"...some of the most famous conspiracy theories to bombinate in backrooms, basements, street corners, college dorms were actually whole-cloth inventions of the Cheka."
"For instance.....Many in 1963 doubted that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone in murdering John F. Kennedy; but only a precious few ever
saw their paranoid Grassy Knoll explanation transformed into a Hollywood
blockbuster. American researcher Max Holland found that the KGB fabricated
letter that got planted in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera was the
first to allege that one of the suspects for the Kennedy assassination, Clay
Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, was actually an operative of Langley. The New
Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, got hold of a copy of that letter and
while he never cited it in court, his film version Kevin Costner most certainly
did in the paranoid Oliver Stone movie JFK. Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB
archivist who defected to the West and smuggled out six enormous cases of
Soviet foreign intelligence files, later recorded that 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 U.S.
intelligence community, than still accept the main findings of the Warren
Commission.'” - Michael Weiss - The Daily Beast
Also See: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination — Central Intelligence Agency
Also See: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination — Central Intelligence Agency
DIRTY WORK
Russia’s Long History of Messing
With Americans Minds Before the DNC Hack
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/26/putin-s-wicked-leaks-didn-t-start-with-the-dnc.html
Russia’s intelligence services have
a long history of mingling sinister fiction with shards of fact and leaking
through third parties to cover their tracks.
Lord Byron observed, in skewering
one of his favorite poetic targets of derision, that while the English have no
word so good as the French longueurs to describe tedious, uninterrupted
stretches of writing, they nevertheless “have the thing.” Similarly, there is
no proper American term for what Russian
intelligence calls aktivniye meropriyatiye, or active
measures, but by now most Americans really ought to be used to the thing, as it
might well decide our next presidential election.
As The Daily Beast reported Monday,
the FBI now suspects that a year-long hacking of the Democratic National
Committee’s emails and their subsequent publication on WikiLeaks was actually
the work of Russian intelligence.
The Kremlin, it is now widely
believed, is trying to rob Hillary Clinton of her chance to be the next
commander-in-chief because its favored candidate is Donald Trump, a mercenary
authoritarian who behaves and sounds like a forbidding cross between Vladimir Zhirinovsky and a Las Vegas pit boss Trump,
like Putin, wants to eviscerate
NATO, dispense with “lecturing” the Russians on democracy and human rights,
and lift any and all diplomatic or economic penalties on
Moscow for its invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
Trump, like Putin, draws on a staff
of consiglieri and advisers who have extensive experience in
the financial and political sectors of the post-Soviet sphere, usually on
behalf of those who wish the Berlin Wall had never come down.
According to a mounting pile of
compelling news reports, the first of which broke in The Washington Post in June, two separate agencies of
Russian spy services, the domestic FSB and the military GRU, gained access,
independently of each other and without the other’s cognizance, to the DNC
correspondence beginning in the summer of 2015 (the FSB) and followed by an
intrusion registered in April of this year (the GRU).
Already, the “leaked” emails, showing
the DNC cooking up ways to sink Bernie Sanders’s campaign on the basis of his
suspected atheism, have deepened a schism within the Democratic Party as its
nominating convention gets going. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out of a job come Friday, and meanwhile she’s busy
being booed
at luncheons and confabs by incensed Bernie supporters in
Philadelphia. Trump is already capitalizing on these embarrassments by egging
on the Bernie Bros to stand their ground and reaffirming the “rigged” nature of
the electoral system.
If Moscow Centre is indeed behind
this bit of cyber skulduggery, then it represents the boldest intrusion ever by
a past and present Cold War adversary into America’s political decision-making.
Indeed, the style and purpose of
this intrusion bears an uncanny resemblance to old Cold War tradecraft.
An active measure is a time-honored
KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare designed, as
retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, “to drive wedges in the
Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord
among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia,
Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really
occurs.”
The most common subcategory of
active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish if
believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media
outlets to make democratic nations look sinister.
As my colleague Peter Pomeranzev and
I discovered in researching our reporton the Kremlin’s weaponization of
money, culture, and information, some of the most famous conspiracy theories to
bombinate in backrooms, basements, street corners, college dorms were actually
whole-cloth inventions of the Cheka.
For instance, a story suggesting
that Jimmy Carter had a “Secret Plan to Put Black Africans and Black Americans
at Odds”; that the United States used chemical weapons in the Korean War; that
AIDS was an invention of the CIA; that the Jonestown massacre was by U.S. intelligence;
that the United States tried to kill Pope John Paul II; that Barry Goldwater
and the John Birch Society were in cahoots to mount a coup d’état in
Washington, D.C.
Many in 1963 doubted that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone in murdering John F. Kennedy; but only a precious few ever
saw their paranoid Grassy Knoll explanation transformed into a Hollywood
blockbuster. American researcher Max Holland found that the KGB fabricated
letter that got planted in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera was the
first to allege that one of the suspects for the Kennedy assassination, Clay
Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, was actually an operative of Langley. The New
Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, got hold of a copy of that letter and
while he never cited it in court, his film version Kevin Costner most certainly
did in the paranoid Oliver Stone movie JFK.
Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB
archivist who defected to the West and smuggled out six enormous cases of
Soviet foreign intelligence files, later recorded that 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 U.S.
intelligence community, than still accept the main findings of the Warren
Commission.”
Mitrokhin’s archive also settled
another long-running debate about an actual CIA provocateur, the defector
Philip Agee, whose KGB code name was PONT.
Agee had been an officer stationed
in Latin America and was forced to quit the agency because he drank, was loose
with government money and all too eager to take to bed the many wives of the
many American diplomats in whose company he traveled.
