Vladimir Putin was born in the shattered city of Leningrad, eight years after the German army nearly destroyed it. The suffering and death inflicted by Hitler’s long siege had no equal in the annals of urban warfare, ancient or modern. One and a half million people had died in air raids, under attack by artillery, and from starvation. The number of the Russian dead and wounded in Leningrad was greater than all the American and British casualties of the war. By Putin’s account, his mother, Maria, had been so close to starving to death that her neighbors laid her out with the corpses in the street until someone heard her moan.
The child of this broken world became a creature of the Leningrad KGB. He had wanted to join the spy service ever since he was in high school. It was the one sure path out of the tiny freezing apartment in his gray concrete building with its stink of cooking cabbage and communal toilets, the only way for a young man unacquainted with power and privilege to claw his way up the greasy pole of politics in Soviet Russia. It dominated everything.
Putin signed up in 1975, having made his desire to join clear to a KGB officer two years earlier. He trained at the 401st KGB school along the Okhta River, at the eastern edge of his birthplace, and spent almost all the next decade as a foreign intelligence officer in Leningrad. Many if not most of his working hours entailed spying on the Americans at the United States consulate, ceremoniously reopened in 1973, in the false dawn of détente between Washington and Moscow, fifty-five years after it was shuttered in the wake of the Russian revolution.
“Leningrad was a much tougher KGB town than Moscow, much,” said G. Wayne Merry, a son of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was a State Department political officer on the first of his three tours at the American embassy from 1980 to 1983. “I received more personal harassment in a total of about three months in Leningrad than I did in almost three years in Moscow. They conducted a series of near hit-and-run encounters with our consular staff. I was one of the targets and was very nearly hit by their car, with its license plates covered over. The Leningrad KGB were real sons of bitches.” Six KGB officers conducted suffocating around-the-clock surveillance of each American diplomat in Leningrad on the supposition that he was a spy. The officers ran American diplomats off the road on the outskirts of the city with their children in the back seat of their cars. They broke into the Americans’ apartments on a regular basis and rifled through their belongings. They telephoned them at 3 a.m. to let them know they were operating on KGB time. When they weren’t harassing American diplomats, they went after American businessmen with sting operations. They were thugs whose talents lay in manipulating people, blackmailing people, extorting people. Putin was part of this culture from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties, until he was posted to Dresden in time to see the Soviet Union start to collapse.
One of Putin’s first official acts after he became the ruler of Russia at the turn of the century was to reinstall a commemorative plaque celebrating the life and work of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov at the old headquarters of the KGB. He later commissioned a ten-foot-tall statue honoring his old boss. This was mete and fitting. Andropov had made him. Putin was his acolyte. He was the most successful graduate of the Andropov era at the KGB and Andropov’s successor in every important regard, first as the chief of spies, and then the supreme leader of the nation.
As the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising, Andropov had watched as an enraged populace strung up members of the hated and feared secret police, and the experience of the uprising shaped him, just as the revolt against the Stasi and their Soviet commissars in Dresden shaped Putin. Andropov had coordinated the counterrevolution, the invasion by Soviet tanks and soldiers, the crushing of the Hungarian resistance, and the imprisonment and execution of the Hungarian prime minister, and this achievement catapulted him up the treacherous ladder of Soviet succession until he became the KGB’s chairman in 1967. He led the most formidable intelligence service in the history of the world for fifteen years until he became the ruler of the Soviet Union in 1982. As KGB chairman, he was a kinder, gentler Stalin. He didn’t murder millions of enemies of the state and send millions more to the Siberian gulag. He only arrested a few hundred thousand over the years and sent the most politically prominent and socially undesirable to imprisonment in so-called psychiatric hospitals. Outside of the Soviet Union and throughout the wider world, he made Moscow’s methods of political warfare stronger and sharper. His lasting legacy is the enduring strength of the KGB school of political warfare.
The Russian-language version of political warfare is aktivnyye meropriatia—active measures. The two terms cover some of the same missions, but they are as different as Russians and Americans. American political warfare in the twentieth century was part of a strategy to win the cold war. Soviet active measures were a great grab bag of tactics aimed at mystifying, misleading, surprising, sabotaging, and on occasion killing political enemies. Deception was the weapon of choice in the battle to subvert the main enemy, America; it was the double helix in the Kremlin’s DNA.
Andropov created an entire sector of the KGB—“Service A”—devoted to active measures. The CIA estimated that some 15,000 officers served in it, spending about $4 billion a year, in the early 1980s, making it roughly equal to the size of the entire clandestine service of the CIA. Every officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence division, had orders to spend 25 percent of his time conceiving and implementing active measures.
Americans who know nothing of Andropov may be nonetheless familiar with aspects of the work of Service A—as is anyone who has ever heard that the CIA killed President Kennedy, or that the FBI assassinated Martin Luther King, or that the army invented the AIDS virus in a germ-warfare lab, all falsehoods broadcast and published and perpetuated by Andropov’s officers and agents. In the 1980s, they created thousands of stories like the 1984 report in TASS, the Russian-language service, one of the world’s largest news agencies, that the United States was developing pathogens harmless to whites but mortal to people of color, and that these viruses were being tested on Africans in the prisons of apartheid South Africa and on Arab inmates in Israeli jails. They created globally circulated reports that the American government carried out the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, secretly maintained a massive biological warfare program, and supplied chemical weapons to the holy warriors fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan. All this and much more was carefully crafted disinformation intended to damage the image of the United States in the eyes of the world.
