"You'll love these games," reads the quote next to a cartoon image of Yoda on the website starwarsweb.net.
These games include Star Wars Battlefront 2 for Xbox, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II for Xbox 360, and Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes for Nintendo Wii. Alongside this, there are links to a Star Wars online store with the slogan “Want to be a Jedi?” and an ad for a Lego Star Wars set.
The website looks a lot like (it did, because it now redirects to cia.com) a typical Star Wars fan site from 2010. But starwarsweb.net was a tool created by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to secretly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to 404media.co.
The site was part of a network of CIA websites first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago, before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.
Researchers found other websites possibly linked to the CIA, including a comedy site, one for extreme sports, and one for a Brazilian musician. Some of the sites appeared to target Germany, France, Spain, and Brazil, judging by their language and content.
The revelation of a much larger number of websites gives a broader understanding of the CIA's interests at the time, including which democracies may have been targeted. It also shows how much importance they placed on different zones at the time, and as expected, the Middle East comes out on top.
In November 2018, Yahoo News published a blockbuster investigation into the CIA's secret communications channels and how they were exposed. This revelation came from Iran before more than 24 CIA sources died in China in 2011 and 2012, according to the report.
The CIA finally shut down the secret communications tool.
In September 2022, Reuters published its own investigation titled “America ’s Throwaway Spies .” This article showed how, for example, a CIA informant in Iran named Gholamreza Hosseini was identified by Iranian authorities thanks to the CIA’s clumsily constructed secret websites. One of the CIA’s mistakes was that the IP addresses pointing to the websites were consecutive, meaning that after discovering one of them, it was easy for an investigator to find the others who were likely on the same network.
As the Reuters article showed, typing a password into the search bar of seemingly ordinary websites actually triggered a login process for the sources, who then contacted the CIA.
This Reuters article published two domains and described a total of nine of the websites.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
