SOVIET AND CUBAN CLANDESTINE ACTIVITES AGAINST U.S. POLICIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86M00886R001000040005-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 25, 2008
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: July 30, 1984
• Content Type: REPORT

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ROUTING AND RECORD SHEET
SUBJECT: (Optional)
FROM:
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DATE 30 July 1984
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DATE
OFFICER'S
COMMENTS (Number each comment to show from whom
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INITIALS
to whom. Draw a line across column after each comment.)
RECEIVED
FORWARDED
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In its conduct overseas, the Soviet Union wields a
clandestine capability to promote its objectives that is without
parallel. The Soviet covert apparatus--primarily the KGB and two
large departments of the Communist Party Central Committee--is
enormous by any measure. It is generously funded, unconstrained
by legislative oversight or journalistic criticism at home, and
specifically organized to exploit political influence
opportunities afforded in more open societies abroad. Soviet
investment in propaganda alone is probably between three and four
billion dollars per year. In tandem with its huge overt
propaganda apparatus, the Soviet clandestine arm works tirelessly
to discredit the United States through literally countless covert
actions and disinformation activities. The Soviet covert effort
is aided significantly by its allies, and Cuba plays an
especially important role in the Western hemisphere.
Since the end of the Second World War, the Soviet
intelligence services have targetted the United States as "the
main enemy." Although the intensity and tone of anti-US propa-
ganda have varied somewhat over time, the basic themes have
remained constant. Moreover, what the Soviets call "active
measures"--especially covert support to the propaganda apparatus--
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have become a significant element in the Soviets' overall
strategy of undercutting US policies worldwide.
Portraying the US Adversary
A recent scholarly study of Soviet disinformation against
the United States has identified some recurrent themes trumpeted
in Pravda, and in internationally-distributed Western-language
publications such as New Times and International Review. The
most important of the themes are:
Aggressiveness. The US is portrayed as an
aggressive and imperialist state, bent on adventure
and provocation, and attempting to interfere in the
affairs of other countries.
Militarism. The US is depicted as militaristic,
constantly seeking superiority, employing force,
and promoting arms races in all categories--
nuclear, conventional, chemical, and outer space.
Intransigence. As a militarist and aggressor, the
US is not only the source of world tension, it
refuses to negotiate for peace. The US is held
solely accountable for the failure of arms talks,
the demise of detente, and the general state of
East-West hostilities.
Soviet characterizations of the United States give
prominence to denigrating the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Pentagon. The anti-CIA campaign has become particularly
vitriolic over the last several years. For example, a TASS News
Agency release of 19 June 1983 greatly distorted a generally
favorable U.S. News and World Report feature on the Agency. TASS
sought to show that the perfidy of CIA and the present
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Administration's reliance on "force and blackmail" have been
fully documented by a major Western newsmagazine. TASS also
claimed that President Reagan's recent speech at the CIA
Headquarters groundbreaking ceremony gave the "greenlight" to the
"traditions" of those who masterminded and carried out the
assassinations of Che Guevara, Salvatore Allende, and Patrice
Lumumba, and those who "mulled over plans to murder" Castro and
former Egyptian President Nasser.
The Covert Arm
We know from past experiences that TASS items of this
nature, and others from Soviet media more generally, are, grist
for the Soviet clandestine mill. These items are picked up and
replayed extensively by Soviet-controlled and sympathetic press
in dozens of countries worldwide. India and Mexico, and to a
lesser extent Nigeria, appear to serve as regional centers for
disinformation campaigns in the Third World.
The Soviet wire service in New Delhi is notably successful
in multiplying TASS stories throughout the Indian media. The
service has a vigorous press placement program--many of its
placements are also written locally--often running Soviet items
as fact and without attribution. To continue the cycle, Moscow
will frequently pick up the article as having originated in
India, which is then replayed in the Soviet press and again back
in India as a fully substantiated story. Examples of such
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disinformation abound. Notable among them are stories that the
CIA had assassinated Maurice Bishop and plotted the death of
Mountbatten, and that the US had placed nuclear and chemical
weapons in nearby Diego Garcia. The Bishop story was a full-
fledged global campaign.
The Ideological Apparatus
The Soviet disinformation bureaucracy is extremely well
organized and very powerful within the Soviet political system.
As a jointly-run operation of Communist Party Central Committee
organs and the KGB, the ideological apparatus does not appear to
lack the resources it needs to run a massive program discrediting
the US. No discernible evidence suggests any internal opposition
to its policies. Both well funded and unopposed at home, and
largely uncontested in its activities abroad, the ideological
apparatus is uniquely empowered to denigrate the West and
undercut US policies at a tempo and volume of its choosing.