“The heart and soul of Soviet intelligence,” the retired KGB major general Oleg Kalugin said after the cold war, was not espionage but subversion: “active measures to weaken the West, to [divide] NATO; to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare the ground in case war really occurs.”
The use of disinformation in Russia traces back at least as far as to the secret police of the czars and their creation of the infamous libel describing a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text beloved by Nazis and Saudis and American conspiracy theorists alike, still circulating on the internet today. Andropov’s active measures department went far beyond that crude kind of work, though it was unusually adept at it. Andropov’s KGB sought to change the course of history by rewriting it, to shape the policies of a foreign government and the thinking of its citizens by bending and warping them. It would steal an election when it was up for grabs, weaken the alliances of its enemies when it could, discredit foreign leaders and undermine their political institutions when it saw the opportunity. These stratagems were the core of the curriculum for Putin’s education in the KGB.
If the great goal of intelligence is to know thine enemy, the object of active measures is to screw him. The KGB used political subversion and all manner of propaganda. It had agents of influence in proximity to the powerful. It had clandestine radio broadcasts. It used covert political and economic support for insurgent movements, opposition groups, and political parties. While the White House and CIA used many of the same instruments in the cold war, the Kremlin and the KGB had a bigger orchestra.
Allen Dulles had his friends at CBS News and Time magazine; he could nudge and cajole and on occasion co-opt them in the service of the CIA’s interests. Yuri Andropov had the biggest global media outlets in the Soviet Union, Pravda and TASS, in the palm of his hand; they distorted the news and provided cover for thousands of spies serving overseas on a daily basis. Dulles controlled small publishing houses and little magazines. Andropov had a regiment of co-opted and compliant reporters and editors across Asia and Africa and more than a few in Western Europe as well. Dulles had the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which sponsored anti-communist literary conferences and political panels. Andropov had the World Peace Council, a staunch foe of American imperialism whose members included Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. The CIA did not fabricate documents to defame the Kremlin’s leaders, though it had toyed with the idea of tweaking Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. The KGB libeled American presidents, American ambassadors, and the American flag. Where the KGB truly excelled was in creating forgeries. It faked State Department cables showing that the United States was complicit in the attempted assassination of the pope, concocted American covert operations to support the racist white regime in South Africa, and counterfeited a U.S. Army field manual condoning genocide, not to mention its invention of top secret CIA reports and entire issues of Newsweek magazine.
Andropov joined the Politburo from his perch atop the KGB in 1973 and poured billions of rubles into political warfare. By the time Putin was serving in the Leningrad KGB, active measures constituted a crucial component of Soviet foreign policy. Andropov was riding high and thriving in his work against the United States. He had received a great boost from the CIA, first from the exposure of its misdeeds at the hands of the United States Senate in the mid-1970s, and foremost from his greatest nemesis, James Jesus Angleton.
Angleton was the Ahab of American intelligence, chasing the white whale of Soviet deception for two decades. He had single-handedly ruled the CIA’s powerful and sovereign Counterintelligence Staff for two decades since 1954. An official historian at the CIA wrote this evocative portrait:
He was tall, thin, and stooped; had a gaunt and pale face distinguished by a chisel nose and a wide mouth; wore oversized, heavy-framed glasses, black suits, homburgs, and floppy overcoats; and drove an old black Mercedes-Benz sedan. He arrived at the CI Staff’s suite late in the morning and left late in the evening. His curtain-shrouded office was dimly lit, hazy with cigarette smoke, and full of scattered files and papers. His lunch “hour” often lasted well into the afternoon, spent at restaurants mainly in Washington with liaison partners, operational contacts, and professional colleagues. His capacity for food (despite his wraith-like appearance) and liquor was remarkable, and toward the end of his career he probably was an alcoholic.… He was secretive and suspicious. Angleton enveloped himself and his staff in an aura of mystery, hinting at knowledge of dark secrets and hidden intrigues too sensitive to share.
Angleton had run counterintelligence out of the hip pockets of his black suits; no one really knew what he was doing in his shrouded, smoky lair. Fixated on the deceptions of the KGB, he had “largely ignored the threat that the Chinese, Czechs, East Germans, and Cubans posed. During his tenure, they either had agents in the CIA or doubled all the spies the Agency thought it was running against them.” This continuous crisis in American counterintelligence lasted long after Angleton’s day was done.
He was one among very few Americans with an understanding of Soviet active measures. But upon that rock he built a soaring church of conjecture. Angleton believed that the KGB was manipulating American perceptions of the military power of the Soviet Union by commanding a company of moles within the CIA. He thought that every Soviet defector who came to the CIA after 1961 was a double agent working for Moscow. And he was convinced as a matter of moral certainty that these moles and double agents were part of an immense and monstrous plot. Their goal was to deceive the White House, the Pentagon, and the American intelligence community; to seduce American presidents into the delusions of détente, to shatter the solidarity of NATO, and to destroy the resolve of the West to oppose Soviet power. His mole hunts damaged or destroyed the careers of every senior officer in the Soviet division of the CIA’s clandestine service. Then Angleton went to war against his own government. Détente was a sham. Arms control was suicide. William Colby, the director of central intelligence in the mid-1970s, was a KGB collaborator. Almost everything the CIA and its allied Western intelligence services knew about the Soviets—apart from what he knew—was wrong. “The bulk of information available to the West through Soviet Bloc contacts,” he told the White House, “is, on the whole, spurious and represents little more than coordinated handouts which advance the interests of Soviet Bloc strategic disinformation.” Only he understood the depths of this plot against America. And only he could save the nation. Angleton was fired at the end of 1974, after the New York Times reported that his staff had been opening Americans’ first-class mail for twenty years and spying on the anti-war left in violation of the CIA’s charter. He left in a drunken rage, and a trove of institutional knowledge went out the door with him. Angleton the mole hunter was half-crazy at best; the general consensus at headquarters was that he had gone mad. But as a dedicated analyst of active measures, he was at least half-right.
