The Sword and the Shield

^FOURTEEN POLITICAL WARFARE Active Measures and the Main Adversary

“The philosophers,” wrote Marx, “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”¹ In addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessments of it, the KGB also sought to influence the course of world events by a variety of “active measures” (aktivinyye meropriatia) ranging from media manipulation to “special actions” involving various degrees of violence. Inspired by exaggerated accounts of its heroic defeat of counter-revolutionary conspiracies between the wars and a desire to impress the political leadership, it frequently overestimated its own effectiveness.

Throughout the Cold War the United States was the main target for KGB active measures as well as for intelligence collection. Most were at the non-violent end of the active measures spectrum—“influence operations” designed to discredit the Main Adversary. A conference of senior FCD officers in January 1984 reaffirmed a priority which had remained unchanged since the end of the Second World War: “Our chief task is to help to frustrate the aggressive intentions of American imperialism… We must work unweariedly at exposing the adversary’s weak and vulnerable points.”² Much of what was euphemistically described as “exposure” was in reality disinformation fabricated by Service A, the active measures branch of the FCD, and spread by Line PR officers in foreign residencies. Line PR officers were supposed to spend about 25 percent of their time on active measures, though in practice some failed to do so.

The wide variation in the sophistication of the disinformation generated by Service A reflected the uneven quality of its personnel. About 50 per cent of its officers were specialists in active measures. Some of the remaining 50 per cent were rejects from other departments. Few of the ablest and most ambitious FCD recruits wanted jobs in Service A; it rarely offered the opportunity of overseas postings and was widely regarded as a career dead end.³ There were, of course, exceptions. Yuri Modin, the last controller of the Magnificent Five, became an active measures specialist, was appointed deputy head of Service A and subsequently had a successful Line PR posting spreading disinformation in India before becoming head of political intelligence at the Andropov Institute.⁴ Many Service A officers, however, had little, if any, experience of living in the West and relied on crude conspiracy theories about the capitalist and Zionist plotters who supposedly operated a secret “command center” in the United States.⁵ Successive chairmen of the KGB and heads of the FCD, none of whom until the late 1980s had worked in foreign residencies, were influenced by the same theories.

IT WOULD HAVE been wholly out of character had the Centre failed to interpret President Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as anything less than conspiracy. The deputy chairman of the KGB reported to the Central Committee in December:

It was not difficult to find circumstantial “evidence” for this simplistic conspiracy theory, particularly as regards the oil magnate and anti-Communist buffoon H. L. Hunt. “The Communists need not invade the United States,” Hunt once preposterously declared. “Pro-Bolshevik sentiment in the US is already greater than when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government and took over Russia.”⁷

Hunt’s son, Bunker, was one of a group of right-wing mavericks who had paid for a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on the day of Kennedy’s visit, accusing the President of being a Communist stooge—a charge which prompted Kennedy to say he was “heading into nut country.”⁸ The Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby, who shot and fatally wounded Oswald on November 24, had visited the Hunt offices shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.⁹

The KGB reported that a journalist from the Baltimore Sun “said in a private conversation in early December that on assignment from a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by millionaire Hunt, Jack Ruby, who is now under arrest, proposed a large sum of money to Oswald for the murder of Kennedy.” Oswald had subsequently been shot by Ruby to prevent him revealing the plot.¹⁰ Khrushchev seems to have been convinced by the KGB view that the aim of the right-wing conspirators behind Kennedy’s assassination was to intensify the Cold War and “strengthen the reactionary and aggressive elements of American foreign policy.”¹¹

The choice of Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin, the KGB believed, was intended to divert public attention from the racist oil magnates and make the assassination appear to be a Communist plot.¹² The Centre had strong reasons of its own to wish to deflect responsibility for the assassination from Oswald. It was deeply embarrassed by the fact that in 1959 Oswald had defected to Russia, professing disgust with the American way of life and admiration for the Soviet system. Initially the KGB had suspected that he might have been sent on a secret mission by the CIA, but eventually concluded that he was an unstable nuisance and were glad to see the back of him when he returned to Texas with his Russian wife in 1962. After Oswald’s return the FBI at first similarly suspected that he might be a Soviet agent but then seems to have made the same jaundiced assessment of him as the Centre.¹³ KGB suspicions of Oswald revived, however, when he wrote to the CPUSA in August 1963 asking whether it might be better for him to continue the fight against “anti-progressive forces” as a member of the “underground” rather than as an open supporter of “Communist ideals.” Jack Childs (codenamed MARAT), an undeclared member of the CPUSA who acted as one of its main points of contact with the KGB, warned Moscow that Oswald’s letter “was viewed as an FBI provocation.” The fact that, unknown to the KGB, Childs was himself an FBI agent renders his warning unusually ironic.¹⁴

The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, reported in September 1964 that it had found “very persuasive” evidence that Oswald had acted alone and none of a conspiracy. Though the report was flawed, its main conclusions are probably accurate.¹⁵ Service A, which may well have been genuinely persuaded that Kennedy was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy, succeeded in sponsoring its first counterblast even before the Warren Report appeared. The publisher was Carl Aldo Marzani (codenamed NORD), an Italian-born American Communist and Soviet agent, probably recruited before the Second World War, who was extensively used by the KGB for active measures.¹⁶ Early in 1960 the New York residency recommended to the Centre that Marzani be given 6-7,000 dollars to enable his Liberty Book Club to continue publishing pro-Soviet material:

The international department of the Central Committee was plainly impressed. In May 1960 it approved a secret grant of 15,000 dollars, more than twice the sum suggested by the New York residency.¹⁷

