SOVIET ACTIVE MEASURES AND DISINFORMATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP89G00720R000500060008-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 6, 2014
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: May 16, 1986
• Content Type: REPORT

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SUBJECT : Speech on Soviet Act
Attached is 's u t ? yo r
speech to be given later this month on So Tet
Active Measures. The text has been viewed in
SOVA and has been approved and coordin ted with
the DO.
firat
STAT
Chie , ?reign Activities Branch
Third World ActiVities Division
Ma. ffice of Soviet Analysis
$1
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174,1.
t0,44/4444;
ftDate 16 May 1986
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16 May 1986
SOVIET ACTIVE MEASURES AND DISINFORMATION
Two years ago, on the eve of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the
national Olympics committees of 20 African and Asian countries received
leaflets threatening violence if their athletes participated in the Games.
The leaflets were signed "Ku Klux Klan." You probably remember that
incident. And you'll remember that Attorney General William French Smith
announced that the leaflets were forgeries by the Soviet political police,
the KGB. They were part of a campaign by Moscow to justify its decision
not to have Soviet athletes go to Los Angeles. They were also an effort to
discourage others from going.
Those leaflets were examples of a wide-ranging, expensive Soviet effort
to influence other countries. Putting out forgeries is one method of
trying to get across a message without having the audience know who's
sending the message. If you know that the Kremlin wants you to believe
something, you'll probably have your guard up. You'll be a bit more
skeptical than you might be if the message seems to come from some neutral
or unidentified source. So the Soviets make extensive use of indirect,
covert ways of trying to influence others. Moscow has a name for such
secret methods: aktivnyye meropriyatiya. We translate it, "active
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measures," and we've picked up their term to identify a whole range of ways
that the Soviets use to hide attempts to exert their influence, to build up
support for Kremlin policies, and to attack our policies.
Those ways of Soviet active measures involve the spreading of
disinformation--that is, information that deliberately gives only part of
the story, that distorts the subject for a purpose. One of the techniques
of active measures is Moscow's control of front organizations, like the
World Peace Council. Such organizations use a public front of seeming
neutrality and objectivity to attack Western attitudes but turn a blind eye
to Soviet similarities--and to human rights violations and other Soviet
deviations from world norms. Active measures also include several other
things that I'll get to in a minute. But first, let me outline the broader
Soviet information and propaganda framework into which active measures
fit--the information and propaganda that is publicly attributed to the
USSR, as distinct from active measures that are done secretly to conceal
the Soviet role.
An essential element of the Soviet political system is the control of
Information. Since knowledge is power, the leaders of any Communist
country seek to keep information restricted to those who need to know.
Only that information which serves a proper purpose from the leadership's
viewpoint is supposed to be circulated. This causes problems for trying to
run a modern industrial country. You can't exercise tight control of all
typewriters, photocopying machines and computer printers for fear of the
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wrong political ideas' being circulated and at the same time expect the
right economic and technical ideas to spread to the places where they're
needed for an efficient, productive economy. The worst recent example of
the possible results is, of course, the slowness in getting out warnings on
the nuclear accident at Chernobyl until after a lot of people had gotten
doses of radiation--not only in the USSR but also in neighboring countries.
Except for cases like Chernobyl, the Soviets try to insure that only
the right information gets out. The limited number of foreigners living in
the Soviet Union have limited access to information. Ordinary Soviets are
not supposed to talk to the diplomats, businessmen and journalists who live
there. Tourists seldom have meaningful conversations with anyone besides
those who are officially assigned to deal with them--and who are skilled at
seeming to be candid while giving only a keyhole view of reality. Few
dissidents are still able to voice the problems of the Soviet people.
The information that reaches the outside world is, therefore, shaped by
the Soviets themselves to a large extent. The USSR spends perhaps 3 or 4
billion dollars a year on propaganda. That is the largest governmental
information program in the world, by far. It includes TASS, which you hear
quoted as being a news agency, except that it isn't like The Associated
Press or United Press International, which go out and dig up news. TASS is
a subdivision of the Soviet government. There's another Soviet press
agency named Novosti that is in theory non-governmental. That doesn't make
any difference, however, since Novosti's controlled from the same Communist
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Party apparatus that controls the government. The party apparatus also
directs the Soviet press. You're not going to find Pravda or Izvestiya
publishing exposes on Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan or overspending in
Moscow's military program.