The revelations of CIA misconduct that began with Angleton’s disgrace led directly to the congressional hearings that exposed the darkest chapters of the CIA’s history. This proved a bonanza beyond imagining for Andropov. America had lost the Vietnam War, its military and intelligence services were in disarray, the reputation of the CIA was shattered, and a long heyday for his KGB was at hand. Seizing upon the Senate’s disclosure of the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba, he immediately launched a long-lasting disinformation campaign purporting to reveal CIA plots to kill forty-five foreign leaders over the past decade. In 1978, from his new sinecure at the Politburo, Andropov inaugurated the International Information Department of the Soviet Communist Party, which used the KGB to open a global propaganda offensive against the West. It worked in direct liaison with some seventy communist parties abroad, along with front groups and national liberation movements all over the world.
At the close of the 1970s, as active measures against the United States doubled and redoubled, the close study of Soviet deception was a second-echelon task for American intelligence. The work of thousands of KGB officers was the province of a handful of CIA analysts. But those analysts were good at what they did.
On February 6, 1980, six weeks after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, John McMahon, the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, testified about Soviet active measures at a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, a discussion long overdue. “Given the importance of propaganda and covert action in its foreign policy implementation, the U.S.S.R. is willing to spend large sums of money on its programs,” McMahon said, giving a rough estimate of $3 billion to $4 billion. “Furthermore, the Soviets have established a worldwide network of agents, organizations and technical facilities to implement its programs. That network is second to none in comparison to the major world powers in its size and effectiveness.” He listed its ambitious goals:
To influence both world and American public opinion against U.S. military and political programs which are perceived as threatening the Soviet Union; to demonstrate that the United States is an aggressive, colonialist and imperialist power; to isolate the United States from its allies and friends; to discredit those who cooperate with the United States; to demonstrate that the policies and goals of the United States are incompatible with the ambitions of the underdeveloped world; to discredit and weaken Western intelligence services and expose their personnel; to confuse world opinion regarding the aggressive nature of certain Soviet policies; to create a favorable environment for the execution of Soviet foreign policy.
McMahon went on to report a new and disturbing development in the Andropov era. The KGB was now producing “technically sophisticated falsifications” of a far higher quality than in the past. The new forgeries, he said, were “realistic enough to allow the Soviets to plant them in the western non-communist media with a reasonable expectation that they will be considered genuine by all but the most skeptical of recipients.… Furthermore, in two cases, Soviet forgers directly attributed false and misleading statements to the President and Vice President of the United States, something they had refrained from doing in the past.” Not long thereafter, President Carter’s press secretary called a news conference to display and denounce a forged top secret presidential memorandum that depicted a viciously racist Oval Office policy toward Africa. The KGB had produced a counterfeit National Security Council document and, through a cutout, sent it to an obscure African American newspaper in San Francisco. It ran under the headline: “Carter’s Secret Plan to Keep Black Africans and Black Americans at Odds.” TASS picked up the article and sent it to Soviet embassies, which redistributed it around the world. Though the White House press corps had never seen anything quite like it, it was a one-day story in the United States. But therein lay the origins of the first American attack against fake news from Moscow.
It began at the start of the Reagan administration in 1981. It took as its foundation a CIA study, classified above top secret, commissioned by Secretary of State Alexander Haig, signed by CIA director Bill Casey, and titled “Soviet Active Measures.” The work’s principal author was Dick Malzahn, an experienced clandestine-service officer in the Soviet/Eastern Europe division who went on to run the CIA’s QR/HELPFUL operation in support of Solidarity. With the blessings of Casey and Haig, but without any coherent orders, a talented State Department official named Dennis Kux started up the Active Measures Working Group. Kux was fifty, a career Foreign Service officer, the deputy assistant secretary of state for coordination at the State Department’s small but highly skilled Intelligence and Research bureau; his job included maintaining liaison with the CIA. He rounded up experts from the CIA (including Malzahn), State, the FBI, the Pentagon, the United States Information Agency, and the National Security Council. And they went to work, gathering the poison fruits of Service A from around the world.
“This was new,” Kux recollected. “In the past, to the extent that the U. S. countered disinformation, it was handled by the CIA,” exclusively, and in secret, without public knowledge or understanding. “The normal attitude in the State Department was: ‘We don’t want to dignify that kind of stuff with a comment. We won’t comment on a forgery.’” He thought the United States needed an entirely new approach, combining facts laid out in public diplomacy with the force of political warfare to combat the Kremlin’s ministry of untruth. Kux came up with a snappy acronym for the mission: RAP. First Report. American embassies and consulates overseas collected all the fake news and forgeries they could find. Then Analyze. That was done by the group’s staff and the CIA. “We began to see patterns developing,” Kux said. “We gradually developed a much better picture of what was going on. We also developed a new strategy to combat disinformation.” And that was Publicize. “Unlike propaganda, disinformation is a lie … done with the intent of misleading people through forgeries and planted false news stories,” he said. “Journalists and media people were the main vehicle used by the Soviets to spread disinformation. We were going to try to sensitize people to the fact that this was going on by publicizing it. Also, we believed that the more noise we made the less likely that the Soviets would succeed. The more publicity that we could generate, the more successful we would be.”