Then, in 1973, as Mitrokhin and
Christopher Andrew recount in The Sword and the Shield, the first volume of a two-part
history on the exfiltrated secrets of the U.S.S.R.’s special services, Agee
walked right into the rezidentura in Mexico City.
He offered the Russians “reams of
information about CIA operations,” according to Oleg Kalugin, who was then head
of the KGB First Chief Directorate’s counterintelligence division. But the
Soviets thought this too good to be true; Agee struck them as a “dangle,” a
deep cover operative posing as a would-be defector in order to hawk faulty
intelligence. So they turned him away. He next tried the Cubans, who found him
legitimate.
Because of Havana’s close security
relationship with Moscow (one that had actually been coerced by the Soviets
through anti-Castro espionage and economic blackmail), Cuba’s own intelligence
service, the DGI, shared their new asset with their KGB masters. “As I sat in
my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing list of revelations
coming from Agee,” Kalugin later wrote, “I cursed our officers for turning away
such a prize.”
Agee’s first act as a Soviet spy was
to name names of his old American comrades in a best-selling book titled Inside
the Company: CIA Diary. It was first released in Britain in 1975 and possibly
curated by Agee’s KGB and DGI handlers. He outed 250 CIA officers and agents
before he set about exposing those stationed in the capital of America’s
closest Cold War ally, London, where he now took temporary residence, much like
another controversial “whistleblower.”
Agee was eventually expelled from
Britain, owing to U.S. diplomatic pressure, but not before becoming a left-wing
celebrity, feted and defended by a raft of Labour MPs and The Guardian newspaper.
Miktrokhin and Andrew are generous
in acquitting most of Agee’s admirers as mere useful idiots rather than
duplicitous co-conspirators. Nevertheless, PONT’s KGB file boasted of his
stature as a putative transparency advocate and martyr of free speech,
notwithstanding his clandestine and destructive work on behalf of a communist
superpower: “Campaigns of support for PONT,” the file noted, “were initiated in
France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Finland, Norway, Mexico and
Venezuela.”
In 1978, Agee began publishing his
own newsletter, Covert Action Information Bulletin, a WikiLeaks-style
journal designed, in Agee’s own words, as a “worldwide campaign to destabilize
the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.”
The Bulletin was a KGB and
DGI operation; the entire project was given the code name RUPOR (Russian for
“mouthpiece”). Besides its internationally recognizable founder, other editors
included other Americans, such as the journalist Louis Wolf, and featured
contributions from other former CIA officers, although Miktrokhin and Andrew
state that there’s no evidence that anyone other than Agee knew which foreign
governments were actually underwriting the Bulletin.
As an active measure, the pamphlet
was a mixture of credible stolen intelligence and dezinformatsiya. Sometimes
the KGB would feed Agee real morsels from Langley; elsewhere, when these proved
impossible to come by, he was instructed to seek out open-source material
“ranging from readers’ letters to crises around the world which could be blamed
on the CIA,” as Mitrokhin and Andrew write. This is how the Jonestown massacre
became an American crime.
The Russians and Cubans even set the
schedule for when Western national security secrets, be they
authentic or sham, were to be disgorged. Around the time of the Bulletin’s
first issue, Agee and Wolf started handing out copies of a new book, Dirty
Work: The CIA in Western Europe, which carried the names of another 700 CIA
employees scattered across the free countries of the continent. The success of
that volume encouraged a sequel, which was duly produced as Dirty Work II:
The CIA in Africa. Its publication, the KGB and DGI jointly decided, would
coincide with a Castro-hosted conference in Havana for the non-aligned nations
in September 1979.
Closer to our own time, following
the invasion of Ukraine, we have seen the recrudescence of active measures as a
form of Russian “hybrid warfare.” Sometimes they’re aimed at the United States,
as when a phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state
for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, was suddenly uploaded to the internet and framed to show a shadowy
plot to not only influence the course of Ukraine’s post-Yanukovych period but
also drive a wedge between Washington and Brussels.
(That phone call had Nuland at one
point say that the UN ought to be brought in to facilitate a peace deal deal
and “fuck the EU.”) Few doubt who intercepted this communication and posted it
online; Nuland herself, in conversation with the BBC, smilingly called “the
tradecraft really quite impressive.”
A subsequent phone exchange between
former Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and former European Higher
Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton appeared to call into
question who, exactly, did the sniping on Kiev’s Independence Square during the
Maidan Revolution—with the suggestion being that it was the opposition, not the
Yanukovych government shooting civilians. (Paet had talked to a Ukrainian
doctor who tended to the wounded on the square and had either misunderstood
where she said the gunfire had come from or was just relaying to Ashton
alternative theories.)
Finally, everyone remembers how the
NSA listened in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cellphone calls, a
bombshell report, tied to the Edward Snowden leaks, which put a frost on
U.S.-German relations. Except that it seems the entire story, first reported in Der Spiegel (and primarily
written by a WikiLeaks associate, Jacob Appelbaum) was wrong—even if the vast
majority of Snowden’s disclosures were genuinely and self-evidently scandalous.
Germany’s top prosecutor, Harald
Range, opened an investigation in June 2014 and closed it a year later, citing
a lack of evidence. “The documents published in the media so far that come from
Edward Snowden also contain no evidence of surveillance of the mobile phone
used by the chancellor solid enough for a court,” Range said. Prior to closing the case, he had noted that the supposed gotcha document proving the
NSA was listening in on an allied head of state’s personal conversations was in
fact “not an authentic surveillance order by the NSA. It does not come from the
NSA database.”
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