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The Democrats’ goal was to stifle what they regarded as a destructive and dangerous conservative policy that would upset strategic nuclear stability. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the Soviet Union in the early 1980s saw SDI as a potentially devastating strategic checkmate to their ability to confront the democratic West with nuclear power. Unknown to most in the West, the Soviets had begun building up strategic defenses of their own while using the ABM Treaty to keep the United States from matching their capabilities. By the mid-1980s, Moscow had an array of programs under way to defeat ballistic missiles, including lasers, particle beam weapons, and the world’s only antisatellite system—orbiting bombs that would maneuver close to satellites and explode.
The Soviets wasted no time in waging information war against SDI, including a program of covert measures. On April 22, 1983, a month after Reagan’s SDI announcement, the New York Times published a letter signed by more than two hundred senior Soviet scientists denouncing the program. Typical of Soviet duplicity, a number of the signatories were closely involved in both traditional and advanced ballistic missile defense programs, a fact unknown to most Americans. Moscow sympathizers, of whom there were many in the West, quickly echoed the Soviet propaganda campaign, taking to the op-ed pages of major newspapers and warning that SDI would doom the coveted arms control negotiations.
Within the Reagan White House, officials were concerned about the Soviet disinformation campaign and tasked CIA director William Casey to formulate a covert information warfare plan to counter it. As part of the approval process, such covert actions had to be approved by Congress, and as part of that process a group of White House and CIA officials traveled to Capitol Hill to brief members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. During the closed-door meeting, one of the senators, liberal Joseph Biden, became so incensed by plans for the secret counter-disinformation plan that he shot back at the witnesses: “You’re just doing this to support SDI.” Furthermore, according to attendees at the closed hearing, Biden then issued the kind of threat that liberal Democrats had perfected in scuttling unpopular CIA covert action programs. The Delaware Democrat, who would go on to promote his liberal agenda as vice president during the Obama administration, threatened that if the CIA went ahead with the information warfare program against the Soviet anti-SDI operation, the world would read about it on the front page of the New York Times. Thus the Soviets were given free rein to go after and discredit the program. The administration was left with few options. The Pentagon, in a March 1985 report on Soviet strategic defenses, noted that “through an intensive, worldwide propaganda campaign, the U.S.S.R. evidently hopes that it can dissuade the United States from pursuing this research program, thereby preserving the possibility of a Soviet monopoly in effective defenses against ballistic missiles—a monopoly that could give the U.S.S.R. the uncontested damage-limiting first-strike capability that it has long sought.” Liberal Democrats in Congress became the unwitting tools of Soviet disinformation, blinded by their own political biases.
For the highly partisan liberal Left, conservatives were regarded as a greater threat than America’s real foreign enemies. The political opposition from liberals in Congress to the counter-disinformation program sought by the CIA would set the tone for U.S. government information warfare efforts, or more accurately the lack of them, for decades afterward.
• • •
During the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan was one of the few American leaders who understood the communist threat and would take steps to hasten its defeat in the Soviet Union.
The date was April 10, 1991. The publication was Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star, the official newspaper of the Soviet Red Army. The author was Major General Gennady Kashuba, head of the USSR Defense Ministry press center. The headline read “How Many Hats Does Mr. Gertz Have?” It was labeled a rejoinder to two articles I had written and published days earlier in the Washington Times about a secret visit to recently reunited eastern Germany by Soviet marshal Dmitry Yazov. The Soviet defense minister had traveled to the remnants of the key Soviet satellite nation of East Germany in March 1991, six months after one of the worst police states had been dissolved and unified with West Germany. The Yazov visit coincided with Moscow’s role in the clandestine escape of East German dictator Erich Honecker, who had been holed up on a Soviet military base and fled the country and authorities who were seeking to put him on trial for ordering the shooting deaths of some two hundred East Germans killed by border guards as they tried to flee the Stalinist state. At the time of the Yazov visit, Soviet forces in the country numbered 370,000 troops.
The article was a masterpiece of Soviet disinformation—the practice of using false and misleading information to advance strategic and policy objectives. The article accused me of writing “base misinformation . . . couched in the spirit of the ‘cold war’ times.” It claimed that in Britain, if someone were caught lying they would be required to eat their hat. Thus the article asserted that for me, “hats seem to have become a constant dish in his diet.”
The real target of the disinformation piece was the second article I had written in the Times the same day as the article on the Yazov visit. It was a detailed exposé of Soviet disinformation and what were called “active measures”—covert and overt intelligence and propaganda programs. The information for my article had been provided by a special group within the U.S. Information Agency, at the time the U.S. government’s official news and information service, which played a pivotal role in helping win the Cold War.