Marzani’s productions during 1960 included his own translation of a rapturous endorsement of the Soviet system by an Italian Communist:

In September 1961 the CPSU Central Committee allocated another 55,000 dollars for the next two years to allow Marzani to expand his publications. He was given a further 10,000 dollars a year to cover advertising costs.¹⁹ When the young KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, stationed in New York in the early 1960s under cover as a Radio Moscow reporter, paid his first visit to one of Marzani’s receptions, he found his apartment “filled with a motley assortment of Communists, liberals, and KGB spooks—all of them watched, undoubtedly, by FBI informers in attendance.”²⁰

Among the books published by Marzani in 1964 was the first volume on the Kennedy assassination to appear in the United States, Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy? by the German writer Joachim Joesten. At the beginning of the book Joesten expresses his “heartfelt thanks… to Carl Marzani, a shrewd and hard-hitting publisher in the finest American tradition, who put his whole heart and soul in this book;” Marzani succeeded in publishing it within five weeks of receiving the manuscript. ²¹ Joesten supported Moscow’s line in pinning the blame for the assassination on a conspiracy by right-wing racists, chief among them “oil magnate H. L. Hunt:”

According to Joesten, Oswald was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background” who had been judged expendable, used as a fall guy and murdered to prevent him giving evidence.²³ Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy? thus established two themes which were to recur in Soviet and Russian active measures for the next thirty years: a plot by Hunt and other right-wing fanatics; and the involvement of the CIA. At the time, however, Joesten’s book was overshadowed by the publication of the Warren report and further undermined by the publicity given to Joesten’s Communist background.²⁴

The KGB correctly identified the New York lawyer Mark Lane as the most talented of the first wave of conspiracy theorists researching the JFK assassination. According to one report made on him, probably by the New York residency:

Joesten praised Lane as “brilliant and courageous” and dedicated his own book to him: “Neither the ‘police state tactics’ of the FBI—to use [Lane’s] own words—nor the conspiracy of silence of the press magnates, could sway him from doggedly pursuing the truth.”²⁶ Together with student assistants and other volunteers, Lane founded the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry in a small office on lower Fifth Avenue and rented a small theater at which, each evening for several months, he gave what became known as “The Speech,” updating the development of his conspiracy theory. “This alternative method of dissent was required,” writes Lane, “because not a single network radio or television program permitted the broadcast of a word of divergence from the official view.”²⁷ Though it dared not take the risk of contacting Lane directly, the New York residency sent him 1,500 dollars to help finance his research through the intermediary of a close friend whom Lane’s KGB file identifies only as a trusted contact. While Lane was not told the source of the money, the residency suspected that he might have guessed where it came from; it was also concerned that the secret subsidy might be discovered by the FBI.²⁸

The same intermediary provided 500 dollars to pay for a trip by Lane to Europe in 1964. While there, Lane asked to visit Moscow in order to discuss some of the material he had found. The Centre regretfully concluded that inviting him to Russia would reveal its hand in too blatant a way and his proposed trip was “tactfully postponed.” Trusted contacts were, however, selected from among Soviet journalists to encourage him in his research. Among them was the KGB agent Genrikh Borovik, who later maintained regular contact with Lane. Lane’s Rush to Judgment, published in 1966, alleged complicity at the highest levels of government in the Kennedy assassination.²⁹ It was top of that year’s hardback bestseller list and went on to become the bestselling paperback of 1967, as well as enjoying what Lane modestly describes as “enormous success around the world” and causing “a dramatic change in public perception” of the assassination.³⁰

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lane’s success was less enormous. The most popular books on the assassination were now those that exposed some of the excesses of the conspiracy theorists.³¹ CPUSA leaders who visited Moscow in 1971, though describing Rush to Judgment as “advantageous to the Communists,” claimed that Lane’s main motive was his own self-aggrandizement.³² In the mid-1970s, however, the dramatic revelations of real conspiracy in the Nixon White House and of CIA assassination plots against several foreign statesmen gave the conspiracy theorists a new lease on life.³³ The KGB, predictably, was anxious to lose no opportunity to promote active measures which supported the increasingly popular theory that the CIA was behind Kennedy’s assassination. Its chief target was the former CIA officer turned Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt (sometimes confused with the Texan oil millionaire H. L. Hunt), who had been wrongly accused of being in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

The centerpiece of the active measure against Howard Hunt, codenamed ARLINGTON, was a forged letter to him from Oswald, allegedly written a fortnight before the assassination. The letter used phrases and expressions taken from actual letters written by Oswald during his two years in the Soviet Union, was fabricated in a clever imitation of his handwriting.

The implication, clearly, was that Oswald wanted to meet Hunt before going ahead with the assassination.

Before being used, the forgery was twice checked for “authenticity” by the Third Department of the KGB’s OTU (operational technical) Directorate. In 1975 photocopies of it were sent to three of the most active conspiracy buffs, together with covering letters from an anonymous wellwisher who claimed that he had given the original to the Director of the FBI, Clarence Kelly, who appeared to be suppressing it. The Centre was doubtless disappointed that for almost two years its forgery received no publicity. In 1977, however, the letter was published by Penn Jones, the retired owner of a small Texas newspaper and self-published author of four books about the assassination. The New York Times reported that three handwriting experts had authenticated the letter. Oswald’s widow also identified her husband’s handwriting.³⁵ Experts summoned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 concluded more prudently that they were unable to reach a “firm conclusion” because of the absence of the original document.³⁶

