Active measures

• 1. Introduction

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  Active measures is the name for political warfare waged by the Soviet Union and, later, the Russian Federation. The U.S. Government's own label for it was executive action.

  Oleg Kalugin knew the machinery from the inside. He headed Foreign Counter Intelligence for the KGB from 1973 to 1979, and he later retired as a Major General. He called active measures the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence. In his description, the work was not about collecting secrets. It was subversion: weakening the West, driving wedges into alliances such as NATO, and sowing discord among allies. If a real war ever came, the ground would already be prepared.

  What did that subversion look like in practice? How does a spy service turn a rumor, a rebel army or a protest march into a weapon? And since so many of the most dramatic claims come from defectors and secret archives, how much weight can each one carry?

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• 2. A Wide Toolbox

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  The 1920s are when the term active measures first appears, and the toolbox was already broad. It covered espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination. It also covered the gathering of kompromat, compromising material held for blackmail. Each tool served the foreign policy goals of the Soviet and, later, the Russian governments.

  Five organizations carried the work across the decades: the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB. Besides gathering intelligence and producing revised assessments of it, they tried to influence the course of world events. The methods ran "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". From the 1920s onward, they were used both abroad and at home.

  International front organizations were one favored instrument. So was support for foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties, and for wars of national liberation in the Third World. The programs also backed underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal and terrorist groups. They forged official documents, carried out assassinations, and practiced political repression, including penetration of churches and persecution of dissidents. Intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states added operatives and information for assassinations and other covert operations.

  In 1923, according to the defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, Joseph Stalin coined the word disinformation. Pacepa said Stalin gave it a French-sounding name to fool other nations into believing the practice began in France. The twist is that the noun is really a translation of the French word désinformation, so it did not come from Russia at all.

  The Mitrokhin Archives say active measures was taught at the Andropov Institute of the KGB. The school sat at Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters in the Yasenevo District of Moscow. Its active measures department was led by Yuri Modin, who had earlier been the controller of the Cambridge Five spy ring.

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• 3. Guerrillas and Terror

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  Soviet secret services have been described as "the primary instructors of guerrillas worldwide". Ion Mihai Pacepa attributed a blunt doctrine to KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky. In Sakharovsky's reported words, nuclear arms had made military force obsolete, so terrorism should become the main weapon.

  Pacepa also quoted Sakharovsky as saying, "Airplane hijacking is my own invention." The account holds that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the PLO, which the KGB financed. These are claims from one defector, and they are presented in the record as his allegations.

  In 1972, Pacepa said, a plan code-named operation SIG was devised. The letters stood for "Zionist Governments", and the aim was to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the United States. Pacepa stated that KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov explained the logic to him. Andropov allegedly said that "a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions".

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• 4. Thrones and Killings

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  After World War II, Soviet security organizations helped install puppet communist governments in Eastern Europe, the People's Republic of China and North Korea, and later in Afghanistan. Their strategy included mass political repression and the creation of subordinate secret services in every occupied country.

  Some active measures were aimed at the Soviet Union's own leaders. The Russian historians Anton Antonov-Ovseenko and Edvard Radzinsky suggested that Stalin was killed by associates of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. They based this on interviews with a former Stalin bodyguard and on circumstantial evidence. Yevgenia Albats alleged that KGB Chief Vladimir Semichastny was among the plotters against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Andropov reportedly struggled for power with Leonid Brezhnev.

  The Soviet coup attempt of 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev was organized by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and other hardliners. Two years later, Gen. Viktor Barannikov, a former State Security head, became a leader of the uprising against Boris Yeltsin in the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. More recently, the SVR has allegedly worked to undermine governments in former Soviet satellite states such as Poland, the Baltic states and Georgia. During the 2006 Georgian-Russian espionage controversy, Georgian authorities accused several Russian GRU case officers of preparing sabotage and terrorist acts.

  Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, claimed that Nicolae Ceaușescu once told him of "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill". The list included László Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary, and Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania. It also named Rudolf Slánský and Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, the Shah of Iran, and Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. The last names were Palmiro Togliatti of Italy, John F. Kennedy and Mao Zedong. Pacepa further alleged a KGB plot to kill Mao with the help of Lin Biao.

  Hafizullah Amin, the second President of Afghanistan, was killed by the KGB's Alpha Group in Operation Storm-333. That happened before the full-scale Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The FSB and affiliated forces killed several presidents of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, among them Dzhokhar Dudaev, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim Saidullaev. Leon Trotsky and the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov are among the other widely publicized murders, both attributed to the NKVD.

  There were also allegations that the KGB stood behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. In Italy, the Mitrokhin Commission worked on the Mitrokhin Archives from 2003 to March 2006 under Senator Paolo Guzzanti. It drew criticism throughout. It closed in March 2006 with no proof for its controversial allegations, including the claim that Romano Prodi was the "KGB's man in Europe". One of Guzzanti's informers, Mario Scaramella, was arrested for defamation and arms trading at the end of 2006.

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• 5. Fake Rebels

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  Between 1921 and 1926, the OGPU ran Operation Trust, built around an invented anti-Bolshevik underground called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia. Its main success was luring Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly into the Soviet Union. Both men were arrested and executed there.

  The Basmachi movement of Central Asia was a real Islamic uprising, and it was an early threat to the Bolsheviks. Its roots lay in the anti-conscription violence of 1916, when the Russian Empire began drafting Muslims for army service in World War I. After the October Revolution of 1917, Turkestani Muslim political movements tried to form an autonomous government in the city of Kokand, in the Fergana Valley. The Bolsheviks assaulted Kokand in February 1918 and carried out a massacre of up to 25,000 people.

