ACTIVE MEASURES, QUIET WAR AND TWO SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 58
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 15, 2010
• Sequence Number: 8
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Active Measures,
Quiet War
and
Two Socialist
Revolutions
By Lawrence B. Sulc
The Nathan Hale Institute
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
"I wish to be useful, and every kind of service
necessary to the public good becomes honorable
by being necessary. If the exigencies of my
country demand a peculiar service, its claims to
perform that service are imperious. "
Capt. Nathan Hale
1755-1776
The Nathan Hale Institute is an independent organization devoted to non-
partisan research in the area of domestic and foreign intelligence with particular
emphasis on the role of intelligence operations in a free society. The Institute's
principal purpose is to increase public awareness and stimulate debate and
scholarly pursuit of important intelligence-related issues.
Classified by the Internal Revenue Service as a publicly-supported Section
501 (c) (3) educational and research organization, the Institute welcomes grants
and contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations. All contribu-
tions to the Institute are tax-deductible under the Internal Revenue Code and the
Institute will provide documentation to substantiate tax-deductibility of a con-
tribution or grant.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Active Measures,
Quiet War
and
Two Socialist
Revolutions
By Lawrence B. Suic
The Nathan Hale Institute
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Lawrence B. Sulc served as an intelligence operations officer for the Central
Intelligence Agency for more than twenty-three years, most of that time abroad.
He later worked for six years on the staff of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of
the House of Representatives. He has served as president of the Nathan Hale
Foundation and the Nathan Hale Institute and is currently a deputy assistant
secretary in the Department of State. The views expressed by Mr. Sulc herein are
not necessarily those of any Government agency or department.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
PART I
ACTIVE MEASURES, QUIET WAR
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
ACTIVE MEASURES, QUIET WAR
by
Lawrence B. Sulc
CONTENTS
THE WAR WE FIGHT
World War III is Now
Soviet Objectives in World War III
A Petty Bourgeoise Prejudice
Caveat Emptor
World Domination and Mendacity
Protracted Conflict and Warfare on the Cheap
Communist Update
SOVIET ACTIVE MEASURES
Secret Political Action
The International Department
Power and Prestige
A Decisive Influence
A Unified Foreign Policy
Subtlety in the Art of War
Parties, Insurgents and Fronts
Soviet Front Groups Abroad
Transmission Belts
The Desire for Peace
Softening Up The Bourgeoisie
Agents of Influence
Terrorism As an Active Measure
Soviet Terrorism
Wet Affairs
Deception
Forgery
The Two Superpowers Theory
Gaining Credibility
Dangerous Reefs
"Maskirovka"
"Dezinformatsia"
Cultural Warfare
Foreign Broadcasting
Even Sports
THE WESTERN RESPONSE
The Ultimate Weapon
The Best Hope
To Prize Precaution - To Know
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
This is not a product of original research. It
was not meant to be. It is a modest compilation of
some important points from other more detailed works
concerning the nature of the war the Soviet Union is
waging against the West (principally the United States),
its objectives in that war, and some of the means it
is using to achieve its objectives. Among those means
is the uniquely Soviet phenomenon, active measures,
a kind of quiet war, if you will. The subject of active
measures has only fairly recently begun to be examined
in detail in unclassified sources. This study contains
a brief summary of active measures contained in certain
recent open sources; unfortunately, however, for lack
of time and space, much good material could not be
dealt with. No offense is intended toward those whose
work has not been mentioned.
Soviet objectives in its self-appointed struggle
with the West are not new. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf,
Lenin carefully spelled out his plans for everyone
to read well over half a century ago. Non-communists,
however, are often amazed when exposed to Lenin's ideas
for the first time and even anti-communists are often
surprised at Lenin's brazen candor. This candor inci-
dentally, is periodically candidly reaffirmed by ruling
Soviet leaders.
It is worthwhile for those opposed to, or merely
interested in, totalitarianism to be reminded from
time to time of just what it is the West is up against
in dealing with the Soviet variety. If now and then
someone unfamiliar with the nature of Soviet thought
and action acquires an awareness of them by means such
as this publication, then so much the better.
I have not dealt here with the serious problem
for the West, especially the United States, presented
by Soviet espionage. Soviet intelligence collection
per is not within the scope of this study. Nonetheless,
like most other things the Soviets undertake, intelligence
is not an end in itself but contributes to the realization
of important Soviet foreign policy goals. For example,
the theft of technology by the Soviet Union is a particu-
larly serious problem for the West. Science and technology
in the Soviet Union and their maintenance by imports
from abroad (legally or illegally) are integral aspects
of economic warfare which, in turn, promotes Soviet
economic, military and political objectives.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
World War Three is Now
James Burnham, in The Struggle for the World in
1947, fixed April 1944 as the beginning of the Third
World War. The Communist-led mutiny of the Greek Navy
in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, a year before the
Second World War had even ended, was cite by Burnham
as the beginning of the Third World War. World War
III was not, and is not, the nuclear war between East
and West, so much feared by all. As Brian Crozier
explains, in The Strategy for Survival, that war has
not, and may never come. The real World War III was
to be, and La, "a different kind of war." According
to Crozier, that war is being "'fought' for the greater
part with non-military techniques, such as subversion,
disinformation, terrorism, psychologic1l war and diplomatic
negotiations, including conferences."
According to Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Rlepikova,
Russian born husband and wife and authors of Yuri Androppov:
A Secret Passage Into the Kremlin, the point is whether
the leaders and people of the U.S. "are capable off
realizing that the war with Russia is already underway."
Soviet Objectives in World War III
The Soviet world view is grounded in the principles
of Marxism-Leninism, consistent to this day from the
advent in Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution and the
formation of the Soviet state.
Class differences, according to Communist doctrine,
create tensions and contradictions from which class
struggle emerges. The laws of class struggle affect
not only a given society, the Communists hold, but
differing social systems as well. Inevitably, in this
conflict, international competition develops along
with the struggle of ideas. The manifestation of this
struggle, political warfare, happens spontaneously
or else it develops as an instrument of policy. No
matter what, it happens.
lAs quoted by Brian Crozier in Strategy of Survival
4 New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978), p. 10.
Ibid., p. 11.
3Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, "Andropov Is
Already Fighting the Big War", Wall Street Journal,
October 21, 1983, p. 28.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Founded on the theories of Marx and Lenin, the
Soviet world view holds that struggle is the natural
order of things--political activity is conflict and
war is normal. Whereas Clausewitz, the 19th century
German military theorist, wrote that war was the continua-
tion of politics by other means and Lenin himself publicly
agreed, modern Soviet leaders conduct themselves as
if they really believe the reverse to be nearer the
truth, that politics is actually war on a different
scale. It might be more accurate, as a matter of fact,
to say that both politics and war, as viewed by
Marxist-Leninists, are part of a continuum, that politics
is war and war, politics.
The ultimate aim of the Soviet Union today is
what it was six decades ago when the Communist International
issued its "Program" in 1924.
The ultimate aim of the Communist leaders in Moscow,
as set forth by the Communist International in 1924,
is to replace the world capitalist economy by a world
system of Communism. Every sacrifice must be made,
in the Soviet view, and the greatest obstacles overcome,
in order to carry on agitation and propaganda "persever-
ingly, persistently and patiently--even the most reac-
tionary--in those institutions, societies and associations
which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to
be found." "...revolutionaries who are incapable
of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form
of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed...",
Lenin said.
At the very end of its 1924 "Program," the Communist
International reaffirms this statement of Karl Marx:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and
aims. They openly declare that their aims can be attained
only by the forci,ple overthrow of all the existing
social conditions. "
A Petty Bourgeoisie Prejudice
According to the Institute for the Study of Conflict
in London, the respected British "think tank," in late
4Programme of the Communist International (adopted at
the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, September
1, 1928), (New York: Workers Library Publishers, December
, 1929), particularly p. 25.
V. Lenin, "Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,"
1920, Collected Works, Vol. 31, (Moscow: Progress
publishers, 1966), p. 53.
7Ibid., pp. 96-7.
Programme of the Communist International, op. cit.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
1920 or 1921, Lenin wrote a memorandum to Georgy Chicherin,
Soviet foreign commissar from 1918 to 1930. In it
the author was most succinct:
As the result of my own direct observation
during the years I spent in emigration I
must confess that the so-called cultured
strata of Western Europe and America are
incapable of understanding either the present
position of things or the real state of relative
power. These strata should be regarded as
deaf mutes, and our behaviour towards them
should be based on this assumption. Revolution
never develops along a straight line or by
uninterrupted growth, but forms a series
of spurts and retreats, attacks and lulls,
during which the power of revolution grows
stronger and prepares for the final
victory... taking into account the long process
which the growth of the world socialist revolution
involves, it is necessary to resort to special
manoeuvres which can speed up our victory
over the capitalist countries: [a] to announce,
in order to pacify the deaf mutes the separation
(fictitious!) of our government and government
organs (the council of people's comissars
etc.) from the party and the Politburo, and
especially the Comintern. The latter must
be declared to be independent political groupings
tolerated on the territory of the Soviet
Socialist Republics. The deaf mutes will
believe this. [b] to express our wish to
establish immediately diplomatic relations
with the capitalist countries, on the basis
of complete non-interference in their internal
affairs. The deaf mutes will believe us
again. They will even be delighted and will
open their doors wide to us, and through
these doors will speedily enter the emissaries
of the Comintern and of our Party investigations
organs in the guise of diplomatic, cultural
and trade representatives. Speaking the
truth is a petty, bourgeois prejudice. A
lie, on the other hand, is often justified
by the ends. The capitalists of the whole
world and their governments will shut their
eyes to the kind of activities on our side
that I have referred to, and will in this
manner become not only deaf mutes but blind
as well. They will open up credits for us,
which will serve us for the purpose of supporting
Communist parties in their countries. They
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
will supply us with the materials and technology
which we lack and will restore our military
industry, which we need for our future victorious
attacks upon our suppliers. In other words,
they will work hard in order to prepare their
own suicide.
Caveat Emptor
It has been thirty-seven years since a certain
"X" authored an absorbing article on "The Sources of
Soviet Conduct," in the prestigious quarterly magazine,
Foreign Affairs. Later identified as Ambassador George
Kennan, expert on Soviet relations, the author, "X,"
had some things to say about dealing with the Soviets
that have been repeated often by others in the years
since the article first appeared. They are worth repeating
here:
It must invariably be assumed in Moscow
that the aims of the capitalist world are
antagonistic to the Soviet regime, and therefore
to the interests of the peoples it controls.