Since the political legitimacy of the ruling party oligarchs
depends on a continued debasing of the free-enterprise and
democratic alternatives to the present Soviet system, the
disinformation bureaucracy is assured of continued high-level
sponsorship. In the Soviet political framework--for both
internal and external reasons--denigrating the United States is
almost a perpetual motion machine.
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As the disinformation enterprise is run jointly by the
Communist Party and the KGB, virtually every needed state asset--
both overt and covert--is marshalled for the effort: newspapers
and magazines, radio and television, most foreign communist
parties, dozens of front groups in Europe and the Third World,
and the full clandestine inventory of operatives and agents of
the KGB's First Chief Directorate.
Soviet Outlets and The Clandestine Connection
Among the overt Soviet outlets for written disinformation,
TASS News Agency and Novosti Press Agency are the most
important. TASS alone is represented in nearly 100 countries.
Novosti is almost as large. Because their primary mission is
churning out propaganda, these agencies also differ with their
Western counterparts in providing their "services" to developing
countries at little or no cost. The weekly Soviet New Times is
the print media's outstanding international outlet for anti-
Western propaganda and disinformation. In addition, Radio Moscow
broadcasts to every continent except Antartica, in 90-odd
languages, and for roughly 2,000 broadcast hours per week.
The Soviet clandestine arm is well represented in all Soviet
agencies abroad. Perhaps one of every three journalists in over-
seas TASS offices are KGB or GRU operatives. In 1979, 10 of the
12 New Times correspondents posted abroad were KGB officers. In
addition to journalistic cover, Soviet intelligence services also
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rely heavily on Trade Missions and Aeroflot offices for cover,
along with their missions, delegations, and staff employees at
the UN and other international bodies such as the IAEA and World
Health Organization. About one-third of Soviet personnel abroad
in diplomatic posts are intelligence officers.
The Soviets are truly alone in both the range of media
assets they control abroad, and in the scale of their clandestine
services. It is their ability to coordinate and harmonize the
overt and the covert that affords the Soviets unique advantages
in the manipulation of information and influence.
Forgeries
Soviet use of forgeries is increasingly understood in the
West. Two particularly insidious examples this year bear all the
earmarks of a Soviet active measure. In one operation the US
Ambassador to Austria, Helene Von Damm, purportedly sought to
compromise Austrian neutrality by requesting, in an unclassified
letter to the Defense Minister, the use of Austrian defense
radars in time of crisis. Copies of the letter were mailed--the
sender remains unidentified--to Austrian newspapers. Technical
analysis of the Ambassador's signature showed it to be an expert
forgery. While the Defense Minister was initially skeptical of
the letter's authenticity, and the media were not apparently
duped, the operation was still damaging to the United States.
The American Ambassador was forced on the defensive concerning US
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designs to manipulate a European neutral at the height of public
controversy over NATO INF deployments, and local sensitivities
over strict Austrian neutrality were exploited to maximize
suspicions against the United States.
A second, and more recent, forgery operation was designed to
denigrate American society as violently racist, and to induce
Third World nations to withdraw their participation from the
Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The Olympic Committees in 20
countries in Africa and Asia have received letters, purportedly
from the Ku Klux Klan, threatening to "incinerate" or hang black
and yellow "apes" who compete in the Los Angeles games.
Linguistic analysis shows that the letters were almost certainly
written by someone who did not learn English as a native
language. Interviewed Klan spokesmen have uniformly denied
authorship, and the letterheads used a Klan logo never seen
before. Foreign Olympic Committees who take this pernicious
threat seriously, and some have said they do, thereby align
themselves with the official Soviet rationale for boycotting the
Games--that the US cannot provide adequate security for its
athletes against extremist groups. In the process, a virulently
racist American society is falsely depicted through extensive
play in the international press of the graphic and abusive
characterizations the forgeries employed.
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Agents of Influence
Former KGB active measures officer Stanislav Levchenko has
described in great detail how the Soviets exploit foreign
journalists as agents of influence in the Japanese mass media.
In addition, some of the 200 or so agents that the Soviets
recruited in Japan either had, or gained, direct political access
allowing them to help shape policy to support Soviet
objectives. The most effective of these agents of influence
included a former member of the Cabinet of Ministers, several
senior officials of the Japanese Socialist Party, and several
members of the Japanese Parliament.