While 1984 was approaching in America, Kux argued, it was not yet 1984, the Orwellian dystopia where the party commanded and controlled the perceptions of the people. In a time of mounting cold war tensions, he counseled his audiences to keep their cool: recognize disinformation as an attack on democracy, but reject the fear that the evil empire could afflict the American body politic, that it had strings to pull that were strong enough to stage a puppet show in the American political theater. Three decades passed before that apprehension evolved into a palpable reality.
On October 9, 1981, the group published fourteen thousand copies of its first report. “Soviet Active Measures: Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations” was only four pages long, but it was a comprehensive and powerful document. “In late 1979,” the report began, “agents of the Soviet Union spread a false rumor that the United States was responsible for the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca.” The Grand Mosque actually had been seized by a gang of messianic Saudis, forerunners of Osama bin Laden. But on November 21 of that year, a Pakistani radio announcer picked up and relayed the rumor blaming America during a broadcast of a cricket match between Pakistan and India, inflaming an Islamist student group in the Pakistani capital. The group stormed the American embassy in Islamabad, set it on fire, and killed a marine guard, two Pakistani employees, and an American contractor. Disinformation could be deadly when left unchallenged.
The New York Times and the Washington Post covered the group’s work. Congress took notice. The House Intelligence Committee again held hearings on Soviet disinformation. Its chairman, Congressman Edward Boland of Massachusetts, and his colleagues praised Kux and his cohort. This in itself was something new. Interagency working groups are where good ideas go to die in Washington; the annals of American government are replete with their desultory proceedings, stilted reports, and stillborn recommendations. The Active Measures Working Group was starting a dynamic attack on secrets and lies.
Kux decided to take the show on the road, bringing the attack on disinformation directly to audiences around the world. In the spring of 1983, members of the group went to Latin America and to nations where the malign impact of fake news was greatest, including India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Morocco, and Italy. “We went around the world with a little truth squad,” Kux said, usually made up of himself, a State Department Kremlinologist, somebody from USIA, and a CIA analyst. They visited about thirty countries over three years, briefing intelligence officials, foreign ministries, and journalists.
They and their colleagues at the State Department and the National Security Council also had to try to counter an especially Orwellian lie that came not from the KGB but the Kremlin. On September 1, 1983, a Soviet warplane shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, en route from New York to Seoul, firing air-to-air missiles when the plane crossed into Soviet airspace over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 people aboard. Among those passengers was an ultraconservative United States congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald. The Soviets insisted that Flight 007 was a military spying mission and accused the United States of trying to start a war. Andropov wasn’t in charge anymore when this outrage took place. He was still the ruler of the Soviet Union, but he had just entered a Moscow hospital suffering from kidney failure, and he would not come out alive.
In the summer and fall of 1983, the fear of nuclear war rose higher than at any time in more than twenty years, since the Cuban missile crisis. To the surprise and consternation of the Pentagon, Reagan had announced his vision for a “peace shield” that would revolutionize the world of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Defense Initiative—immediately renamed “Star Wars”—was a visionary concept of space-based lasers and particle beams that would knock out incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles in flight. Tens of billions of dollars went to waste during the 1980s in pursuit of this technological fantasy, but it served as a weapon of political and psychological warfare: it created terror in the Soviet Union. Andropov called it a manifestation of military psychosis. He believed that Reagan really was getting ready to fight and win a nuclear war. Nearly everyone within the Kremlin and the KGB thought that NATO and the United States could launch that war at any moment, without warning. American war games at NATO headquarters went on in November 1983, culminating in the simulation of a DEFCON 1 nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The government of the United States was willfully ignorant of the intense panic these exercises for World War III engendered. They brought Washington and Moscow dangerously close to the edge of triggering an accidental Armageddon.
The war scare subsided somewhat after Andropov died in February 1984. The equally sickly leader of the Soviet Union for the next year was Konstantin Chernenko, a colorless factotum who was too ill to rule. In this interregnum, the most powerful man in the Politburo was the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. In the spring, he embarked on a powerful series of active measures and political influence operations designed to defeat Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. Remarkably, the White House saw the KGB coming, thanks in large part to John Lenczowski, a charter member of the Active Measures Working Group, who served as the National Security Council’s staff director of European and Soviet Affairs. In August 1984, he sent a warning to his superior at the NSC, Admiral John Poindexter. The KGB’s officers had planted anti-Reagan articles across Europe and India in 1976, during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Now they were at it again, but this time on a far greater scale, and in the United States as well.
“The Administration is harboring a growing concern about Soviet attempts to intervene in the American election process,” Lenczowski wrote. “The Soviets devote a massive amount of resources to influence American voters.… Their activities not only constitute intervention into the internal affairs of our country, but have done a great deal to aggravate the international climate.” That reporting never made its way out of the classified confines of the National Security Council, but it was a harbinger of things to come.
If the Active Measures Working Group had a blind spot, it was a failure to see that Soviet fakes were on occasion founded on facts, as the best disinformation always is. The KGB’s propaganda painting Reagan as a warmonger was rooted in the reality that he was positioning intermediate-range American nuclear missiles in NATO’s terrain, one thousand miles from the Kremlin. The group denounced a forged letter from the AFL-CIO’s Irving Brown broadly implying a connection between Solidarity and the CIA—but Dick Malzahn, a core member of the working group, knew that deep secret to be true. The group condemned a second forgery, a letter supposedly sent by J. Edgar Hoover to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, describing the FBI’s links to the president of the Screen Actors Guild—Ronald Reagan—and Reagan’s cooperation with the FBI in exposing communist infiltration of Hollywood. In fact, Reagan was at the time an FBI informant, complete with a code name: T-10.