If the Soviet Government occasionally sets
its signature to documents which would indicate
the contrary, this is to be regarded as a
tactical manoeuvre permissible in dealing
with the enemy (who is without honor) and
should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor.
Basically, the antagonism remains. It is
postulated. And from it flow many of the
phenomena which we find disturbing in the
Kremlin's conduct of foreign policy: the
secretiveness, the lack of frankness, the
duplicity, the wary suspiciousness, and the
basic unfriendliness of purpose. These phenomena
are there to stay, for the foreseeable future.
There can be variations of degree and of
emphasis. When there is something the Russians
want from us, one or the other of these features
of their policy may be thrust temporarily
8Special Report, (London: Institute for the Study of
Conflict, Feb.-Mar. 1973), p. 73. The Institute says
that, "(T)here is no shadow of suspicion that he [Lenin's
confidant] might have forged the document, the authenticity
of which, in style and content, is regarded as beyond
doubt by leading scholars." It is from this document
that the famous remark comes, attributed to Lenin,
that the Capitalists will sell the Communists the rope
which the latter will use to hang them.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
into the background; and when that happens
there will always be Americans who will leap
forward with gleeful announcements that "the
Russians have changed," and some who will
even try to take credit for having brought
about such "changes." But we should not be
misled by tactical manoeuvres. These character-
istics of Soviet policy, like the postulate
from which they flow, are basic to the internal
nature of Soviet power, and will be with
us, whether in the foreground or the background,
until the internal nature of Soviet power
is changed.9
World Domination and Mendacity
Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, put it
very simply when he said, "I think you have to go back
to the original teachings that were published at the
time the Soviet Union was founded and have never been
disputed and have never been apVnded and that is world
domination. It's that simple.".LV
"Mendacity is the immortal soul of communism,"
according to Leszek Kolakowski. "They cannot get rid
of it. The gap between the reality and the facade
is so enormous that the lie has become a normal and
natural way of life."11
In his book, "New Lies for Old," Anatoliy Golitsyn,
a former KGB officer now in the West, described the
efforts to update Communist doctrine and, at the same
time, "de-Stalinize" the movement. Nikita Khrushchev,
principal Soviet leader at the time, and other older
Communist officials "wanted to purge themselves," he
says, "of the taint of Stalinism and rehabilitate themselves
in the eyes of history. The Communist update, according
to Golitsyn, was a reaffirmation of Lenin's dogma:
The Manifesto produced by the Eighty-one-party
Congress (November 1960) clearly betrays
the influence of Lenin's ideas and practice,
9George Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign
agfairs, Volume 25, Number 4, July 1947.
Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, April 10,
1984, as quoted in The New York Post, April 11, 1984,
p1 4.
Leszek Kolakowski, as quoted by Paul Henze, Survey,
Autumn - Winter, 1983, p. 2.
Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old, (New York: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1984), p. 85.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
as does Khrushchev's follow-up speech of
January 6, 1961. These two basic documents
have continued to determine the course of
communist policy to the present day. They
explain in detail how the triumph of communism
throughout the world is to be achieved through
the consolidation of the economic, political,
and military might of the communist world
and the undermining of the unity and strength
of the noncommunist world. The use by communist
parties of a variety of violent and nonviolent
tactics is specifically authorized. Peaceful
coexistence is explicitly defined as "an
intense form of class struggle between socialism
and capitalism." The exploitation by world
communism of economic, political, racial,
and historical antagonisms between noncommunist
countries is recommended. Support for "national
liberation" movementj3throughout the Third
World is reemphasized.
Protracted Conflict and Warfare on the Cheap
The Soviet Union constantly expands its influence
and power throughout the world, engaging only reluctantly
in open conventional warfare. As a consequence, the
world in this period of "protralced conflict," to use
the term used by Mao Tze-tung, has entered a phase
of unconventional, low intensity warfare or, as Ray
Cline of Georgetown University calls it, "warfare on
the cheap."
According to R. Judson Mitchell, the Soviets have
maintained a "traditional preference for avoiding frontal
conflict with the principal enemy and for the achievement
of ends by flanking maneuvers and concentration on
the frings rather than the center of the opposing
system."` As pointed out by Richard H. Shultz and
Roy Godson, however, "While Mitchell is correct, it
is also the case...that the Soviets employ political
13Ibid., p. 35.
14The phrase, appearing originally in the military rhetoric
of Mao Tse-tung, in 1959 became the title of the book,
Protracted Conflict, by Robert Strausz-Hupe.
R. Judson Mitchell, Ideology of a Superpower: Contemporary
Soviet Doctrine on International Relations, (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1982), p. 57.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
warfare measures directly against the enter of the
major opposing system." (emphasis added).1?
16Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia. Active
Measures in Soviet Strategy, (NewYork: Pergamon-Brassey's,
1984), p. 40.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
"To the danger of espionage is added active measures,"
as President Ronald Reagan has said, "designed to subvert
and deceive, to 'disinform' thg public opinion upon
which our democracies are built."
A number of books and articles Y~ave been published
recently on Soviet active measures. Active measures
are an integral part of Soviet diplomatic, political,
economic and military programs in every stage. They
1President Ronald Reagan on May 23, 1984 at ceremonies
at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On that
occasion the President said the following to the assembled
employees of the CIA:
"...Without you, our Nation's safety would be
more vulnerable and our security fragile and endangered.
The work you do each day is essential to the survival
and to the spread of human freedom. You remain the
eyes and ears of the Free World, you are the tripwire
over which the forces of totalitarian rule must stumble
in their quest for global domination.
"Though it sometimes has been forgotten here in
Washington, the American people know full well the
importance of vital and energetic intelligence operations.
From Nathan Hale's covert operation in the Revolutionary
War to the breaking of the Japanese code at Midway
in World War II, America's security and safety have
relied directly on the courage and collective intellect
of her intelligence personnel. Today, I want to stress
to you again that the American people are thankful
for your professionalism, for your dedication--and
for the personal sacrifice each of you makes in carrying
on your work.
"You are carrying on a great and noble tradition;
and I believe you are adding a brilliant new chapter
to the annals of America's intelligence services."
--------------------------------------------------------
2The Soviets use the term "active measures" to describe
overt and covert techniques for influencing events
and behavior in, and the actions of, foreign societies.
Richard A. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia, op.
cit., p. 15. This book is an excellent study of the
phenomenon. The authors' analysis of Soviet overt
propaganda over a period of 20 years, against which
Soviet covert activities and other overt activities
can be compared, is especially useful.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
are a part of Soviet doctrine, strategy and day-to-day
operations as they are a fundamental part of Soviet
foreign policy.3
An interagency group of the Executive Branch defined
active measures as follows:
1. The Soviets use the term active measures
(aktivnvve meropriyatiya) primarily in an
intelligence context. Within that context,
the term is used to refer to active operations
intended to provide a policy effect, as distinct
from espionage and counterintelligence.
But the Soviets do not limit the concept
of active measures to intelligence alone.
Active measures are an unconventional adjunct
to traditional diplomacy. They are quintessential-
ly an offensive instrument of Soviet policy.
Specifically, they are intended to influence
the policies of foreign governments, disrupt
relations between other nations, undermine
confidence in foreign leaders and institutions,
and discredit opponents. Active measures,
thus, consist of a wide range of activities,
both overt and covert, including:
Manipulation or control of the media.
Written or oral disinformation.
Use of foreign Communist parties and
front organizations.
Manipulation of mass organizations.
Clandestine radiobroadcasting.
Economic activities.
Military operations.
Other political influence operations.
2. The range of activities included under
active measures is broader than that covered
by the U.S. term covert action. In American
parlance, overt activities, such as officially
sponsored propaganda, actions by accredited
diplomatic and official representatives,
3As an illustration of the scope and variety of
this incessant Soviet active measures program even
in neutral, not totally unfriendly countries, such
as Switzerland, is the fact that the Swiss Government
felt constrained to use these terms, to describe Soviet
activity when in 1983 it closed the Bern bureau of
Novosti, the Soviet news agency: "disinformation,
subversion and agitation."
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
and activities of friendship and cultural
societies, are automatically excluded from
the range of covert action.
The purpose of secret political action, as in
the case with overt propaganda, is to persuade, manipulate,
mislead, and deceive. The two activities are closely
related and overt propaganda themes are often promoted
by covert means. Both overt and covert active measures
are directly related to Soviet foreign policy objectives.
While the Soviets engage in a variety of secret operations,
to promote their foreign policy objectives, special
emphasis is placed on international front organizations,
agent-of-influence operations and forgeries. To understand
what the United States is dealing with, it is essential
to understand how Soviet foreign policy is made, how
active measures fit in, and that the same people devise
both. It is necessary, also, to understand the Inter-
national Department.
The International Department
In "A Study of the International Department of
the CPSU: Key to Soviet Policy," Leonard Shapiro,
professor of political science, London School of Economics
and Political Science, said:
One is, of course, used to these theories
of conflicting groups inside the Soviet hierarchy,
pulling in different directions. Journalists
love them and academics are not always immune
from their fatal charm. It is, however,
alarming to find so erroneous a notion of
how the Soviet Union conducts its foreign
policy prevailing at what appears to be the
highest government level. At the basis of
this misconception, which could have serious
consequences if it should become current
among those who are responsible for the conduct
of United States foreign policy vis-a-vis
the Soviet Union, lies the failure to understand
4Interagency Intelligence Study on Soviet Active Measures
appeared in Soviet Active Measures, Hearings before
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
July 13,14, 1982, p. 89.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
the role played by the International Department
of the Central Committee of t 9e Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). 6
In his study, Shapiro traces the evolution of
the International Department from the Foreign Affairs
Department formed in the Central Committee after the
demise in 1943 of the Comintern. In 1957, the Foreign
Department was divided into three departments, one
for Relations with Communist and Workers Parties of
Socialist Countries, controlling the bloc; a second
for Cadres Abroad, linked to the KGB, and responsible
for instructing overseas cells of the CPSU (cells within
missions abroad) and maintaining a register of members
of the CPSU overseas, the latter being virtually an
intelligence function; and, finally, the core of the
Foreign Affairs Department, the present International
Department. From the beginning to this day, this department
has been headed by Bori% N. Ponomarev, a former high
official of the Comintern.
Power and Prestige
The ID is powerful and prestigious and clearly
more important than the other more routine, technical
5Leonard Shapiro, International Journal, (London: Institute
gf International Affairs, Winter 1976-1977), p. 42.
