The report said the recent effort was especially alarming to intelligence officials because the disinformation appeared as text messages on Americans’ mobile phones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before.

Messages like this one, which claimed to come from a source in the US Department of Homeland Security, were commonplace in the early days of the pandemic:

“They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters. He said he got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the call today with his dispatch orders.”

With so many Americans receiving such messages, the White House’s National Security Council issued an announcement via Twitter declaring that they were all “FAKE”.

China’s US ambassador takes veiled swipe at Trump for politicising outbreak

According to The Times, “The officials interviewed for this article work in six different agencies. They included both career civil servants and political appointees, and some have spent many years analysing China.”

“The Chinese see opportunities to advance their narratives to portray China as having effectively gotten the pandemic under control and show that the United States has done a terrible job through the numbers of of cases, the inadequate preparation in terms of medical supplies,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia and director of the China Power Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“There's a lot of ways that they can point to the United States as having failed its people … so I think they’re doing that, but there’s also a lot of others”, including Russian operatives.

Still, the precise origin of the messages remains unclear, according to the report. Two of the officials said they did not think China created the messages, but used their operatives to spread them over messaging apps on people’s phones and over social media to the point that they would gain traction and go viral.

Such techniques are in line with common strategies employed by Russian intelligence and their proxies online, who have been known to create fake social media accounts used to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who then spread them to friends who are inclined to share their views, The Times said.

The Chinese move to spread disinformation via text message and encrypted messaging apps is potentially significant, the report said, as they would be much harder to track and control by law enforcement.

There is growing agreement among some analysts in the private sector that Chinese manipulation in the US is growing and becoming more sophisticated.

“Beyond overt information campaigns, Chinese operatives have also engaged in covert efforts to manipulate information and sow chaos – even amplifying false text messages that went viral in the United States in mid-March warning in panicked tones that Trump was about to order a two-week national quarantine,” she said in an article published on Wednesday.

“These efforts reflect changes not just in Beijing’s message but also in the mechanisms by which it is transmitted,” said Rosenberger, who is director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “Over the past year, the number of Chinese diplomats and embassies on Twitter has grown by more than 250 percent.”

According to The Times, the Chinese diplomatic corps in the US has also come under scrutiny, with some questioning whether spies embedded there had a hand in spreading the fake messages.

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Spying by Chinese diplomats is hardly unheard of; as recently as September, the State Department secretly expelled two employees of the Chinese embassy in Washington suspected of doing so.

The disinformation push goes beyond text messages appearing on American mobile phones. American officials told The Times that within China, top government officials have issued directives to agencies to engage in a global disinformation campaign around the virus.

In March, Zhao Lijian, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote on Twitter – a service that is banned in China – that the US Army might have brought the coronavirus to the Chinese city of Wuhan. That message was then retweeted by the official Twitter accounts of Chinese embassies and consulates.

Millions saw a state-run China Global Television Network produced video aimed at Middle Eastern viewers, in which an Arabic speaking anchor reported on findings that allegedly showed that the coronavirus came from American participants in a military sports competition in October in Wuhan.

In the United States, China’s efforts mirror techniques used by Russians and other foreign powers that garnered widespread scrutiny and alarm during the 2016 presidential election. And there is reason to suspect that other powers were involved in this most recent round of misinformation as well, The Times said.

The pandemic and the widespread confusion it has wrought is fertile ground for misinformation of all kinds, with conspiracy theories bringing together even unlikely bedfellows.

Does brash Zhao Lijian really speak for the Chinese government?

Recently some pro-Trump news outlets were found to have promoted the conspiracy theory that the virus was created in a US laboratory. Such techniques, popularised by the Russians, are not to promote any one viewpoint but to sow division generally.

Officials speaking to The Times were especially alarmed over disinformation campaigns promulgated by Chinese operatives in Europe that encouraged European disunity while heaping praise on the Chinese response to the virus and China’s role in donating medical supplies.

The campaigns ignored reports that China had kept the outbreak under wraps for days, had hidden its severity from the rest of the world and that some of its donated supplies were of poor quality.

When The Times sought comment about its report, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a statement on Tuesday saying: “The relevant statements are complete nonsense and not worth refuting.”

Additional reporting by Robert Delaney.