by Clint Watts
October 27, 2010, proved a tipping point for transparency, when Assange went from a pioneer to a puppet. Others have traveled in his footsteps, couriers have supported him, and for them the consequences have been far higher. Chelsea Manning went to prison, and Assange called for her release, going so far as to say he’d accept extradition to the United States if Manning were granted clemency. President Obama commuted Manning’s thirty-five-year sentence before leaving office in January 2017. More than a year and a half later, Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy, not honoring his pledge. Stationed there, he toes the Kremlin line against the West, harming Western democracies but not authoritarians.
Snowden’s become a celebrity, but his disclosures have done little to ease the alleged surveillance he claimed plagued Americans. The data he stole from U.S. systems went far beyond information related to surveillance and included military secrets, putting Americans at risk and ruining costly protections paid for by taxpayers. Instead of reducing surveillance of Americans, Snowden increased surveillance of Russians. Two Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan masterfully detail how Putin has used Snowden and the threat of American spying as justification for mass internet surveillance in Russia in their book on the history of surveillance technologies in Russia. Snowden became a useful tool for passing more restrictive laws in that country, such as the “Bloggers Law” of May 2014, which “required bloggers with more than three thousand followers . . . to register with the government . . . [giving] the security services a way to track them, intimidate them, or close them down.”37 Russia has since banned VPNs that could hide someone’s identity on the internet inside the country and has installed internet and social media surveillance systems that monitor all traffic in Russia. Snowden now rails against American cyber surveillance while living in a country with quite possibly the most intrusive internet surveillance in the world.
Mexican bloggers hung from bridges in 2011, and yet WikiLeaks has never mounted a campaign to avenge their deaths. There have been no calls to expose the violent tyranny of drug cartels and the corrupt government supporting them. No leaks from the Zetas cartel or the Mexican government have surfaced on the website. The Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers have spearheaded investigations of dark money, journalists have died, and WikiLeaks—well, they’ve gone a different route.
Through all of this, Russia has seen not a threat but an opportunity. Its government may have been on WikiLeaks’ hit list, but it never feared transparency efforts, because it never would have tolerated it. No free press truly challenges Putin and his oligarchs. Russian journalists are either co-opted, jailed, or killed for challenging the government with secret disclosures. WikiLeaks’ system from the beginning always favored authoritarians and harmed democracies, for the costs of disclosure in the West are at most detention, not death. Western bureaucratic agencies and political parties must have electronic communications, and the opportunities for a disgruntled employee to betray a nation, corporation, or elected official loom large. Those betraying our government know they’ll never hang from a bridge or evaporate in a car bombing.
Instead, Russia intelligently recognized that transparency movements relied on content, and compromising information seeded to WikiLeaks provided a new method for character assassination. The Russian intelligence services had already forged ahead, compromising adversaries in cyberspace throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. They secretly placed child pornography on the computers of defectors and intelligence officers and leaked salacious sex videos of political opponents onto the internet, creating a media feeding frenzy. Outlets like WikiLeaks were a perfect vehicle for widespread character assassination of enemies worldwide, an open-source vehicle for planting information that allowed for plausible deniability.
Many of the great chess masters have been Russian, and their leader, Vladimir Putin, is a lover of judo. Both require strategy, and victory routinely goes to those who employ their adversary’s strengths against them. As Putin famously demonstrated his judo skills on YouTube, Edward Snowden settled into a Kremlin-provided safe house. Julian Assange stowed away in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Kremlin trolls practiced on audiences in Ukraine and Syria, and occasionally heckled me. As for the hackers swirling around the Syrian Electronic Army, some of them went offline, busy working on a new project. And Russia’s cyber team came together for a new mission, with some new methods the world had yet to see and still doesn’t quite comprehend.
6
Putin’s Plan
Soldiers surrender, sign armistices, and lay down their weapons when they’re defeated. Intelligence officers—spies—burn files when their country loses, giving up their weapon: hard-won secret information on their enemies. That was exactly what Vladimir Putin did when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989: he burned the Kremlin’s files from his KGB outpost in Dresden, Germany. Putin’s assignment outside Mother Russia focused on spotting, assessing, and recruiting East Germans with access to the West. He employed spycraft to buy, compromise, and coerce people into doing the Kremlin’s bidding, focusing largely on “stealing Western technology and NATO secrets,” in part by recruiting agents trained in “wireless communications.” He also learned the subtler art of using politics and compromising situations, rather than overt force, to unseat and dethrone adversaries—a skill that proved handy during his rapid ascent to his country’s helm upon returning home to the new Russia.
Putin saw the Soviet Union crumble as the West, aligned under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), outspent and outcompeted Communism on every level. The Soviets couldn’t keep up with the American economy. Mikhail Gorbachev’s move away from central planning and toward economic restructuring, known as perestroika, combined with increased openness for political and social discussion—glasnost—came too late. Rather than adapt and upgrade Communism’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the Western world, these liberalization efforts brought about the country’s unraveling. Openly available information didn’t free the Soviet economy; it crumbled it. Eastern European Communist dictatorships dissolved rapidly in 1989, marked by the epic fall of the Berlin Wall. Less than two years later, on Christmas Day 1991, the Russian flag replaced the Soviet flag atop the Kremlin.