Phil Nicolaides, editorial writer for the Washington
Times, scores "the intellectual effort to deny the
unpleasant reality of communist aims and ideology,"
the academic school that ascribes Soviet behavior to
the "Russian temperament" and Czarist antecedents.
"One suspects," he said, "that if Cuba had been the
first communist state, these scholars would be tracing
the sins of the Castro regime to the fierceness of
the Caribs, the belligerence of the conquistadores,
and the ruthlessness of the Spanish Inquisition.",
Washington Times, April 19, 1984, p. 2C.
The department of the Central Committee, Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CC, CPSU), dedicated to
agitation and propaganda and the corresponding activity
carried out by it and by other communist parties worldwide
was long known as "agitprop." This department was
absorbed, as explained elsewhere herein, by the Inter-
national Department of the CC, CPSU. "Agitprop" activities
have likewise been largely incorporated into what the
oviets call "active measures."
Shapiro, op. cit., p. 42.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
departments of the Central Committee. It has considerable
resources of its own and can and does draw on those
of other departments as well and the research institutes
attached to the Soviet Academy. It is responsible
for, among other things, publishing Problems of Peace
and Socialism, the English language edition of which
is called World Marxist Review, official Soviet ideological
publication for foreign instruction. It also controls
the international Soviet front organizations.
The International Department surpasses in importance
and authority the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which,
according to Shapiro, "has no muscle whatever." Shapiro
goes on to say:
It may be added that it is normal Soviet
practice to maintain in every branch or sphere
of central government a system of dual control:
an appropriate department of the Central
Committee to co-ordinate intelligence and
to brief the Politburo, and in general to
exercise tutelage, if not authority, over
the relevant ministry or government agency.
The emergence in 1943 of the Foreign Affairs
Department of the Central Committee was thus
fully in accord with the established pattern
of Soviet political practice.
It seems therefore beyond dispute that
the International Department is the element
in the Soviet decision-making process which
gathers information on foreign policy, briefs
the Politburo, and thereby exercises, subject
to the Politburo, decisive influence on Soviet
foreign policy. In fact, Ponomarev stated
the position quite accurately when he said:
"All the fundamental problems of foreign
policy come under the scrutiny of the Central
Committee of the CPSU and its leadership
where they are examined and comprehensive
decisions are taken--in the mainstream of
the Ie~ninist international strategy of the
CPSU.
9
l0f which more below.
Shapiro, op. cit., p. 44,45.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
A Unified Foreign Policy
Shapiro sums up by saying, "that Soviet foreign
policy, so far from being torn by party-state rivalry,
is a unified, co-ordinated whole in which, after Brezhnev,
the leading role belongs to the International Department
of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which attempts
to bring into line both state foreign policy and the
part which foreign communist parties are expected to
play in the policy as a whole."
It was Sun T'zu, the ancient Chinese strategist
(and tactician) who said, "To fight and conquer in
all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme
excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance
without fighting." "Be subtle!", Sun T'zu said, "Be
subtle! and use your spies in every kind of business."
The Soviets are known to be students of Sun T'zu; it
is almost as if the Chinese genius, for his part, was
talking about Soviet active measures twenty-five hundred
years before their time.
James Clavell describes the views of his subject,
Sun T'zu, as follows:
Sun T'zu believed that the moral strength
and intellectual faculty of man were decisive
in war, and that if these were properly applied
war could be waged with certain success.
Never to be undertaken thoughtlessly or reck-
lessly, war was to be preceded by measures
designed to make it easy to win. The master
conqueror frustrated his enemy's plans and
broke up his alliances. He created cleavages
between sovereign and minister, superiors
and inferiors, commanders and subordinates.
His spies and agents were active everywhere,
gathering information, sowing dissension,
and nurturing subversion. The enemy was
isolated and demoralized; his will to resist
broken. Thus without battle his army was
conquered, his cities taken and his state
overthrown. Only when the enemy could not
be overcome by they e means was there recourse
to armed force....
1llbid., p. 55.
12James Clavell, Sun T'zu. The Art of War, (New York:
Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 39.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Subtlety in the Art of War
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
According to Clavell, Sun T'zu himself put it
this way:
The skillful leader subdues the enemy's
troops without any fighting; he captures
their cities without laying siege to them;
he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy
operations in the field. With his forces
intact he disputes the mastery of the empire,
and thus, w thout losing a man, his triumph
is complete.'3
Parties, Insurgents and Fronts
In their study of that distinctly Soviet
phenomenon--the International Department--Shultz and
Godson say that, in addition to its other functions,
the ID is responsible for "planning, coordinating,
and conducting active measures." "The latter function,"
they point out, "includes administering, funding, and
coordinating the activities of well over a dozen inter-
national front organizations." The ID also carries
out active measures through its liaison with non-ruling
Communist parties and revolutionary movements14 and
the non-governmental organizations they, in turn, control.
Through international meetings, representatives stationed
abroad, and the monthly journal, Problems of Peace
and Socialism, according to Shultz and Godson, the
ID communicates official instructions and guidelines
to foreign Communist parties, insurgent movements,
and front organizations.
Soviet Front Groups Abroad
The Soviet Union in conducting active measures
abroad employs numerous mechanisms, one of the principal
mechanisms being the international front group. The
largest of these, as well as the most active, is the
World Peace Council (WPC). Foreign communist parties,
which are of course also directed by the ID, usually
provide the cadres for the national sections of the
13Ibid., p. 16.
14"It [the Soviet Union] has consistently promoted widespread
revolutionary violence even while taking care to project
the illusory image that the Soviet Union was abiding
by the spirit of peaceful coexistence." Cline and
exander, op. cit., p. 55.
Shultz and Godson, op. cit., p. 23.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
international fronts. For example, the United States
Peace Council (USPC), the American section of the WPC,
is largely managed by the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA).
The ID thus runs multiple lines of control to carry
out its policies, in this particular instance, that
is to say, with the USPC, it does so (a) by means of
its direction of the WPC, of which the USPC, is the
U.S. section; (b) through its supervision of the CPUSA
whose officials form the cadre of the USPC; and, finally,
(c) via KGB clandestine contacts where secrecy is indicated
or quite openly, for that matter, w~cre the Soviets
believe they can dispense with secrecy.
"Soviet control of the World Peace Council and
the other international Communist fronts is maintained
both through the financing and the personnel of the
organizations," according to Herbyrt Romerstein, a
student of Soviet activities abroad.l The KGB's support
of active measures campaigns is part of the traditional
Communist concept "to combine legal and illegal work"
and at times KGB officers take active part, under cover,
at open meetings of the fronts, as has been the case
in recent "peac " cpn ,rences abroad manipulated by
the Soviet Union.
16Theoretically the KGB is a governmental organization
but is in effect a department of the CC, CPSU, working
f9 close coordination with the ID and IID.
Herbert Romerstein, The World Peace Council and Soviet
'Active Measures', (Washington, D.C.: The Hale Foundation,
}883), p. 25.
Ibid., p. 25.
19John Barron, in KGB Today, The Hidden Hand, (New York:
Reader's Digest Press, 1983), documents numerous Soviet
intelligence operations and active measures in the
world "peace" movement and U.S. "peace" movements.
The book is an excellent study of Soviet intelligence,
58unterintelligence and active measures.
When American groups work with and jointly sponsor
conferences with Soviet organizations, such as the
Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada (IUSAC), they are
dealing with an entity charged by the CPSU with an
active measures (as well as an intelligence) mission.
The entity is closely associated with the KGB and directed
by the ID. Two of the three directors of the IUSAC
have intelligence backgrounds, one being a covert KGB
officer and the other a military intelligence (GRU)
officer. KGB and GRU officers attended the "peace"
conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in late
May 1983.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Transmission Belts
Lenin was given to calling front groups "transmission
belts" to the masses. Something other than what it
appears to be, a front group, or "transmission belt,"
to use Lenin's jargon, joins together Communists and
non-Communists, the former manipulating the latter,
in an ostensibly non-Communist activity. Moreover,
although millions of people are aware of Soviet control
of certain front groups, many otherwise informed people
apparently are not. Many apparently informed people
on the other hand, aware of Soviet control of a given
front, seem not to understand what that fact actually
means or, if they do understand, seem not to be concerned.
A case in point is the American "peace" movement, in
which the USPC and CPUSA itself are deeply involved.
On January 4, 1983, Bruce Kimmel, a member of the Communist
Party, USA, wrote the following in the Daily World,
the Party's newspaper:
The Communist Party has played and continues
to play an active role in the U.S. peace
movement. Right now Party members are active
in literally hundreds of local peace organiza-
tions. The Communist Party USA--like Communist
parties around the world--has always been
and will continue to be an active fighter
in the struggle for peace. My Party's peace
activities have indeed served the interest
of the Soviet people--because their desire
for FT ace is identical to that of the U.S. peo-
ple.
The Desire for Peace
Much is said about the desire of the Soviet Union
and its front groups for peace.
Lenin was quite candid when he wrote:
"Socialists cannot, without ceasing
to be socialists, be opposed to all war. ..social-
ists have never been, nor can they ever be,
opposed to revolutionary wars."22 "(T)he
victory of socialism in one country does
21Daily World, newspaper of the CPUSA, New York, January
4 1983.
V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 23, August 1916
March 1917, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964),
p. 77.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
not at one stroke eliminate all wars in"nneral.
On the contrary, it presupposes wars.
Softening Up the Bourgeoisie
In 1922 Lenin was crystal clear when he wrote
to Yuri Chicherin, his foreign commissar: "You and
I have both fought against pacifism as a programme
for the revolutionary proletarian party. That much
is clear. But who has ever denied the use of pacifists
by that party to soften up the enemy, the bourgeoisie?" ...
"we consider it our duty as businessmen to support
(even if the odds are 10,000 to2 ) the pacifists in
the other, i.e., bourgeois camp..."
According to Stanislav Levchenko, a former KGB
active measures case officer now working against Communism
in the West, "Soviet overt and covert propaganda organiza-
tions employ t least 15,000 people (in the Soviet
Union alone). "2g The funds available for active measures
are enormous-and not subjected to scrutiny by the Soviet
parliament. To implement Communist Party directives,
according to Levchenko, the KGB recruits "agents of
influence" in foreign countries, penetrating by this
means foreign poltical parties, public organizations
and the mass-media.'
Agents of Influence
It is important to realize that, for purposes
of description, aspects of Soviet active measures are
treated separately here which in practice are closely
23Ibid., p. 79.
24lbid., Volume 45, pp. 474, 5 (Letter dated February
21g, 1922).
