How Russia’s Active Measures Came Home to the United States
From kompromat to Russiagate: A modern history of 'disinformation'
In 1984, still fuming over the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics four years earlier, the Soviet Union attempted revenge. Under the heading, “The Olympics—For Whites Only,” a team of forgers from the KGB’s Directorate A penned a viciously racist tirade, signed it “Ku Klux Klan,” and sent copies postmarked from Maryland and northern Virginia to the Olympic organizing committees of African countries. “The highest award for a true American patriot would be the lynching of an African monkey,” the missive warned. “Blacks, welcome to the Olympic games in Los Angeles!”
The task of exposing this particularly crude “active measure,” a form of political warfare practiced by the Soviet Union since the days of the Bolshevik Revolution, was left to a U.S. government body known as the Interagency Active Measures Working Group. Behind the bureaucratic-sounding name was a scrappy collection of determined cold warriors committed to exposing and rebutting the avalanche of lies the Soviets and their satraps excreted as a matter of routine. Perhaps the most infamous of these deceits was “Operation Infektion,” which began with a story, planted in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper, claiming that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Like the disease whose origins it lied about, belief in this conspiracy theory spread all over the world before the working group’s “truth squads” could catch up to it.
Interest in the work of the Interagency Active Measures Working Group, which was housed within the State Department and comprised representatives from an alphabet soup of federal agencies—including the CIA, FBI, DOD, and DOJ—rekindled in the early 2010s as the primary successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia, amplified its information warfare operations abroad. I was working for one of the great Cold War-era legacy institutions, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and was a daily witness to Kremlin lies and propaganda. Indeed, rebutting them was a large part of my job. After Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the first armed seizure of territory on the European continent since the Second World War, the subject of “disinformation” became ubiquitous at the European security conferences I regularly attended, and rightly so.
Unfortunately, like so many aspects of American life (e.g., the mainstream media, pop culture, professional sports) whose value once derived in part from their eschewal of partisan politics, the discourse surrounding disinformation began to change dramatically for the worse in 2016. Donald Trump’s shady Russia connections spawned a dacha industry of amateur Kremlinologists, and suddenly, the terms and methods of analysis that I had gleaned from my years as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe started popping up in the conversation and social media feeds of people whose knowledge of the region and its history was limited to cheap spy fiction. When Upper West Side #Resistance wine moms, speaking with the cryptic authority of James Jesus Angleton, started throwing around words like kompromat, I realized that what had once been a noble cause—fighting back against Russia’s malign influence—had been hijacked by political hacks.
The degeneration of the disinformation discourse is exemplified in the Biden administration’s creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board.” Whereas the work of the last significant American governmental initiative for tackling disinformation was directed overseas, this effort, as the board’s establishment under the Department of Homeland Security suggests, will likely confront targets closer to home. Though DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has tried to dispel criticism of the board by stating that it is just a “small working group” without “any operational authority or capability” and that it will not monitor American citizens, the residue of Russiagate and the haste with which so many former spooks have intervened in domestic American political debates (see the Hunter Biden laptop story, which dozens of these supposed intelligence “experts” dismissed as “Russian disinformation,” only for it to prove accurate) suggests otherwise.
If the necessary fight against authoritarian disinformation has Cold War precedents, so too does the leap to characterize one’s domestic political adversaries as foreign saboteurs. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the CIA to uncover foreign communist influence over the civil rights and anti-war movements. Despite its blatant illegality, Operation CHAOS was extended and enhanced by Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, a token of the paranoia that ultimately led to his downfall. Neither man could appreciate that their opponents might be sincere; they just had to be dupes and traitors. There are lessons to be learned in this for today’s disinfo-warriors, who see treason wherever they look.
James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.
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