Book digs into disinformation and its main goal: chaos
Editor’s note: This review was written and originally published before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In early July 2016, amid an outpouring of grief and anger over the police shooting of Philando Castile in the Twin Cities, an unknown organization called Don’t Shoot used Facebook to invite demonstrators to a protest. But something was very wrong.
The demonstration was set for the wrong police department, and all of the well-known local groups listed in the announcement disavowed involvement. Eventually, concerned local activists took over the event. It was only much later that they learned “Don’t Shoot” was likely a front for a “Russia-linked” organization that was using Facebook to sow discord across the United States.
These events would have been less surprising had the activists known about the prior century of Soviet and Russian influence campaigns directed against the United States and its allies, which is laid out in crisp detail in “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare,” by Johns Hopkins University professor and cyberwar expert Thomas Rid.
Rid, who testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2017 about disinformation operations, recounts elaborate and sometimes shocking tactics used to disinform democratic societies and inflame passions. “The goal of disinformation is to engineer division by putting emotion over analysis, division over unity, conflict over consensus, the particular over the universal,” Rid writes. And it is nothing new.
In the1950s and1960s, the KGB distributed fake letters intended to look like racist American KKK literature, and clandestinely directed the vandalism of synagogues and Jewish headstones in New York to make neo-Nazism appear as a rising threat, the book says, citing the accounts of Soviet-bloc defectors. Yet the same agents distributed accurate information on racism in America, to antagonize the KKK’s opponents.
KGB agents “weren’t simply posing as the KKK — remarkably, the same Russian operators posed as an African-American organization agitating against the KKK,” Rid writes.
The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency used its own “active measures” to disinform enemies. In the1950s, a long-running CIA project published everything from forged pamphlets to glossy gossip and jazz magazines woven with disinformation to weaken “Communist manifestations” in East Germany.