Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Sekou Touré was profuse in his thanks for the KGB disinformation: “We highly appreciate the concern shown by our Soviet comrades. This is not Chile, and we are not going to allow the same events [the overthrow of the President] to happen in our country.” He asked Seliskov how his top secret information on the machinations of the CIA, supposedly obtained from “important and reliable sources in the United States,” should be handled. “At your own discretion,” replied Seliskov graciously. Sekou Touré asked him to convey his “deepest gratitude” to the appropriate Soviet authorities and asked to be kept informed about future imperialist threats to the security of the Guinean Republic. 112

The fabrication of compromising US documents and imaginary CIA plots continued into the Gorbachev era. In addition to the “silent forgeries” shown privately to Sekou Touré and other gullible political leaders around the world, forgeries were used to promote media campaigns: among them, in 1987, a forged letter from the DCI, William Casey, on plans to overthrow the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi; in 1988, bogus instructions from Reagan to destabilize Panama; and in 1989, a fabricated letter from the South African foreign minister, “Pik” Botha, referring to a sinister but non-existent secret agreement with the United States. 113

Probably the most successful anti-American active measure of the Gorbachev era, promoted by a mixture of overt propaganda and covert action by Service A, was the story that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by American biological warfare specialists at Fort Detrick in Maryland. An East German, Russian-born physicist, Professor Jacob Segal, claimed on the basis of “circumstantial evidence” (later wholly discredited) that AIDS had been artificially synthesized at Fort Detrick from two natural viruses, VISNA and HTLV-1. Thus fortified by spurious scientific jargon, the AIDS fabrication not merely swept through the Third World, but took in some of the Western media as well. In October 1986 the conservative British Sunday Express made it its main front-page story. During the first six months of 1987 alone, the story received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries.

At the very height of its success, however, the AIDS fabrication was compromised by a combination of Western protests and “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy. “We tell the truth and nothing but the truth,” Gorbachev proudly proclaimed at a Moscow press conference in July 1987. Faced with official American protests and the repudiation of the AIDS story by the international scientific community, the Kremlin for the first time showed signs of embarrassment at a successful active measures campaign. In August 1987 US officials in Moscow were informed that the story was officially disowned and Soviet media coverage of it came to an abrupt halt.

The AIDS fabrication, however, was swiftly followed by other, equally scurrilous anti-American active measures in the Third World, some of which also seduced sections of the Western media. Among the most successful was the “baby parts” story, alleging that rich Americans were butchering Third World children in order to use their bodies for organ transplants in the United States. In September 1988 a motion in the European Parliament condemning the alleged trafficking in “baby parts,” proposed by a French Communist MEP, passed on a show of hands in a poorly attended session. 114

Even the end of the Cold War did little to diminish the enthusiasm for active measures of both Kryuchkov, who became chairman of the KGB in 1988, and Leonid Shebarshin, who succeeded him as head of the FCD. Shebarshin, who had made his reputation as resident in India from 1975 to 1977 in part by the success of his active measures operations, was wont to speak “nostalgically about the old days, about disinformation—forging documents, creating sensations for the press.” 115

Not all KGB personnel, however, shared their chiefs’ continuing enthusiasm for active measures. Kryuchkov complained in September 1990 that some FCD officers in both Moscow and foreign residencies “underestimate the importance and the role of measures designed to promote influence.” He issued a formal “Order of the Chairman of the KGB” requiring “refinement of the work of the foreign intelligence service in the field of active measures” and insisting that “their importance in intelligence work is continuing to grow:”

In effect the joint political and operational scenario and the interests of the Soviet state and its society require the KGB foreign intelligence service to introduce active measures with greater ingenuity, inventiveness and secrecy which will enhance the level of their effectiveness… Work on active measures is to be considered one of the most important functions of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service.

The FCD training school, the Andropov Institute, was instructed to prepare new “specialist courses in active measures.” Among the most important “themes” for active measures was to frighten off support by the West—in particular the United States—for nationalist movements in the Baltic republics and other parts of the Soviet Union:

In Western government and political circles and in influential émigré groups, it is important… to strengthen the conviction that an adventurist gamble on the disintegration of the Soviet Federation and statehood would lead to a disruption of contemporary international relations with the attendant unpredictable consequences. 116

Amid the active measures promoted by the SVR in the mid-1990s there remained some echoes of its KGB past. Yeltsin’s memoir, The View from the Kremlin, published in the West in 1994, ends with an appendix which contains two specially selected examples of KGB documents in the secret archives of the Russian president. One concerns the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The KGB documents on this topic, probably drawn to Yeltsin’s attention by the SVR (then headed by Yevgeni Primakov), support the theory formerly propagated by Service A that Oswald had been selected as the assassin by “a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by millionaire Hunt:”

Oswald was the most suitable figure for executing a terrorist act against Kennedy because his past allowed for the organization of a widespread propaganda campaign accusing the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the US Communist party of involvement in the assassination. But… Ruby and the real instigators of Kennedy’s murder did not take into account the fact that Oswald suffered from psychiatric illness. When Ruby realized that after a prolonged interrogation Oswald was capable of confessing everything, Ruby immediately liquidated Oswald. 117

No conspiracy theory of the Cold War era seems to have greater staying power than that generated by the death of President John F. Kennedy.

The KGB and its predecessors had played a crucial part in the creation of the Soviet Bloc after the Second World War. Throughout eastern Europe, Communistcontrolled security services, set up in the image of the KGB and overseen—except in Yugoslavia and Albania—by Soviet “advisers,” supervised the transition to so-called “people’s democracies.” Political development in most east European states followed the same basic pattern. Coalition governments with significant numbers of non-Communist ministers, but with the newly founded security services and the other main levers of power in Communist hands, were established immediately after German forces had been driven out. Following intervals ranging from a few months to three years, these governments were replaced by bogus, Communist-run coalitions which paved the way for Stalinist one-party states taking their lead from Moscow. 1