active measures

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

by Thomas Rid

was, and in many ways continues to be, the domain of intelligence agencies—professionally run, continually improved, and usually employed against foreign adversaries. Second, all active measures contain an element of disinformation: content may be forged, sourcing doctored, the method of acquisition covert; influence agents and cutouts may pretend to be something

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propagating false news, and occurring in the public sphere. Almost all disinformation operations are, in fact, imperfect by design, run not by perfectionists but pragmatists. Active measures are contradictory: they are covert operations designed to achieve overt influence, secret devices deployed in public debates, carefully hidden yet visible in plain sight. This

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once required a human hand, such as manipulating or incapacitating infrastructure, logistics, or supply chains. Automation and hacking, in short, became natural extensions of the active measures playbook: exercised remotely, denied at little cost, and falling short of physical violence. The line between subversion and sabotage became blurrier, operations more easily scalable

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digital disinformation were, to a significant degree, themselves disinformation. The internet didn’t bring more precision to the art and science of disinformation—it made active measures less measured: harder to control, harder to steer, and harder to isolate engineered effects. Disinformation, as a result, became even more dangerous. 1921–1945:

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planning that a large intelligence bureaucracy was pouring into designing, authorizing, shaping, funding, maintaining, securing, evaluating, and eventually liquidating what would soon become known as active measures. The CIA examples of the Kampfgruppe and LCCASSOCK also illuminate the difficulty of measuring effects. The CIA worked with Marbach’s LCCASSOCK, for example, to

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defector who told his interrogators that the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the foreign intelligence branch of the Ministry of State Security—the Stasi—had already conducted active measures before 1957. But disinformation and “psychological warfare,” the defector said, had been officially announced within the HVA as a “major operational responsibility,” just as

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turn. Previously, different regional departments had handled their own special operations, which meant that resources from other departments could not be put to use for active measures in areas that were particularly important to leadership. Meanwhile, KGB advisors were supervising the development and execution of operations at multiple levels in the bureaucracy

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Eastern intelligence agencies, like their Western counterparts, used to treat disinformation as a task secondary to the primary mission of gathering information. But after 1961, active measures slowly began to rise in internal significance, attracting some of the most ambitious officers, and the quality of special operations further increased. Bittman tells a

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entangled himself in contradictions through inept crisis management. The editors were right. The episode illustrates the tendency of intelligence agencies to overstate the effects of active measures, or, to be more precise, it illustrates the difficulty of measuring their effects. The raw material of disinformation is made of existing conflicts and

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tell whether an anonymous leak contained some shrewd mix of both, handcrafted for maximum impact. This symbiotic relationship found its fullest expression in the active measures field. “What would active measures be without the journalist?”3 Wagenbreth asked the Stasi leaders. “Revelations are their métier.” The X, of course, had the same métier. For

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Wolf discussed progress with Wagenbreth in weekly meetings, often considering specific operational methods, potential improvements of ongoing operations, and foreign reactions to current and finished active measures. Markus Wolf instilled as much awe as respect among his staff. Tall, handsome, vain, and emotionally cold, he was usually dressed in a tailored

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in Washington, D.C. The activists were publishing, researching, and collecting compromising intelligence—in short, they were running their own form of active measures. The line between activism and active measures had begun to blur, and the KGB no longer needed Agee and his co-editors to be witting influence agents—unwitting, they were

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third issue, albeit transcribed and not in the original layout. FM 30-31B represents a turning point in the history of disinformation, a moment when active measures became fully activated. Disinformation operations rely upon tactics that exploit technology, political divisions, and tensions between allies. Political fissures and friction are a function of

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East German Department X, for instance, would in turn agree on annual plans with Prague’s operatives. These plans contain a detailed list of individual active measures, complete with specific objectives, targets, and assigned responsibilities, and are therefore an invaluable source for the historian of disinformation. Oral disinformation, as Ivanov outlined