Ibid., p. 507 (Letter dated March 14, 1922).
26Levchenko on May 16, 1984. Levchenko is engaged in
an effort to educate Western media, academicians and
the public about Soviet active measures, considering
his "moral obligation to the free world."
The not entirely unpopular "mirror image" concept,
discussed elsewhere, would logically envisage parliamentary
oversight of the KGB and GRU by the appropriate committees
of the Supreme Soviet. Supreme Soviet control of these
intelligence services would, of course, be exercised
by means of the purse strings or the threat of exposure
59 in the U. S.
Stanislav Levchenko, speaking on May 16, 1984, at a
conference on "Soviet Disinformation and the News,"
presented by the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
linked in planning and execution. They encompass both
overt and clandestine means. Agents of influence are
one of these elements--a most important one in the
active measures panoply. An agent of influence may
or may not be a major source of intelligence--his main
purpose is the manipulation of persons and events toward
Soviet goals. Such "a person uses his or her position,
influence, power, and credibility to promote the objectives
29
of" his sponsor. He may be a controlled agent, a
"trusted contact" or one of a number of "unwitting
but manipulated individuals."-I0
"Moscow utilizes agents of influence," according
to Godson and Shult;7j "as one element of a carefully
orchestrated effort" known as kombinatsia, combining
various elements from its active measures arsenal.
Kombinatsia combines "various agents of influence (at
various times and in various places) with special operation-
al and takings, in such a way as to enhance effective-
ness.
Terrorism as an Active Measure
The scope of the responsibilities of the International
Department, as pointed out above, reaches across the
spectrum from the 3d3evelopment of international overt
propaganda themes, in close coordination with the
International Information Department (IID), to building
and guiding the operational network of what Cline and
Alexander term the "international infrastructure of
terrorism." "It has consistently promoted widespread
revolutionary violence," they say, "even while taking
care to project the illusory image that the Sovi
was abiding by the spirit of peaceful coexistence.
In its efforts to expand its influence throughout
the world, the Soviet Union undertakes still another
active measure, its exploitation of terrorism, either
by supporting independent movements or by initiating
its own terrorist operations. Terrorism has "become
29Godson
and
Shultz, op. cit., p. 193.
30Ibid.,
p.
194.
31Godson
and
Shultz, op. cit., p. 64.
32Ibid.,
p.
133.
33"During
the 1960-1980 period, Soviet overt propaganda
directed
against the United States and NATO...was char-
acterized by consistency and intensity, and by increasing
complexity, flexibility, and sophistication.", Godson
jr2d Shultz, op. cit., p. 100.
Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, Terrorism: The Soviet
Connection, (New York: Crane Russack, 1984), p. 55.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
an indispensable tactical and strategic Mol in the
Soviet struggles for power and influence. Its aim
seems to be to achieve strategic ends where the use
of conventional armed forces is considered "'nappropriate,
ineffective, too risky or too difficult."3?
Cline and Alexander have this warning:
Unless Americans become more conscious
of the broad strategic dangers implicit in
the patterns of contemporary terrorism and
become more skillful in deterring or countering
terrorist operations, the next two decades
in this century will be catastrophic for
worldwide security interests of the United
States and its friends and allies abroad.
This subtle assault on the values and defensive
strengths of our society is not well understood,
and its strategic implications for liberal
democracies are only beginning to be explored.37
"Indeed," according to Darrell M. Trent, former
Deputy Secretary of Transportation, "if we do not allow
ourselves to think of our struggle against terrorism
as warfare, we shall surely fail to -meet one of the
gravest challenges of this generation." In the words
of Susan Weaver, moreover, "the first political task
at hand on the issue of terrorism is to cut the idea
of terrorism loose from the connection it now has in
many Western liberal minds with notions of national
liberation and social justice; only then can terror
be viewed plainly as a crime and a threat. But their
second task is to establish another kind of connection
and make people see terrorism not as just a random
occurrence 9but as a tactic in the Soviet war against
"
the West.
Yet, as Paul Henze, former National Security official,
says, "It is in the nature of the operations that support
terrorism that very little proof of their origin is
going to be produced--all the more so when Soviet secret
operatives are doing it. They are not only the world's
most experienced in clandestine techniques; they work
for a government which enjoys a complete lack of ac-
35Ibid., p. 6.
36Ibid., p. 8.
37Cline and Alexander
, op. cit., p. 8.
38Darrell M. Trent,
"The Deadly Game of Terrorism," The
Stanford Magazine, Fall 1982, p. 33.
Susan Weaver, "The Political Uses of Terror," The Wall
Street Journal, July 26, 1979.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
countability to a legislature, a free press or any
other form of public opinion...(t)he Soviets didn't
invent terrorism any more than the Mafia invented crime.
Both simply capitalize on their relationship in remarkably
parallel ways."40
Marx himself observed thifii "violence itself is
an economic (form of) power. Active measures are
thus usually but not always the "quiet war."
Terrorism was employed by the Russian Communists
very early. During the Russian insurrection of 1905,
Lenin instructed the Combat Committee of St. Petersburg
Bolsheviks to provide "recipes for making bombs" and
"begin military training"..."to kill a spy or blow
up a police station...raid a bank" so that hundreds
could be trained who tomorrow will "be leading hundreds
of thousands."42 According to Romerstein, such "tactics
were developed by both the Communists and tae Nazis
in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s." Each
learned from and emulated the other. Both used terrorism
as a means of seizing power and both "employed state
terror as4en instrument of their rule after coming
to power.
Romerstein sums up as follows: "Thus for Communism
no less than for Nazism, terrorism has long been accepted
in ideology and practice as a central tactic of the
struggle for power and an essential method of rule.""
Assassination too is encompassed in the term active
measures. Part of the broader concept of "wet affairs,"
40Paul B. Henze, "Soviets Are the Mafia of Terrorism,"
Street Journal, June 15, 1984, p. 31.
Marx, pas Kapital, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), p. 779,
Z5 quoted by Cline and Alexander, ibid.
V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1972), Vol. 9, pp. 345-6, as quoted by Herbert Romerstein,
Soviet Support for International Terrorism, (Washington,
D.C.: The Foundation for Democratic Education, Inc.,
49381) , p. 7.
Ibid., p. 7.
44See Part II of this study.
45The question of Soviet anti-Semitism and a specific
example of a Soviet propaganda line supported by active
measures tasking is treated in the second part of this
study.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
(mokevve dela) to use the KGB term, whereby blood is
shed as in sabotage, assassination often appears to
fall into the province of Communist surrogates for
carrying out the actual murders. There is strong
evidence, examined especially by Clair Sterling and
Paul Henze, mentioned above, that the Bulgarian secret
service plotted the attempt on the life of Pope John
Paul II. It is inconceivable, Western experts say,
that the Bulgarian service could have entertained such
a plan without at least the early knowledge and approval
of its Soviet control mechanism.
Deception
The overall philosophy of deception is an important
part of Soviet global strategy and it too is incorporated
into the active measures program.47 "The number one
theme of Soviet deception," according to John Lenczowski
of the National Security Council staff, is that "the
Soviets are not Communists anymore" that they do not,
in fact, have unlimited objectives and that a
"spheres-of-influence" arrangement is possible between
the U. S. and the USSR. Soviet disinformation, he says,
attempts to promote the impression that "hawks" and
"doves" fgist in the Kremlin--both ideologues and prag-
matists.
46An earlier "active measures" operation, although not
known at that time by the name, was the Soviet assassination
of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. Soviet "wet affairs"
are carried out by the 13th Department of the KGB First
Chief Directorate, the "executive action" component.
It carries out joint operations with the 9th (or Soviet
emigres) Department of the same directorate. "Wet
Affairs," Survey, (London: London Institute for Defense
j9d Strategic Studies, Winter, 1983), p. 71.
"Deception is a singularly important aspect of Soviet
strategy. It is also a national talent in the Soviet
Union. It is an integral part of this planning process."-
Samuel T. Cohen and Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., "Selective
Targeting and Soviet Deception," Armed Forces Journal
International, September 1983, p. 101.
John Lenczowski, director of European and Soviet Affairs,
National Security Council, speaking on May 16,
1984,
at a conference on "Soviet Disinformation and the
News,"
presented by the Heritage Foundation, Washington,
D.C.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Forgery
The story of active measures would be woefully
incomplete without mention of Soviet forgery operations.
They too are an aspect of disinformation and deception.
Forgeries, of course, are documents which, although
false, are crafted by the KGB to appear genuine. They
are often falsified or altered versions of U.S. official
publications or communications; on occasion, they are
totally fabricated.
Forgeries are usually intended for specific targets,
such as a particular foreign government but often are
directed at the people of an entire country or region.
Forgeries, as with other classes of clandestine political
warfare operations, are conducted by Service A, the
First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
Fortunately, much of the effect of many Soviet
forgeries has been neutralized by quick and efficient
response by the CIA and FBI in informing the audience
of the results of their analysis of the motivation
for the operation and the errors of the forgery itself.
Unfortunately, as with many Soviet operations, the
truth has difficulty reaching all the recesses where
the original Communist untruth has penetrated. The
lie often outruns the truth.
Primary targets of Soviet forgeries are the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S. itself.
Third World countries are also targetted by the Soviets.
The usual propaganda themes are the basis of the forgery
motive: the United States is racist, a war monger,
imperialist, and manipulative of Third World and NATO
governments. The forgery is often accepted--although
often, to their credit, not--by the target audiences,
publicized locally and picked up and replayed by the
Soviet media.
Although many Soviet forgeries show an increasing
level of sophistication some forgery operations are
poorly--or hastily--assembled and show carelessness.
Nonetheless, forgeries are an especially ernicious
and virulent form of Soviet active measures.
4$
The Two Superpowers Theory
Soviet active measures, according to Lenczowski,
follow the open propaganda theme of "the two superpowers."
49Details of Soviet forgeries are contained in Congressional
reports, including, House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence (HPSCI), "Soviet Covert Action (The
Forgery Offensive)," and HPSCI, "Soviet Active Measures."
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Lenczowski is one of a number of observers of Soviet
behavior to see a hidden meaning behind "the two super-
powers" concept. This theme, in the terms of Soviet
strategic deception, promotes the idea that the U.S. and
the USSR are both "superpowers," the Soviet Union being
placed at once on the same level of development as
the United States, a primary goal of Soviet propaganda.
