Kampala, the Foreign Intellience front-cum-NGO hosted a group of 10 Nigerian journalists at the Kempinski Gold Coast hotel in Accra, Ghana for a clandestine weeklong program on “Russian FIMI and disinformation.”
Just like in Kampala last week, participants in Accra were told not to publicly reveal anything about the program or their participation in it, and they were also forced to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Following their return to Nigeria, they were each tasked with producing 1 story every 3 months, for the purpose of labelling specific journalists, social media voices, activists and politicians who express opinions not in line with Western narratives in Nigeria as “Kremlin-sponsored” and “Russian-backed.”
According to the contract agreement sighted by West Africa Weekly, each journalist was to be compensated in the sum of £1,000 per story, alongside strict instructions to never disclose that the stories were sponsored.
The repeated use of secretive ‘media trainings’ by Western embassies is raising concerns across the continent about foreign control of African narratives. Media analysts and civil society groups are questioning the ethics and long-term consequences of such influence. Many believe that while beningly presented, these programs are actually about shaping what African journalists are allowed to believe and report.