The group was known as the Active Measures Working Group and was dedicated to exposing Soviet lies and deception. The list of Soviet disinformation operations made public by the group included details on how the KGB intelligence service planted lies and half-truths in Russian and developing-world news outlets that falsely reported the CIA created the AIDS virus and was exporting condoms containing AIDS-infected lubricant to the third world. Other disinformation operations revealed by the group included lies that the CIA had been plotting with separatists to weaken the Soviet Union, and that the CIA was sabotaging the Soviet economy and dividing Soviet leaders. The KGB also spread disinformation that the agency had been arranging the assassinations of world leaders such as France’s Charles de Gaulle, China’s Chou En-lai, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
As a young news reporter, getting criticized in the official Red Army newspaper was very heady stuff. Rarely does a journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper get singled out for political attack by one of the world’s most sophisticated propaganda and disinformation operations. The Red Star clipping is now framed in my office. It was a gift from a longtime friend, the late Herb Romerstein, a former communist turned anticommunist who was among the most effective thought leaders on the Active Measures Working Group during the 1980s and ’90s in battling the evil empire’s disinformation program.
General Kashuba’s attempt to smear me proved ineffective and ill-fated. The last laugh would be mine eight months after the Red Star article appeared, when the massive disinformation operation of the KGB and Red Army itself were relegated to the ash heap of history on December 26, 1991, the day the Soviet Union was dissolved.
The Active Measure Working Group was one of the few successful information operations by the U.S. government since the end of World War II. It was created—despite opposition from the Left—after KGB disinformation operations began expanding to target key administration officials. The Reagan administration took action against KGB disinformation that was relentless, sophisticated, and inflicted serious damage on the image of America around the world. As mentioned, the covert information warfare emanating from Moscow included the planting of foreign press stories by the KGB. But the KGB took the activities to a new level in spreading forged U.S. government documents that aimed to discredit senior officials, such as the United States ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick. In 1983, an Indian newspaper published a report, based on a forged Soviet KGB document that was purpo
rtedly a speech by Kirkpatrick discussing a plan to divide up India. Earlier, in 1980, the Soviets circulated a forged presidential review memorandum on Africa claiming the U.S. administration had adopted racist policies. And in 1986 the Soviets spread a forged speech by defense secretary Caspar Weinberger falsely claiming the United States Strategic Defense Initiative was part of American plans for a protracted nuclear war and would be used as part of offensive nuclear warfare to prevent counterattacks.
The interagency Active Measures Working Group was staffed by a small group of dedicated officials and proved to be one of the most important postwar government programs on the information warfare front and is a model for information warfare programs in the twenty-first century. “The working group also changed the way the United States and Soviet Union viewed disinformation,” states a National Defense University study. “With constant prodding from the group, the majority position in the U.S. national security bureaucracy moved from believing that Soviet disinformation was inconsequential to believing it was deleterious to U.S. interests—and on occasion could mean the difference in which side prevailed in closely contested foreign policy issues.” The report noted the applicability of the working group to the Information Age. “In an increasingly connected age, America will need to protect its public reputation from those who would malign it to weaken our national security,” Dennis C. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, and James R. Locher III, a former Pentagon assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, wrote in a foreword to the study.
The working group’s origins were traced to 1983, when a pro-Soviet newspaper in India, Patriot, published several stories that had been planted by the KGB claiming the U.S. military secretly had developed the deadly AIDS virus and released it as a weapon. The report also said the virus had been genetically designed to afflict Africans. The disinformation spread quickly throughout the undeveloped world and eventually was picked up and reported by the official Soviet cultural weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. By 1987 the state-sponsored, anti-U.S. libel had appeared more than forty times in Soviet-controlled news outlets and had reached eighty countries, in thirty different languages. At the time, the virus was not understood and the disease was terrifying. It was an especially damaging piece of disinformation that undermined America in the eyes of millions of people in the developing world.
The working group toiled in relative obscurity until October 30, 1987. During a meeting that day between Secretary of State George Shultz and the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader held up a copy of a report titled “Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986–1987.” He charged the report was part of American efforts at “nourishing hatred” of the Soviet Union. In reality, the report was a carefully documented exposé of damaging KGB disinformation operations against the United States, including the AIDS-made-in-America falsehood. Shultz stood his ground in the showdown, telling Gorbachev the report told the true story about the lies Moscow was spreading about the United States. He noted that the disinformation was undermining Gorbachev’s glasnost, or opening-up, policy. For the team operating out of the State Department, denunciation of the report was tremendous confirmation that the working group had impacted the highest levels of the Soviet leadership and, more important, its self-declared sword and shield, the KGB.