So Soviet authorities try to control and direct the voice with which
they speak to the world. They run the world's largest overseas broadcast
operation in more than 80 languages. They have cultural exchange
agreements with 120 countries, sending out everything from ballet troupes
to teachers to scientists who are looking for things of value to Soviet
industry. More than 57,000 students from the Third World are studying in
the USSR. Most of them are on full scholarships, because Moscow is trying
to influence the future leaders of developing countries. The Soviets don't
succeed with all the foreign students. A lot of them are alienated by
attempts to hammer Marxism-Leninism into them, by the difficult living
conditions, by the often violent racism that they encounter. But it's an
important long-term investment for the Soviets to try to win over a
significant number of foreign students. There are already a few cabinet
ministers in Africa who went to school in Moscow some years ago.
A related Soviet investment is in magazines and books. In 1982 the
USSR officially exported more than 70 million copies of books and
pamphlets. Most of them were made available abroad for free or at very low
cost. In a number of developing countries, Soviet textbooks in English,
French, Spanish, Hindi and many other languages dominate the import market.
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In some places they have the effect of discouraging local publishing. For
a few rupees a poor student can get a technical book--with a subtle
political message probably thrown into the purchase. The message isn't
even subtle in political science, history and economics texts from Moscow.
These are public aspects of the Soviet propaganda effort. So are the
kind of information activities that are conducted by Soviet diplomats and
the glossy magazines circulated by the USSR. One of those magazines is
Soviet Life. Its issue last February told how safe the Soviet nuclear
power industry is. The example it gave was Chernobyl. At about the same
time, a couple of small-circulation Soviet internal publications were
warning of construction and maintenance shortcomings at Chernobyl.
When you hear something from an official representative of the USSR, or
read it in Soviet Life, you probably know how to discount for bias. But
what I want to discuss in some detail is the secret side of that propaganda
effort, the active measures. They try to hide the bias in order to be more
credible.
Like virtually everything else in the Soviet Union, active measures are
ultimately determined by policies laid down by the Communist Party's
political bureau, or politburo--the dozen men who run the country. They
delegate details and implementation to the party's secretariat. In the
case of active measures, that means primarily to the party secretariat's
International Department that oversees dealings with the world outside the
Soviet bloc. This department in turn works closely with the KGB. It is
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the KGB that carries out many of the covert activities involved in active
measures.
Let me return first to forgeries as one of the varied forms of active
measures. The ideas for forgeries are dreamed up either in KGB
headquarters or at a KGB residency overseas--an office in a Soviet embassy.
The ideas are approved at some higher level, with the level depending on
how sensitive and important the target is. Favorite forgeries are U.S.
government documents. Over the years the KGB has developed considerable
technical proficiency at fabricating them. Some forgeries are intended
only for private circulation in order to influence policymakers, and some
are aimed at the media. The Soviets calculate that if a forgery gets into
the media, a denial will never really catch up with the first impression, a
seed of suspicion will have been planted.
An example was a speech that Jeane Kirkpatrick was alleged to have made
when she was ambassador to the United Nations. A forgery of a telegram
from the U.S. Information Agency with the supposed speech text surfaced in
India. Ambassador Kirkpatrick allegedly said the United States favored the
"Balkanization" of India and also criticized the Indian government. But
she never made such a speech. The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said so, but
the forgery stirred up anti-American feeling there. Also, it was reprinted
in a number of other countries after TASS had picked up the stories about
the false speech from the Indian press and circulated them.
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That's one of the values to the Soviets of forgeries--once they start
circulating, they can be kept going a long time with an artificially
amplified echo effect. A Soviet embassy press officer who regularly wines
and dines an editor from some poor Third World newspaper often doesn't have
much trouble getting an interesting forgery reprinted on the apparent
authority of the distant newspaper where it was first planted. And it's
more than just wining and dining in some cases. The Soviets and their East
European allies have a whole stable of subsidized newspapers in the Third
World that can be counted on to publish canards when initial efforts fail
to plant them in more respectable, independent papers.