The Centre was somewhat put out, however, by the fact that initial press reaction to its forgery centered chiefly on the likelihood of the letter being addressed to the late Texan oil millionaire H. L. Hunt (the central character in its own original conspiracy theory), rather than the KGB’s current intended target, the Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt. Service A believed there had been a CIA plot to disrupt its own plot. The KGB reported that an “orchestrated” American press campaign was seeking to divert public attention from Oswald’s connections with the American intelligence community by concentrating on H. L. Hunt instead. In April 1977, soon after the publication of the forged letter, the KGB informed the Central Committee that it was launching additional active measures to expose the supposed role of the “American special services” in the Kennedy assassination.³⁷ By 1980 Howard Hunt was complaining that, “It’s become an article of faith that I had some role in the Kennedy assassination.”³⁸

By the late 1970s the KGB could fairly claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the US intelligence community, than still accepted the main findings of the Warren Commission. Soviet active measures, however, had done less to influence American opinion than the Centre believed. By their initial cover-ups the CIA and the FBI had unwittingly probably done more than the KGB to encourage the sometimes obsessional conspiracy theorists who swarmed around the complex and confusing evidence on the assassination. Allen Dulles, the recently retired DCI on the Warren Commission, had deliberately not informed the commission that the CIA had plotted the assassination of Castro. On the very day of Kennedy’s assassination, the Agency had supplied an agent with a murder weapon for use against Castro. J. Edgar Hoover too had held back important information. He discovered, to his horror, that Oswald had not been included on the FBI’s security index of potentially disloyal citizens, despite having written a threatening letter to the Bureau after his return from Russia and subsequently making an appointment to see a KGB officer in Mexico City. After reading a report on “investigative deficiencies in the Oswald case,” Hoover concluded that, if it became public, the report would destroy the FBI’s reputation.³⁹

The information withheld by Dulles and Hoover would have been most unlikely to undermine the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald had been a lone assassin. But, when it became public in the mid-1970s, it inevitably encouraged the belief that there had been other cover-ups which pointed to the involvement of the intelligence community. The Watergate scandal, and the revelations of intelligence abuses which followed, created a perfect breeding ground for the spread of conspiracy theories.⁴⁰ Though most of the major abuses had been ordered or authorized by successive presidents, the belief grew that, in the words of Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, the CIA had been “behaving like a rogue elephant on the rampage.”⁴¹

SERVICE A SEIZED eagerly on Church’s ill-chosen metaphor. The KGB’s most valuable asset in its active measures to discredit the Agency was an embittered former CIA operations officer in Latin America, Philip Agee (codenamed PONT),⁴² who had been forced to resign in 1968 after complaints at his heavy drinking, poor financial management and attempts to proposition wives of American diplomats.⁴³ Though he remained in the West, Agee became, in effect, the CIA’s first defector. In 1973 he approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD’s Counter-intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called “reams of information about CIA operations.” The suspicious KGB resident, however, found Agee’s offer too good to be true, concluded that he was part of a CIA plot and turned him away. According to Kalugin:

In January 1975 Agee published an uncompromisingly hostile memoir of his career in the CIA entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which identified approximately 250 Agency officers and agents and claimed that “millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports.”⁴⁵ The self-congratulatory KGB file on the book claims, doubtless with some exaggeration, that it was “prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans.”⁴⁶ Mitrokhin’s notes do not indicate exactly what the KGB and its Cuban ally, the DGI, contributed to Agee’s text. As Agee himself acknowledged, however: “Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba [the DGI]… gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed.”⁴⁷ While Agee was writing his book in Britain, the KGB maintained contact with him through its co-optee, Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, London correspondent of the Novosti news agency and the Literaturnaya Gazeta.⁴⁸ At Service A’s insistence, Agee removed all references to CIA penetration of Latin American Communist parties from his typescript before publication.⁴⁹

Because of legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in Britain, where it was an instant bestseller. The London Evening News called it “a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy.” The Economist commended it as “inescapable reading.” Probably most valuable of all, from Service A’s viewpoint, was a review in the Spectator by Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief in Cairo, who described Inside the Company as “as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere.” With enthusiastic support from a number of journalists, Agee then set about unmasking the members of the CIA London station, some of whom were surprised emerging from their homes by press photographers. An American theater director staged a production satirizing the Agency in front of a number of CIA officers’ houses. “For a while,” claimed Agee, “the CIA in Britain was a laughing stock.” The left-wing Labor MP Stan Newens promoted a Commons bill, signed by thirty-two of his colleagues, calling for the CIA station to be expelled. Encouraged by Agee’s success in Britain, there was a rush by the media in other parts of Europe to expose the CIA stations in their own capitals.⁵⁰

The six-month delay between the publication of the British and American editions of Inside the Company, and the associated legal difficulties, merely served to increase media interest in the United States and ensure its place high on the bestseller list. A review of Inside the Company in the CIA’s classified in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, acknowledged that it was “a severe body blow” to the Agency: “A considerable number of CIA personnel must be diverted from their normal duties to undertake the meticulous and time-consuming task of repairing the damage done to its Latin-American program…”⁵¹

On November 16, 1976 a deportation order served on Agee requiring him to leave England turned his case, much to the delight of the Centre, into a cause célèbre. According to one of the files noted by Mitrokhin:

On November 30 the first in a series of well-publicized meetings to protest against the deportation order was held in London, with speakers including Judith Hart, former Labor Minister of Overseas Development, the leading Labor left-winger Ian Mikardo, Alan Sapper of the film and TV technicians union and the distinguished historian E. P. Thompson. An active defense committee⁵³ based at the National Council of Civil Liberties organized petitions, rallies and pickets of the Home Office. In the Commons Stan Newens sponsored a protest supported by over fifty MPs and led a delegation to see the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees. Agee addressed sympathetic meetings in Birmingham, Blackpool, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Coventry, London, Manchester and Newcastle. At his appeal against deportation in January and February 1977, Agee’s character witnesses included Stan Newens, Judith Hart, former Home Office minister Alex Lyon, former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, Kissinger’s former aide Morton Halperin and Sean MacBride, Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN High Commissioner for Namibia. Hart and another ex-Labor minister, Barbara Castle, sponsored a motion, supported by 150 MPs, to reform the appeals procedure. According to Agee’s KGB file, “Campaigns of support for PONT were initiated in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Finland, Norway, Mexico and Venezuela.” After Agee’s appeals had failed, the final act in the long drawn-out protest campaign was a Commons debate on May 3. The Guardian, which supported Agee’s appeal, commented:

Though Agee was eventually forced to leave England for Holland on June 3, 1977, the KGB was jubilant at the “deeply embarrassing nature of [the] fuss” his deportation had caused. The London residency’s claim that it had been able to “direct” the campaign by prominent Labor politicians and others in support of Agee was, however, greatly exaggerated.⁵⁵ It doubtless did not occur to the vast majority of Agee’s supporters to suspect the involvement of the KGB and the DGI.⁵⁶

After Agee’s well-publicized expulsion from Britain, the KGB continued to use him and some of his supporters in active measures against the CIA.⁵⁷ Among the documents received by Agee from what he described as “an anonymous sender” was an authentic copy of a classified State Department circular, signed by Kissinger, which contained the CIA’s “key intelligence questions” for fiscal year 1975 on economic, financial and commercial reporting.⁵⁸ KGB files identify the source of the document as Service A.⁵⁹ In the summer of 1977 the circular was published in a pamphlet entitled “What Uncle Sam Wants to Know about You,” with an introduction by Agee. While acknowledging that it was “not the most gripping document in the world,” Agee claimed that it demonstrated the unfair assistance secretly given to US companies abroad by the American intelligence community.⁶⁰

In 1978 Agee and a small group of supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin in order to promote what Agee called “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.”⁶¹ Files noted by Mitrokhin claim that the Bulletin was founded “on the initiative of the KGB” and that the group running it (collectively codenamed RUPOR), which held its first meeting in Jamaica early in 1978, was “put together” by FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence). ⁶² The Bulletin was edited in Washington by Bill Schaap, a radical lawyer codenamed RUBY by the KGB, his wife, the journalist Ellen Ray, and another journalist, Louis Wolf, codenamed ARSENIO. Agee and two other disaffected former members of the CIA, Jim and Elsie Wilcott (previously employed by the Agency as, respectively, finance officer and secretary), contributed articles and information.⁶³ There is no evidence in Mitrokhin’s notes that any member of the RUPOR group, apart from Agee, was conscious of the role of the DGI or KGB.

The first issue of the Covert Action Information Bulletin was launched by Agee and the RUPOR group at a Cuban press conference on the eve of the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students, held to coincide with the Havana carnival in the summer of 1978. Agee also produced advance copies of another book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, coauthored by himself and Wolf, which contained the names and biographical details of 700 CIA personnel who were, or had been, stationed in western Europe. “Press reaction,” wrote Agee, “was not disappointing. In the next few days we learned by telephone from friends in the States and elsewhere that most of the major publications carried stories about the Bulletin and Dirty Work. Perfect.”⁶⁴

The Centre assembled a task force of personnel from Service A and Directorate K, headed by V. N. Kosterin, assistant to the chief of Service A, to keep the Covert Action Information Bulletin supplied with material designed to compromise the CIA. Among the material which the task force supplied for publication in 1979 was an eighteen-page CIA document entitled “Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976-1981.” The document had originally been delivered anonymously to the apartment of the Washington resident, Dmitri Ivanovich Yakushkin, and at the time had been wrongly assessed by both the residency and the Centre as a “dangle” by US intelligence.⁶⁵ Agee’s commentary on the document highlighted the complaint by DCI William Colby that recent revelations of its operations were among the most serious problems the CIA had to face.⁶⁶ Kosterin’s task force, however, became increasingly concerned about the difficulty of finding enough secret material for the Bulletin, and recommended that it look harder for open-source material, ranging from readers’ letters to crises around the world which could be blamed on the CIA—among them the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, when 900 members of the American religious cult the “People’s Temple” had been persuaded to commit mass suicide or had been murdered.⁶⁷

Following what Service A believed was the success of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, Agee began work with Wolf on a sequel, Dirty Work II: The CIA in Africa. Early in 1979 Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko of Directorate K and A. N. Itskov of Service A met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.⁶⁸ Shortly before Dirty Work II was finished, Agee decided not to be publicly identified as one of the authors for fear that he might lose his residence permit in Germany, where he now lived. He also changed his official role on the Covert Action Information Bulletin from editor to “editorial adviser.” “How that would save my residence in Germany,” Agee later acknowledged, “was a little obscure… but such was my fear that I was barely rational—at least on this point.”⁶⁹ Nechiporenko and Itskov agreed with Pedro Pupo Perez, the head of the DGI, that publication of Dirty Work II should be timed to coincide with the conference of ninety-two heads of non-aligned nations to be held in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.⁷⁰

By Agee’s own count, Dirty Work II brought the total number of CIA officials exposed by him and the RUPOR team to about 2,000. For the KGB it had been a remarkably effective active measure. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 1980:

All thirteen members of the House Intelligence Committee sponsored the Intelligence Identities Protection Bill, popularly known as the “Anti-Agee Bill,” which eventually became law in June 1982. Agee himself had been deprived of his American passport in 1981 and traveled over the next few years on passports issued by, successively, Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His influence, by now, was in sharp decline. As he complained, “My 1983 call for a continent-wide action front against the CIA’s people in Latin America went nowhere. People had other preoccupations and priorities.”⁷¹

LIKE THE CIA, the FBI was inevitably a major target of KGB active measures. Until the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, many of these measures were personally directed against the Bureau’s long-serving, aging and irascible director. Service A employed three simple and sometimes crude techniques. The first was to portray Hoover as in league with extremists such as the ultra right-wing John Birch Society, whose founder regarded even the former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Service A had acquired both some of the society’s stationery and samples of its leaders’ signatures from its California headquarters to assist it in its forgeries. In November 1965 it fabricated a letter of good wishes from Hoover to the leader of the John Birch Society, reminding him that the FBI funds put at his disposal would enable the society to open several more branches.⁷²

A second, more sophisticated form of active measures concerned alleged FBI abuses of civil rights. Operation SPIRT was designed to demonstrate that the head of the Passport Office in the State Department, Frances Knight, was a secret FBI agent whose loyalty was to Hoover rather than to the Secretary of State. In 1967 Service A forged a letter from Ms. Knight to Hoover and arranged for it to be sent to the celebrated columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Washington Post on August 4.⁷³ The fabricated letter reported that a situation of “extreme urgency” had arisen as a result of press enquiries about an alleged FBI request to her for information on Professor H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard critic of American policy in Vietnam:

Ms. Knight told Hoover she was unwilling to commit too much to paper and suggested an urgent meeting with him.⁷⁴ Knight and Hoover both dismissed the letter as a forgery, but the fact that neither denied the FBI’s contacts with the Passport Office persuaded the KGB that at least some of its mud had stuck.⁷⁵

A third line of attack deployed by Service A against Hoover was to accuse him of being a homosexual.⁷⁶ The truth about Hoover’s probably severely repressed sexuality is unlikely ever to be known. Later, much-publicized claims that he was a gay cross-dresser whose wardrobe included a red dress and boa, which made him look like “an old flapper,” and a black dress, “very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings,” which he wore with a black curly wig, rest on little more than the discredited testimony of a convicted perjurer, Susan Rosenstiel, who claimed to have seen Hoover so attired. Nor is there any reliable evidence that Hoover and his deputy, Clyde Tolson, who shared his house, ever had a homosexual relationship. But attempts to portray him as a heterosexual are also less than convincing. Hoover had no known female liaisons. As his staunchly loyal number three, “Deke” DeLoach, acknowledges, probably the only person he had ever loved was his mother: “Hoover’s capacity to feel deeply for other human beings [was] interred with her in the Old Congressional Cemetery near Seward Square.”⁷⁷

The later commercial success, admittedly in a more prurient period, of fanciful stories of Hoover at gay transvestite parties suggests that in fabricating stories of his homosexual affairs in the late 1960s Service A had hit upon a potentially promising active measures theme. DeLoach was later depressed to discover how readily such stories were accepted as “undeniable truth:”

As sometimes happened, however, Service A spoiled a plausible falsehood by surrounding it with improbable amounts of conspiracy theory. It sent anonymous letters, intended to appear to come from the Ku Klux Klan, to the editors of leading newspapers, accusing Hoover of personally selecting for promotion in the FBI homosexuals from whom he expected sexual favors. Not content with turning the FBI into “a den of faggots,” Hoover had also allegedly been engaged for several decades in a larger gay conspiracy to staff the CIA and the State Department with homosexuals. The national security of the United States, claimed the letters, was now seriously at risk.⁷⁹ Service A’s belief that major newspapers would take seriously nonsense of this kind, especially emanating from the Ku Klux Klan, was graphic evidence of the limitations in its understanding of American society. The letters had, predictably, no observable effect.

THE MOST CELEBRATED victim of the FBI’s own active measures was the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Hoover’s obsessive belief that King was “a tom cat with degenerate sexual urges” and his simmering resentment at King’s criticism of the FBI led him to make the preposterous allegation to a group of journalists in 1964 that “King is the most notorious liar in the country.” When his staff urged him to insist that his outburst was off the record, Hoover refused. “Feel free,” he told the journalists, “to print my remarks as given.” The active measures against King were organized, apparently without Hoover’s knowledge, by FBI Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. In December 1964 Sullivan sent King a tape recording of some of his adulterous sexual liaisons which the Bureau had obtained by bugging his room in Washington’s Willard Hotel. With the tape was an anonymous letter which purported to come from a disillusioned former supporter:

King was probably the only prominent American to be the target of active measures by both the FBI and the KGB. By the mid-1960s the claims by the CPUSA leadership that secret Party members within King’s entourage would be able to “guide” his policies had proved to be hollow.⁸¹ To the Centre’s dismay, King repeatedly linked the aims of the civil rights movement not to the alleged worldwide struggle against American imperialism but to the fulfillment of the American dream and “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” He wrote in his inspirational “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963:

Having given up hope of influencing King, the Centre aimed instead at replacing him with a more radical and malleable leader. In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration. While leading freedom marches under the admiring glare of worldwide television, King was allegedly in close touch with the President.⁸³

The same operational plan also contained a series of active measures designed to discredit US policy “on the Negro issue.” The Centre authorized Modin:

Service A sought to exploit the violent images of the long, hot summers which began in August 1965 with race riots in Watts, the black Los Angeles ghetto, which resulted in thirty-six deaths, left 1,032 injured and caused damage estimated at over 40 million dollars. The Centre seems to have hoped that as violence intensified King would be swept aside by black radicals such as Stokeley Carmichael, who told a meeting of Third World revolutionaries in Cuba in the summer of 1967, “We have a common enemy. Our struggle is to overthrow this system… We are moving into open guerrilla warfare in the United States.” Traveling on to North Vietnam, Carmichael declared in Hanoi, “We are not reformists… We are revolutionaries. We want to change the American system.”⁸⁵

King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots had erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested. To “Deke” DeLoach, it seemed that, “The nation was teetering on the brink of anarchy.”⁸⁶ Henceforth, instead of dismissing King as an Uncle Tom, Service A portrayed him as a martyr of the black liberation movement and spread conspiracy theories alleging that his murder had been planned by white racists with the connivance of the authorities.⁸⁷

Simultaneously the Centre implemented a series of active measures designed to weaken the internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international reputation by inciting race hatred. In 1971 Andropov personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League, headed by Meir Kahane, calling for a campaign against the “black mongrels” who, it was claimed, were attacking Jews and looting Jewish shops. Thirty pamphlets were mailed to a series of militant black groups in the hope of producing “mass disorders in New York.” At the same time forged letters were sent to sixty black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by the League against blacks and calling for vengeance against Kahane and his chief lieutenants. Probably to the Centre’s disappointment, Kahane was assassinated some years later, not by a black militant but by an Arab.

On at least one occasion, the Centre ordered the use of explosives to exacerbate racial tensions in New York. On July 25, 1971 the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to proceed with operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive package in “the Negro section of New York.” Kireyev’s preferred target was “one of the Negro colleges.” After the explosion the residency was ordered to make anonymous telephone calls to two or three black organizations, claiming that the explosion was the work of the Jewish Defense League.⁸⁸

The attempt to stir up racial tensions in the United States remained part of Service A’s stock-in-trade for the remainder of the Cold War. Before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, for example, Line PR officers in the Washington residency mailed bogus communications from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries.⁸⁹ Among the racial taunts devised by Service A for inclusion in the mailings was the following:

This and other active measures on the same theme made front-page news in many countries. When Attorney-General William French Smith denounced the letters as KGB forgeries, Moscow predictably feigned righteous indignation at Washington’s anti-Soviet slanders.⁹⁰

THE CENTRE’S ASSESSMENT of “anti-Sovietism” in the United States changed radically at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1968 the Kremlin had been so anxious to prevent the election of the veteran anti-Communist Richard Nixon that it had secretly offered to subsidize the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey.⁹¹ Once in office, however, Nixon rapidly emerged as the architect of détente. More Soviet-American agreements were signed in 1972-3 than in the entire forty years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, under threat of impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, caused both dismay and deep suspicion in Moscow. Seen from the Kremlin, Nixon’s attempts to conceal the use of dirty tricks against his opponents were, as Dobrynin later acknowledged, “a fairly natural thing to do. Who cared if it was a breach of the Constitution?” The conspiracy theorists in the Centre convinced themselves that Nixon’s dramatic fall from power was due far less to public indignation over Watergate than to conspiracy by the enemies of détente—in particular the “Jewish lobby,” who were campaigning for unrestricted emigration by Soviet Jews to Israel, and the military-industrial complex, which was anxious to prevent lower arms expenditure.⁹²

The key figure in holding together the anti-Soviet coalition, in the Centre’s view, was the liberal Democrat, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Kissinger too regarded Jackson as “the indispensable link between the liberals, preoccupied with human rights [in the Soviet Union], and the conservatives, who became anxious about any negotiations with the Soviets.” “Jackson,” one commentator has written, “was not the type of leader who needed an impassioned aide to tell him what to think, but he had one anyway: Richard Perle, an intense, razor-sharp scourge of the Soviets who, despite his cherubic smile, earned the sobriquet Prince of Darkness from the legions he had engaged in bureaucratic battle.” Perle was the leader of what the KGB saw as a particularly dangerous part of the Jewish lobby: an informal group on Capitol Hill which included both paid Israeli lobbyists and congressional staffers.⁹³

Jackson was propelled into battle in August 1972 by the Soviet announcement of an exit tax on emigrants, theoretically designed to repay the costs of their statefunded education but whose main practical effect would have been to reduce Jewish emigration to a trickle. In October Jackson introduced an amendment to the Nixon Trade Reform Bill barring the Soviet Union from receiving most-favored nation status and trade credits until it had lifted restrictions on emigration. Though Moscow quickly dropped the exit tax, Jackson maintained his amendment. For the next two years Kissinger conducted a shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Jackson, trying vainly to obtain enough Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration to persuade Jackson to back down. “For a long time,” said Kissinger later, “I did not realize that Jackson could not be placated.”⁹⁴

Dobrynin reported to Moscow that Jackson “kept escalating his demands” in order to win the backing of the Jewish lobby for his attempt to win the Democratic nomination at the 1976 election.⁹⁵ The New York resident, Boris Solomatin, informed the Centre that Jackson appeared to be in a strong position for the presidential primaries:

Others in the Centre cynically concluded that Jackson’s reticence about his private life “probably points to the existence of compromising information which could be used to discredit him and his family.” The KGB’s search for “compromising information” was extraordinarily wide-ranging. Despite the fact that Jackson’s parents had left Norway as long ago as 1885, the Oslo residency was ordered in 1974 to make a detailed investigation of his Norwegian relatives. As the American residencies examined Jackson’s long political career with a fine toothcomb, the most promising area which seemed to emerge was his sexuality. Jackson’s file in the Centre records that his marriage at the age of forty-nine “amazed many of his colleagues, who had considered him a confirmed bachelor.” Intensive KGB research, however, found no more incriminating evidence of homosexuality than the fact that for many years Jackson had shared an apartment in Washington with a male childhood friend.⁹⁶

Lacking any proof that Jackson had ever been a practicing homosexual, the Centre decided to fabricate it in an active measure codenamed operation POROK. In 1976 Service A forged an FBI memorandum, dated June 20, 1940, in which Hoover reported to the Assistant Secretary of Justice that Jackson was a homosexual. Photocopies of the forgery were sent to the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Topeka Capital and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters. Service A also sought to exploit a number of incidents during the 1976 primary campaign. After an argument with a gay rights activist at a press conference in March, Jackson told him that he did not want his vote. During a television appearance in April, Jackson declared that “homosexuality leads to the destruction of the family.” The KGB sent these statements, together with bogus documents purporting to show that Jackson and Perle were members of a gay sex club, to, among others: Senator Edward Kennedy, who was thought “personally hostile to Jackson;” the columnist Jack Anderson; and the magazines Playboy and Penthouse.

Because of Jackson’s continuing influence on the ratification of Soviet-American arms limitation agreements, operation POROK continued long after he had failed to gain the Democratic nomination. One of the aims of the operation during 1977 was to incite the gay press into attacking Jackson as a closet gay who hypocritically attacked homosexuality in public for his own political advantage. Early in May a Service A officer in New York posted a forged FBI document to the California-based magazine Gay Times reporting that Jackson had been an active homosexual while working as a state prosecutor in the early 1940s. Handwritten on the forgery was the heading “Our Gay in the US Senate.” Like the rest of operation POROK, the forgery had no discernible effect on Jackson’s career.

THE CENTRE’S MAIN target within the Carter administration, which took office in 1977, was the Polish-born National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously an ill-chosen KGB target for cultivation.⁹⁷ As Brzezinski later acknowledged, he and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance engaged in a “prolonged and intense” debate over policy to the Soviet Union. The result, according to Vance, was an unstable balance between the “visceral anti-Sovietism” of Brzezinski and his own “attempt to regulate dangerous competition” between the superpowers.⁹⁸ “When Carter spoke on foreign affairs,” complained Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, “we tended to hear echoes of the anti-Sovietism of Brzezinski.”⁹⁹ The aim of Service A was to diminish Brzezinski’s influence relative to Vance’s and, if possible, to engineer his dismissal.

The Centre ordered its American residencies to begin a trawl for potentially damaging information on Brzezinski as wide-ranging as that which preceded operation POROK. Was Brzezinski concealing Jewish origins? Was he having an affair with the actress Candice Bergen? Was there any compromising material on his relations with, among others, his deputy David Aaron, his special assistant Karl Inderfurth, Ambassador Richard Gardner and the Polish émigré community?¹⁰⁰

Though muckraking in the United States appears to have proved unproductive, the Centre was supplied with what it believed was sensational evidence of Brzezinski’s secret career in the CIA by the Bulgarian intelligence service. Probably under pressure from his interrogators, Henrich Natan Shpeter, a Bulgarian economist who had confessed to working for both American and Israeli intelligence, produced a bizarre account of a visit to Bulgaria in 1963 by Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University, as a guest of the Academy of Sciences. Shpeter allegedly claimed that Brzezinski was a CIA officer who contacted him by using a password, received intelligence from him and gave him further instructions for intelligence operations. In addition, even in 1963, according to Shpeter, Brzezinski had a major role in framing US policy towards the Soviet Bloc.

Shpeter’s story, in short, was strikingly similar to those expected of defendants in Stalinist show trials. The Centre, however, was easily seduced by attractive conspiracy theories and used Shpeter’s bizarre tale as the basis of an active measure code-named operation MUREN. Service A drafted a bogus report on Brzezinski by an Israeli Zionist organization which included allegedly authentic details of his involvement in Shpeter’s espionage. The report went on to denounce Brzezinski as “a secret anti-Semite” and declared that the Zionists had compromising information on his private life which would seriously discredit him.

The Centre decided to deliver this bizarre document to the US embassy in Israel, convinced that its contents were so sensational that they would be brought to carter’s as well as Vance’s attention. On August 20, 1978 the report was inserted through the half-open window of a car parked by an American diplomat on a street in East Jerusalem.¹⁰¹ In all probability, the US embassy dismissed the document as the work of a mildly deranged conspiracy theorist. Service A, however, persuaded itself that it had succeeded in putting Brzezinski’s career in jeopardy. It seized on press articles during and after the negotiation of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in September 1978—which appeared to show that Vance had established himself as Carter’s main foreign policy adviser—as proof that Brzezinski had been demoted. In November 1978 the deputy head of Service A, L. F. Sotskov, proudly reported to Andropov that operation MUREN had been successfully completed. Though the MUREN file fails to mention it, that judgment was doubtless revised the following year. The hardening of Carter’s policy to the Soviet Union was evident even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979.¹⁰³

