There is a moment in the film Wizards of the Kremlin when the protagonist, Baronov, describes information warfare as “twisting a wire”. It doesn’t matter which way you twist the wire, what you believe in, or who is impacted. The brilliance is in finding an opening to insert the twisted wire and start shredding national identities, cultures, and societies. 

Origins in Russia

The Russian intelligence services have a long history of successful information warfare, beginning in the 1920s. As the empires of Europe and Russia crumbled under the impact of the First World War and the proliferation of Marxist-Leninist revolutions, the fledgling Soviet State needed a way to solidify its authority and justify its hegemonic ambitions. The Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first intelligence service, created the first of thousands of information warfare operations designed to support the state and usher in the eventual global domination of communism. One of the first of these was Operation Trust, a subversive project designed to look like an anti Bolshevik underground network that would lure monarchists and White Army emigres back to Russia for imprisonment or execution. The origins of these operations are lost in the archives of the Russian intelligence services but early technical experts like Artur Khristianovich Artuzon and Gleb Ivan Bokii, under the aegis of the Cheka’s legendary, ruthless leader Felix Dzerzhinsky laid the ground for what would become the KGB and the FSB. Joseph Stalin, in 1923, coined the term “disinformation operations” purposely choosing a French sounding name to make it appear as  though the practice had been invented in the west, instead of in the belly of Cheka headquarters. In the decades since, Russia has dominated information warfare, ranging from local geopolitical operations to vast, global endeavours whose origins almost no one attributes to Russian activity. 

French philosopher Jacques Ellul describes propaganda as “an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions”

French philosopher Jacques Ellul describes propaganda as “an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions”. Over the decades, the KGB became adept at redefining global events across the information sphere, evolving a sophisticated methodology for ideological subversion that came to be known as ‘active measures’.  Rather than the deliberate targeting of specific issues or groups, active measures depends for its success on swimming within an ecosystem that accepts its presence without questioning why it is there. At the height of the Cold War, at least 15,000-20,000 agents were employed in active measures, far surpassing the number of agents involved in regular espionage operations such as spying, blackmail, or honey traps. 

Initially, active measures were focused on keeping a divided Germany from rebuilding and aligning with America and Europe. A Germany, demilitarised and unfocused, would be no threat to Soviet interests or to the spread of communism across the West and into Africa and South America. As the Cold War unfolded, the KGB widened their focus to include nuclear weapons, military technologies, the arms race, CIA operations, and American foreign policy. Tactics included forging documents, running honeytrap and blackmail operations against influential political, military, and NATO figures, cultivating small scale journalists and underpaid academics who could pass forged documents into mainstream organisations or act as agents of influence, and funding research programmes in key universities. Collectively, the intent of active measures was to weaken American standing around the world, to portray it as a corrupt entity that was being poisoned from within by its support of decadent western values and liberal principles, and to position it as the antithesis of the pure strength and collectivism that was the USSR. Outside of America, active measures were meant to sow division, deepen social and political fracture lines, and cultivate well placed agents of influence and friendly journalists who would accept a KGB forgery as genuine ‘news’ which could be picked up by the international media. 

In the 1960s, the KGB moved to quell nationalist and religious sentiment among the Armenian population, carrying out a series of brutal assassinations of leaders and potential leaders and instigating domestic and international penetration of the Armenian church which it saw as a potential incubator of nationalist ambitions. Although religion was banned under the Soviet regime, and hundreds of thousands of clergy had been executed or imprisoned,  the underground churches were viewed as dangerous hubs of nationalist activity. The KGB extended their operations to Ukrainian, Moldovan, Georgian and Baltics churches, killing thousands of priests and forcibly transferring church properties and icons to the central government. The KGB operated a dual strategy when it came to active measures in the churches, at first hunting out ‘un Soviet propaganda’ and identifying potential enemies of the state, and then creating a shadow Orthodox Russian church. Under KGB control, the Russian Orthodox Church was permitted to reopen, operating under strict conditions, and staffed only by vetted clergy who reported to KGB handlers. The shadow church was designed to show that religion was accepted in the USSR and to link clergy into international religious organisations where they could plant the idea that complaints about religious persecution and human rights were just western propaganda, with no basis in reality. Travelling abroad, something not permitted for most Russians, these clergy members became the eyes and ears of the KGB identifying fracture lines in western society, highlighting polarising issues before they emerged, and drawing up profiles of dissidents in exile. It was a highly successful strategy, allowing the KGB to build a vast global intelligence web, cultivate sleeper agents abroad, and sow division in overseas orthodox churches, whether Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, or Romanian. 