As Soviet disinformation grew more sophisticated at outfoxing America and the world, the working group had to fight harder to ferret out its flaws. It won those battles more often than not by its meticulous attention to detail. Few Soviets had a fluent command of idiomatic American English; their intelligence officers had been schooled in the British tongue. When the Italian press ran with a forged American military memo describing NATO warplanes downing Italian civilian aircraft during training exercises, the group saw that the document used the British word manoeuvre rather than the American maneuver. Fake! They examined an official-looking letter purporting to prove that the Northrop Corporation, with the blessings of the Reagan administration, was selling fighter jets to South Africa in violation of an arms embargo. The letter used the un-American phrase “competent bodies”—a literal translation of kompetentnyye organy, KGB lingo for “state security services.” Fraud! Kux and company used the same kind of linguistic forensics to expose the KGB’s egregious efforts to tie the United States to the attempted assassination of the pope. “They had faked an Embassy Rome telegram,” he said. “We had to take the fake telegram apart by pointing out the technical mistakes,” including the bungled transliterations and the sclerotic syntax of the threadbare party line.
The working group’s greatest coup came during the run-up to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The Soviets secretly published two vicious pamphlets in the name of the KKK—or as the KGB put it, the “Ku-Klux Klan,” the errant hyphen all but screaming out the sham. “AFRICAN MONKEYS! A GRAND WELCOME AWAITS YOU IN LOS ANGELES!” the first broadside began. “OUR OWN OLYMPIC FLAMES ARE WAITING TO INCINERATE YOU. THE HIGHEST AWARD FOR A TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT WOULD BE THE LYNCHING OF AN AFRICAN MONKEY!” The leaflet featured a drawing of a chimpanzee dangling from a noose with a sign around its neck that read: “Hang the Nigger.” It was mailed from outside Washington, D.C., to Olympic committees in ten African nations. A second, sent throughout Africa and to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, read: “IF YOUR CURS DARE TO COME TO THE SUMMER OLYMPICS IN AMERICA THEY WILL BE SHOT OR HANGED. ALL OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALS TO THE WHITES ONLY! DEATH TO THE BLACKS AND COLOREDS!” The message of hate was picked up by TASS and blasted around the world. But in a matter of days, after an ironclad report from the Active Measures Working Group, Attorney General William French Smith publicly denounced the diatribes as Soviet disinformation.
The certitude came from the FBI’s representative at the Active Measures Working Group, a counterintelligence agent named Jim Milburn. He had an impeccable source: a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington who was working in secret for the FBI. The man was Sergei Motorin, officially a low-ranking diplomat assigned to the information section but in reality a spy tasked with gathering political intelligence to help Moscow understand Washington’s plans for fighting the cold war. He had been recruited by the FBI eighteen months before, by a combination of friendly persuasion and blackmail. And he had helped to write the racist tracts himself. Counterintelligence rarely produces such rapid results and clear-cut victories.
Eight months later, Motorin was betrayed by Aldrich Ames, an alcoholic and embittered career officer at CIA headquarters who had, incredibly, risen to the post of chief of the counterintelligence branch of the Soviet division of the clandestine service. Ames was the mole of Angleton’s nightmares. He sold the identities of ten Soviets secretly working for the CIA or FBI in exchange for $2.5 million, and all were tried for treason and summarily executed. He handed over reams of secrets disclosing American military and intelligence policies and plans. These in turn allowed the KGB to feed the United States disinformation that distorted American perceptions of Soviet military power, exactly as Angleton had feared twenty years before. Milburn became one member of a team of FBI agents who finally hunted down and arrested Ames—fully nine years after he had ransacked the CIA’s files on behalf of the KGB.
His continuing success at sabotaging American intelligence was in part due to the CIA’s collective failure to imagine that one of their own officers could be a traitor. The agency missed many opportunities to catch Ames, including two botched lie detector tests, a four-year failure to finish a financial inquiry into his newfound affluence, and a collapse in communications among CIA counterespionage officers when they finally began to focus on him. Yet it was worse than that. How did a man like Ames rise to a position where he held the keys to the kingdom? (The same question would be asked about Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old systems operator with a high school education who stole terabytes of the most sensitive intelligence secrets from the CIA and the National Security Agency, and who fled to find a warm embrace in Putin’s Russia in 2013.) Ames had a long history of “no enthusiasm, little regard for rules and requirements, little self-discipline, little security consciousness, little respect for management or the mission, few good work habits, few friends and a bad reputation in terms of integrity, dependability and discretion,” the CIA inspector general reported after his arrest. “Yet his managers were content to tolerate his low productivity, clean up after him when he failed, find well-chosen words to praise him and pass him on with accolades to the next manager.” His laziness and drunkenness were tolerated, and that tolerance led to his promotion to a position “where he was perfectly placed to betray almost all of CIA’s most sensitive Soviet assets.”
Ames wasn’t the only American spying for the Soviets in the 1980s. John Walker Jr., a navy warrant officer, led an espionage ring that sold Moscow the most sensitive information on American systems for secure military communications. Ronald Pelton turned over details of the National Security Agency’s top secret programs for targeting the Soviets. Edward Lee Howard sold CIA secrets to the KGB and defected to Moscow. The United States was adept at calling out Soviet disinformation but seemingly powerless at countering Soviet espionage or stopping its American agents from spying before incalculable damage was done.