Some forgeries have long lives. A doctored U.S. military planning
document that shows supposed U.S. nuclear targets in Western Europe first
surfaced in Norway in 1967. It has cropped up more than 20 times since
then despite our best efforts to drive a wooden stake through its heart.
Some years ago the KGB concocted out of whole cloth a U.S. Army manual
about "destabilization techniques" in non-Communist countries. It has been
used by the KGB to stir up suspicion about American intentions in countries
where we have military advisers or our troops are stationed. Since 1975
the manual has surfaced every once in a while from Spain to Turkey to the
Philippines.
Other examples range from a forged telegram from the U.S. ambassador in
Nigeria, which ordered the assassination of a Nigerian presidential
candidate, to a fake State Department letter alluding to a possible
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military coup if we didn't like the results of elections in Greece. And
it's not just official documents that are forged. A private company in New
Orleans that supplies aviation personnel for projects overseas was a KGB
target. A forged letter from it to the South African Air Force made it
sound as if the U.S. Government was secretly involved in helping South
Africa against its neighbors. The letter was planted among some of those
sensitive neighbors.
There's another category of active measures that's closely related to
forgeries. It's the spreading of false rumors intended to damage Western
interests. A classic case was the Soviet attempt to discredit us in the
Moslem world after the seizure in 1979 of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a
group of fanatics. The KGB circulated a rumor that the United States was
responsible. Another example was the numerous untrue rumor versions of
U.S. espionage involvement with the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 that the
Soviets shot down in 1983.
Let me turn now to public organizations that the Soviets use to
demonstrate, lobby, publicize and otherwise spread messages under
supposedly neutral auspices.
The World Peace Council is the best known Soviet front. It was founded
by the Soviets in Paris in 1949. Now it has its headquarters in Helsinki,
a neutral city, and it's headed in name by someone from a neutral country,
India--although he's a leader of the Indian Communist Party. But in fact
it's run from the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party's
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secretariat. There are more than 140 national groups under its umbrella,
including some non-Communist ones. The key qualification for membership is
supporting whatever position is currently advocated by the Kremlin.
Organizations and individuals participating in World Peace Council
campaigns and assemblies have been blocked from registering views that
differ from official Soviet positions. Some Western groups have tried to
maintain contact with the unofficial, persecuted groups in the Soviet bloc
who advocate balanced approaches to peace problems, but Soviet officials
will have none of this.
The World Peace Council claims that national peace groups and special
donations provide its money. But when it applied for the right to address
a United Nations organization, it was told it would have to disclose its
sources of funds and submit to independent auditing. Rather than do that,
the Council withdrew its application.
The World Peace Council's agenda for 1986 reflects Soviet disarmament
initiatives. It supports and encourages the disarmament movement in
Western Europe without saying anything about Eastern Europe. It opposes
the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative--"Star Wars"--and it seeks the
withdrawal of American Pershing and cruise missiles from Western Europe
without mentioning the SS-20s and other Soviet missiles that caused West
European governments to want such U.S. protection. Anyone who suggests
that the Soviets bear any responsibility for the arms race is castigated by
Soviet or fellow-travelling spokesmen.
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Right now the World Peace Council is having an increasingly difficult
time in getting Western organizations to buy its one-sided line--partly
because of the U.S. Government's public efforts to expose Soviet control of
the Council. A Council affiliate has scheduled a big conference in
Copenhagen next October, but a lot of nonpartisan groups have refused to
take part because of the strong Soviet slant.
The Soviet Union also runs front organizations for churches and
religious groups, scientists, lawyers, journalists, labor unions,
solidarity with the Third World, and other purposes. Most of them are
based in East European capitals like Prague to avoid a direct Moscow taint.
They have such names as the Christian Peace Conference, the World
Federation of Trade Unions, the Women's International Democratic
Federation, and the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization.
