SOVIET DISINFORMATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201460021-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: January 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: Cl
ARTICLE APp
ON PAGE ~2 7
RETIRED OFFICER
January 1985
$ciet biirottmatien
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
We have heard the media-my pro-
fession-accused of being biased,
cynical, conspiratorial, lazy and apa-
thetic. I plan to be a little more critical.
Legions of pseudo-intellectuals, both
Western and non-Western alike, care-
fully encouraged by Marxist disinfor-
mation specialists, have seized upon
Third World themes as so many pegs
on which to hang very facile and in-
stant anti-American cliches.
What has been going on for some
time now, quite openly in my judg-
ment, is the introduction into Western
politics in general and American pol-
itics in particular of a radical anti-U.S.
Third World ideology. It is reflected in
our major media outlets which see
America as the villain. America the
racist. America the exploiter. America
on the wrong side of history.
Carlos Rangel, a very well-known
Venezuelan author and journalist, in
his latest book The Third World and the
West, documents how millions of peo-
ple throughout the developing world
have been disinformed into believing
that Yankee bogeymen are responsible
for most of what goes wrong in their
countries.
Jean-Francois Ravel, France's most
important media voice, a man who
came from the left, for 10 years edited
France's most important magazine,
L'Express. In his latest best seller How
Democracies Perish, to be published
next month by Doubleday, he demon-
strates like Range) how disinformation
has quite literally invented a new ide-
ology that's called "Third World-ism."
It has one basic principle: The consum-
er society has stifled the revolutionary
ardor of Western workers and, ergo, it
is now up to the problems and pres-
sures of the Third World to bring down
capitalism.
This new ideology is Moscow's secret
weapon for destabilizing the West and
eroding our will to resist. Under this
false flag of convenience, revolutions
have quite literally been highjacked by
a tiny minority of Marxists who then
proceed to impose a worse form of dic-
tatorship than the one they overthrew.
The good news, ladies and gen-
tlemen, is that it ain't working. Marx-
ism is proving to be a catastrophic
failure all over the Third World. And,
miracle of miracles, a prominent
American academic and long-time
sympathizer of the Sandinista regime
in Nicaragua has publicly conceded
that he was wrong, yet another victim
of disinformation. His name is Dr.
Robert S. Leiken, the Carnegie Endow-
ment Scholar? who edited what was de-
scribed as the Democratic alternative
to the bipartisan Kissinger Commis-
sion Report on Central America which,
as you may recall, last January docu-
mented the scale and the scope of the
Soviet-Cuban enterprise to outflank
the United States in Central America.
Dr. Leiken has now written an as-
tonishing repudiation of his previously
held pro-Sandinista views on Nicara-
gua. Leiken's untold story about the
Sandinistas-at least untold in our
major media outlets-appears as the
cover story of the Oct. 8, 1984, issue of
the liberal magazine, The New Re-
public. The story was read on the floor
of the Senate a couple of weeks ago and
began opening a number of Demo-
cratic eyes on Capitol Hill.
L eiken has made six trips to Nic-
aragua. He has testified before
congressional committees
against any further aid to the so-called
Contras or counterrevolutionaries who
are fighting the Marxist regime in Nic-
aragua. And now, after his latest trip to
Nicaragua. Leiken admits that the
Contras, referred to locally and ad-
miringly as Los Muchachos-"the
bovs"-enjoy widespread support in
the population and that the Sandinista
regime, propped'up by some 3,000
Cuban military and 6,000 Cuban civil-
ian advisors; is widely despised.
You'd never guess any of that from
reading our press. Leiken, a liberal aca-
demic, comes down very hard on the
U.S. press corps covering Nicaragua.
He says American journalists have
been- taken in, co-opted in effect, by a
larger group, the so-called Marxist in-
ternationalists, a term which embrac-
es all the foreign camp followers who
express solidarity with the Sandinis-
tas-from Bulgarian and Cuban jour-
nalists to idealistic leftists from North
America and Western Europe.
Disaffected Sandinista intellectuals
who poured their hearts out to Leiken
in Nicaragua said they were afraid'to
meet with American reporters because
they knew that they sympathized with
the Sandinistas.
Continued
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a,
None of this should come as any sur ry. Yet the very first document was a Mozambique, an African Marxist
ise to those of you who have heard secret speech given by the late Prime state, has signed a non-aggression trea-
-,: before discuss disinformation, Minister Maurice Bishop a year before tv with the hated enemy, South Africa,
hose most pernicious aspect is what I the U.S: led invasion in which he told and has actually expelled 800 guer-
,%11 "censorship by omission." Stories his politburo colleagues that the objec- rillas to Zambia and Tanzania-all, in.
that are deliberately ignored, sur- I tive was to impose a Marxist-Leninist cidentally, against Moscow's wishes.
because they might change percep- I ning the U.S. into believing that it was ngola, yet another Marxist state
tions in a way that the self-appointed doing something quite different. Pre- in Africa which is protected by
opinion molders might disapprove of. cisely the same disinformation tech- 25,000 Cuban troops, is losing
Leiken furnishes many examples of .piques were used in Nicaragua in 1978, ground daily to the anti-communist re-
this practice in Nicaragua, but the in Vietnam from 1956-75, in Cuba in sistance fighters led by D Jonas Sav-
same thing has been going on all over 1958-59, and in many other parts of the imbi, and to this I can pee s nally testi-
the world throughout my 38-year ca- world. fy, having recently returfie;d from a trip
reer in this profession. The word that Possibly the most successful Soviet behind the lines in Angola.
the Nicaraguans employ most fre-1 disinformation campaign in recent Soviet client-states in the Third
quently, according to Leiken, is engag-', years was the effort to make millions of' World are'on the brink of economic di.
no, Spanish for "hoax" or "trick." Even people on both sides of the Atlantic be- saster, and there is apparently nothing
the Sandinistas' much-vaunted liter- lieve that we were on the brink of a the Soviets can do about it except to
acy campaign about which you've read global nuclear holocaust and then send them more weapons. But I'm sure
a lot in our media is a hoax, according blaming that horrifying prospect on you would all agree with me that weap-
to Leiken. U.S. President Ronald Reagan. As the ons is what Africa needs least.