  The massacre rallied support to the Basmachi, who waged guerrilla and conventional war and seized large parts of the Fergana Valley and much of Turkestan. Enver Pasha and, later, Ibrahim Bek were their notable leaders. Soviet Russia answered with special military detachments disguised as Basmachi forces, and it received support from British and Turkish intelligence services. Those operations helped the movement collapse and led to the assassination of Pasha.

  After World War II, partisan organizations in the Baltic states, Poland and Western Ukraine fought Soviet forces for the independence of their occupied countries. The NKVD sent many agents to join and penetrate these movements. It also built puppet rebel forces and let them attack local Soviet authorities to earn credibility. That credibility helped the NKVD exfiltrate its senior agents to the West.

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• 6. Peace Movements

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  More than $1 billion is the figure Stanislav Lunev gave for what the GRU alone spent on peace movements opposing the Vietnam War. He called it a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost". Lunev claimed that the GRU and the KGB helped fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad.

  By the 1980s, the US intelligence community doubted that Soviet influence had directly shaped the non-aligned part of the peace movement. Even so, KGB attempts to influence the movement in the United States, Switzerland and Denmark were well known. The CIA categorized the World Peace Council as a communist front organization. It had been established on the orders of the Communist Party of the USSR in the late 1940s. For over forty years it campaigned against western, mainly American, military action, and many communist-influenced organizations affiliated with it.

  Kalugin described KGB programs that ran peace congresses, youth congresses, festivals, women's movements and trade union movements. They also ran campaigns against U.S. missiles in Europe and against neutron weapons, along with forgeries and faked material. The targets were politicians, the academic community and the public at large.

  Sergei Tretyakov, an ex-KGB agent, claimed that in the early 1980s the KGB wanted to stop the United States from deploying nuclear missiles in Western Europe. The Soviet answer to those missiles was the RSD-10 Pioneer, called the SS-20 Saber in the West. It was a mobile, concealable intermediate-range ballistic missile first deployed in European Soviet territory in March 1976. Each carried a MIRV with three 150-kiloton warheads, and its range fell just below the 5500 km minimum the SALT II Treaty set for an ICBM. Tretyakov said the Soviet Peace Committee organized and financed anti-American demonstrations in western Europe. He also said the KGB created the entire nuclear winter story to stop the Pershing II missiles, by feeding misinformation to western peace groups and influencing a key scientific paper.

  The intelligence historian Christopher Andrew drew a more modest picture for Britain. He wrote that the KGB could not infiltrate major figures in the CND and relied instead on "less influential contacts" who were more receptive to the Moscow line. MI5 found no evidence that KGB funding to the British peace movement went beyond occasional payment of fares and expenses to individuals.

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• 7. Targeting America

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  In 1974 alone, according to KGB statistics, more than 250 active measures were aimed at the CIA. They produced denunciations of Agency abuses, both real and, more frequently, imaginary. These appeared in media, parliamentary debates, demonstrations and speeches by leading politicians around the world.

  The Mitrokhin Archive exposed several American operations. One involved the writer Philip Agee, codenamed PONT, who exposed the identities of many CIA personnel. Mitrokhin alleges that Agee's bulletin CovertAction received help from the KGB and Cuba's DGI. Another operation mailed bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan to stir up racial tensions. Under Operation PANDORA, an explosive package was placed in a Black neighborhood of New York.

  The KGB also planted claims that the CIA had assassinated both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In the Middle East in 1975, it claimed to identify 45 statesmen from around the world who had been victims of successful or failed CIA assassination attempts over the previous decade.

  The Reagan administration increased US military aid to the government of El Salvador more than fivefold between 1981 and 1984. The KGB aimed to make that aid so unpopular that public opinion would demand it stop. About 150 committees were created in the United States to speak out against interference in El Salvador, and contacts were made with US Senators.

  The KGB also fabricated the story that the AIDS virus was manufactured by US scientists at Fort Detrick. Russian-born biologist Jakob Segal spread it. Former East German spymaster Markus Wolf admitted, during a visit to Italy in 1998, that his HVA had helped spread AIDS conspiracy theories.

  Soviet intelligence often spread disinformation to distort its adversaries' decisions. Sometimes the falsehoods filtered back through the KGB's own contacts and distorted its own reports, a problem known as blowback. In The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, Lawrence Bittman wrote that "There are, of course, instances in which the operator is partially or completely exposed and subjected to countermeasures taken by the government of the target country."

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• 8. After 1991

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  The annexation of Crimea gave post-Soviet active measures a fresh target. Kremlin-controlled media spread disinformation about Ukraine's government. In July 2014, a Russian missile shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. Kremlin-controlled media and online agents then claimed that Ukraine had shot it down. Active measures in the Russian Federation are in many ways based on Cold War schematics.

  Russia's alleged disinformation campaign has drawn comparison with Soviet practice. So have its involvement in the UK's withdrawal from the EU and its interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. The same goes for its alleged support of far-left movements and documented support of far-right ones in the West. The shared aim, in the phrase used for it, is to "disrupt and discredit Western democracies". Victoria Nuland, a former US Ambassador to NATO, told the United States Senate Intelligence Committee that she was "a regular target of Russian active measures".

  The Internet, and social media in particular, opened new opportunities. The Kremlin-affiliated Internet Research Agency, also called the Information Warfare Branch, was established in 2013. It is devoted to spreading disinformation online, and its best-known operation was its part in the 2016 US election interference. According to the House Intelligence Committee, by 2018 the agency's organic posts had reached at least 126 million US Facebook users. Its politically divisive ads reached 11.4 million. Its tweets reached approximately 288 million American users.

  Committee chair Adam Schiff described the aim as "sowing discord in the U.S. by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues". He said the Russians wove together fake accounts, pages and communities to push politicized material. Then they mobilized real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests.

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