23.

The Philosophy of “AM”

By the 1980s, communism, like any resilient spiritual system of thought, had long evinced a capacity to tolerate contradiction. Cynicism was widespread, and even intelligence officers were sharing Communist jokes inside Soviet bloc security establishments. This capacity for contradiction might appear to be a weakness at first glance. But contradictions are the raw material of active measures. Cynicism, as opposed to the fiery Marxism of the 1950s, enabled more sophisticated and more active measures, for it removed ideological and ethical limitations.

The Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984 offers an extraordinary active measures example. The Soviet Union boycotted the games, and targeted them with special operations instead. Service A, playing both sides, impersonated the KKK and sent vile racist leaflets to African and Asian Olympic committees in more than twenty countries in the name of the American militant extremists, threatening bodily harm if they participated in the games. The letters were postmarked in the Washington, D.C., area.¹ At the same time, with help from partner agencies, the KGB’s disinformation specialists impersonated a then-fierce Islamic terrorist organization, al-Jihad, and threatened French and Israeli delegations with physical attacks, according to a declassified memo.²

Disinformation operators regularly referred to Lenin’s writings.

By early 1985, active measures had also reached peak bureaucratic performance. Soviet active measures then had an annual budget between $3 billion and $4 billion—an estimate that CIA analysts called “conservative.”³ Service A was making a concerted effort to refine and distribute the philosophy of active measures throughout the Eastern bloc intelligence establishment. The context for this push was probably an attempt by the leadership of Service A to upgrade active measures for the second time, after more than two decades, from a “service” into a full-blown “directorate,” on a level with the First Chief Directorate.

In January, Vladimir Ivanov traveled to Sofia to give a lecture, “The Art of Planning, Developing, and Implementing AM”—by then, disinformation was so common that Soviet bloc intelligence services referred to active measures simply as “AM,” with no need to spell out the ubiquitous acronym.

“AM are extremely effective, but also a very sharp and delicate weapon of intelligence,” Ivanov explained. “Every AM is a sharp political action.” Work in this delicate area, he said, “is in itself one of the most acute forms of a secret political struggle, in the full sense of this notion.” The KGB general was giving a political talk about a political tool, and he sounded like he was. Ivanov added that active measures would affect the fundamental political, economic, and military interests of all socialist states. He wanted to get the point across to his audience, intelligence officers used to rigidity, rules, order, and hierarchy, that active measures were both “a science and an art.” To anchor this important activity in Soviet ideology, the ambitious chief of Service A reached for the very top: Lenin. He referenced a quote from a booklet that Lenin had published in 1920, “Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.” Rigid rules and recipes would not be helpful, he said.⁴ What was required was—and here Ivanov used Lenin’s words—“the knowledge, experience and—in addition to knowledge and experience—the political flair [instinct] necessary for the speedy and correct solution of complex political problems.”⁵

Then Ivanov delivered the take-home message for the senior intelligence officers and AM operators in the room, again straight from Lenin:

The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable, and conditional.⁶

Ivanov stressed that Lenin’s teachings had “retained their power” especially for intelligence operators engaged in active measures. He then went on to outline this delicate art of disinformation.

Based on the analysis of all the material and, if necessary, with the help of scientists and specialists, the officers are obliged to find the overwhelming outbreaks of crises, dissatisfaction, friction, disagreement, rivalry, and struggle in the enemy camp. The discovery of such looming crises, Ivanov explained, and then the identification of the most sensitive vulnerabilities, required scientific knowledge and a scientific approach, knowledge of the objective processes in the world and in the country of residence.⁷

The KGB general spoke as if he were giving a creative-writing class, and, in a way, he was—to a group of forgers. “The process of developing AM is complex, and requires not just intelligence and knowledge, but also great intuition, imagination, ingenuity, and sensibility,” he said. Only by keeping all these subtleties in mind would the disinformation specialist be able to achieve the desired effect, which depended on “emotions and psychological sentiments.” Local AM operators had to be in touch with political events in their countries, and able to react quickly. “Sometimes, even the ‘rumor’ of the moment and the knowledge of the subsequent supporting events can prove to be of great influence and effect in solving your tasks,” Ivanov explained. He added that solving the task would require carefully maintaining a large circle of trusted ties, with government officials, civil servants, parliamentarians, publishers, and journalists.

