The cyber-espionage attacks on the US electoral system are rooted in classic KGB and Soviet government techniques called “active measures” dating back nearly a century.1

Service A was a special KGB misinformation unit created in the 1950s. Its agents were a bunch of mad scientists and puppeteers, who concocted nonviolent and macabre schemes to destabilize other countries.² One of the chief ways they attempted to destabilize the United States was by exploiting what they viewed as our Achilles’ heel, a hair-trigger vulnerability resulting from racial discrimination and our brewing civil unrest.³

Our country's oppression of African Americans, particularly under Jim Crow laws in the South, made our democracy look like a sham and earned disfavor in global public policy. Russian officials viewed our bad image as a strategical advantage. In the 1960s, when civil rights campaigns started gaining traction, they were concerned. The KGB didn't like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for several reasons. His calls for nonviolent protests in America didn't suit their recipe for stirring up civil unrest. They believed more militant leaders, such as the Black Panthers, were more apt to ignite violence. The way Dr. King associated the movement with the American dream and freedom for all Americans also didn't suit their needs.

During this same period, the Soviet Union's Service A launched a campaign that included forging documents that portrayed King and other prominent civil rights activists as sellouts, calling them “Uncle Toms,” who were in cahoots with the US government. They created fake articles and sent them to the African press, to be reprinted in US papers.4

The KGB unleashed propaganda that President Lyndon Johnson had secretly planned methods to keep black people in a subordinate status and had bribed King to tame the civil rights movement. Then later, after King was assassinated in April 1968, Service A changed its slant, depicting him as a martyr and implying the US government was behind his assassination.⁵

Service A kept up a steady onslaught of racially charged misinformation during the 1970s and 1980s. For example, in 1971, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, okayed the creation of pamphlets laden with racist language to be distributed to militant African American groups and to be blamed on the Jewish Defense League. The pamphlets purportedly urged Jews to avenge attacks on Jewish shops and Jewish people—which never occurred. They also created racially inflammatory pamphlets and fliers and attributed them to the Ku Klux Klan.⁶

Service A's strategy regarding America's long-standing discriminatory practices against African Americans and the intense volatility around racial issues was apt. In the 1960s, race was the most surefire issue to undermine the stability of our political system. In many ways, it still is.⁷

Simultaneously, Russia has not lost this strategic advantage or the desire to tap into it. A Russian hacker group called Secured Borders launched a series of Facebook and Twitter posts intended to stir up hatred. For example, one post attributed to Far Right radicals blared, “They won't take over our country if we don't let them in.”⁸

They tried to provoke an anti-immigrant rally in Twin Falls, Idaho, on August 27, 2016, by using Facebook's event and initiation tool. Secured Borders called the city a “center of refugee resettlement responsible for a huge upsurge of violence toward American Citizens.” The rally never occurred.⁹

Facebook shut down the Secured Borders group, but investigators noted that there were many more fake sites just like it, including those they have yet to identify. An early internal investigation by Facebook found over three thousand ads costing $100,000 attributed to Russian internet trolls, containing messages about divisive issues, including race.10 Facebook admits that some of the ads were paid for in rubles. But even that for them wasn't an indicator of suspicious activity “because the overwhelming majority of advertisers who pay in Russian currency, like the overwhelming majority of people who access Facebook from Russia, aren't doing anything wrong.”

I occasionally hear from friends, family, and neighbors who are overwhelmed by the news about Russia's interference in the US election and claims about its association with the Trump campaign. Some insist that they've heard enough. Others say that ordinary Americans are just pawns in a game being played by the wealthy and we'll never really know what's going on, so there's no point in listening. More claim that paying any attention to it is playing into the hands of political puppeteers.

Then there are many who believe the most important issue is obviously being played out on our own soil, that being the ever-growing rift between the Left and the Right or the rich and the poor. I know many African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, and recent immigrants who believe that racism has always spurred violence and exploitation in this country. They believe that is the only real issue. I can certainly understand that sentiment. In some sense, I was raised in it.