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Israeli delegations with physical attacks, according to a declassified memo.2 Disinformation operators regularly referred to Lenin’s writings. By early 1985, active measures had also reached peak bureaucratic performance. Soviet active measures then had an annual budget between $3 billion and $4 billion—an estimate that CIA analysts called “conservative.”3 Service A

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East Germany, although politically and economically divided, were culturally, geographically, and linguistically one entity. This proximity meant that the East had an overwhelming advantage in active measures—for the West had almost entirely retreated from strategic disinformation operations by then. But a similar dynamic applied in the other direction as well. The

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itself. The KGB, however, had underestimated Romerstein. The previous year, he had testified before another high-profile Senate body, the Foreign Relations Committee, on Soviet active measures, his field of expertise. During his testimony, Romerstein discussed one particular Soviet forgery, a document that purportedly came from Lieutenant General Robert Schweizer, an influential

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invented the internet was uniquely vulnerable to remote attacks. Unbridled optimism predominated in Silicon Valley; pessimism came to dominate the Beltway. Both extremes would benefit active measures operations over the next decade, although for different reasons: utopianism made it easy to run operations undetected; dystopianism made it easy to exaggerate results. A

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on December 11, 2013. (Reuters / Andrew Kravchenko / Pool) Journalists were still crucial, but the emerging social media platforms enabled surfacing, amplification, and even testing of active measures without the participation of reporters. Online sharing services, especially those with built-in anonymity, were tailor-made for at-scale deception. Dirty tricksters could now

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(Wolfgang Kumm / picture alliance / dpa / AP Images) Der Spiegel was very careful with this particular story, not least because its journalists knew the danger of active measures; the magazine had fallen for Eastern disinformation in the past. Investigative journalists at Der Spiegel particularly remembered the humiliating forgery of the CDU strategy paper

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been using, steering, and exploiting political activists for about eighty years. CyberGuerrilla, with its idealistic anonymous posting concept, would be an exceptionally attractive vehicle for active measures. Meanwhile, during the fall of 2013, Vladimir Putin, now the Russian president, increased the pressure on those Eastern European countries flirting with closer trade ties

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disinformation worked. The escalating situation in Kyiv would soon undermine this innocence. As the political and military crisis intensified in Ukraine, so did the flanking active measures campaign. Within about a month, disinformation operations that targeted Western interests became more overtly political in nature, and went beyond the old game of spy

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operation and the very design of the “construction” in the first place. This seeming contradiction is no contradiction, but a core feature of active measures over the past century. Active measures are purpose-designed temptations, designed to exaggerate, designed to give in to prejudice, to preformed notions—and to erode the capacity of an

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, an insider or a foreign intelligence agency, the Shadow Brokers campaign was an artful masterpiece that illustrated, in its cruel uncertainty, the twisted logic of active measures—irreversibly blurring the line between victim and perpetrator, between observation and participation, between reality and representation. * * * Just a few weeks before I met him,

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and Sergei Kondrashev, Spymaster (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), p. 187.   8.  Ivanov, “Роля и място на активните мероприятия в разузнаването.”   9.  Interagency Intelligence Study, “Soviet Active Measures,” Washington, DC, 1981, paragraph 19. 10.  Carlos Prats González, Una vida por la legalidad (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976). 11.  Marlise Simons, “Diary of

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Miami). 14.  Cristóbal Peña, “El hombre que falsificó las memorias del general Carlos Prats,” La Tercera (Santiago), June 19, 2005. 15.  Interagency Intelligence Study, “Soviet Active Measures,” Washington, DC, 1981, paragraph 36. 16.  See also “Special Report Nr 88” (Washington, DC: State Department, Bureau of Public Affairs, October 1981), p. 1.