This idea at the same time promotes the "mirror image"
view of East-West relations (sometimes called the "Samantha.
concept) that we, the people and leaders of the two
countries, are really just the same after all. Logically
if we find nuclear war "unthinkable," this theory holds,
the Soviets also find it so when in fact the Soviets
have developed over the years a complex doctrine on
nuclear warfare including extensive and expensive civil
defense planning. Plainly, rather than finding it
unthinkable, they have given nuclear war a great deal
of thought. Finally, the "two superpowers" idea morally
equates the two countries and their systems, a perception
which Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, finds so pernicious and the errors of which
she has struggled against so tirelessly at the U.N. and
elsewhere.
Gaining Credibility
Other observers see similar Soviet basic themes
gaining credibility among analysts in the West. Although
there may be some substance in these themes, these
observers suspect they are the "product of a deliberate
and persistent Soviet disinformation campaign," according
to Joseph D. Douglass, 5dlr., a specialist on the subject
of Soviet deception. Prominent among these themes
are:
* The Soviet Union will change.
* There are "differences" among Soviet leaders.
* U.S.-Soviet "convergence" is possible.
* No attention should be paid to official Communist
ideology in the Soviet Union.--it is not relevant.
* The Soviet Union is defense oriented and threatens
no one; it does not seek strategic sup9fiority
nor does it want first strike capability.
50Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. , "Soviet Disinformation," Strategic
Vie, Winter 1981.
Ibid., pp. 18, 19.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
In an Interagency Intelligence Study the Executive
Branch has identified the objectives of Soviet policy
in promoting these themes as follows:
* To confuse world public opinion regarding the
* To create a favorable environment for the execution
aggressive nature of certain Soviet policies.
of Soviet foreign policy.
opinions against U.S. military and political
policies and programs which are perceived as
threatening by the Soviet Union.
Dangerous Reefs
No stranger to deception operations, himself,
on April 5, 1940, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda
of Nazi Germany, gave a secret briefing to selected
German journalists during which he is quoted as saying:
Up to now we have succeeded in leaving
the enemy in the dark concerning Germany's
real goal, just as before 1932 our domestic
foes never saw where we were going or that
our oath of legality was just a trick. We
wanted to come to power legally, but we did
not want to use power legally.... They could
have suppressed us. They could have arrested
a couple of us in 1925 and that would have
been that, the end. No, they let us through
the danger zone. That's exactly how it was
in foreign policy too.... In 1933 a French
premier ought to have said (and if I had
been the French premier I would have said
it) : "The new Reich Chancellor is the man
who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and
that. This man cannot be tolerated in our
vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But they didn't do it. They left us alone
and let us slip through the risky zone, and
we were able to sail around all dangerous
reefs. And when we were done, and well arme91
better than they, then they started the war.
52Soviet Active Measures, Hearings Before the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives,
gyly 13, 14, 1982.
As quoted by Paul Johnson, Modern Times, The World
From the Twenties to the Eighties, (New York: Harper
and Row, 1983), p. 341.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
The valuable lesson, learned from World War II
about the Nazis, unfortunately was lost with resp Ht
to the Soviets. The "risky zone" is long since past.
Very little has been written about deception operations
because they are among the most closely guarded secrets
of intelligence services and general staffs. Since
World War II the Soviets have, unheralded, developed
a sophisticated and well coordinated system of military
and political deception. The Russian word maskirovka
includes not only military "camouflage and covert maneuvers,
but also political deception desigpggd to protect the
secrecy of military operations..." Jiri Valenta,
a student of Soviet affairs, makes an interesting point
with a certain irony when he writes that, "In the case
of [the Soviet invasion of] Czechoslovakia, [Prime
Minister Alexander] Dubcek admitted to being surprised
and deceived. But this may have been due more to his,
and some of his colleagues', political naivete a99
self-deception than to skillful Soviet strategem."
This observation could well apply to many cases of
"successful" Soviet deception operations; naivete and
self-deception play a very large role in Soviet schemes.
As Lenin told Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Chek~
the then KGB, "Tell them what they want to hear."
Within the scope of strategic deception and important
aspects of active measures are Soviet disinformation
(dezinformatsia) operations. One of the many purposes
of disinfortion, of course, is to hide Soviet strategic
intentions.
54As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Communists and
Rzis learned from and emulated each other.
Jiri Valenta, "Soviet Use of Surprise and Deception,"
Survival, Mar/Apr. 82, p. 51. Valenta is associate
professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European
Y~udies, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.
Valenta, op. cit., p. 59.
57As quoted by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. , "Soviet Disinforma-
on," Strategic Review, Winter, 1981, p. 18.
A purpose clearly explained in the "Soviet Military
Encyclopedia," according to Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.,
"Soviet Disinformation," Strategic Review, Winter,
1981, pp. 16-26.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Paul B. Henze, a former high government official
and a longtime student of Soviet behavior has this
to say about disinformation:
It is impossible to draw a clear boundary
between misinformation and jinformation.
The two categories are part of a continuum
which in Soviet practice extends from distortion
to total falsification, misrepresentation
and forgery. All parts of this spectrum
are interconnected and consciously manipulated
to achieve desired results. Thus false informa-
tion planted abroad and seemingly originating
from sources that have no connection with
the USSR or Eastern Europe is fed back into
the Soviet propaganda system, cited in the
Soviet press as authoritative confirmation
of views which the CPSU propagandists want
to spread, and then it is disgorged by TASS
and Novosti in their international services.
Thus spewed out again into international
information channels, it becomes self-confirming.
Sometimes the process goes through several
cycles. Not only current news, but even
scholarly research and intelligence are influ-
enced.
To those familiar with Soviet techniques
and objectives, such operations are relatively
easy to identify, but often difficult to
prove. To accomplish their purposes, Soviet
propagandists and KGB operatives do not rely
only on the credulity and predisposition
to believe of Western and Third World journalists,
writers and intellectuals. They exploit
the readiness of reporters to accept cash
or other favours in return for doing their
bidding. In Soviet usage, dezinformatsiva
means deliberately concocted, falsely attributed
or distorted information brought to the surface
through ostensibly non-Soviet channels or
outlets. Of course, the more legtimate
(and unwitting) these are, the better.
59Paul B. Henze, Survey, Autumn-Winter, 1983, Vol. 27,
pp. 118, 9. Henze has done much original work on Soviet
involvement in the Bulgarian plot to assassinate Pope
John Paul II.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Soviet propaganda themes appear at increasing
frequency in Western media, including those of the
U.S., in print and on the screens of motion picture
theaters and home television sets. This realm of activity
is called by the Soviets "cultural warfare."
According to Michael Miklaucic, of the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Soviets
have by means of active measures gained the igher
moral ground" in the global ideological struggle.6
The semantics question, which some even call the
"semantics war," and which is closely related to the
disinformation issue, encompasses the problem of the
misuse of words and terms by the Western media, often
spontaneously, often in response to Soviet guidance.
"Peace" and "democracy" are words misappropriated by
the Communists long ago. More recently, Afghan freedom
fighters are termed "rebels," and terrorists are called
members of "liberation movements." Murders are perpetrated
by "right wing death squads" never by left-wino death
squads, although sometimes by "guerrillas," and so
forth. Some of these semantic twists are Soviet inspired,
some possibly not but serve Soviet objectives nonetheless.
It is known that the Soviet intelligence services
and their surrogate services in Communist countries
devote considerable resources to the penetration of
foreign media. Foreign nationals are recruited as
"agents of influence," working clandestinely under
Bloc direction or to serve as collaborators with Bloc
guidance, to make things happen as the Soviets want
them to happen.
In the last few years, such Soviet operations
have surfaced in the press in a number of countries
from Scandinavia, France and the Netherlands to Southeast
Asia. It is presumed that others have not been publicized.
The practice is widespread even if publicity of the
practice is not. Nevertheless, numerous representatives
of the American media have said publicly that for various
reasons their own profession in the United States is
free from such penetration. It is truly remarkable
that the U.S. armed forces and intelligence services
(again, based on public records) have been penetrated
as have American high technology firms and other KGB/GRU
targets, yet, although a target almost everywhere in
the world and of unquestioned importance especially
60Michael Miklaucic, "Soviet Active Measures and How
to Cope," Washington Times, January 6, 1984, p. 20.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
on the American scene, the media in this country have
not been targetted by the Soviets. One can only ask
why?
Foreign Broadcasting
While the IID directs Soviet overt propaganda
abroad, including overt radio as well as press activitfts,
the ID manages Soviet clandestine radio programming.
To complement their overt foreign language inter-
national radio broadcasts, the Soviets maintain a sig-
nificant clandestine broadcasting capability as well,
still another aspect of active measures. For example,
the National Voice of Iran, ostensibly broadcasting
from within that country, is the official voice of
the Tudeh, or Communist, Party of Iran and actually
transmits from Radio Baku in the Soviet Caucasus.
The same transmitters also broadcast official Soviet
programs in Iranian languages. During the 1979-81
hostage crisis in Teheran, this clandestine Soviet
radio station transmitted false information and inflammatory
rhetoric in contrast to official Radio Moscow which
was on occasion cautious in its coverage. The National
Voice of Iran even replayed S6p2vipt KGB-inspired disinfor-
mation from other countries.
Even Sports
The combined Olympic team fielded by the Soviet
Union, when it attends the Olympics, is largely made
up of professional sports organizations, the Dinamo
Sporting Club and the Central Army Sports Club (ZSKA).
61"Soviet Propaganda Campaign Against NATO," U.S. Arms
Control Agency, Al.
6l Soviet Active Measures Against the United States,
8lexandria, Virginia: Western Goals, 1984), p. 34.
Edward J. Derwinski, former Representative from Illinois,
currently Counselor of the Department of State, described
Radio Baku and other Soviet radio broadcasting efforts
worldwide in an article "The Radio War," The Journal
of Electronic Defense, March/April 1981, pp. 21-26.
He also wrote of the electronic jamming of U. S. broadcasting
to the East at a cost to the Soviets of twice what
the U.S. spends on the programming. Amidst all the
East-West "wars," there is this "radio war"--the struggle
of the West to pierce the iron curtain electronically,
to get the truth into the Soviet Bloc and the herculean
efforts of the latter to obliterate the truth, quite
literally.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
The former belongs to the KGB. The latter, the ZSKA,
is part of Soviet military intelligence (GRU), the
military counterpart of the KGB. These two sports
organizations are in strong competition, as indeed
are their parent organizations, the KGB and GRU, themselves.