Having reached a high point of expertise and influence in 1984, the Active Measures Working Group fell on hard times. Kux had left for a classified State Department assignment, charged with protecting American embassies around the world from attacks by spies and terrorists. His replacement was a low-energy bureaucrat nearing an overdue retirement. And the CIA’s Bill Casey had sent his own man to the White House, where he stole some of the group’s talent and, for a time, much of its thunder. Walter Raymond was a twenty-eight-year CIA veteran with deep experience in covert operations and propaganda campaigns. Raymond had officially retired from the CIA in April 1983, but he continued to report to Casey. He held the titles of special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director of international communications and information at the National Security Council. He ran interagency task forces focused on public diplomacy, psychological operations, and political warfare.
Raymond created the Soviet Political Action Working Group, a squad of red-blooded Reaganauts who aimed to use the tools of disinformation to turn the tables on the KGB and undermine the Kremlin. The minutes of their first meeting, in December 1983, reflected their shared belief that they had to “turn Soviet active measures back onto the Soviets—take the offensive—and make them pay the price.” Raymond’s biggest champions and closest collaborators were a gung ho marine on the NSC staff, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and a right-wing Cuban exile, Otto Reich, who was in charge of the Office of Public Diplomacy at the State Department. Congressional investigators later labeled their work as propaganda aimed primarily at Americans, not at the Soviets, seeking to achieve what “a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt—to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies” for political warfare in Central America.
Reagan was single-mindedly devoted to supporting the contras, the ragtag rebels backed by the CIA, as they sought to overthrow the Soviet-supported leaders of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, who had toppled a four-decade dynasty of American-backed dictators in 1979. When Casey ordered the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, an act of war, Raymond’s spin machine sprang into action, telling reporters that the contras had done it themselves, proving their military prowess. Reich’s office leaked false stories to the American press, like the bogus claim that the Sandinista government was receiving Soviet MiG fighter jets. NBC News broke into its 1984 presidential election coverage with that report, which spurred calls in Congress for American air strikes. This was only one facet of a White House disinformation program targeting the minds of an American audience, guided by Casey and overseen by Reagan’s National Security Council under the aegis of the president’s mission to roll back Soviet communism in Central America.
Raymond, Reich, and North, along with “senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee concluded in a report published at the close of the Reagan administration. The president and the director of central intelligence, through their offices and officers, were manipulating American public opinion with the tools of CIA tradecraft. They were waging political warfare against the American people, as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had done in their day; the difference was that Reagan used the national security system to lie to the people, where his predecessors used it to spy on them.
The effort on behalf of the contras, both covert and overt, went on for five years. It failed spectacularly. After Congress cut off funds for the “freedom fighters” in 1984, the CIA and the NSC, led by Casey and North and aided by a confederacy of spooks and swindlers, were caught trying to circumvent that legal ban. They had sold millions of dollars of weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, skimmed the profits, and backhanded them to the contras. No one could spin that fiasco, which broke the laws of the United States, violated American foreign policy, shattered the dictates of common sense, and set the Reagan administration reeling. The Iran-Contra story began to emerge in November 1986, eroding an elaborate White House cover-up, engulfing the Reagan administration in infamy, and exposing its political warriors to investigations and indictments. (Six years later, a lame-duck president George H. W. Bush, counseled by Attorney General William P. Barr, who returned to that high office under President Trump, issued pardons to five senior CIA, NSC, and State Department officials convicted in the case, along with Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, who was awaiting trial. With that, the cover-up was complete.)
Three days before the Iran-Contra firestorm erupted, Pravda ran a crude cartoon showing a mad scientist handing a huge test tube to a grinning American general in exchange for a fistful of dollars. The vial was filled with floating swastikas and bore a large label: “AIDS virus.” The caption above read: “The AIDS virus, a terrible disease for which up to now no known cure has been found, was, in the opinion of some Western researchers, created in the laboratories of the Pentagon.” An elaborate story went with it. The disinformation campaign had gone on undetected and uncontested for more than a year while the original Active Measures Working Group sputtered and its NSC counterpart concocted falsehoods for Americans.
The KGB had sent a directive to its allied spy services in Eastern Europe in September 1985: “We are conducting a series of active measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—AIDS’ … and its subsequent, large-scale spread to other countries, including those in Western Europe. The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control [and] is the result of yet another Pentagon experiment with a new type of biological weapon”—specifically, genetic engineering experiments at Fort Detrick.
The Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, read by the Russian cultural elite, had published an article headlined “Panic in the West or What Is Hidden Behind the AIDS Sensation” in October 1985, and the story gradually seeped into the minds of millions. The East German spy service, the Stasi, sent out a global bulletin to Soviet-affiliated agencies headlined “Combatting the USA’s Policy of Confrontation and Arms Build-Up.” It said that “Operation ‘DENVER’ had the goal of exposing the dangers to mankind arising from the research, production, and use of biological weapons … to strengthen anti-American sentiments in the world and to spark domestic political controversies in the USA.” The East Germans would “deliver a scientific study and other materials that prove that AIDS originated in the USA, not in Africa, and that AIDS is a product of the USA’s bioweapons research.” The Bulgarian spy service handled the distribution of the disinformation in the United States, Western Europe, and the Third World.
The story spread around the world. It was picked up by the London tabloid Sunday Express, the Madrid magazine Interview, and the Argentine daily Diario Popular, among other publications; TASS then replayed the Diario Popular piece, making the newspaper look like the original source. It immediately ricocheted into India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Nigeria. The KGB’s hand in this had gone unseen; the service laundered disinformation like a mafia laundered money. By the end of 1986, the story had surfaced in at least sixty nations, very much including the United States. Twenty-first-century polls suggest that millions of Americans still believe it to be true.