And there's the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which supported
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the shooting down of that Korean
airliner. The youth organization is part of Moscow's effort to influence
future leaders. Last year the Soviets staged the 12th World Youth Festival
in Moscow and claimed that 20,000 persons attended. The authorities
cleaned up Moscow the way they'd clone for the 1980 Olympics. They stocked
it with more consumer goods than you'll find when you get there, and in
general they tried to put their best foot forward. Then they kept a tight
rein on proceedings, so that questions about Afghanistan were not
translated, for instance, or the public address systems broke down when
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questions were asked about Soviet military programs. And the Soviets
violated prior assurances that delegations would be able to bring in and
distribute their oWn literature.
Another facet of active measures was the Soviet effort to make their
youth festival look like the only truly valid gathering of the world's
young people. Four months earlier an International Youth Conference was
held in Jamaica as a non-Communist forum to recognize the United Nations'
International Youth Year. It made the Soviets furious. After all, they
thought they had cornered the youth market for statements supportive of
Kremlin policies.
The Soviets started almost a year before the Jamaica conference to run
it down. They spread rumors about lawlessness and disease in Jamaica; they
invented stories that the Israelis were responsible for Arab delegates;
they exaggerated the U.S. role in helping raise money; and they tried other
tricks to cut attendance. Moscow Radio carried an anti-conference message
in 28 languages, and Havana picked it up and rebroadcast it in Spanish and
English. The Soviets tailored special articles for Third World newspapers
and got them published in places like Ghana and Morocco. And the
conference had hardly ended when Pravda was proclaiming it a "flop"--a line
picked up by East European newspapers and later dutifully echoed by leftist
periodicals from Latin America to India.
In addition to the front organizations that they control directly, the
Soviets try to penetrate international groups that started off with
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genuinely neutral and objective purposes. Moscow wants to steer such
groups so that they become unwitting helpers--so that they seem to be
honest sources of propaganda messages crafted by the USSR, with greater
credibility than the obviously controlled fronts. The Soviets have worked
hard to influence groups whose individual Western members do not recognize
that they are up against a concerted, well-organized campaign of
subversion.
* * * * * * * *
[If asked for specifics: The Soviets have tried to steer such groups as
the World Council of Churches, the Generals for Peace in Western Europe,
the U.N. Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Non-Aligned
Movement (where Cuba plays the lead role for the USSR). We do not say that
these are Soviet fronts, but Moscow has tried to capture them for its own
purposes.]
* * * * * * * *
The Soviet fronts are supplemented by friendship societies. They play
a mid-way role between public propaganda and active measures. Some of
their activities involve encouraging normal relations between people; some
are more secretive. The friendship societies are particularly useful for
Moscow for spotting people in foreign countries who are favorably inclined
toward the USSR and can be used in covert ways to influence others.
There are other forms of active measures. One of them is clandestine
broadcasting--running a station that pretends to be somewhere it isn't, or
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speaking for someone other than the true sponsors. The so-called "National
Voice of Iran" is really based in the southern USSR. During the hostage
crisis in Tehran six years ago, official Soviet statements supported the
American hostages' claims to diplomatic immunity, but the "National Voice
of Iran" urged that our diplomats not be released. Moscow also uses such
covert broadcasting to criticize Beijing's policies under the guise of an
internal Chinese station.
Harder to pin down is economic manipulation by the Soviets. A Soviet
ambassador in a West European country has warned a local businessman that
his trade with the USSR would suffer if he provided technical assistance to
China. That is another form of active measures. The Soviets have also
tried--not always successfully--to manipulate prices of things they buy or
sell by putting out rumors about market conditions. That, too, is active
measures, but you might also see a little capitalism creeping into Marxism.
Yet another type of active measures involves the use of what are known
as "agents of influence." They are people who spread rumors or
disinformation or carefully selected facts without revealing to their
audience that they are serving a Soviet purpose. Moscow tailors its
message specifically for the person it is trying to influence--a
politician, industrial boss, newspaper editor or broadcaster. Sometimes
the tailoring is for the target's needs and requirements for information,
sometimes for his vulnerabilities.