In the Soviet Union, sports and athletes are dedicated
to the enhancement of the party and the state. Moreover,
the special services of athletes and sportsmen are
put to use extensively by the intelligence organizations,
the KGB and GRU. The Spetsnaz, Soviet military special
forces--the Soviet "Green Berets," if you will--provide
the athletes for the ZSKA. The KGB has its own special
forces, a counterpart to the Spetsnaz, which supplies
athletes for the Dinamo Sporting Club.
These troops, the Spetsnaz and the KGB's own version,
are an elite fighting force devoted in wartime to operations
behind enemy lines, diversionary tactics and the assassina-
tion of foreign leaders. Their mission also embraces
intelligence collection (including reconnaissance),
deception, sabotage, terrorism and guerrilla warfare.
The mission of the GRU is essentially military, while
that of the KGB is political and economic. It is from
these special forces that the Dinamo and ZSKA sports
competitors come.
Personnel of these Soviet unconventional forces
receive familiarization tours abroad as members of
Soviet sports teams. Soviet athletes are not merely
winning medals when competing abroad; they are preparing
for clandestine activities or unconventional warfare
roles; in effect, "casing" their target. It might be
added that Soviet strategic plans include the employment
of elements of "underground" Communist parties in the
West in support of Soviet unconventional units in time
of conflict.64
Regarding athletes in the Spetsnaz, a former profes-
sional Soviet army officer had this to say:
The Soviet Union needs prestige, and
one way of providing this is by winning Olympic
medals. The country needs an organization
with draconian discipline to squeeze the
maximum effort out of the athletes. At the
same time, the Spetsnaz needs athletes of
the highest caliber who have the opportunity
to visit areas in which they may have to
operate in time of war.
64Frederic N. Smith, Defense and Foreign Affairs, June
1983.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
The athletes, for their part, need op-
portunities for training and need to belong
to an organization that can reward them lavishly
for athletic achievement, give them apartments
and cars, award commissioned ranks in the
forces and arrange trips outside the Soviet
Union.
The Spetsnaz thus provides a focal point
for the interests of state prestige, military
intelligence and individuals who have dedicated
themselves to sports.
The ZSKA sends its athletes all over
the world, and the fact that these athletes
have military ranks is not hidden. The KGB,
which also has the role of assassinating
enemy VIPs, has its own similar organiza-
tion.... They are ordinary but carefully
selected and trained soldiers, top-grade
athletes, foreigners and, at the head of
all gf these, the professional intelligence
men.
Soviet athletes are thus carefully selected and
very well cared for. In a word, they are "special;"
members of an elite service. Athletes too are elements
in the overall scheme of Soviet active measures.
65Victor Suvorov (a pseudonym), "Spetsnaz: The Soviet
Union's Special Forces," Military Review, March 1984.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
THE WESTERN RESPONSE
The Ultimate Weapon
According to Sidney Hook, the philosopher:
(T)he ultimate weapon of the West is
not the hydrogen bomb or any other super
weapon but the passion for freedom and the
willingness to die for it if necessary.
Once the Kremlin is convinced that we will
use this weapon to prevent it from subjugating
the world to its will, we will have the best
assurance of peace. Once the Kremlin believes
that this willingness to fight for freedom
at all costs is absent, that it has been
eroded by neutralist fears and pacifist wishful
thinking, it will blackmail the free countries
of the world into capitulation and succeed
where Hitler failed.
Our inability to comprehend Soviet strategy is
connected to our misunderstanding of Soviet objectives.
Sir James Goldsmith cites the Carthaginians of old
who, although good warriors, were essentially a trading
people. "They never understood the Romans," he says,
"who were military and imperial." We too are a mercantile
people, like the ancient Carthaginians, Sir James says,
and we seem incapable of understanding the Soviets.
To combat Soviet strategy, the disinformation content
of Soviet active measures, according to Sir James,
rather than restrictions and controls, "we need more
information, more facts. We need better journalism,"
he says.2 The light of truth, once again, is the best
defense.
To quote Brian Crozier again, "The security of
a nation-State or of an alliance is concerned with
territorial integrity, ntional sovereignty and the
defense of a way of life."' He goes on to say:
It is not enough to know and understand:
it is also necessary to act. In a world
war fought largely by means other than military,
1Sidney Hook, Political Power and Personal Freedom,
New York: Criterion Books, 1959), p. 426.
Sir James Goldsmith, remarks before the Defense Strategy
Forum sponsored by the National Strategy Information
center, in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 1984.
Crozier, op. cit., p. 154.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
the search for security cannot be confined
to an analysis of military and weapons capabili-
ties, useful though these may be in themselves.
Nor is a purely defensive posture enough.
Containment has brought us to the brink of
defeat in World War Three. A more active
policy is required if we are to survive.
How can the West, especially the United States,
deal with the Soviet active measures offensive? Our
system is such that we cannot respond in like terms.
According to Rett Ludwikowski:
Moscow has not attempted to abolish
the Catholic Church or the relics of private
ownership in Poland, aware of the Poles'
strong attachment to these institutions.
It is characteristic of Soviet Policy that
(in both foreign and internal affairs) Russians
try to insinuate themselves into places they
find weak. But when they encounter strong
opponents and the prospect of swift victory
seems uncertain, they will withdraw.
Accordingly, the Russians will never
attempt to attack the United States directly
except in some tremendous crisis. Rather,
they will endeavor to weaken America's inter-
national position, to assist America's opponents,
to incite unrest among America's neighbors,
and to spread communist ideas among Third
World countries.
The Best Hope
"The best hope that the free world remains free,"
according to M.R.D. Foot of the University of Manchester,
"lies in an efficient, constitutional freedom-loving--but
adequately secret--CIA and FBI."? Our intelligence
and counterintelligence capabilities must be strengthened.
Another important part of the answer is to continue
to illuminate Soviet and Bloc activities in the West,
to subject to the light of day the realm of Soviet
active measures. In the East, again the prescription
4Crozier, op. cit., p. 155.
5Rett Ludwikowski, "Over There," Policy Review, No. 22,
gall 1982, p. 83.
M.R.D. Foot, Professor of Modern History, University
of Manchester, in The Economist, London, March 15,
1980, p. 58.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
is the light of truth: to continue to reinforce the
Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty--and
for Cuba, Radio Marti--to carry to the peoples of the
Soviet system the facts of the world as it really is
and the hope of eventual freedom.
In the words of an ancient Chinese sage: "Now
the way to make the country secure is to prize precaution.
Now that you are awa, a of the dangers, misfortune is
left at a distance." For first we must know. Then
we must muster the will. And then we must act. But
first we must know.
One final quotation: "The history of failure
in war can be summed up in two words: Too late. Too
late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential
enemy; too late in realizing the mortal danger; too
late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible
forces for resistance; too late in standing with one's
friends." -- General Douglas MacArthur.
7Wu Ch' i, as quoted in Sun T' zu, The Art of War, translated
by Samuel B. Griffin, (Oxford University Press,), p. 155.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
PART II
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
TWO SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONS
by
Lawrence B. Sulc
CONTENTS
Of Lies and Myths
The Left and the Right
The Great Socialist Alliance
The Berlin-Moscow Axis and Its Socialist Revolutions
Totalitarian Socialism -- Emulation and Cooperation
National Socialism
Other Socialists, Other Fascists
Terrorism and State Terror
Class and Race
Liberalism
Conclusion
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
This small book is really two small books. In
addition to an overview of Soviet active measures employed
by the Soviets in the "quiet war" they are waging against
the West--the first part of the book--a description
is presented in this, the second part, of a Soviet
propaganda theme that has found its way into Western
thought. It is persistent and pernicious and has taken
root deeply.
A number of prominent authors have explained the
truth of the matter and some inklings have even emerged
in the popular press. By and large, nonetheless, the
myth--the lie--remains fixed in the minds of scholars
and the general public alike.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Of Lies and Myths
President John Kennedy once said,
"The great enemy of truth is very
often not the lie--deliberate,
contrived and dishonest, but the
myth--persistent, persuasive and
unrealistic."
To promote a myth--"persistent, persuasive and
unrealistic"--in a "deliberate, contrived and dishonest"
fashion, is of course a lie, as well, and a more dangerous
lie at that. This is the way of the Soviet system.
The Left and The Right
For many decades, it has been an objective of
communist propaganda to characterize communism and
fascism, especially Nazism, the German variant, as
at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The horrors
of Nazism--totalitarianism, racism, armed aggression
and the countless other evils associated with Hitler
and an armed and rampaging Germany--are placed on the
right. Socialism, peace, progress and social justice,
embodied in the Soviet Union which fought and destroyed
fascism, are on the left. "The myth of the left-right
syndrome", according to Richard Vetterli and William
E. Fort, "has helped to perpetuate the belief that
communism and fascism are dissimilar."1
This communist theme has been uncritically accepted
by millions and given currency by huge quantities of
unwitting assistance, especially by Western intellectuals.
Its promoters, in communist circles, now in the second
generation, can claim, fairly or not, fabulous success.
They have created or helped to create this great myth,
helpful to communism.
Although not a major Soviet propaganda theme,
according to Stanislav Levchenko, a former Soviet intel-
ligence officer who specialized in KGB "active measures"
operations, the concept of a dichotomy along communist/Nazi,
left/right lines has long been promoted by the CPSU.
As such, Levchenko points out, the active measures
apparat of the Soviet party and government structure
is tasked continuously to further propaganda themes.
Levchenko, now working in the West to expose Soviet
1Richard Vetterli and William E. Fort, Jr., The Socialist
Revolution, (New York: Clute International Corporation,
1983), p. 5.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
machinations, speaks frequently on the subject of Soviet
propaganda and corresponding active measures operations.
There are, of course, advantages to the Soviets
to this right/left placement. The horrors of the totali-
tarian right, according to this Communist theme, are
thus distanced from the Socialist world on the left.
The murder of much of Europe's Jewish community, for
example, according to this Communist idea, was a unique
phenomenon of the right. Jews, and others revolted
by the Nazi persecution and death camps, are thus drawn--or
driven--to the left, away from the right. Conservatives
and many other anti-communists, being on the right
of the political spectrum, find themselves perilously
close to the fascists in the communist world view.
Heed the conservatives, move to the right, the message
reads, and at once you are associated with the worst
aspects of Nazi totalitarianism; to the left, however,
there resides peace and justice.
The tyrannies of communism and fascism are clones.
The assignment of one to the left and the other to
the right is immensely deceptive. Both are forms of
revolutionary socialism. "(T)he collectionist systems
of Communism and Fascism," as Vetterli and Fort point
out, "belong not on the opposite extremes of the political
spectrum, but, on the contrary, their characteristics
demand th~t they share a position side by side on the
far left."
