KGB - Active Measures
Active measures were clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals and to extend Soviet influence throughout the world. This type of activity had long been employed by the Soviet Union abroad, but it became more widespread and more effective in the late 1960s. Among these covert techniques was disinformation: leaking of false information and rumors to foreign media or planting forgeries in an attempt to deceive the public or the political elite in a given country or countries.
The United States was the prime target of disinformation, in particular forgery operations, which were designed to damage foreign and defense policies of the United States in a variety of ways. Defectors reported that the Soviet Union and its allies circulated forged documents--often purporting to be speeches, letters, or policy statements by United States officials--containing false information. The use of international front organizations and foreign communist parties to expand the Soviet Union's political influence and further its propaganda campaigns was another form of active measures. The World Peace Council was the largest and most important of Soviet front groups. Together with the International Department of the Central Committee, the KGB funneled money to these organizations and recruited Soviet agents to serve on their administrative bodies.
As a result of a disastrous KGB loss, the West gained encyclopedic, inside knowledge of how the Soviet Union conceived and conducted Active Measures. In late 1979 Maj. Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko escaped from Japan to the United States, and he turned out to be one of the most important officers ever to flee the KGB. Levchenko had worked at the Center as well as, in front organizations in Moscow. At the time of his escape he was Active Measures Officer at the KGB's Tokyo Residency. From his unique background, he disclosed strategy, tactics and myriad examples of Active Measures, while unmasking Soviet fronts and key KGB operatives.
“Few people who understand the reality of the Soviet Union will knowingly support it or its policies,” Levchenko stated. “So by Active Measures, the KGB distorts or inverts reality. The trick is to make people support Soviet policy unwittingly by convincing them they are supporting something else. Almost everybody wants peace and fears war. Therefore, by every conceivable means, the KGB plans and coordinates campaigns to persuade the public that whatever America does endangers peace and that whatever the Soviet Union proposes furthers peace. To be for America is to be for war; to be for the Soviets is to be for peace. That's the art of Active Measures, a sort of made-in-Moscow black magic. It is tragic to see how well it works.”
Active Measures include both overt and covert propaganda, manipulation of international front organizations, forgeries, fabrications and deceptions, acts of sabotage or terrorism committed for psychological effect, and the use of Agents of Influence. Vy the early 1980s the KGB had concocted more than 150 forgeries of official U.S. documents and correspondence portraying American leaders as treacherous and the United States as an unreliable, warmongering nation. One of the most damaging was a fabrication titled U.S. Army Field Manual FM30–31B and classified, by the KGB, top secret. Field manuals FM30–31 and FM30–31A did exist; FM30–31B was entirely a Soviet creation.
The local Communist parties constituted a ready reservoir of disciplined demonstrators who could take to the streets simultaneously in cities throughout the world to foster an illusion of spontaneous concern. They provided the indefatigable cadre of planners, organizers and agitators who help stage mass demonstrations that attracted non-communists. The vast Soviet Active Measures apparatus — the overt propaganda organs, foreign communist parties, international fronts, KGB Residencies around the world, the factories of forgery and disinformation, the Agents of Influence — was well coordinated and disciplined and can respond to commands rapidly and flexibly.
The KGB relied heavily on the intelligence services of satellite countries in carrying out both active measures and espionage operations. The intelligence services of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Cuba formed important adjuncts to the KGB. Although formally subordinated to their own governments, these satellite intelligence services were, according to many Western experts, heavily influenced by the KGB.
A former official in the Czechoslovak intelligence service stated that Soviet intelligence was informed about every major aspect of Czechoslovak intelligence activities, and Soviet advisers (called liaison officers) participated in planning major operations and assessing the results. As far back as the 1960s, the KGB introduced a new element of coordination with the satellite intelligence services through the creation of departments for disinformation in East German, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian intelligence services and the establishment of direct lines of communication from these departments to the KGB.
Soviet active measures involved not only KGB and satellite intelligence services but also several other Soviet agencies, which all participated in a coordinated effort to further Soviet policy objectives. In addition to the KGB, the Central Committee's International Department took a leading role in directing and implementing active measures.
A few days after Reagan won, the Soviet Union instigated the great new Active Measures campaign to prevent NATO from countering the SS-20s and to reverse the American election results by nullifying the rearmament program implicitly mandated by the voters.
The KGB, the International Department and the immense Active Measures apparatus began a campaign against American deployment of Euromissiles - the Perching II, and Ground Launched Crusie Missile, With the World Peace Council, its foreign affiliates and local communist parties again the principal organizers, a new series of mass demonstrations occurred in Europe. An estimated 250,000 people marched in Bonn, protesting against any new missiles or nuclear weapons. Soviet fronts helped assemble a throng estimated at 350,000 in Amsterdam, a reported 400,000 in Madrid and 200,000 in Athens. The KGB all along played its traditional part.