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A French journalist was convicted in 1980 of having acted as a Soviet
agent of influence for 21 years. He had subtly pushed the Soviet line in
articles published in a number of important newspapers and in a private
newsletter circulated to members of parliament and others. A KGB officer
who defected in Japan disclosed that Japanese agents of influence were used
by the Soviets to plant stories about troubles in China, to play a major
role behind the scenes in opposition politics, and do other things. The
defector, Stanislav Levchenko, said that the KGB office in Tokyo had five
persons including himself who worked full time on active measures.
Incidentally, Levchenko's cover story was that he was a correspondent for
the Soviet news magazine New Times. This was a convenient job because it
gave him plenty of time and freedom of movement to cultivate people who
would serve Soviet purposes. He said the magazine had been founded by the
KGB as an active measures tool.
In Denmark, an agent of influence used Soviet money to advertise Danish
artists' support for a Scandinavian zone free of nuclear weapons. He also
arranged for the printing of material provided by the Soviet embassy that
attacked the British prime minister.
Let me conclude with a brief discussion of the general purposes for
which the Soviets have used both open propaganda and secret active measures
in recent years. I've already mentioned one: trying to run down the
Jamaica youth conference and build up their own controlled youth meeting.
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You can probably guess what most of the other main purposes have been
if you think back over what the big East-West news stories have been for
the past few years. Wherever there've been big propaganda campaigns,
speeches by Soviet leaders and lots of articles in Pravda denouncing a
Western position, they've also used active measures. Nicaragua is an
obvious example. Ever since the Somoza government fell in 1979, Moscow has
been deploying its front organizations in support of the Sandinistas. It's
been trying to build up the Sandinistas' international acceptability and to
defend them from charges of having betrayed the revolution by steering it
into Communist totalitarianism. The Soviets have also been trying to build
up support abroad for the insurgents in El Salvador with active measures as
well as overt propaganda. ,
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the continued attempt to
subjugate that country, have been a major test for active measures. Moscow
has deployed its full range of techniques. Agents of influence whisper
suggestions of a settlement into Western officials' ears--if only the West
would get the Afghan resistance to lie down. Front organizations claim
that the Soviet Army really was invited in by grateful Afghan people.
False rumors about foreign involvement in Afghanistan, and other things.
But perhaps the biggest effort for the Soviet Communist Party and KGB
active measures specialists has been on the most important issue in Moscow.
That is protecting the control that the Soviet leadership exercises over a
vast, multinational empire. The Soviet leaders believe that protecting
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their control requires making the USSR ever stronger while trying to
discourage the West from wanting to maintain adequate defenses against
Soviet power. The most intensive efforts have been saved for arms control
proposals and related military matters.
The NATO decision in the late 1970s to deploy intermediate-range
missiles in Western Europe as a counter to new Soviet SS-20s and other
weapons was opposed by every instrument at Moscow's disposal. The World
Peace Council not only denounced it but also worked hard to get various
national peace fronts in the Council to come out on their own in
opposition. New organizations were created just to give the appearance of
more broad-based opposition. Agents of influence whispered about American
intentions to abandon Europe, or to turn it into a nuclear battlefield.
Forgeries were planted to heighten concern about U.S. military policy.
And in the end it all failed. The Pershings and cruise missiles are
being deployed. Now the Soviets are working hard against the Strategic
Defense Initiative. And they've moved on to new arms controls plans that
they can support with active measures. Every time you hear another variant
of a disarmament proposal from Moscow, you can be sure that the various
Soviet front organizations and agents of influence and other active
measures elements are getting their orders to back up the public propaganda
in favor of it with indirect ways of trying to influence the West to favor
the proposal.
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Right now, however, the people in Moscow who think up disinformation
and forgeries and peace front messages and such probably have their hands
full. They're probably trying to find some way to get across the
idea--without having it appear to originate in the USSR--that the accident
at Chernobyl wasn't as bad as it seemed. We have already heard the public
Soviet media denounce the Western press for exaggerating it--at a time when
Moscow was not yet conceding that many people had been evacuated and a
number had died. You can be pretty sure that various kinds of active
measures are also being developed. Chernobyl is a stiff test for the
Soviet system for trying to influence others through active measures that
are supposed to keep Moscow's hand hidden.
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