The Communists and the National Socialists were
allies for a period from 1939 to 1941. In 1939 Poland
was divided between them and Hitler was freed to attack
in the West. By this pact World War II was thus allowed
to begin. The short but decisive alliance between
the two revolutionary socialist powers permitted Germany
to concentrate its forces against the Western Allies.
Large shipments of Soviet iron ore provided steel for,
and Caucasian petroleum fueled, the Nazi panzer divi-
sions. For its part, the Soviets absorbed the independent
Baltic states (illegally occupied to this day) and
struck at Finland.
On October 31, 1939, V. M. Molotov, Soviet Commissar
for Foreign Affairs, reported to the Supreme Soviet
2Vetterli and Fort, ibid, p. 2.
3The U.S. Government maintains diplomatic relations
with the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian legations
in Washington, D.C., and does not recognize the Soviet
occupation of the Baltic states.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
about the war, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact which had
recently been signed, and about the Soviet Union's
new ally, Germany, its enemy, Poland, and peace: "We
have always held that a strong Germany is an indispensible
condition for a durable peace in Europe," Molotov claimed
magnanimously. "Today our relations with the German
state", he said, "are based on our friendly relations,
on our readiness to support Germany's efforts for peace
and at the same time on a desire to contribute in every
way to the development of Soviet-German economic relations
to the mutual benefit of both states.
"One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism
as well as any other ideological system", the foreign
commissar pointed out, in an expansive mood, nowhere
demanding the usual ideological monopoly for Communist
doctrine.
"Germany is in the position of a state which is
striving for the earliest termination of the war and
for peace," Molotov explained, "while Britain and France,
which only yesterday were declaiming against aggression,
are in favor of continuing the war and are opposed
to the conclusion of peace." And with regard to Poland,
Molotov said, "... one swift blow... first by the German
army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was4left
of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty..."
The Soviet Union got its strong Germany, so in-
dispensible, in Molotov's thinking, for a durable peace.
Indeed, the Soviet Union helped to make Germany strong
and gave Hitler the free hand he needed to strike in
the West--against neutral countries as well as the
British and French. It got its friendly relations
with Germany too, for a time. In fact, Stalin refused
to believe it at first when Hitler broke their treaty
in June 1941 and thrust into the Soviet Union itself.
The Berlin-Moscow Axis and Its Socialist Revolutions
In the eyes of "sincere Stalinist and Trotskyist
partisans of the Berlin-Moscow axis," according to
Sidney Hook, the American philosopher, Bolshevism had
accomplished a 'social revolution'... the transfer of
4Molotov's Report to the Supreme Soviet, (New York:
Workers Library Publishers, 1939).
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
property in the basic instruments of production fXothe capitalist class to the party bureaucrats."','
Totalitarian Socialism -- Emulation and Cooperation
Following the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917, the
Communist party under Lenin and, subsequently under
Stalin, himself, elaborated throughout the Soviet Union
an immensely effective state control mechanism. The
pervasive and efficient secret police and vast labor
camp network of this control system had functioned
in the USSR for 15 years before Hitler assumed power
in Germany. The components of Soviet Communist totalitarian-
ism--the party, the secret police, the prison camps--stood
as remarkably effective models for the leaders of National
Socialism in Germany. The identity of party and government,
the interlocking mechanisms for restraint and manipula-
tion--indeed, the use of terror for political control--were
all functioning aspects for a decade and a half in
the Soviet Union by the time the Nazi regime was put
into place.
According to Adam Ulam, in writing about the Communist
collectivization in the 1930s of Soviet agriculture,
The dimension of the holocaust which
accompanied the forcible collectivization
awed even its maker. In a conversation during
World War II with Churchill, Stalin acknowledged
that the ordeal surpassed in its severity
even those disaster-filled first years of
the Nazi invasion.
It was a demonstration, unique in recent
history, of how much can be accomplished
by force and violence. And this violence
was not exerted against a foreign nation,
an isolated class, a racial minority; it
5Sidney Hook, Political Power and Personal Freedom,
New York: Criterion Books, 1959), p. 378.
This point is the key one to many economists and social
scientists, not who owns the factors of production
but who controls and benefits from them. Both under
Nazism and under Communism the party elites controlled
and benefited from the creation of wealth. Party membership
rather than membership in the capitalist class is the
key issue for party membership confers the requisite
status and the resulting power. These conditions prevail
in Communist countries today.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
was directed against one's own people, with
victims' sons and brothers serv~ng as the
instrument of their own oppression.
Foreign Communists were not spared. Roy Medvedev,
Soviet Marxist historian, is quoted by Paul Johnson,
the British historian, as noting that,
"It is a terrible paradox that most European Communist
leaders and activists who lived in the USSR perished,
while most of those who were in prison in their native
lands in 1937-8 survived." Stalin and the Nazis exchanged
lists of "wanted" persons, as well, Johnson points
out. In Soviet prisons, through which about ten percent
of the Russian people passed, "torture was used," Johnson
says, "on a scale which even the Nazis were later to
find it difficult to match."
The Nazis imported the Russian camp system, as
well, Johnson explains, but there were always more
Soviet camps, most of them larger than their Nazi counter-
parts and holding more prisoners. The total deaths
caused by Stalin's policy during this period was about
ten million, Medvedev claps, 4.5 million of them victims
during the period 1936-9.
Johnson also tells of Stalin's secret negotiations
with Hitler to facilitate the former's purge of his
army. In 1936, Stalin persuaded the Nazi government
to provide forged evidence of secret Soviet-German
military contacts. The Gestapo provided the information.
Marshal Tukhachevsky, commander of the Red Army, and
other senior officers were arrested and killed. Eventually
30,000 men, about half of the total Soviet officer
corps, were executed. The purge then spread to the
party and *;I, the end about one million members in all
were killed.l
Hitler like Lenin began his political career as
a socialist. He joined the German Workers Party in
1919. Changing its name to the National Socialist
7Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era, (New York:
Whe Viking Press, 1973) p. 290.
Roy Medvedev, as quoted by Paul Johnson in Modern Times,
The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, (New York:
9arper and Row, 1983), p. 303.
Ibid., p. 303.
11Ibid., p. 304.
Ibid., p. 391.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
German Workers Party, the "Nazis" were joined by the
German Socialist Party in 1922.
Hitler made it abundantly clear from the start
that his was a socialist revolution. "I have learned
a great deal from Marxism," Hitler told Hermann Rauschning.
"The whole of National Socialism is based on it ... all
these new methods of political struggle are essentially
Marxist in origin. All I had to do wa~2take over these
methods and adapt them to our purpose.
The German dictator also told Rauschning, according
to the latter, that German socialism "does not change
the external order of things, Ii3 orders solely the
relationship of man to the st~te." "We are socializing
the people.", Hitler said. An even more telling
statement by Hitler was his comparison of Soviet socialism
and German National Socialism. "It is not Germany
that will turn Bolshevist, but Bolshevism that will
become a sort of National Socialism," Hitler told
Rauschning. "Besides, there is more that binds us
to Bolshevism than separates us from it," Hitler explained.
"There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling,
which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there
are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance
for this circumstance," Hitler said, "and given orders
that forme; Communists are to be admitted to the party
at once."'-' Josef Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propa-
ganda, made the point in mystical terms. "To be a
socialist," declared Goebbels, "is to submit the I
to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual
to the whole ."l6
According to Hanns Johst, Hitler once told him
that "National Socialism derives... national resolution
from the bourgeoise tradition, v ptla} creative socialism
from the teachings of Marxism. Beyond "national
resolution" what did National Socialism derive from
12Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, (New
G.P. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1940), p. 186.
Ibid.
14Paul Johnson, Modern Times, The World From the Twenties
to the Eighties, (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 293,
1'Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, (New York: G.
Putnam, and Sons, 1939), p. 131.
Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 233, as quoted
Vetterli and Fort, op. cit., p. 32.
David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, (New
York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966), p. 61, quoting
from an interview Hitler gave Hanns Johst, Frankfurter
Volksbatt, January 27, 1934.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
the bourgeoise? Numerous observers have spoken of
the cooperation of German capitalists with the Nazis.
Hook cautioned as follows, however:
Nothing indicates so eloquently the
sterility of Leninist theory as the view
that fascism is the last phase of finance
capitalism.... It assumes that the individual
capitalist, who as a capitalist is interested
only in profit, is willing to sacrifice himself
for the interests of the capitalist
class--in actuality, the interests of a few
finance capitalists. Not only is this the
sheerest mysticism, it is demonstrably false.
Finance capitalists--insofar as any were
left in Hitler's Germany--took their orders
from the Nazi party and not vice versa.
Nor is there any evidence that their counsel
had greater weight in Nazi pjgty circles
than that of other social groups.
Far from big business corrupting his socialism,
it was the other ay around," adds Paul Johnson, the
British historian. " "He had no intention, like Russia,
of 'liquidating' the possessing class," Rauschning
said of Hitler. "On the contrary, he would compel
it to contribute by its abilities toward the building
up of a new order."0 According to Rauschning, Hitler
explained to him thus: "Why need we trouble to socialize
banks and factories? We socialize human beings.
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski concluded
"from all the facts available... that fascist and communist
totalitarian dictatorship are basically alike, or at
any rate more nearly like each other than any other
system 25 government, including earlier forms of auto-
cracy." "It is only natural," they went on, "that
the regimes, conceiving of themselves as bitter enemies,
dedicated to the task of liquidating each other, should
take the view that they have nothing in common. This
has happened before in history. When the Protestants
and Catholics were fighting each other in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, they very commonly denied
18Hook, op. cit., p. 376.
19Johnson, op. cit., p. 294.
20Rauschning, op. cit., p. 161.
21lbid., p. 193.
22Carl J. Friedrich and ZbigniewK. Brzezinski, Totalitarian
Dictatorship and Autocracy, (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, 1961), p. 5.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
to each other the name of 'Christians' and argusd about
each other that they were not 'true churches.'"
While acknowledging important differences between
the two forms of totalitarianism, Arthur Schlesinger,
the American historian, for his part points out that,
"the similarities are vastly mere overpowering and
significant than the differences."