Vladimir Putin understood relationships: how to mold them and manipulate them. Not surprisingly, his return to St. Petersburg led to his becoming a behind-the-scenes fixer for a controversial mayor before quickly climbing into Russia’s leadership. In less than a decade, Putin rose from KGB veteran to president of Russia—a remarkable feat. He understood power: how to acquire it and how to wield it, even if armed with a weaker hand. Putin learned these skills in the KGB, where a weaker country, the Soviet Union, sought an asymmetric approach to undermining the West by nonmilitary means, an approach known as “active measures.”
By the 1980s, the Soviet Union knew it was playing a losing game. American capitalism had exponentially outpaced Communism, providing the United States with significantly more military spending and economic power. Nuclear programs, combined with America’s much vaunted new “Star Wars” missile defense system, put the Kremlin at a severe disadvantage at a time when the Soviets were experiencing their own calamitous war in Afghanistan. NATO further challenged the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe. Short of the mutually assured destruction of a nuclear exchange, the Soviet Union would lose any major conflict with the United States and its broad range of allies. Economically, the USSR’s closed planned economy was doomed to failure. The Soviets needed a new, cost-effective approach if they were to keep pace in the Cold War.
If the Soviet Union couldn’t defeat the United States from the outside in, then it would have to collapse the United States from the inside out. Rather than fight a losing battle of military spending against overwhelming alliances, the Soviets accepted that the cards were stacked against them militarily, and developed a different approach to America and NATO.
“Active measures” became the tagline for the Soviet campaign to defeat the Wes
t “through the force of politics, rather than the politics of force.” Ever since the United States created the United Nations, it had enjoyed dominance in the realm of “state-to-state” systems—diplomatic and military alliances. The Soviet Union, by contrast, created its alliances through the real or perceived threat of military force, establishing coalitions with iron-fisted strongmen in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. As the Cold War dragged on and the Soviets became increasingly isolated politically and militarily, active measures, led by the KGB’s Service A, became the focal point for their efforts against America and the West.1
On the surface, the Soviets continued their state-to-state engagements and diplomatic contacts with the West, but they invested equal or even more energy in two other veins of influence. State-to-party efforts developed political parties inside Western democracies that promoted Communist agendas. This was a brilliant stroke, creating a double-edged sword to democracies promoting freedoms of speech, assembly, and press. If Communist ideals flourished and gained popular support, they might legitimately win in elections, leading to Communism’s overtaking democracies from within. Conversely, American policymakers seeking to mitigate rising Communist sentiment would undermine their own democratic principles and tarnish American values, as witnessed during the 1950s period of McCarthyism.
Active measures also involved identifying individual citizens within Soviet adversaries who were ripe for influence and manipulation in the pursuit of Soviet objectives. Westerners driven by fame and fortune would be singled out and approached by KGB agents. Soviet strategists called these unwitting, malleable zealots “useful idiots,” a term coined by Polish agents to describe Russian nihilists in the 1860s, who served as “useful fools and silly enthusiasts.” If driven by ego, a good useful idiot provided a cheap method for influencing democratic societies at the grassroots level.
Soviet agents paired unwitting useful idiots with witting “fellow travelers”—Westerners supporting Communism and allies in the pursuit of Kremlin goals. Fellow travelers spoke the ideas, policies, and sympathies of Communism but resided in the West, where, both overtly and covertly, they were provided with political support or financial resources via Communist political parties. In tandem, these two kinds of targets could build a grassroots ground game, spreading the perception of organic support for Soviet ideas and objectives in Western democracies.
Soviet propaganda was the lifeblood of effective state-to-party and people-to-people active measures strategies. Soviets artfully blended three layers of messaging to influence their targeted populations. Their newspapers provided the baseline for Communist influence, spreading the Kremlin’s party line, along with strategic falsehoods. Overt state-sponsored media outlets attributed to the Kremlin issued headlines known as “white” propaganda. “Gray” propaganda outlets were Soviet-established foreign newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. These semi-covert influence efforts amplified Soviet white propaganda, manipulated facts to spread exaggerated falsehoods, and fabricated local stories to smear Americans and promote Soviet policies and practices abroad. Local gray propaganda efforts, integrated with people-to-people strategies, created the appearance of indigenous authenticity.
Finally, there was “black” propaganda: covert actions by KGB agents to plant false stories, which appeared to the reader to come from a local source, and thus propel their legitimacy. Two key elements fueled these efforts: provocateurs and forgeries. To help spread falsehoods, KGB agents might order their assets to act as provocateurs, engaging in protests or crimes to add further credence to the information campaigns promoted by Communist newspapers all across the West and spouted by Kremlin media outlets. Service A complemented these physical actions with legitimate-looking falsehoods. Bogus U.S. government internal memorandums, alleged letters attributed to the CIA, or bogus secret documents found their way to a wide range of news outlets carrying Soviet sympathies. During the height of active measures, the KGB crafted and strategically placed thousands of forgeries in media outlets around the world, soiling the American brand with conspiracies of all types. Forgeries and provocateurs leveraged the useful idiots and fellow travelers promoting Kremlin propaganda, thus providing local credibility to what might otherwise be obvious foreign meddling. The more local it seemed to be, the more successful an active measures campaign would be. When successfully employed by the Soviets, white, gray, and black propaganda dissemination provided a holistic information bubble, consuming targeted audiences across all media with synchronized, repeated messaging that would be difficult not to believe in the absence of a strong countereffort from the West.