The Marxist-Maoist Rivalry

As the USSR and Maoist China competed for dominance in the fledgling socialist/communist revolutions in Africa, South America, and Asia, both countries engaged in increasingly sophisticated subversive operations. China had early on built its networks and proxies in Africa and Asia while the USSR was more active in the Middle East, Central Asia, Cuba, and across Europe.  Up for grabs was India, Kashmir, and smaller countries like Bhutan, Tibet, and Thailand. Communist China, from its earliest days under Mao Zedong, used a system of political, economic, and cultural co-option to cultivate foreign allies, neutralise opponents, and engage Chinese diaspora communities into a feeling of One China that would position them as an extension of the Chinese Communist Party across the world. Known as “the three warfares”, the Chinese method is still in use and focused on 

1. shaping domestic and international media to bolster state narratives
2. using psychological leverage to fracture an adversary’s resolve and force it to weaken its own society and security infrastructure
3. using international and domestic laws to thwart criticism of Chinese hegemonic actions against its neighbours or its international espionage in political and commercial arenas

Over the decades, while the Soviet Union concentrated on subversion, mastery of the information and media ecosphere, and exploiting social fractures wherever they appear, China has focused on corporate and intellectual espionage and quietly building inroads into western commercial and technical spaces and left wing groups at the fringes of mainstream politics.  The goal of the “three warfares” approach is to achieve objectives without using overt military tactics. Locally, China positions its military forces at the very edge of acceptable borders with its neighbours, a psychological pressure that corrodes commercial and diplomatic independence and irritates smaller countries in the region. Bhutan and China have a long standing border dispute, and following China’s annexation of Tibet in 1959, Bhutan allied with India, sharing intelligence and military forces to push China back from the border or prevent unauthorised construction of roads or installations by China. Satellites show China continues to build infrastructure just over the border of Bhutan, threatening both Bhutan and the regional security infrastructure built by India and its smaller neighbours. As anti-Indian rhetoric from China increases, and China moves to block Indian advancement in international institutions like the UN, there is a corresponding increase in subversive operations against India and Indian commercial and diplomatic initiatives overseas and across the region. China has a particular focus in disrupting the deepening cooperation between India and the Gulf states which would inject vast amounts of capital into shared infrastructure projects and reshape regional power distribution.  For Maoist China, economic and military spheres of influence are equally susceptible  to disruptive information warfare. 

India and the Bengali War

Unlike Russia, China, and America, India has focused its active measures on local and regional conflicts, mainly Pakistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and the Himalayan foothills. India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was established in 1968 and is mainly focused on local conflicts and actors. During the 1971 Bangladeshi war, India carried out a wide range of covert and overt operations across military, political and financial spaces in support of the Mukti Bahini (the nationalist guerrillas).  Bangladesh was originally part of Pakistan  and India, subdivided into East and West Pakistan, with no recognition by Pakistan of either the Bengali language or Bengali culture. When an independence candidate won in the 1970 elections, Pakistan refused to transfer power to the new government and unleashed a massive military campaign against what was then still a province. India, having recognised Bengali independence after the election, intervened on behalf of the vastly outnumbered Mukti Bahini and deployed both its military and its intelligence capabilities to deter Pakistan until it capitulated nine months later. It was one of India’s most successful operations and laid the groundwork for its future use of an integrated military and intelligence apparatus to manage regional geopolitical affairs. 

In the 1980s, India refined its use of subversive warfare first in Sri Lanka with support to the Tamil Tigers, a position it later reversed, and then in Tibet, Nepal and along the contested borders zones with China. It actively conducts operations to assess and contain the activities of Pakistan’s security organisations, especially the state of its nuclear program, spillover from the Afghani and Iranian conflicts, and ongoing border disputes with China. Iran, in particular, funds a wide array of jihadist groups in the region, using madrassa and mosques to incubate and train terrorists, forcing the RAW to develop sophisticated intelligence operations that can penetrate into the closed world of the Islamic schools. 

