Plan de negocios

Following the conclusion of hostilities in 1945 Europe, the Soviet Union rapidly established robust mechanisms to control the information environment. This structure included a “full array of ‘non-political’ fronts, organized from above and below, ‘spontaneous’ mass appeal and resolutions, subsidized media, and manipulated politicians serving hidden agendas.”137 _{The newly formed Cominform promulgated} policy set by the Secretariat of the CPSU across the European continent. In Eastern Europe, this was accomplished through “official media, educational, and cultural establishments,”138 _{and backed by the clandestine efforts of the Soviet security services} and the occupation forces of the Red Army. In Western Europe, the Communist and Socialist parties, as well as Front organizations, backed by covert actions, served as the principal medium. The basic policy that would dominate the Soviet narrative for the duration of the Cold War was set in the first meeting of the Cominform in 1947, declaring that:

The imperialist and anti-democratic camp having as its basic aim the establishment of the world domination of American imperialism and the smashing of democracy, and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp

137 _{Paul A. Smith, On Political War (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1989), 186–}

187.

having as its basic aim the undermining of imperialism, the consolidation of democracy, and the eradication of the remnants of fascism.139

Propaganda was the heart and circulatory system of Soviet active measures and was perhaps the best coordinated structure within the Soviet PW machine. The politburo and the central committee of the CPSU approved all major themes of the propaganda campaign. The IID of the CPSU, established by Brezhnev in the late 70s as a successor to the Soviet Information Bureau, was responsible for all overt media campaigns, and coordinated propaganda efforts with the generally “gray” activities of the International Department and the covert and “black” activities by the KGB’s Service A. The IID, as the overt arm of the tightly woven Soviet information infrastructure, included two major newspapers (Pravda and Izvestiya), Radio Moscow, and numerous official information departments based out of Soviet embassies. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) news service, with branches in nearly 100 countries, and the “competing” Novosti News service that connected with hundreds of national and international news agencies, in addition to countless radio and television stations, publishing houses, and over 7,000 newspapers and magazines, in essence comprised a global mass media empire.140 _{The system was designed to provide operational} synchronization between covert and overt active measures and get ahead in the information reaction cycle with both engineered and chance events. The ID’s front organizations and KGB agents of influence and forgery operations further amplified the propaganda effect by propagating and supporting the overall narrative.141

The efficiency of this global disinformation network was evident early in the Cold War. In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the World Peace Council released a report accusing the United States of using germ warfare in Korea. This report, originating with Kuo Mo-Jo, the head of the Chinese branch of the WPC, claimed that U.S. military aircraft were actively disseminating microbes of plague, cholera, typhus, and other

139 _{Royal Institute for International Affairs, Documents on International Affairs: 1947-1948, ed.}

Margaret Carlyle (London, 1952), 122–46. From Paul A. Smith, On Political War, 187.

140 _{Richelson, Sword and Shield, 147.} 141 _{Ibid., 146–150.}

contagions across North Korean territory. The story, accompanied with pictures of supposed germ warfare and supported by an investigative delegation of doctors that was organized by the various Soviet front organizations, was quickly propagated through various WPC branches across the globe. Further “investigations” from the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, another Soviet front, supported the germ warfare conclusions and the story rapidly spread through recruited “agents of influence” into Western media, including the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Christian Science

Monitor, as well as the Daily Express in London. Declassified Soviet documents in the

1990s reveal that the Soviet MGB fabricated the germ warfare scenario, going as far as to prepare “false areas of exposure” by bringing in corpses from China and germinating those corpses with cholera.142

“Black” radio operations, generally located within the Soviet Bloc, but presenting themselves as transmitting from within the target country, aided in the broad disinformation campaign, and were active from the borders of Western Europe to as far away as Turkey, Iran, and China.143 _{Though attempts at misinformation inside the United} States proved to have very limited overall effects, the combined efforts of the Soviet propaganda architecture had substantive impact in entrenching opinions in Europe and the Third World. The anti-Vietnam movements in the 60s and 70s,144 _{and campaigns in} the 70s and 80s against enhanced-radiation warheads and U.S. nuclear modernization were relatively successful in affecting global perception and causing social and political friction within the Western-aligned bloc.145 _{Among the more successful propaganda} mechanisms were the Cuban-led and KGB-sponsored publications of Philip Agee, a former Center Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations officer in Latin America, who wrote