A strategic victory was gained beyond the actual countering of Soviet information warfare. The working group helped the U.S. government for the first time in decades realize and understand that foreign enemies were conducting information warfare operations, something that it had almost universally ignored or dismissed until then. Since the Office of War Information went out of business forty years earlier, the American government had been left defenseless against this ideological assault posed by communist and authoritarian regimes of past and present. How important were these activities? Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, director of Department X of the East German foreign intelligence service, would reveal later that his KGB proxy service relished the operations: “Our friends in Moscow call it ‘dezinformatsiya.’ Our enemies in America call it ‘active measures,’ and I, dear friends, call it ‘my favorite pastime.’ ”
One reason U.S. government efforts to counter Soviet disinformation atrophied significantly prior to the 1980s was bureaucratic backlash within the CIA to James Jesus Angleton, the master counterspy who ran afoul of agency higher-ups in a hunt for KGB moles. After Angleton’s retirement, the agency halted all training of officers and analysts in strategic deception. Liberal intelligence bureaucrats would come to regard all counterintelligence under the rubric of “sickthink.” A policy that lasted until the discovery in the early 1990s that all its recruited agents in Russia had been sold out by a traitor inside the CIA, Aldrich Ames, a drunk who used his access to CIA counterintelligence files to get money from the KGB. More Soviet penetration agents would be uncovered, but CIA counterintelligence today remains a strategic vulnerability for the United States, since the view from abroad is that the agency is ripe for penetration by spies.
Counterintelligence became a priority for the Reagan administration under Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffer who became White House National Security Council staff intelligence director. Under deGraffenreid’s leadership, the U.S. government sharply changed course in the 1980s and the Active Measures Working Group proved to be one of its more significant information warfare tools. DeGraffenreid helped draft one of Reagan’s first directives as president, National Security Study Directive No. 2, on “Detecting and Countering the Foreign Intelligence Threat to the United States.” The top-secret directive, since made public, stated that foreign spying posed a significant threat and added: “Moreover, collection is not the only threat; Soviet ‘active measures’ include subversion, disinformation and other clandestine activities inimical to U.S. interests.” Presidential-level attention thus set the tone for the rest of the government bureaucracy, which had continued to resist security reforms. Indeed, many of the reforms were pushed through despite fierce opposition from the bureaucrats. An example was Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who became deputy director of national intelligence as part of a deal in Congress to confirm Bill Casey, a close Reagan adviser, as CIA chief. After the directive was signed, Inman clashed with White House national security adviser Bill Clark in opposing the directive, threatening to resign unless it was reversed. Clark, a former judge, refused to be bullied and called Inman’s bluff. He told Inman to see his secretary in the reception area and draft his resignation letter. The incident highlighted how much the intelligence bureaucracy was opposed to President Reagan’s policies.
“The Active Measures Working Group was a significant White House–driven example of all-too-rare interagency cooperation that exposed Soviet disinformation and influence operations for the strategic threat that they posed,” deGraffenreid told me. “And for the first time in decades it energized government to begin doing something about it.” The working group is a model for urgently needed efforts today to conduct similar activities and programs against foreign adversaries, especially the Islamic threat, deGraffenreid added. “The Islamists went to school on the Soviets for their own active measures, which is why they use it today and why they’re good at information warfare,” he said.
The Active Measures Working Group and many of the policies under Reagan helped steer the government in a positive direction during the eight years of his administration. Ten years after Reagan left office, however, in 1999, one of the most damaging government reforms in the field of U.S. information warfare capabilities took place. The agency that hosted the Active Measures Working Group, USIA, was disbanded and its functions placed within the State Department, an agency that was and remains ill-suited to conducting aggressive public diplomacy and, more important, information warfare. USIA was set up in the early days of the Cold War and at its peak was funded with more than $2 billion annually, providing vitally important inform
ation about the American ideals of democracy, freedom, and free markets to millions of people around the world in about 150 different nations. USIA created libraries in foreign capitals around the world that were extremely valuable resources for people in countries seeking to know and understand America. A Chinese-born American university professor told me the USIA was a godsend because it was a source for truthful information that helped counteract the lies and deception of the communist regime in China. Russian and Eastern European dissidents, too, have praised USIA and American radio broadcasts for helping to bring down the Soviet empire.
Formally, USIA had been given the simple task of informing and influencing foreign publics about American interests. During the Cold War, the agency’s easiest task was highlighting the differences between free societies and the repressive Soviet Bloc while working to spread America’s message. The agency became the unfortunate victim of shortsighted cost cutting by Congress, specifically, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican. After becoming committee chairman, Helms, a staunch conservative and one of the most pro-American lawmakers to serve in Congress, set his sights on eliminating three State Department–controlled agencies: USIA, the Agency for International Development, and the liberal-dominated Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Of the three, Helms was particularly focused on eliminating the arms control agency, which had been an aggressive promoter of liberal arms control policies and agreements such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The senator believed arms agreements more often than not ended up limiting the United States while ignoring systematic violations by the Soviet Union, in particular. In 1997, then–secretary of state Madeleine Albright bargained with Helms to allow the State Department to pay $2 billion in unpaid American government dues owed to the United Nations that had been held up by Congress in protest of anti-Americanism at the international organization.