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), Exhibit IX, p. 108. 21.  Statement of Edward O’Malley, assistant director, Intelligence Division, FBI, in House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Soviet Active Measures,” July 13–14, 1982, 97th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), p. 202. 22.  House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “

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Confidence (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 436. 16.  Ilya Dzhirkvelov, Secret Servant (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 306. 17.  Interagency Intelligence Study, “Soviet Active Measures,” Washington, DC, 1981, paragraph 114. 18.  Ibid., paragraph 12. 19.  John Vinocur, “KGB Officers Try to Infiltrate Antiwar Groups,” The New York Times, July 26

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. 340–41. 38.  “The Arne Herlov Peterson Case,” Danish Ministry of Justice, April 17, 1982, translated by the CIA, “Soviet Political Influence Operations,” in Soviet Active Measures, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, July 13–14, 1982 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), pp. 61–63. 39.  See also “Arne

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. 167–181, Sofia: COMDOS Archive, 2010, https://archive.org/details/1985-07-10-joint-am.   3.  House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Soviet Active Measures,” July 13–14, 1982, 97th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), pp. 15, 221.   4.  Vladimir Ivanov, “Изкуството на планирането, разработката и

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Committee on Intelligence, “Meeting the Espionage Challenge” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, October 3, 1986), p. 142, Appendix F. 18.  Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Soviet Active Measures in the United States, 1986–87,” Congressional Record, December 9, 1987, E4717–24. 19.  John Goshko, “For Forgery Specialist, a Case Close to Home,” The

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23, 2016. 48.  WikiSaudiLeaks, July 20, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150810005744/http://www.wikisaleaks.com/. 49.  Thomas Rid, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns,” Testimony, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC, March 30, 2017. 50.  The leak site was hosted at 87.236

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содействия”; see Евгений Максимович Примаков, Очерки истории российской внешней разведки, Том 2 (Москва: Международные отношения, 1996), p. 14. See also Ivo Juurvee, “The Resurrection of ‘Active Measures’,” Strategic Analysis (Hybrid CoE), April 2018. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Errors in fact and interpretation that may mar this work are mine and mine alone. A humbling number

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recognizing; Service A and; skill set for; Soviet budget for; Stasi’s history with; as support measures; the Trust’s success inspiring; see also disinformation Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services report activism; see also Anonymous; peacewar Adenauer, Konrad “Adventures of Mr. Hudson in Russia” Adzhubei, Alexei AEDEPOT Afghanistan AFL (American Federation

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Sefton Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Democratic National Committee (DNC) dengue fever DENVER operation Department 8, see Státní bezpečnost Department D Department X (the X): Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services report and; agent-report forms and; civil war fought by; internal newsletters and; legacy of; origins of; professionalism of; RIGAS operation

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on; imperfection of; KgU and; learning from past; misconceptions about; oral; passage of time and; postmodernism and; self-; skill set for; targets of; see also active measures DNC (Democratic National Committee) Dobbert, Andreas Dobbins, Jim Dobrynin, Anatoly Dodd, Thomas Dönitz, Karl DOUBLEPULSAR “double-track decision” Drummond, Roscoe DTLINEN Dulles, Allen Dulles, John

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see also Anonymous; digital leaks Hahn, Walter Hansapank Harare Sunday Mail Harbottle, Michael Harvey, William King Hatcher, Kyle hate crimes Hatfield, Mark Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA); Active Measures of Eastern Intelligence Services report and; Arbeitskreis and; archival records of; DENVER operation and; Devil and His Dart and; disinformation focus of; effectiveness of; Fleissmann

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how to strengthen the KGB’s operations against the United States and its Western allies, deciding that more emphasis should be placed on so-called active measures, including collecting kompromat on foreign public figures and using disinformation campaigns. The KGB’s leadership also demanded a renewed emphasis on illegal intelligence.[37] The

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fact, the arms cache had been planted, in boxes conveniently marked “Made in USA,” by Andropov’s illegals.[13] This invented scandal, and other similar “active measures,” served several functions. First, Moscow wanted to “prove” to the Czechoslovak party elite that the forces it was unleashing were dangerous and could lead to

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, Helen. Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. London: Hutchinson, 2009. Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. London: Penguin, 1993. Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. London: Profile, 2020. Rieber, Alfred J. Stalin as Warlord. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022. Ross

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