Other Socialists, Other Fascists
Fascism in Italy, like Nazism in Germany, had
its origins in socialism as well. Mussolini was probably
Italy's foremost Socialist before he organized the
Fascist Movement. Although not a "complete" Marxist,
according to Torquato Nanni, his biogragyer and close
friend, he was a Marxist none-the-less. Mussolini,
an "admirer of Lenin's brutal energy," left the Socialist
Party, because of its lethargy. It was his intent
to "modernize and revise" the socialist movement in
Italy, 2~rnst Nolte, the German chronicler of fascism,
notes. Revolutionary socialists were then, as they
are today, interested in power even more than ideology.
In Britain, for its part, Sir Oswald Mosley, who
founded the British Union of Fascists in 1933, also
came from the Socialist Party. The youngest member
of the Labor Party cabinet, Mosley was considered by
many to be a future prime minister. The British left,
like the left in other countries, could produce fascists
as well as Marxists., Laval in France and Quisling
in Norway, Friedrich Hayek note4 "began as socialists
and ended as Fascists or Nazis."
Always competitive, eventually Nazism and Communism
broke, but the lessons of the Soviet secret police
and labor camps, mass coercion and brutality, had been
quickly--and thoroughly--learned by the National Social-
23lbid., p. 7.
24Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center, (Boston:
Ypughton Mifflin Co., 1962), p. 59.
Torquato Nanni as quoted by Ernst Nolte, Three Faces
of Fascism, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
jg66), p. 489.
Nolte, ibid., p. 489.
27Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 28-29, as quoted
by Vitterli and Fort, op. cit., pp. 97-98.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
ists. It would be difficult to demonstrate that the
latter were any worse than their mentors in the Soviet
union. "Even Hitler's Gestapo lacked the sweeping
powers of the KGB," according to Brian Crozier, the
British student of totalitarianism.28
Both ideologies, Communism and National Socialism,
incorporated terrorism into their systems very early.
Lenin's instructions on terrorism to the Bolsheviks
of St. Petersburg were dated 1905.29 Such "tactics
were developed by both the Communists and the Nazis
in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s," Herbert Romerstein
points out. Each learned and emulated the other in
terrorism, not to mention street fighting. The uniforms
of the Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung), the infamous
"brown shirts," Romerstein observes in an aside, were
even copied from those of the Communist League of Red
Fighters (Rote Frontkampferbund).30 Both Soviet Communism
and German National Socialism, those two forms of totali-
tarian socialism, used terrorism as a means of seizing
power and both employed state terror to remain in power
once there.
What distinguished the two totalitarian systems
most was the foundation of Communism on class and of
National Socialism on race. Even this distinction
becomes blurred, however. Anti-Semitism, the hallmark
of Nazism, has been an important part of Soviet ideology
and practice for fifty years although in recent decades
it has become more institutionalized. In 1971 the
KGB formed a Jewish Department, John Barron reports,
under its Fifth Chief Directorate, itself created in
1970, "to annihilate intellectual dissent, stop the
upsurge of religious dissent, suppress nationalism."31
One need not be a Zionist to know what that means for
Jews in the Soviet Union today. According to Ken Jacobson,
28Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, (New Rochelle,
N Y.: Arlington House, 1978), p. 133.
2?V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1972), Vol. 9, pp. 345-6, as quoted by Herbert Romerstein
in Soviet Support for International Terrorism, (Washington,
D.C.: The Foundation for Democratic Education, Inc.,
1881), p. 7.
3~Ibid., p. 7.
John Barron, KGB. The Secret Work of Soviet Secret
Agents, (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 22.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
director of Middle East Affairs of the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith, "the Soviet Union is the center
of anti-Semitism in the world today."
It is interesting--but not surprising--that the
contemporary neo-Nazi movement in the U. S. and Europe
shares with the Soviet Union its anti-Semitism and
its admiration for the Palestine Liberation Organi-
zation. The September 1980 bombing at the Munich beer
festival which killed 13 people and injured 212 has
been linked by the German police to members of the
neo-Nazi group called the "Military Sports Group Hoffman."
According to the West German press, members of the
Hoffman group trained with the PLO in Lebanon and had
taken part in public meetings with the PLO. Early
the following month, a bomb exploded outside a Paris
synagogue killing three people and injuring 33. A
neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for that bombing,
and the French press reported that French police linked
the bombing to the Government of Libya.
There is evidence that the Soviets support, or
even establish, "fascist" groups outside the bloc,
to bring discredit on "the right." In early 1982,
Gerhard Boeden, director of the West German Federal
Criminal Police (BKA), reported "indications that bloc
intelligence services and their German stooges are
stooping," as he put it, "to founding 'national socialist
groups' so as to be able to claim the danger of neo-Nazi
activities in the FRG" (Federal Republic of Germany).
Earlier, Radio Moscow, on January 15, 1982, Boeden
went on, reported the founding of a "nationalist socialist"
organization which "in fact did not take place until
the following day and whose founder and secretary general
is the known Communist Herbert Bormann."
Boeden charged the Soviet Union with aiding terrorism.
The PLO, he claimed, supported by the Soviets, trained
German terrorists--both leftists and rightists. As
for the "peace" movement in West Germany, Boeden explained,
"these peace demonstrations constitute a great success
for the Soviet disinformation campaign and just as
great a success for Communist alliance politics."
Although the German Communist Party never wins as much
as one percent of the vote in elections, Boeden pointed
out, "it has in this manner, with its auxiliary and
32Ken Jacobson, speaking on May 16, 1984, at a conference
on "Soviet Disinformation and the News," The Heritage
53undation, Washington, D.C.
Herbert Romerstein, Soviet Support for International
Terrorism, (Washington, D.C.: The Foundation for Democratic
Education, 1981), p. 8.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
front organizations and with its mostly innocent 'allies cI
managed to win great influence upon popular movements.
"What is not generally known," according to Vetterli
and Fort, "is the fact that not only did much of practical
and theoretical Nazism spring from socialist roots,
but so too did much of German anti-Semitism. The Jews,
having been denied membership in the early guilds and
not having been allowed to own property," they explain,
"quite naturally helped in the development of free
enterprise. As a matter of fact, the Jews exerted
a more or less consistent pressure directed toward
the breakdown of feudalism and the emergence of free
enterprise and the industrial system. Thus, they quite
naturally incurred the enmity and wrath of early social-
ists. Too, socialist revolutionaries," the authors
explain, "all over Europe contemptuously placed the
Jew as an idej5tifiable category of the upper-class
establishment."
Liberalism in Germany, a potential obstacle to
fascism and communism, was of little consequence in
the developments of the 1920s and 1930s, as explained
by Hayak:
In Germany before 1933, and in Italy
before 1922, Communists and Nazis or Fascists
clashed more frequently with each other than
with other parties. They competed for support
of the same type of mind and reserved for
each other the hatred of the heretic. But
their practice showed how closely they are
related. To both...the man with whom they
had nothing in common and with whom they
could not hope to convince was the liberal
of the old type. While to the Nazi the Communist,
and to the Communist the Nazi, and to both
the Socialist, are potential recruits who
are made of the right timber.... They know
that there can be no compromise between them
and those who believe in individual freedom.
[Hitler hated Liberalism of the old type] .. this
hatred had little occasion to show itself
in practice merely because, by the time Hitler
34Manfred Schell, Die W& U, Bonn, February 19, 1982.
35Vetterli and Fort, op. cit., p. 108.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
came to power, Liberalism was to all intents
and purposes dead in Germany,. And it was
Socialism that had killed it."-
It is put another way, by Fritz Stern, also a
student of totalitarianism. Although he deplores the
numerous reasons causing us, Stern says, "to distance
ourselves from the once comforting view that only Germans
or National Socialists could have committed so horrible
a crime" [as the Nazi holocaust], he realizes that
"Soviet, terror has claimed even more lives than the
Nazis. There is a Russian proverb that says, "When
the forest is being cut down, chips fly." The millions
of people who died in the Soviet Union are still called
"Stalin's ',38 Franz Borkenau, the German historian,
for his part, maintains that since 1929 Russia h
taken its place "among the totalitarian, fascist .15
Susan Sontag, although of the left, was right in her
trenchant assessment that "communism is in itself 4$
variant, the most successful variant of fascism.
To repeat the words of Sidney Hook, cited earlier,
"the German Fascists recapiti}ated the essential history
of the Russian Revolution." "Culturally," he added,
"Leninism must be regarded in the light of its developments
as the first Fascist movement of the twentieth century."
There it is then--"Communism... the most successful
variant of fascism." Q course, the Soviets would
want to hide the fact--they have worked so hard to
give fascism a bad name, and rightly so. They have
worked even harder to plant the banner of fascism on
the far right, but wrongly so. It doesn't belong
36Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1944), pp. 28-29 as quoted by
y4tterli and Fort, op. cit., p. 97, 98.
Fritz Stern, in a chapter entitled "The Burden of Success,
Reflections on Germany Jewry," in Art. Politics and
(New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977), p. 125.
"Aleksei Myagkov, Inside the KGB, (New York: Arlington
1use, 1983), p. 47.
Fritz Borkenau, Der Europaische Kommunismus, (Munich:
ckbd.), p. 64, as quoted by Nolte, op. cit., p. 8.
Susan Sontag, as quoted in The Nation, February 27,
l?82.
Hook, op. cit., p. 379.
42 Ibid., p. 379.
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
there; it belongs on the far left of the political
spectrum, next to Communism itself. Allowing for their
differences, they were variants of the same awful thing:
totalitarian revolutionary socialism.
Not only is Communism in the Soviet Union the
most successful form of fascism, as Sontag says, but,
according to Borkenan and Hook, it was the first.
It is painfully obvious, of course, that Communism
still exists while the other forms have vanished.
How could the notion, that communism is something
apart from fascism and that fascism did not emerge
from the left but from the right, become so firmly
implanted? Why so persistent? Moscow doubtless has
a way with words.
The massacre by the Communist Party of millions
in Ukraine in the 1930s is largely unknown in the West.
Stalin simply said it never happened. He merely denied
it repeatedly. This newer myth, this, however,
required some positive effort to give it momentum.
Eventually acquiring critical mass, as it were, it
became self-sustaining.
Another question emerges: How has this
myth--persistent, pervasive and unrealistic--this lie
--deliberate, pervasive and unrealistic--affected history?
How has this deflection of the thoughts of millions
over scores of years skewed the perceptions and judgments
of history? What will it take to put it all right?
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
Additional copies of this report may be obtained from:
THE NATHAN HALE INSTITUTE
422 First Street, S.E., Suite 208A
Washington, D.C. 20003
Permission to quote from this publication is granted
provided due acknowledgement is made.
PRICE $10.00
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
 Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2
ISBN 0-935067-05-1
Approved For Release 2010/06/15: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200720008-2