142 _{Herbert Romerstein, “Counterpropaganda: We can’t win without it,” in Strategic Influence: Public}

Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda, and Political Warfare ed. Michael J.Waller, , Lord Carnes, John

Lenczowski, Jennifer Marshall, Robert R. Reilly, Herbert Romerstein, Andrew Garfield, Angelo Codevilla, John J. Tierney, Hampton Stephens, Stephen C. Baker, and Juliana Geran Pilon. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of World Politics Press, 2009), 137–179, 156–158.

143 _{Ibid., 153.}

144 _{Lunev, Through the Eyes of the Enemy, 78.} 145 _{Richelson, Sword and Shield, 156.}

Inside the Company; CIA Diary in 1975, exposing hundreds of CIA operatives and

claiming that “millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports.”146 _{The widespread global} propagation of the memoir by the Soviet information instrument caused substantial effects, including a majority sponsored bill in the British House of Commons calling for the expulsion of the CIA station, and a flood of media efforts across Europe to expose CIA stations and operations worldwide. In 1978, Agee began publishing the Covert

Action Information Bulletin as well as another book titled Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, both supported and supplied with a steady stream of information by a

specialized task force (codename RUPOR) within Service A of the KGB’s Directorate K. The combined efforts of Agee and RUPOR ended up exposing nearly 2,000 CIA operatives across Europe and Latin America.147 _{Further propaganda efforts in the 1980s,} aimed primarily at the European and Third World audiences, were the supposed artificial synthesis and dispersal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) created in U.S. military laboratories at Fort Detrick, and allegations of Americans butchering Third World children in order to harvest their organs for transplants in the U.S.148

Forgeries were another critical component of the active measures campaign. One of the more sophisticated and influential falsified documents was Supplement B to U.S. Army Field Manual 30-21, titled Stability Operations Intelligence – Special Fields. This document, first appearing in 1975 and carrying a “SECRET NOFORN” label, contained operational parameters to create a “strategy of tension” within foreign societies and their governance systems. The document advocated false flag operations blamed on leftist extremists to discredit communist and socialist movements, and press the target nation’s security services into harsh civilian control measures. This theme continued to echo in further falsified U.S. documents, to include a remarkably prophetic “leaked” 1978 National Security Council (NSC) memorandum from Zbigniew Brezinski to Carter. This document proposed a destabilization policy in Poland along socio-economic, diplomatic,

146 _{Andrew, The Sword and the Shield, 230.} 147 _{Ibid., 232–234.}

and covert lines of effort, including the use of Polish labor unions and mass media, designed to weaken Soviet domination over Eastern Europe. Forgery activities in the Third World were just as pervasive, and included everything from leaked plans to supply South Africa with combat aircraft, to documentation implicating U.S. Ambassador Thomas W.M. Smith in Ghana of ordering the assassination of Nigerian politicians and attempting to stage a CIA led coup, prompting Ghanaian officials to publically charge the United States with interfering in its internal affairs.149 _{The use of forgeries continued} well into the 1980s, and included a 1987 forged document from William Casey, then the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), to stage a coup d’état of India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, instructions by President Reagan to destabilize Panama in 1988, and efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of South Africa in 1989.150

Disinformatzia and active measures in Soviet information PW were highly

successful in supporting existing anti-Western and specifically anti-U.S. sentiment across the globe and helping drive the generational disequilibrium of Bezmenov’s demoralization phase. The relative success of this approach was clearly rooted in the massive investment of time and resources that the Soviet Union placed in information PW. The United States, however, did not fully commit to this dimension of PW until the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, essentially allowing the USSR to hold a monopoly in the information domain for three decades. The fatal flaw in the Soviet system was its reliance on fabrication. Once the United States engaged in a concerted effort to expose Soviet deception measures and substantially increased its own involvement in the information arena without relying on misinformation, the Soviet propaganda system was unable to keep up.