You've seen mass rallies in favor of French Foreign Minister Claude Cheys- To understand the magnitude of the
the Sandinistas on your evening news son, a Socialist and a man I've known Soviet failure and the phase I believe
programs. But what you were never since Saigon in 1952, told me at dinner we are presently entering, I think one
told is that ration cards are confiscated in New York recently the Soviets has to dial back to 1972. The year then-
if an individual fails to show up at these launched an unprecedented campaign President Richard Nixon, with the as
"spontaneous" demonstrations and; of intimidation to prevent the deploy- sistance of Dr. Henry Kissinger, signed
that people are jailed for so much as' ment of Euromissiles, which were, as 29 bilateral agreements with the Sovi-
criticizing visiting Sandinista officials you all know, NATO's response to et Union, including the SALT I treaty
or perhaps asking them embarrassing Moscow's deployment of the SS-20s be- and the famous space rendezvous pro-
questions."The most depressing aspect ginning in 1977 and targeted prin- gram.
of our trip," Leikin concluded, "was to cipally against Western Europe. The United States at that time was
hear from so many people that their If this campaign had succeeded, engaged in a damage-limitation opera-
lives are far worse today than they ever Cheysson said Moscow doubtless tion. Nixon and Kissinger were still
were under the Somoza dictatorship." would have achieved its principal ob- hoping somehow to head off final de-
If the media does not report inconve- jectives: the decoupling of the NATO feat in Vietnam by weaving the Soviet
nient facts, how then is our Congress, Alliance, the encouragement of neu- Union into a web of mutual interest
whose perceptions are largely shaped tralism in Europe and of isolationism with the United States. Somehow that
by the media, supposed to make intelli- in our own country. Fortunately, would temper their Third World be-
gent decisions? Which explains again, Moscow's strategic gambit was check- havior and discourage the Kremlin
in my judgment, why Congress refused mated. As a consequence, Cheysson be- from exploiting our defeat if one were
the $21 million requested by the ad- lieves that the Western Alliance to occur. This U.S. strategy did not
ministration to fund the so-called Con- achieved its single greatest political work, because several administrations
tras. A movement which Leiken, a victory since its inception 35 years ago. failed to grasp the real nature of
Democrat, now regards as legitimate The Soviet Union is faced with crum- Moscow's professed policy of peaceful
resistance against an oppressive Marx- bling colonial outposts and the spread- -coexistence.
ist regime, whose elite, he says, is living ing phenomena of anti-communist na- Between January 1973, when the
very "high on the hog," while the rest of tional liberation fronts on Mozam- Paris Peace Accords on Vietnam were
the population has been cowed into si- bique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, signed, and April 1975, when Saigon
lence. Cambodia and Nicaragua. Guinea be- fell to the communists, our Congress
The administration's 800-page White came Africa's first Marxist state in cut military aid to South Vietnam by
Paper on the thousands of documents 1958. It turned against Marxism with a 76 percent. And during that same peri-
that vve captured in Grenada a year ago vengeance when its first and only pres- od, the Soviet Union doubled its mili-
was released in Washington two weeks ident, Sekou Toure, died last March tarn aid to North- Vietnam.
ago. The Washington Post reported this after a quarter of a century of despotic
news at the bottom of page 30. with the rule.
headline "Selected Grenadian Mate-
rial Released by State" guaranteed to
make the average reader ignore the sto-
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3,
Never forget that despite all of their
difficulties, the Soviets remain ex-
traordinarily skillful at pursuing their
objectives by all means short of open
warfare-objectives that are more tra-
ditionally pursued at least in our West-
ern minds by war itself. And here, of
course, I am referring to state-spon-
sored terrorism, in many cases fi-
nanced by drug rackets as explained in
my latest book, Monimbo. I am refer-
ring to penetration, subversion and
disinformation.
Two kamikazes, driving five-ton
trucks loaded with explosives, trig-
gered the unravelling of the entire
Western position in Lebanon on, Oct.
23, 1983, and literally changed the
course of history. Libyan plots to mine
the Red Sea, to bomb the Aswan High
Dam-which would have wrecked the
Egyptian economy-and to seize the
holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia-
with hundreds of terrorists disguised
as pilgrims-have all been uncovered
in recent months, and Col Muammar
Qadhafi is not the lone wolf operator
that our media make him out to be. His
intelligence service has been under
East German management since
1974-a fact known to every Western
intelligence service.
So, like a wounded predator, the
Kremlin may be at its most dangerous
as its many difficulties deepen. Weak
or strong, the Soviet Union will remain
locked in protracted conflict with the
Western democracies.
The bottom line is that containment
remains the only viable foreign policy.
There are no shortcuts and no quick
fixes. By way of conclusion, when afflu-
ence, freedom and peace are taken for
granted, when instant gratification be-
comes a way of life, when well-inten-
tioned people feel that nuclear freeze
without verification equals a safer.
world, when people are no longer will-
ing to fight and die to preserve their
freedom and eternal principles of the
American revolution, then totalitarian
temptation cannot be far behind.
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