KGB Operations

KGB active measures have been very successful at times. Operation Infekton, in the 1980s, seeded the idea that America had created the AIDS virus as a biological weapon, and was based on the well honed Soviet tactic of narrative laundering. A story was planted in a small, pro Soviet Indian newspaper, The Patriot, where it was picked up on the international news wires and spread widely. Operation SIG was launched in the Arab and Muslim world, in the late 1960s, to seed the idea that America and Israel were responsible for regional chaos and that Israel, rather than being a small nation emerging, was in fact the point of an imperialist western spear bringing violence to the peaceful Muslim world. The KGB translated a vast array of forged documents into Arabic as proof, which were then spread through militant Palestinian, Egyptian and Iraqi groups across the region and into diaspora communities and on into training camps, mosques, and cultural organisations. SIG stands for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva  or ‘Zionist Governments’. The aim of Operation SIG was to foster chaos in the Levant and Middle East and slowly turn the governments towards adopting communism as the most stable political system for the region. The USSR had initially supported Israel, believing it would become a communist outpost in the Muslim world, but switched sides when Pan Arab socialism started to emerge in the region. 

The Illegals Programme, run by the KGB’s Directorate S, focused on ideological subversion . The programme embedded Russian sleeper agents into American elite, liberal universities to seed useful concepts or identify academics who could be co-opted to push pro Marxist ideologies. Over time, the KGB began to sponsor research projects by American academics, facilitating access to carefully prepared ‘archives’ inside Russian universities.A sub-strand of the Illegals Programme was the Line X unit, dedicated to finding and stealing scientific and technical innovation being developed in American universities. At the height of the Cold War, the USSR and America were both engaged in vast amounts of technical and scientific research and commercial-academic espionage was rife on both sides. The Illegals Programme was one of the KGB’s most successful endeavours, carving a unique pathway into American and Western intellectual cultures and forming the blueprint for many other operations. 

Subversion is critical to understand because it is so prevalent today, aided by digital spheres and the vast intricate network of bots, AI, and hacker farms. The USSR carved the grove where subversion in the elite universities could take root. When the USSR fell in the 1990s, the new Russian Federation set up new departments using the same KGB models which had been so successful. But time and geopolitics brings new actors and new agendas. China and Qatar have emerged as the two biggest funders of research in the same elite universities, China to strip out technological innovation and promote pro Maosit ideologies and Qatar to build a vast influence structure for the Muslim Brotherhood and its brand of militant Islamic fundamentalism.  Qatar is the largest foreign donor to US universities, targeting departments that will produce future policy makers and media commentators, an astute long term strategy that includes funding anti Israeli or pro Palestinian NGOs, consultants on the Middle East, and buying the distribution rights to Miramax. As with the Soviets, the intent of subversive operations is less about a specific outcome and more about sowing dissension, corroding trust, and stripping assets. In recent years, an American strategist has moved to use the same tactics inside America. Steve Bannon is a devotee of a theory called the Fourth Turning which argues that history moves in cycles, and can be accelerated by fostering chaos. His access to vast financial resources allows him to fund both right and left wing entities to further polarisation and the disintegration of American society into a state of existential crises. Technology, and a cadre of tech bros who have come to dominate in recent decades add another layer of information warfare to an already complex global mix of hybrid warfare across borders, industries and institutions. What began in the darkened offices of the Cheka has morphed into a multi tentacled octopus swimming unnoticed in an ecosystem that barely notices it exists.

Future Posts in the Series

This is the first of a series of posts on subversion and active measures. Future posts will cover KGB operations in Poland during the Solidarity movement that began in the shipyards of Gdansk, American subversive operations which focus on specific outcomes, the post WWII emergence of anti-communist intelligence operations and the early days of the CIA, the rise of the dystopian tech bros and their unprecedented access to the tools of information warfare and ideological subversion, Qatar’s support for a vast anti western fundamentalist intelligence operation aimed at the heart of American, European, and Russian culture, and the role of terrorism in subversion and information warfare.  I have a deep interest in the intelligence operations against the Vatican, especially against Popes Pius XII and John Paul II and the role of the Catholic and Orthodox churches during the Cold War. Other topics may also occur to me as I research and write.