The big lie helped to rejuvenate the Active Measures Working Group. The group rebounded under a new leader, Kathleen Bailey, a feisty thirty-seven-year-old Texan, a political scientist by training, who had two years’ experience as the deputy director of the United States Information Agency and strong ties to the American intelligence community from her previous work on nuclear proliferation. She took command at the end of 1985. “To be honest, I didn’t know the Active Measures Working Group existed before I took it over,” Bailey said. “It was not something on my radar. The group had all but vanished during 1985. My job was to stand it up again.” It had faltered due to a lack of leadership, wavering support from the top echelons of the State Department, and the poaching of its talent and energy by Raymond and his covert propaganda campaign. “I viewed Walt Raymond and his work at the NSC as an outlaw operation,” she said. “‘Let’s do active measures ourselves’ was not to me legitimate. I don’t believe the United States government should be involved in active measures short of warfare. Unless we’re trying to overthrow somebody, I don’t find it acceptable. The Russians have dedicated bureaucracies for deception. We don’t.” She went to several meetings Raymond chaired at the NSC and came away with a feeling of foreboding. “He was very influential in the Reagan administration and with Ronald Reagan himself,” but she conscientiously kept her distance from his work at the White House.
The KGB’s AIDS deception appalled her. “I was aghast,” she said. “It made me angry. It seemed so slimy to me. I was particularly struck by the cartoon. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Every word carried an impact. Every aspect—the general, the swastikas, the money changing hands.… We decided to go whole hog and publicize it ourselves and say the Soviets were playing a very dirty game.”
The Pravda cartoon was the cover and the centerpiece of the group’s biggest counterpunch against the KGB, a highly detailed 101-page compendium of lies and propaganda published in August 1987. The forgeries it exposed included a bogus NSC memo detailing the Reagan administration’s pursuit of a first-strike nuclear strategy against the Soviets, an invented American propaganda campaign exaggerating the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, and a fake report from General Mobutu about American support for anti-communist guerrillas across Africa. It meticulously recorded the almost daily repetition of the AIDS hoax by print and broadcast outlets around the world. It reported on the Soviets’ worldwide broadcasts of disinformation about biological warfare by the United States. “Pentagon bacteriologists are provoking epidemics,” including “hemorrhagic fever in Korea, dengue in Cuba [and] viral encephalitis in Nicaragua,” one such fake news item read. Another incendiary falsehood detailed CIA support for RENAMO, a vicious African guerrilla army created by the white racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s, whose senseless violence killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The CIA didn’t back RENAMO, despite the strong desires of Director Casey, due in great part to the insistence of American ambassadors in Africa. But countless Africans and millions of Americans thought it did. One chapter in the report included an interview with Stanislav Levchenko, who had been a KGB major assigned to active measures while posing as a Soviet journalist in Tokyo when he defected to the United States in 1979. “The Soviet Union has been tricking the West for almost 70 years,” he said. “Without any doubt, both in Europe and the United States there are still a significant number of people who remain naïve” about that fact, he added, but “the number of people who are completely naïve is gradually diminishing.”
The report found many readers among the American public, the Congress, the White House, and the Kremlin. Among them was Mikhail Gorbachev.
The last of the Soviet leaders had been in power since March 1985, and over the following two years, it had become apparent that he was something new under the sun. Though he had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Soviet system in the 1960s and 1970s, a rise accelerated by Andropov’s political support and personal friendship, he seemed to differ from his predecessors in almost every significant regard. He stopped to talk to people in the streets. He encouraged new ideas and open debate in the Politburo. He was socialism with a human face. By the start of 1987, he had met with Reagan in Geneva and in Reykjavík. He was negotiating nuclear weapons deals with the United States, preparing to pull the Red Army out of Afghanistan, and trying to change the rancid politics and starveling economics of his country through his policies of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, or reform.
What he hadn’t done was to alter the KGB’s use of active measures. In October 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci were in Moscow, in the grandeur of Saint Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin, discussing the fate of nations with Gorbachev, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Communist Party secretary Anatoly Dobrynin, when, to the Americans’ astonishment, the subject of the American counterattack against Soviet disinformation suddenly came up.
The meeting had started on a high note. A grinning Gorbachev offered a hearty “So, we go forward!” But midway through a four-and-a-half-hour session dealing with issues including strategic arms reduction talks and the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet leader turned sour. “He had with him an interesting document,” read the American minutes, declassified in 2016. “He had decided he must raise it with the Secretary. Holding up a copy of the State Department publication, Soviet Intelligence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986–87”—the recent work of Bailey and her team—“Gorbachev alleged that it contained ‘shocking revelations.’ Specifically, he noted the pamphlet’s treatment of a ‘Mississippi Peace Cruise,’ which Gorbachev had commended to President Reagan during the Geneva summit as an example of the kinds of people-to-people activities they had agreed to expand. Now, it turned out, the U.S. had discovered that these same agreements—and this same cruise—were being used by the Soviets to deceive Americans. Gorbachev asked if the example he had given the President had been chosen on purpose for inclusion in the study.”
Shultz, taken aback, said he was unfamiliar with the report, which he was, and he asked if he could keep it. Gorbachev said it was his only copy. He had raised the issue, he said, because he wanted to improve relations across the board. “There was no interest in Moscow in nourishing hatred for the U.S,” he said. “Could the U.S. not live without portraying the Soviet Union as an ‘enemy’? Was it a ‘must’ to do so? What kind of a society would need such an approach?” He wondered aloud whether the Soviet Union still really was seen as an “evil empire” by the White House, and if so, “how could the Secretary of State negotiate with people he considered ‘enemies’?” Then he struck a low blow. He said Shultz’s own State Department had itself “developed active measures which portrayed two years of progress in expanding exchanges as KGB penetration.” Shultz, now reeling, tried counterpunching with the time-honored technique of whataboutism, long practiced by Soviet propagandists, trying to discredit Gorbachev as a hypocrite without disproving his argument. What about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan? Shultz said. What about the downing of KAL 007? Gorbachev fired back: How much had the American government paid for the military pension of the pilot who flew the doomed plane? “The Secretary said he would not dignify the comment with a response. Gorbachev said he would ignore the Secretary’s remarks as well.” A cold shadow fell across the glittering room.