Dutch authorities in April 1981 expelled KGB officer Vadim Leonov who, in the guise of a TASS correspondent, associated closely with leaders of the Dutch peace movement. Leonov made a number of professional mistakes, including a drunken boast to a Dutch counterintelligence source. “If Moscow decides that 50,000 demonstrators must take to the streets in the Netherlands, then they take to the streets. Do you know how you can get 50,000 dem- onstrators at a certain place within a week? A message through my channels is sufficient,” Leonov bragged.
In November 1981 Norway expelled KGB officer Stanislav Chebotek for offering bribes to those Norwegians who would write letters to newspapers denouncing NATO and the proposed missiles for Europe. In January 1982 Portugal ousted two KGB officers, Yuri Babaints and Mikhail Morozov, for attempting to incite riots against NATO. That same month the Portuguese also denied visas to Soviet Peace Committee representatives who wanted to join a communist-sponsored demonstration against NATO and the missiles on grounds that they were Soviet subversives.
The KGB manufactured a spate of forged documents intended to buttress the theme that American rather than Soviet nuclear weapons most imperil Western Europe. It succeeded in circulating in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Malta, Greece and France a pamphlet entitled “Top Secret Documents . . . on U.S. Forces Headquarters in Europe . . . Holo caust Again for Europe.” The contents consisted of alterations and fabrications based upon authentic military-contingency plans stolen by a KGB agent, Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson, from the Armed Forces Courier Center vault at Orly Field in 1962.
The fabrications purported to show that the United States planned to blow up much of Europe with nuclear weapons to save itself.
KGB - Africa Operations
The year 1960 was momentous for what would soon become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country wrested independence from Belgium in June, installing its first democratically elected government. In September, power struggles led Joseph-Désiré Mobutu AKA Mobutu Sese Seko, secretary of state at the time, to carry out his first military coup. And a few months later, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.
This rapid succession of events marked a pivotal year in history, but not just for emancipation rights in Africa. Some 11,000 kilometres east of Kinshasa, in Russia, the Kremlin’s foreign policy took a new turn amid the crisis that gripped the Belgian Congo. Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB at the time, realised there were barely any Russian spies south of the Sahara Desert. There was a solid base of secret agents in Egypt, a few scattered across the Maghreb and some with ties to the local Communist Party were stationed in South Africa.
In Shelepin’s eyes, his network of spies in the African continent was scant. Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Communist Party, had made it a priority to open up to (mostly African) low-income countries and mark a break with his predecessor Joseph Stalin. As a result, the crisis in the Congo became “the first known case of an intervention by the KGB in a sub-Saharan African country”, explains Natalia Telepneva, historian and specialist of Soviet intelligence in Africa at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
During the Congo crisis, Russia didn't yet have a legacy on the continent. “Ivan Potekhin, the chief Africanist of the USSR at the time, had only visited Africa for the first time in the 1950s,” Telepneva points out. The operation by the Soviet Union to help then Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba suppress Belgian-supported secessionists was poorly resourced. “Moscow only had the means to send a handful of agents on the ground,” says Telepneva. So when Joseph-Désiré Mobutu carried out his military coup in 1960, which was actively supported by the CIA, the blow to the KGB was significant.
The Soviet Union had some catching up to do if it wanted to push its strategy of influence in the region, but it could count on the enthusiasm of the wave of independence from colonial powers in the 60s to reach that goal. “To get agents to join the KGB in Africa, the continent offered interesting espionage prospects. And the missions they would pursue – supporting independence movements while simultaneously monitoring US activity on the ground – seemed noble,” Telepneva writes in her book “Cold War Liberation”, which is based on the memoirs of Vadim Kirpitchenko, the first director of the KGB’s Africa division.
From 1960 onwards, Russia opened a growing number of embassies in African countries. Each one of its delegations “included both a KGB and a GRU (the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army) agent”, Telepneva explains. The Congo crisis served as a lesson. “Moscow realised that the USSR didn’t have the same resources as Western powers in Africa did. So intelligence and clandestine operations seemed to be the best way of waging a ‘low-cost’ Cold War,” Telepneva says.
Though the Soviet Union eventually lost ground in Africa, the efforts made proved to be useful to the Kremlin's foreign policy down the line. Russia emerged as an ally of the deceased former Prime Minister Lumumba, who became a key figure of inspiration for other independence movements across the continent. The US, on the other hand, was seen as an ally of the former colonial powers in Africa. The reputation of the Soviet Union being on the “right side” of history in Africa was pushed by Russia, and further reinforced by the USSR’s support for Nelson Mandela in his fight against apartheid in South Africa.