Similarly, the French journalist Pathe was politically well
connected in Paris and exerted a personal influence beyond his
famed newsletter Synthesis. Tried and convicted as a Soviet
agent in 1979, Pathe's respected journal--clandestinely
subsidized by the Soviet Union--counted nearly 440 French
legislators among its subscribers.
Arne Treholt, who rose to Assistant Secretary in the
Norwegian Foreign Ministry, was arrested in January 1984 for
illegal intelligence activities. Treholt had not only been
supplying classified documents to the Soviets, as a high official
in the Foreign Ministry he had unique opportunities to influence
discussions favorable to Soviet positions. He apparently
succeeded in this by "locking in" an unfavorable position for
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Norway--over the great dissatisfaction of the Prime minister and
the government--in Barents Sea negotiations with the USSR.
Treholt was also instrumental in proposing the Nuclear-Free
Nordic Zone and having it adopted as a Labor Party policy goal.
The full extent of the damage he caused to Norway and NATO will
not be known for some time. Treholt had been working as a KGB
agent for about 15 years before his arrest. He was detained,
with a briefcase full of classified documents, en route to a
Vienna meeting with Gennadi Titov, a KGB operative expelled from
Norway in 1972.
The United Nations
The number of Soviet and East European staff employees at
the UN has grown tenfold since 1960. Today about 1,000
representatives from the USSR and other Warsaw Pact nations work
for Soviet objectives in virtually all parts of the UN. Contrary
to established UN Secretariat policy--and its scrupulous
adherence by American UN employees--Soviet and bloc personnel
ignore the explicit proscription against taking instructions from
their governments, acting as partisans both openly and
surreptitiously for Soviet causes. This practice, long conceded
privately in UN corridors, has been repeatedly confirmed by
former Soviet employees of the UN Secretariat who now live in the
West.
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Soviet citizens have effectively controlled the UN personnel
office in Geneva and occupy senior personnel posts in New York.
They can direct and influence UN hiring and promotion decisions,
and have access to personnel records and applicants' files--a
significant source of information for recruitment of intelligence
assets. In 1983, they occupied 36 posts in the UN Department of
Public Information--with 63 media centers worldwide and a unique
position for access to influential journalists. Soviets were in
place to obstruct potentially damaging UN actions such as the
yellow rain investigation which was successfully emasculated by a
senior Soviet official. The Soviets also promote their interests
through UN staff studies such as a UN Conference on Trade and
Development study which attacked the West while touting Moscow's
contributions to Third World development.
Supporting Insurgents
The Soviet Union provides various forms of direct and
indirect support--including arms--to numerous dissident and
insurgent groups throughout the Third World. Evidence clearly
points to a direct relationship between the Soviet Union and an
extensive international network of insurgent and dissident
training programs. Separate elements of the KGB, the GRU, and
the International Department of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party make up an infrastructure to organize and
coordinate these training efforts at home and abroad. The
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Soviets conduct some training inside the Soviet Union primarily
for Palestinians, and for members of the African National
Congress. Abroad, the Soviets actively support and facilitate an
ambitious insurgency and counter-insurgency training program
conducted primarily by Cubans for Latin Americans and Africans,
and by Libyans for islamic insurgent groups.
Help From The Bloc
Most of the East European intelligence services work closely
with the Soviet Union. The East Germans and the Bulgarians have
the most cooperative relationship with the KGB, followed closely
by the Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, and the Poles. While the scope
of autonomy that each enjoys varies among the countries
themselves, and with specific operations, in general they all
augment Soviet clandestine capabilities against the United
States.
The East Europeans are also able to add their resources to
the Soviet effort against Western targets closer to home. For
example, the East German service concentrates its propaganda
heavily against the Federal Republic. In the southern tier, the
Bulgarian service has focused much of its activity against
Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, and against US interests in the
Mediterranean.
In addition, the various East European services have taken
on targets further afield. The East Germans play the most active
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role in support of Soviet objectives in the Third World. East
Berlin has a vigorous program of sending advisers to help train
Third World intelligence and security services. While
concentrated most heavily in Africa and the Middle East, the East
Germans have recently become more active in Latin America. Also
at Moscow's instigation, the Bulgarian service has expanded its
operations in Africa. Sofia, in addition, facilitates the sale
or delivery of small arms to terrorist or radical groups in such
countries as Turkey and Lebanon.
The Cuban Connection
The Cuban intelligence organization generally parallels the
structure of the Soviet intelligence apparatus, and has direct
access to Castro. Department of State Security (DSE) agents
infiltrate Cuban exile communities and attempt to penetrate
foreign intelligence agencies. The DSE works closely with the
General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI), Cuba's primary
collector of foreign intelligence.
