Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

This two-pronged assault—open denunciations of communist tyranny and behind-the-scenes operations to weaken the stranglehold of the Kremlin—was reinforced by increased counter-propaganda broadcasts by the congressionally-funded Radio Free Europe (for Central and Eastern Europe,) and Radio Liberty (for the Soviet Union itself). These broadcasts in the languages of the captive nations often featured former dissidents who had escaped the “workers’ paradise” and could speak firsthand of the internal contradictions and illegitimacy of the socialist state.

In addition to these measures, the Reagan administration authorized a systematic attack on the propaganda that the Kremlin had been spreading for decades. The vehicle for this assault was a small interagency organization which today has new relevance in the fight to delegitimize the totalitarians and ideologues who threaten us.

The US approach to delegitimizing the anti-democratic message of our Cold War foe was logical and comprehensive. As the “frontman” for America, President Reagan made the strategic-level argument about the Soviets’ moral bankruptcy, a role for which the former actor now remembered as the “Great Communicator,” was perfectly suited.

For example, when he demanded that his Soviet counterpart tear down the wall that separated East from West in Berlin, his global audience on both sides of the divide knew full well that he wasn’t delivering a throwaway line. Calling attention to the Berlin Wall so dramatically underscored the harsh geopolitical reality that the communist elite had built a wall not to protect its people from the predations of a capitalist West, but to prevent their escape from a totalitarian regime to the free world.

At the same time, it was understood on the basis of Kennan’s analysis that in a one-party state such as the USSR or any of its Warsaw Pact satellites, the party could brook no dissent and therefore had to monopolize all information. In a system without freedom of choice, a free market, or independent media, all information was controlled by the state. All domestic media were party-sanctioned and controlled. Foreign media were banned, and anyone found listening to them or reading them would be punished.

Several of the nations now under communist control had once been democracies or at least moderately open societies, and Washington expected that their populations would crave uncensored news from the outside world. The Reagan administration therefore redoubled America’s commitment to broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain, investing in new pro-democracy channels such as Radio Martí, broadcasting in Spanish into Cuba and modernizing Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the English-language Voice of America.

In the Reagan era, America’s ideological orchestra had a highly visible conductor, and the strains of the symphony of freedom floated across the airwaves throughout the Soviet empire, finding an eager audience.

Having recognized the failure of containment and replacing it with a policy of “rolling back” Moscow’s influence globally, the White House identified Soviet propaganda as a direct threat to free nations everywhere and in 1981, established the Active Measures Working Group (AMWG) to uncover and undermine these global influence operations.

In Soviet terminology, “active measures” included any political actions aimed at influencing foreign populations or foreign political elites in the interests of the Kremlin and the spread of communism into new territories. By the 1980s, active measures included not only the firsthand propaganda efforts of Soviet government organs such as the KGB and the diplomatic corps of the USSR, but also:

• the use of front organizations representing themselves as apolitical

• co-opting agents in the West and the non-aligned third world, especially in media and academia

• the aggressive distribution of forged documents to support stories undermining America and her allies

Key figures in the Reagan administration realized that the general public in the West and third-world nations had little idea how aggressively the Soviets were manipulating public opinion through their surrogates and covert assets. The AMWG was a small and truly interagency group, made up of representatives from the Department of State, Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, US Information Agency (USIA), Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Council.

Meeting every week and working hand in hand with expert staffers from Congress, the AMWG developed the “RAP” system—report, analyze, publicize—to win the war of ideas. American Information Centers, operated by the USIA in cities around the world, submitted reports on local Soviet and Warsaw Pact disinformation efforts to Washington’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). INR experts, assisted by the CIA and Soviet defectors, analyzed these reports, identifying lies, fabrications, and inconsistencies. The AMWG then publicized these findings, exposing the communists’ stories as disinformation that could be sourced right back to Moscow.

The AMWG shed light on a wide array of past and present Soviet influence operations. These included Moscow’s use of the putatively independent and apolitical World Peace Council to block the deployment in Europe of intermediate-range nuclear forces, which were a key deterrent of the USSR and subordinate Warsaw Pact militaries.

The list of forgeries and lies identified and exposed by the RAP process bears some scrutiny, as it includes the kinds of stories that even today, like reanimated zombies, live on in the internet world of insidious conspiracy theories.

The reports of the AMWG proved, for example, that the Soviets had spread stories that the CIA was responsible for the Jonestown cult’s mass-suicide in Guyana in 1978 and that the US government was smuggling in Latin American children just to butcher them and harvest their organs for transplants.

Perhaps the most famous influence operation uncovered was a story, fabricated in Moscow and seeded among the press in Africa, that the AIDS virus was a product of US biological weapons experimentation. By forensically tracing the story to its Soviet source and demonstrating the forgeries and outright lies on which it was constructed, the AMWG delivered a direct blow to the Soviets’ credibility and moral prestige. The implication was clear: if “Moscow Central” could systematically lie about something as tragic as the international AIDS epidemic, how seriously should anyone take its public statements and commitment to causes such as world peace or social justice and equality? A regime that was prepared to exploit AIDS or the Jonestown tragedy was clearly immoral and not to be trusted.

On November 9, 1989, the strategy of undermining the communist ideology while applying the pressure of SDI and an American arms build-up finally bore fruit.

That night, on the very spot where Ronald Reagan had called out Mikhail Gorbachev, striking a death blow to the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, the Cold War ended. And it ended without one shot being fired from the barrel of an American M-16 or a Soviet AK-47. Not one missile was launched, not one combat plane scrambled. The residents of Berlin, not waiting for Mr. Gorbachev’s help, began to tear down that wall. Communist border guards, who before that night would have shot anyone attempting to escape to the West, simply stood by and watched, their masters having lost the will to order them to use force. Thus had our enemy lost the will to fight, to die for the bankrupt vision peddled by its decrepit and morally vanquished elite. A totalitarian ideology had been brought to its knees without the need to resort to war.