Secrets of the Cold War: Disinformation | Soviet Active Measures | 1984 | Documentary
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This
Documentary reviews the various measures, including disinformation, bribery, forgery, and overall dirty tricks employed abroad by the
Soviet Union to further its aims against the
Western world.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Active measures:
Active measures (
Russian: Активные мероприятия) was a
Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the
Soviet security services (
Cheka,
OGPU,
NKVD,
KGB) to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it". Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration in churches, and persecution of political dissidents.
Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the
World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist andopposition parties; wars of national liberation in the
Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. The intelligence agencies of
Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.
Retired KGB
Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul of
Soviet intelligence": "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the
West, to drive wedges in the
Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly
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 ground in case the war really occurs."
Active measures was a system of special courses taught in the
Andropov Institute of KGB situated at
SVR headquarters in
Yasenevo, near
Moscow. The head of the "active measures department" was
Yuri Modin, former controller of the
Cambridge Five spy ring.
Disinformation:
Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth. Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.
Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions. A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole.
Another technique of concealing facts, or censorship, is also used if the group can affect such control. When channels of information cannot be completely closed, they can be rendered useless by filling them with disinformation, effectively lowering their signal-to-noise ratio and discrediting the opposition by association with many easily disproved false claims.
In espionage or military intelligence, disinformation is the deliberate spreading of false information to mislead an enemy as to one's position or course of action. In politics, disinformation is the deliberate attempt to deflect voter support of an opponent, disseminating false statements of innuendo based on a candidate's vulnerabilities as revealed by opposition research. In both cases, it also includes the distortion of true information in such a way as to render it useless.
Disinformation may include distribution of forged documents, manuscripts, and photographs, or spreading dangerous rumours and fabricated intelligence. Its techniques may also be found in commerce and government, used to try to undermine the position of a competitor.
The comparative Russian word is дезинформация, transliterated as "Dezinformatsiya", and was used throughout the Soviet Union
with a great deal of information about the KGBs activities coming to light with the fall of the Soviet Union. A successful example of Soviet disinformation was the publication in
1968 of
Who's Who in the
CIA which was quoted as authoritative in the West until the early
1990s.
Secrets of the
Cold War: Disinformation | Soviet
Active Measures |
1984 | Documentary