The KGB’s First Chief Directorate had authorized the HVA and Department X to perform similar outreach with the wider Ministry of State Security in East Berlin. As was recommended by Russian advisors, Rolf Wagenbreth, the head of Department X, embellished his lecture in Belzig with a quote from Lenin: his unit, and the wider Eastern bloc, was engaged in “a war,” he said, “a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complicated than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states.” This war operated under the single objective of driving wedges into preexisting fissures within the adversarial societies.

The West German intelligence community was well aware of the rising threat of active measures, as were many German investigative journalists. Just as the Soviet rollout of their AM philosophy was under way, in early 1985, the German intelligence community finalized a remarkable internal report titled Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services.⁸ It was the first time that the West German government had comprehensively detailed the onslaught of disinformation it had faced for many years. The “offensive role” of disinformation, the West Germans understood, went far beyond the traditional task of collecting information:⁹ “The known past and present goal of ‘active measures’ directed by the Soviet intelligence agency KGB against the Federal Republic of Germany is to degrade the federal government’s trust in its U.S. ally.”¹⁰

Across the Berlin Wall, the X immediately took note of the report. The HVA assumed that they were looking at the work of the counterintelligence unit of the BfV, West Germany’s domestic intelligence service headquartered in Cologne. “They had analyzed dangerously well,” noted the HVA.¹¹

West and East Germany, although politically and economically divided, were culturally, geographically, and linguistically one entity. This proximity meant that the East had an overwhelming advantage in active measures—for the West had almost entirely retreated from strategic disinformation operations by then. But a similar dynamic applied in the other direction as well. The West Germans operated in such proximity to the Soviet bloc that they had a superb understanding of the sophistication and intellectual and historical depth of late Cold War active measures. What made the BfV analysis from Cologne so dangerous in the HVA’s eyes was that the West German officers understood the philosophy of AM. West German counterintelligence had read and understood Lenin, whose ideas formed the basis of Zersetzung, or disintegration, and ultimately disinformation.

Lenin’s perhaps most influential and visionary pamphlet, written in 1902, is titled What Is to Be Done? It sketches out a vision for a revolutionary party. “Have we sufficient forces to be able to direct our propaganda and agitation among all classes of the population?” Lenin writes, answering himself, “Of course we have.”¹² To mobilize the masses, Lenin suggested, the movement would have to utilize every manifestation of discontent, and seize every grain of even rudimentary protest. One way to whip up and spread agitation was to expose what those in power were trying to hide. “Political exposures are as much a declaration of war against the government as economic exposures are a declaration of war against the employers,” wrote the young Lenin. Public exposure of government secrets was the political expression of economic class warfare, and the wider and more powerful this campaign of exposure, the larger its mobilization effect on the masses, and the greater its “moral significance.” Lenin called for a radical plan not only to expose poor factory conditions and economic inequality for the working class but to reveal the camouflaged “inner workings” of all classes, the true face of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse. Exposures, he argued, were an engine for mobilizing the masses against any adversarial government, be it at home or abroad. Lenin foresaw that even in countries with political liberty, there would still be opportunities for exposure. He wrote: “Hence, the political exposures in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for disintegrating the system we oppose, the means of diverting from the enemy his casual or temporary allies, the means for spreading enmity and distrust among those who permanently share power with the autocracy.”¹³

Some analysts in West Germany had learned from their East German opponents that understanding active measures required understanding Lenin first.

As West German counterintelligence noted in the 1985 report, Lenin reversed the famous line, by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, that war was a continuation of politics by other means. Politics was a continuation of war by other means, in Lenin’s reading, and active measures an “ersatz for (military) warfare.”¹⁴

By this point in the Cold War, the West Germans understood not just Lenin but also the tactics, techniques, and procedures of this form of ersatz war. The analysts in Cologne had “no doubt” that the KGB coordinated the overall planning for offensive political influence operations with the Stasi in Berlin, StB in Prague, and other satellite agencies.