Soviet spies worked hard to maintain their country’s reputation. The country began a sweeping campaign of “active measures”, what would today be referred to as disinformation and propaganda. Its aim was to portray the Soviet Union as a disinterested supporter of a decolonised Africa. Meanwhile, Washington was depicted as a puppeteer plotting in the shadows, safeguarding its own interests.
The KGB used its entire arsenal, manipulating local media and forging false documents to make the CIA the enemy that had to be destroyed. Moscow nourished the paranoia of Ghanaian revolutionary – and the country's eventual first prime minister and president – Kwame Nkrumah, who saw himself as an “African Lenin”. He would see US spies everywhere. “In 1964, a fake letter written by Service A outlining a plot by the CIA angered him so much that he sent a letter directly to US President Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of using all its resources with one goal in mind: overthrow him,” reads the Mitrokhin archives, named after Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB chief archivist who defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 and took 30 years of notes with him.
But not all of the KGB’s efforts were crowned as victories at the time – or at least not to the extent that Moscow had hoped. The Soviet Union “thought that these countries would naturally fall in line with communist ideologies and therefore the USSR. But it turned out to be more complicated than they expected”, explains Telepneva.
Kwame Nkrumah, who ruled Ghana for six years, was the Soviet Union’s first “friend” in sub-Saharan Africa. He was overthrown in 1966 after he drifted towards authoritarianism. The two other countries to have most openly sided with Russia, Mali and Guinea, left behind no memories of communist paradise. After eight years in power, Mali’s leader Modibo Keita was ousted, while Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré stayed put at the head of a brutal regime for over 25 years, until 1984.
It wasn’t until the second wave of decolonisation and the dismantling of Portugal’s colonial stronghold in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola in the 1970s that Soviet influence operations picked up again. But this time, leader Leonid Brezhnev urged intelligence services to “redeploy their efforts to strengthen military and security cooperation with the armies of ‘friendly’ countries”, says Telepneva. The Kremlin had become aware that, until now, it had underestimated the role of the military in African power struggles.
The Soviet Union became a major arms supplier for the African continent. Backed by Soviet support against Somalia, Ethiopia received a “Soviet plane full of military equipment and instructors [on its soil] every 20 minutes” in the winter of 1977, according to the Mitrokhin archives.
During the Cold War, military support went beyond supplying weapons. The Soviet Union also trained thousands of “freedom fighters” back home. The Perevalnoe Educational Centre-165 in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula now annexed by Russia, has become the most famous example.
Handling weapons was only a fraction of what was taught. “There was also political training with excursions to tourist sites, visits to collective farms and film screenings. The courses also included an introduction to Leninism-Marxism and discussions on the history of colonisation,” says Telepneva. Moscow realised early on that education could deepen its ties with Africa, so Khrushchev opened the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in 1961. Over the course of 50 years, it trained more than 7,000 students from 48 different African countries in physics, economics and public administration. African students were also admitted to different universities across the USSR.
For Soviet spies, universities were wonderful breeding grounds for potential recruits. In fact, the vice president of Lumumba University was part of the KGB. But “that wasn’t the most important thing for Moscow”, says Konstantinos Katsakioris, a specialist on African education and the former Soviet Union at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Moscow’s priority was to improve the Soviet Union’s reputation in Africa. All students were expected to preach the good Soviet word back home.
And so began the start of a race for Russian influence south of the Sahara. Despite a lack of interest in the region from the early 1990s to the end of the 2000s, the Kremlin left its mark. “To restore Russian presence in Africa, Vladimir Putin took advantage of the relatively good reputation the Soviet Union had in the continent and called on a network of old contacts,” says Marcel Plichta, who researches Soviet influence in Africa at St Andrews University in Scotland.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow gradually withdrew from Africa, but all the students taught in the former USSR stayed put. So when, in 2014, Putin decided to reinvest in the African continent in search of new allies to offset Russia’s diplomatic isolation caused by his annexation of Crimea, he knew his agents could find friends there. “The soldiers and students were young when they went to the Soviet Union. Today, some of them have become influential members in their home countries,” says Plichta. These veterans of the Soviet adventure in post-colonial Africa are today's potentially obliging ears in which Putin and Prigozhin’s men can whisper.
It’s hard not to see Soviet “active measures” as forerunners for today’s online disinformation campaigns and “troll factories” run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group. Putin’s Russia uses a new and improved version of the Soviet narrative. Back then, the Soviet Union presented itself as a champion of decolonisation. Today, “Russia claims to be an ally of the anti-colonial Pan-Africanism movement,” says Plichta. The Russian campaign to fuel anti-French sentiment in the Central African Republic and Mali is just one example. “Moscow’s main strategy for extending its influence in Africa, in addition to sending Wagner mercenaries, is multiplying military agreements [21 of which were signed between 2014 and 2019],” says Plichta.
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