Active measures propaganda didn’t simply promote Soviet policy positions the way America would play to patriotism or democracy. U.S.-backed counters to Soviet propaganda, such as Voice of America, promoted freedom of speech, democratic governance, and free elections and hosted feel-good pieces on U.S. exceptionalism. The Soviet system, on the other hand, took a more negative, antagonistic approach, deploying a spectrum of messaging across four general themes. First, political messages, as one might expect, sought to tarnish the reputations of the Soviet Union’s political adversaries or undermine democratic institutions by alleging corruption or incompetence. Next, social commentary messages played alongside political themes, fomenting racial, religious, and socioeconomic divisions among the American electorate. Financial propaganda, meanwhile, sought to undermine support for capitalism by stoking fears of world market collapse, wealth disparity, or imperialism. But above all, the Soviets attempted to inject fear into audiences. Fear, more than any other emotion, lowers people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction, making lies easier to sell. Audiences were reminded, relentlessly, of impending calamities that could bring the end of humankind. Nuclear standoffs with the West were amplified by Kremlin outlets at home and abroad. Global pandemics poised to destroy local communities offered a particularly effective line of attack on America, and this area of effort, more than any other, represents what may have been the greatest success of active measures to date.
The AIDS virus ravaged communities around the world, growing from a handful of cases in 1980 to more than 4.5 million in 1995.2 The United States led much of the world’s effort to counter the spread of HIV across impoverished regions. Instead of viewing the U.S. effort as a helping hand, though, much of the world then, and even now, believes that the U.S. government unleashed AIDS on the world as a biological weapon—thanks to the KGB’s disinformation campaign known as Operation Infektion.
An active measures media campaign generally employs three simple ingredients to create damaging propaganda and provide the Kremlin with plausible deniability: anonymously sourced falsehoods, mixed with true information, disseminated through an information proxy. The Kremlin wanted to tarnish world opinion toward America as the Cold War ratcheted up militarily. It began one such campaign on July 17, 1983. An anonymous letter surfaced from an alleged “well-known American scientist and anthropologist” claiming that AIDS was the “result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.” The letter stated that the United States planned to transfer experiments to Pakistan, a claim that would create panic for neighboring India, where the letter arrived. The Patriot, a little-known “gray” left-wing Indian newspaper partially founded by the KGB in 1967, received the letter and published a sensational story attempting to bolster the false anonymous claim with accurate facts about the AIDS epidemic, alongside public information about the U.S. biological weapons programs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Patriot, a fringe outlet, received little attention from its false bombshell revelation against the United States.
While tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union rose, active measures picked up. On October 30, 1985, the Patriot AIDS conspiracy reemerged—this time cited by the KGB’s overt propaganda newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. The article, entitled “Panic in the West or What is Hiding behind the Sensation Surrounding AIDS,” pointed at the anonymous so
urce in the Patriot letter from two years earlier. The story then detailed the biological weapons at Fort Detrick and the testing of LSD on CIA officers before alleging that the United States had conducted AIDS tests on unsuspecting victims. The KGB then directed its allied East German intelligence to further the conspiracy by adding more scientific detail to the narrative. They employed a “useful idiot,” professor Jakob Segal, an agent known to the Soviets who authored a disinformation pamphlet entitled “AIDS: Its Nature and Origin.” Segal provided extensive, detailed facts regarding the AIDS virus before falsely theorizing that the U.S. government had deliberately infected “homosexual prisoners who went on to infect gay populations in New York City and San Francisco.”3 Segal’s pamphlet refuted the common consensus that AIDS had originated in Africa, instead asserting that America had invented the deadly virus. Segal proliferated this conspiracy during a presentation at the Eighth Conference of NonAligned Nations in Harare, Zimbabwe, September 1986.
Segal served as a Soviet proxy agent of influence, giving interviews to a wide variety of newspapers in West Germany and abroad, providing further legs to an unfounded conspiracy. By 1987, third world outlets routinely held the United States culpable for the spread of AIDS, repeating verbatim the manufactured Soviet falsehood. British newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, repeated the claims, and the Soviets put special emphasis on countries hosting U.S. military bases, where “infected” U.S. soldiers might be spreading the deadly virus. Africans believed and repeated the false AIDS story the most, ultimately harming American efforts to combat the spread of the virus among the most affected populations. Even today, this Soviet-created conspiracy still endures in parts of the world. The Soviets orchestrated thousands of false stories and smear campaigns over the course of the Cold War. No single effort likely demonstrates the longevity and pervasiveness of active measures like Operation Infektion.