They also highlighted the role of Western journalists as information bearers of active measures throughout the Cold War. “Adversarial services pay attention in particular to journalists in non-Communist states,” they noted in the report.¹⁵ “Manipulating the media is the single most commonly used method to realize ‘active measures’ in the Western world.”¹⁶

But the West was getting better at fighting back. Various congressional committees held several hearings on Soviet active measures in the early 1980s, and both the CIA and the FBI provided a wealth of evidence to Congress in hearings and various highly publicized reports published in the Congressional Record. Part of the government’s goal was simply to raise awareness among the public and the press. But the State Department would not stop there, and would even apply tradecraft to stop disinformation.

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor number 4 exploded. The disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history, occurred near Pripyat, a town of nearly fifty thousand then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. Just weeks later, with reactor 4 still smoldering, even before its protective concrete sarcophagus had been built, the KGB decided to take advantage of the catastrophe with an exceptionally cold-blooded yet equally instructive active measure.

The letter was backdated to April 29, 1986, just three days after the Chernobyl disaster. Printed on legitimate U.S. Information Agency (USIA) letterhead, addressed to David Durenberger, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it read:

Dear Senator Durenberger:

Now that there is conclusive evidence that the breakdown of a Chernobyl nuclear power plant reactor produced a considerable quantity of radioactive fallout, we have a chance to utilize this fact for propaganda purposes. Furthermore, it is good for us that Moscow has made no official statement on the event.

Therefore we suggest that the following steps should be taken:—reports should be spread by our associates in European information media giving the public the details of Chernobyl disaster [sic]:—number of victims should be alleged to be somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000;—mass evacuation from the 100-mile zone […]¹⁷

The one-page letter was signed by Herbert Romerstein, the senior policy officer on Soviet Active Measures at the USIA, and had been sent to The Washington Post and U.S. News and World Report in an attempt to make it look like the work of a whistle-blower.¹⁸ Neither of the two papers fell for the letter.¹⁹

It was a brazen operation on the part of Soviet intelligence, and a big middle finger to the U.S. government—a Russian active measure camouflaged as an American active measure. In the most cynical way possible, as if they were trying to deflect some of Chernobyl’s nuclear fallout onto the United States, Eastern operators were trying to take advantage of one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, one that was still playing out in the Soviet Union itself.

The KGB, however, had underestimated Romerstein. The previous year, he had testified before another high-profile Senate body, the Foreign Relations Committee, on Soviet active measures, his field of expertise. During his testimony, Romerstein discussed one particular Soviet forgery, a document that purportedly came from Lieutenant General Robert Schweizer, an influential and hawkish strategic planner. Romerstein had analyzed the Schweizer forgery and mailed a copy of the analysis to Schweizer himself, along with a cover letter printed on USIA letterhead. In the 1985 hearing, Romerstein offered to supply the committee with a copy of the cover letter and accompanying analysis.

The press attaché of the Czechoslovak embassy, Vaclav Zluva, became aware of this episode, and inquired with the USIA about whether he could receive a copy of Romerstein’s letter. But Romerstein quickly understood what was really going on: Czechoslovak intelligence wanted the letterhead and his signature for future forgeries. So he decided to set a trap. Romerstein drafted a sample letter for Zluva, wrote “COPY” in handwriting at the top, and kept a record of his precise handwritten signature on that particular letter.²⁰ If a forgery surfaced with those unique features, the USIA would have a clear indication of a forgery—and when the Chernobyl letter emerged, it did.

Forgery of a letter from Herbert Romerstein. The forgery still carries Romerstein’s original handwritten markings, especially the “COPY” at the top. (Herbert Romerstein)

In retrospect, Ivanov’s effort to explain the philosophy of “AM” to his audience in 1985 highlighted a major philosophical and moral asymmetry between Cold War opponents. For a quarter century, the West had deescalated what the CIA once called “political warfare,” while the East had escalated. This asymmetry is best illustrated by comparing selected high-end active measures from each side of the Iron Curtain just before the end of the Cold War. On one side is the DENVER campaign and the Romerstein letter, with their representative disregard for the victims of two of the twentieth century’s worst humanitarian crises; on the other side is QRPLUMB.

