"The disinformation themes these journalists were fed by the KGB always contained a kernel of truth that became the lead to a story followed by a tissue of falsehoods."

October 5, 1999

---

http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/leftism/borchgrave10-5-99.htm

Disinformation Documentation

by Arnaud de Borchgrave
(editor at large for the Washington Times)

ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO, this writer and Robert Moss co-authored a novel about Soviet disinformation operations in the Western media that was immediately dismissed by the mainstream media as loony lucubrations from the far right. Hollywood directors who were interested in turning The Spike into a movie were threatened with blacklisting. A $250,000 option remained on the shelf-to this day. It was a classic case of reverse McCarthyism, or anti-anti-Communism.

Top editors, both print and media, scoffed at the book's central premise by arguing that editorial gatekeepers were far too savvy to let something as crude as Soviet disinformation slip through their adroit and ever-vigilant blue pencils (before the computer "kill" button).

Whenever a defector from the KGB or its proxy services in Eastern Europe and Cuba confirmed that the Soviet intelligence agency's Service A (for "Active Measures") was in charge of "dezinformatsiya" (disinformation) in the Western media, mainstream media adopted the ungainly posture of the proverbial ostrich. Now we have a new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive, the most complete picture of the KGB and its operations in the United States and Europe, courtesy of Vasili Mitrokhin, who toiled for three decades in the KGB's archives, and co-author Christopher Andrew, chair of the History Department at Cambridge University and a former visiting professor of national security at Harvard.

After the Soviet collapse, Mr. Mitrokhin took to Britain a massive secret collection of Cold War material about the KGB's activities in Western countries.

The scope of the KGB's disinformation operations in the West during the Cold War was breathtaking. Philip Agee, the CIA's first ideological defector who specialized in burning CIA operatives, rapidly became a liberal left icon in the U.S. and Western Europe. Now we have confirmation that Agee's book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1975, that identified 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," was the work of the KGB and the DGI, the Cuban proxy of the KGB.

Agee (KGB code name: Pont) became the darling of the liberal left in the U.S. and Europe. But his activities on behalf of the intelligence services of Cold War enemies became too much for Britain's Labor government. And in November 1976, a deportation order was served. The far left sprang into action, aided and abetted by the KGB's Service A. Among traitor Agee's character witnesses: Morton Halperin, a former Kissinger aide and now head of policy planning at the State Department; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has flacked for anti-American causes the world over; Melvin Wolf, a hard-left lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 1993, President Clinton nominated Mr. Halperin to the new position of assistant secretary of defense for democracy and peacekeeping. But Mr. Halperin withdrew at the last moment. His backers were fearful he would be grilled about his relationship with Agee.

Agee lost his appeals against deportation from Britain and moved to the Netherlands where he was expelled again. He finally landed in Germany, married a German dancer, and could no longer be kicked out. In 1978, Agee, again with the covert assistance of the KGB and the DGI, began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin that was designed to promote "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel."

KGB files note that Agee's Bulletin was "the initiative of the KGB." The Soviet Agency thus gave Agee the names of 2,000 CIA agents to expose publicly.

Agee's mill was kept supplied by a KGB Task Force headed by V. N. Kosterin, deputy head of the service in charge of Actives Measures in the Western media. Thus the KGB planted numerous stories that were picked up as news by the mainstream media -- e.g., extreme right-wingers and CIA rogues were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. It forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald, dated two weeks before Kennedy was killed, to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt asking for information "before any steps are taken by me or anyone else." The letter was created twelve years after the assassination and passed on anonymously to conspiracy buffs.

In 1971, according to the Mitrokhin archives, KGB chief Yuri Andropov personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL) and calling for a campaign against "black mongrels" who, it was claimed, were looting Jewish shops. At the same time forged letters were sent to 60 black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by JDL against blacks. They called for revenge against JDL leader Meir Kahane. He was assassinated some years later, not by a black extremist, but by an Arab.

Throughout the Cold War, KGB disinformation was under orders to stir up racial tensions in the United States. Before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, KGB operatives in the Washington residency mailed forgeries from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic Committees of African and Asian nations.

These are among hundreds of examples of KGB operations that wound up in various media as fact. When Washington denounced them as forgeries, Moscow indignantly responded "anti-Soviet slanders." Both sides were dutifully reported.

The KGB's Service A also helped Agee craft his next book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Mr. Agee then met with Service A operatives in Cuba who went to work on yet another tome, Dirty Work II: The CIA in Africa. But Agee, fearful of being expelled from Germany, decided to drop his name from the title. The director of the Cuban DGI and the KGB then decided to release the book for the opening of the summit of 92 non-aligned nations in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.

The Sword and the Shield also tells about the recruitment of ten French journalists whose job was to put across a positive image of Communist countries and a negative image of their enemies. This writer knew one of them. He was the Renard character in The Spike. He had been blackmailed by the KGB into doing the Soviet Union's dirty work in the French media -- and now works as a legitimate journalist.

The disinformation themes these journalists were fed by the KGB always contained a kernel of truth that became the lead to a story followed by a tissue of falsehoods. Apologists for the Soviet Union in the U.S. would then quote them when interviewed for their reactions to major events abroad. The falsehoods quickly became conventional wisdom. So far, ten years after the implosion of the Soviet empire, no one has come forward to say they were victims of KGB disinformation operations.