Shultz tried to recoup. He said he thought there was no more important task than improving relations between Moscow and Washington. But Gorbachev was still furious. Waving the working group report, he asked how it could have been published: “Did documents like this one produce confidence? There had been some improvement in contacts between the two countries, and the Soviet side welcomed this. But the U.S. seemed to be afraid of it. How weak the U.S. must be to react so. Gorbachev said he would like to conclude this sharp exchange on the note with which he had begun—a desire to improve relations. The desire was there on the Soviet side. The U.S. should reflect on this. The Secretary said he agreed. Gorbachev said, ‘Good. Let’s forget it.’”
It wasn’t forgotten. When Shultz returned to Washington, he wanted the Active Measures Working Group abolished. He was furious that Gorbachev had blindsided him and that the sandbagging and the ensuing confrontation had come close to derailing the delicate negotiations. His anger was misplaced. The report was in his briefing book before he arrived in Moscow. He simply hadn’t taken time to read it. “I was very unhappy with George Shultz,” Bailey said. “He should have read the report and he should have taken Gorbachev to task and supported us.”
Gorbachev visited the White House seven weeks later, floating on a sea of popular acclaim from Americans, met by cheering crowds in the streets of Washington chanting, “Gorby! Gorby!” But active measures were on the agenda again. Gorbachev and his team had a ninety-minute working lunch at the White House with Reagan, Bush, Shultz, Carlucci, Colin Powell, and the U.S. Information Agency director Charles Wick on December 10, 1987. Unprompted, Wick chimed in to say that he had met with the heads of TASS and two other Soviet news agencies, and they had agreed “that there would be not only arms reduction, but also an end to disinformation.” Gorbachev pondered this. “In other words,” he said, “both sides spoke against psychological warfare.” The transcript records that “Shevardnadze joked that disarmament would come faster than agreement on this.” He was dead right on that point.
The Soviets did ease up on the most aggressive active measures against the United States; the CIA attributed that, in part, to the efforts of the Active Measures Working Group. But the United States stepped up political warfare operations in the Soviet Union, as the CIA reported to the White House in November. “Our enhanced program is designed to exploit the current Soviet policy of ‘glasnost’ and the revolution in electronic communications, two phenomena which offer an unprecedented opportunity for our covert action program to impact on Soviet audiences,” the agency’s Soviet division noted. “Last year, some 500,000 books, periodicals, audio cassettes, and video cassettes were distributed inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” There was more to it than that. A still mostly classified readout of a covert-action review at a July 1988 White House Situation Room meeting shows that CIA director William Webster told the president, Carlucci, and Powell that the agency had been using many of the same tools, such as clandestine electronics and computer publishing, that it had used in support of Solidarity, and wielding them against the Soviets. He showed Reagan a “Russian-language propaganda pamphlet, ostensibly written by the Communist youth organization,” but produced by the CIA. “Six thousand copies were infiltrated into the Soviet Union, claiming to support Gorbachev’s reform program, but demanding democratic reforms well beyond what the regime will tolerate,” he reported. “The pamphlet was openly circulated and triggered a KGB investigation. We recently learned that students called in for questioning by the KGB claimed they supported the pamphlet’s message.” Perhaps they had escaped imprisonment; on this point the record is silent.
The Active Measures Working Group began to fall apart as the Reagan administration came to an end, in no small part due to the animus of the secretary of state. Bailey went to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Her best staffers returned to their full-time jobs at the CIA and the FBI. The bureau’s Jim Milburn devoted his life to hunting down Aldrich Ames. The FBI agent sent to replace Milburn was a dour and taciturn man, a counterintelligence veteran who presented a personality so colorless that some members of the group couldn’t recall him clearly in years to come, though he sometimes chaired its meetings and served as a principal author of its final report to Congress.
His name was Robert Hanssen, and he had been spying for the Soviets from inside the FBI since the late 1970s. Like Aldrich Ames, Hanssen had betrayed almost every Soviet agent who worked in secret for the FBI and the CIA, and the double proof provided by the two turncoats sent each one to their deaths. The FBI had assigned Hanssen to study all the known and suspected Soviet penetrations of the bureau, in order to find the man who had unmasked Sergei Motorin and two of his KGB colleagues. Hanssen was looking for himself, so his study proved maddeningly inconclusive, and it turned the trail cold. Having covered his tracks, Hanssen saw a clear field for his trysts with Moscow’s spies. As a counterintelligence supervisor entrusted with an unsurpassed ability to tap into the FBI’s computer systems, he delivered to the KGB, among other treasure troves, a complete list of double-agent operations being run by the FBI, a warning that the bureau was tunneling into the basement of the new Soviet embassy in Washington, a detailed technical description of the National Security Agency’s ability to decode Moscow’s communications, a line-by-line reading of the CIA’s budget requests for the next five years, and a great deal more. Hanssen was not arrested until the twenty-first century, twenty-two years after his treason first took shape.
Moscow’s spies and agents had made a clean sweep of their American enemies in the first years of the cold war. They had done so in the last years, even as the final battles of the long struggle came to a close. And they would do so once again after a veteran of the Leningrad KGB took power in the Kremlin.