The CIA deescalated, but never ceased, its political influence activities in the Soviet bloc over time. The operation known as QRPLUMB ran for the entire duration of the Cold War, and was the CIA’s only covert action program of its kind.²¹ It evolved out of an émigré group called the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council/Foreign Representation, or ZP/UHVR. The group had emerged during World War II, and supported the Ukrainian Partisan Army in 1944 against the Germans and later the Soviets. The CIA established an “operational relationship” with ZP/UHVR in 1949, initially for the purposes of intelligence collection and counterintelligence, but soon for “covert action.”²²

In 1953, the CIA helped set up the nonprofit Prolog Research Corporation, in New York City, with a publishing affiliate in Munich called the Ukrainian Society for Studies Abroad.²³ In the 1960s, the project “became very closely involved in the national revival in Ukraine,” according to the project files.²⁴ (In the late 1980s, the CIA moved its front organization to Newark, as Manhattan rents had become too expensive.)²⁵ QRPLUMB’s origins may sound adventurous, but by the mid-1980s the project demonstrated the degree of change in the CIA’s approach to “political warfare.”

The CIA’s goal for the Ukrainian front was “to keep alive the Ukrainian nationalist spirit in the U.S.S.R.,” according to a 1986 budget renewal request.²⁶ Another memo described the project’s main purpose as encouraging liberalization in Ukraine and “providing intellectual and moral support” to Ukrainians seeking social or economic moderation.²⁷ By 1986, QRPLUMB had three witting employees, the president, his deputy, and the treasurer. Thirty-three unwitting employees worked full-time or part-time for the front organization. “All unwitting employees believe they are working for the research/publishing corporation,” the CIA noted at the time.²⁸

In order to achieve its goal, QRPLUMB published a flagship political and literary magazine called Suchasnist, a letter-sized monthly news bulletin on dissident activity in Ukraine, as well as a few books and pamphlets. In one nine-month period in 1972, QRPLUMB smuggled more than fifteen thousand copies of periodicals and books into Ukraine. The project mainly targeted “intellectuals,” with essays and poems on a wide range of topics. Texts were either procured from Ukrainian writers, or translated (one was Waiting for Godot). Just as Counterspy was ramping up its operations against the CIA, in order to prevent George Orwell’s 1984 from becoming a reality, the CIA’s main remaining European front had 1984 translated into Ukrainian and infiltrated into the Soviet Union—in the year 1984.²⁹

In 1985, QRPLUMB slipped more than twenty-four thousand copies of its publications into the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries. In addition, the CIA lists the infiltration of two video machines, 340 cassette tapes, six cameras, twelve tape recorders, four hundred T-shirts “with appropriate slogans,” as well as five thousand stickers with either pro-Ukrainian or anti–Afghan War slogans. QRPLUMB maintained a working relationship with like-minded Polish underground groups and a Czech resistance group in London.

The CIA’s curious Ukrainian resistance outfit is noteworthy for what it wasn’t, and for what it didn’t do. QRPLUMB was a covert research organization and publishing house that operated as a front, but it appears not to have produced forgeries, nor to have leaked confidential information; instead, it focused on the distribution of genuine Ukrainian and Soviet literature as well as translated Western books. In one 1986 strategic assessment, a CIA analyst laments the “foolhardy” tactical mistakes of the 1960s, namely that the CIA had become too closely involved with activists “involved with literary/political affairs,” including using them for intelligence collection.³⁰ The CIA’s tactical restraint in the late Cold War offers a sharp contrast with the KGB’s simultaneous strategic escalation.

QRPLUMB is also remarkable for its small size, which it maintained throughout the entire Cold War. It had an annual operating budget of $1.1 million in 1985, which decreased slightly the following year³¹—negligible sums when compared with the resources that the CIA poured into political warfare in the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, in 1985, the Agency considered QRPLUMB an “extensive” operation and treated its New York City front as a “major covert action instrumentality.” The contrast in funding is even more striking when compared with Soviet active measures at the same time. QRPLUMB cost around 1 percent of the massive anti-neutron-bomb campaign alone.

The project offers one final lesson: it was one of the first examples of the digitalization of active measures. With video and audio players newly and increasingly available in the Soviet Union, QRPLUMB increased its audio- and videocassette infiltration. In 1988, just before the Soviet Union began to collapse, QRPLUMB slowly began to infiltrate “computer and printing equipment” into Ukraine to support fledging dissident groups and independent publishing initiatives, although the subversive groups struggled with finding software compatible with local equipment to render text in the Cyrillic alphabet.