PROBABLY NO AMERICAN policymaker at any time during the Cold War inspired quite as much fear and loathing in Moscow as Ronald Reagan during his first term as president. Active measures against Reagan had begun during his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in 1976. The Centre had no doubt that Reagan was far more anti-Soviet than either the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, or the Democratic contender, Jimmy Carter. As in the cases of Jackson and Brzezinski, Service A was ordered to embark on a remarkably wide-ranging quest for compromising material. The Centre ordered, inter alia, an investigation of reports that Reagan’s health had been affected by his father’s alcoholism.¹⁰⁴ During his childhood Christmases, Reagan later recalled, “there was always a threat hanging over our family. We knew holidays were the most likely time for Jack [Reagan senior] to jump off the wagon.”¹⁰⁵ But such painful childhood memories were not the stuff of which successful active measures were made. Apart from confirming Reagan’s reputation as a Cold War warrior, Service A seems to have discovered nothing more damaging than alleged evidence of his “weak intellectual capabilities.” Service A successfully planted anti-Reagan articles in Denmark, France and India,¹⁰⁶ where they found more fertile soil than in the United States, but it is barely conceivable that KGB active measures had any influence on Reagan’s failure to win the Republican nomination in 1976.

The Centre was less involved in trying to influence the 1980 presidential election than it had been four years earlier. Moscow saw little to choose between what it now saw as a Carter administration dominated by Brzezinski’s hard line policies and Reagan’s long-standing anti-Sovietism. “Fed up with Carter and uneasy about Reagan,” wrote Dobrynin, “it decided to stay on the fence.” After Reagan’s election, Moscow quickly regretted its fence-sitting, convinced that the new administration represented “the most conservative, chauvinist, and bellicose part of American politics… pressing for the restoration of American world leadership after the defeat in Vietnam.” To Dobrynin’s dismay, the Kremlin succumbed to a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy, fearful—particularly during 1983—that he was planning a nuclear first strike. Dobrynin discovered from the Washington resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov, the instructions for the vast KGB-GRU operation RYAN designed to detect Reagan’s non-existent preparations for the surprise attack. But RYAN remained so secret that most Soviet ambassadors were kept in ignorance of it.¹⁰⁷

It was probably the extreme priority attached by the Centre to discrediting the policies of the Reagan administration which led Andropov to decree formally on April 12, 1982, as one of the last acts of his fifteen-year term as chairman of the KGB, that it was the duty of all foreign intelligence officers, whatever their “line” or department, to participate in active measures.¹⁰⁸ Ensuring that Reagan did not serve a second term thus became Service A’s most important objective. On February 25, 1983 the Centre instructed its three American residencies to begin planning active measures to ensure Reagan’s defeat in the presidential election of November 1984. They were ordered to acquire contacts on the staffs of all possible presidential candidates and in both party headquarters. Residencies outside the United States were told to report on the possibility of sending agents to take part in this operation. The Centre made clear that any candidate, of either party, would be preferable to Reagan. Residencies around the world were ordered to popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!” The Centre announced five active measures “theses” to be used to discredit Reagan’s foreign policy: his militarist adventurism; his personal responsibility for accelerating the arms race; his support for repressive regimes around the world; his administration’s attempts to crush national liberation movements; and his responsibility for tension with his NATO allies. Active measures “theses” in domestic policy included Reagan’s alleged discrimination against ethnic minorities; corruption in his administration; and Reagan’s subservience to the military-industrial complex.¹⁰⁹

Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1984 election was striking evidence of the limitations of Soviet active measures within the United States. Even on university and college campuses Reagan was surprised by the (admittedly less than unanimous) “outpouring of affection and support:” “These students in the eighties seemed so different from those that I’d dealt with as governor a decade earlier.”¹¹⁰ Though Service A was never willing to admit it, there was little it could do to undermine a popular president. Its attacks on Reagan fell on much more fertile ground in Europe and the Third World, however, where his populist appeal to the American way was frequently ridiculed.

ACTIVE MEASURES AGAINST the Main Adversary were usually more effective outside than inside the United States. One of Service A’s most successful tactics was its use of forgeries of US documents shown in confidence to Third World leaders to alert them to supposedly hostile operations against them by the CIA and other American agencies. Since most of these forgeries were never made public, the United States was not usually able to challenge their authenticity. One characteristic example in the files noted by Mitrokhin was operation KULBIT in the Republic of Guinea in 1975. The operation was based on three French language leaflets attacking the government of President Sekou Touré, allegedly produced by the CIA station in the Guinean capital, Conakry, but in reality fabricated by Service A in Moscow. To heighten the dramatic impact of the forgeries, the Soviet ambassador in Conakry telephoned the Minister of Security, Mussa Diakite, at 6 p.m. on October 16, 1975 to tell him that a special emissary had arrived from Moscow with top secret information for the President of great importance. At 9 p.m. the ambassador and O. A. Seliskov, deputy head of FCD Directorate K, were ushered by Diakite into the presence of Sekou Touré. Seliskov handed the President the three fabricated CIA leaflets, the first of which began with an attack on the high level of Guinean unemployment. According to the KGB file on operation KULBIT, on seeing the reference to unemployment, Sekou Touré turned to Diakite, waved the pamphlet in his face and angrily exclaimed, “The filthy imperialists!” Seliskov then described various alleged plots by the CIA station to overthrow the President, making the plots appear all the more convincing by incorporating into them various pieces of information which he knew were already known to the Guinean security service. Sekou Touré, by now “in an emotional state,” pounded the table and declared, “We will take decisive action against the US intelligence officers you have identified. They will be expelled within twenty-four hours!” When he calmed down, the President observed, as Service A had intended, that some of Seliskov’s information coincided with intelligence already in the possession of his security service.¹¹¹

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:”

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:

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:”

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.