Within the Cuban Communist Party, both the America
Department and the Department of Foreign Relations are also
involved in covert operations. These party officials often
preempt Ministry of Foreign Relations personnel in the day-to-day
conduct of foreign policy. The America Department is headed by
Manuel Pineiro, a strong proponent of Cuban support to violent
revolution abroad. He is responsible for the promotion and
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coordination of all leftist activities in Latin America and the
Caribbean. The party's General Department of Foreign Relations
has responsibility for similar leftist activities in those parts
of the world not covered by the America Department.
Focus on the US
Castro's career has become a nearly obsessive quest to
reduce US influence, especially in the Western hemisphere. He
has promoted subversion to bring to power radical regimes hostile
to the US. Cuba's national airline, charter airlines, and
fishing boats have been used to transport insurgents and support
infiltration operations.
The Cuban news agency, PRENSA LATINA, is deeply involved in
propaganda and clandestine operations. Its first director died
in the mid-1960s while trying to spark a Cuban-supported
guerrilla war in Argentina. The Cuban Communist Party, through
several different propaganda organizations, operates schools to
instill anti-US attitudes in foreign students.
Over the past three decades, Cuba has supported insurgents
in guerrilla warfare throughout Latin America. Castro was
successful in Nicaragua, and is now engaged in helping the
guerrillas in El Salvador. Other countries which have been the
targets of Cuban subversion over time include Panama, the
Dominican Republic, Argentina, Venezuela, Columbia, and
Bolivia. Havana's paramilitary activities are supplemented by a
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complex and effective propaganda apparatus. The Head of the
America Department frequently hosts insurgent leaders in Havana
to consult on tactics and support for subversion. Faithfully
mimicking Soviet propaganda themes, Cuban books, magazines,
newspapers, radios stations, and news agencies maintain a
relentless barrage of words denigrating the US and depicting Cuba
heroically in an epic struggle to defeat US imperialism.
Cuba's Worldwide Activities
Outside the Western Hemisphere, Havana also is involved in a
wide variety of overt and covert activities geared to damaging US
interests. The role of Cuban military forces in Ethiopia and
Angola have seriously impeded progress toward a peaceful
settlement of the Namibia question. In spite of a severely
strained economy, Havana has military advisers in a number of
other African countries and has thousands of civilian advisers
and technicians in more than two dozen countries of Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia.
Cuba provides various types of support to such groups as the
African National Congress, the South West Africa People's
Organization, the Polisario insurgents, and the Palestine
Liberation Organization. Through the Cuban Institute of
Friendship Among Peoples, it maintains ties with anti-nuclear
weapons organizations and peace groups in Western Europe.
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The Soviet Role
The Castro regime pays close heed to Soviet policy when
formulating its own policy line. At the same time, Moscow
appears more willing to let Havana take the lead in Latin
American affairs. Elsewhere, Havana has less freedom of action
and apparently takes much greater pains to ensure that its
tactics do not upset Soviet plans. Cuba's military involvement
in Ethiopia during the Ogaden war demonstrated that Castro, under
certain circumstances, is willing to subordinate his armed forces
to Soviet control and permit Moscow to drag Cuba into a major
military operation where the Castro regime's vital interests are
not at stake. Angola is another example of the melding of Soviet
materiel with Cuban military personnel in support of Soviet
African policy.
Soviet influence in the Cuban intelligence services is
exerted through diplomatic channels, through Soviet advisers in
Cuba, and through the training of Cuban intelligence personnel in
the Soviet Union. The America Department's close collaboration
with Moscow is very clear from the joint "theoretical
conferences" that are periodically sponsored for the region's
Communist leaders and revolutionary chiefs. Frictions still
arise between Havana and Moscow on policy toward Latin America--
as the Grenada affair has shown--but cooperation today is greater
than it has ever been.
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 Executive Registry
84- 2559
8 June 1984
WW-
'MORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director for Intelligence
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? Director of Central Intelligence
SUBJECT: KGB
FRS
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1. Pursuant to our A scussi
of two statements: One would be on what we face in the KGB and the ~satellli
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n this morning I'd like to ask. for drafts
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agency that it controls. That subject is dealt wit Qua
which 1 attacn vy a retiree
I also attach an intelligence report on the uban apparatus.
I would like roue and the NIO to see what they can add in
additional and up a e in mation as well as any additional ideas. The
basic theme of this statement was expressed in a report I sent to the President
in January.from which I extract the following:
SECRET
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