The end of the Cold War was a temporary setback for the art and craft of disinformation, but it also triggered remarkable conceptual innovation. In late 1997, a curious book on American intelligence activities in the now reunited Germany appeared, titled Headquarters Germany. It was a first: the authors were two longtime former HVA officers with a focus on countering U.S. spying, Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert. The two had worked in the IX, HVA’s counterintelligence unit, and together had more than forty-four years of Stasi experience under their belts. The book was dripping with details: it included, for example, a list of secret CIA and NSA files now in the archives of the BStU, the German government entity in charge of the Stasi files, and wild stories of the CIA attempting to recruit newly unemployed Stasi officers. Eichner and Dobbert’s messaging was not subtle. The 381-page book had a map of unified Germany on the cover, set against a bright red background—and a gigantic tarantula with hairy legs sitting on top of the map. The two veteran counterespionage officers no longer had access to HVA documents, they stressed on the book’s dust jacket and in the preface—indeed, they described in detail how one of them had helped destroy operational documents by the truckload in January 1990. The authors emphasized that they wrote their tell-all book “mainly” from public sources and “from memory.”

Headquarters Germany was a 1997 book by two former Stasi counterintelligence officers. The spider symbolizes U.S. spying against the reunited Germany. The CIA’s assessment was that the book was sponsored by Russian intelligence.

The CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence immediately studied “this devastating book.” The early review called the work of the small group of people in the American section of the HVA’s counterintelligence unit “truly impressive,” and particularly highlighted the fact that the East Germans were “very successful in identifying CIA employees” in Germany. Langley noted, not without pride, that HVA reportedly developed leads on CIA identities in Germany by gleaning from U.S. military newsletters in Frankfurt that people not listed in telephone directories were winning on-post athletic competitions, thus marking them out. Remarkably, the reviewer at CIA headquarters largely treated the crudely anti-American book as an accurate historical account, and even gave the ex-HVA officers the benefit of the doubt when they “misidentified” State Department personnel as CIA officers because the ex-Stasi men “had to rely on their memories.”³² The CIA station in Germany, it appeared, was less credulous.

In fact, the book included details that were neither public nor preserved in the memory of the two ex-HVA men. Most obvious was the appendix. Headquarters Germany—once again—contained supplemental material with hundreds of names of alleged U.S. intelligence personnel, complete with dates of birth, the first names of spouses, and dates of postings abroad.³³ The list was also up-to-date, and in the case of about two dozen alleged CIA officers, the appendix included post-1990 biographical details, all the way to 1997—HVA, of course, no longer existed then. One such entry, for example, read:

Paseman, Floyd Lisle

Bonn (since 1994), COS,

EO: Tokyo 76, Burma 77,

Athens 80–83, Bangkok 86³⁴

The information was correct. Paseman indeed became CIA Chief of Station in Germany in 1994, and was still in the post when the book came out. In late 2004, months before his death, Paseman published a memoir in which he revealed that many of the names in Headquarters Germany were accurate, and that the CIA judged the book to be “Russian-sponsored.”³⁵ And as with previous red books that revealed alleged CIA short bios, this book also falsely identified—deliberately, not by an accident of memory—a number of Americans as intelligence officers. The project listed, for example, “Brattain, Steven Michael” with a correct date of birth, correct advanced degree, and correct dates of his recent posting in Bonn (“1992–1996”). But Brattain was a diplomat and “never worked for the CIA,” he explained later.³⁶ The successor organization of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, it appeared, had shrewdly worked with their former East German HVA comrades on an effective active measure, a measure that was elevated by the Stasi’s reputation for ruthless professionalism. The Economist had reviewed the tome with the tarantula on the cover uncritically;³⁷ Der Spiegel later recommended the anti-American Stasi tell-all as one of the best nonfiction spy books of the century.³⁸ Even serious intelligence historians took the “very informative book” by the ex-HVA counterintelligence officers at face value.³⁹ Yet the sourcing remained murky despite the many footnotes, and confirming facts was often impossible. The line between activism and operations had been crossed from both sides.