PoliticalMANIPULATIVE

Active Measures

What it is

The Soviet and Russian intelligence term for covert political-influence operations — forgeries, front organizations, planted stories, agents of influence, and manufactured events — designed to shape foreign decisions and opinion while concealing the sponsor's hand.

How it works

Active measures (aktivnye meropriyatiya) treat an adversary's politics as an environment to be engineered rather than argued with. Thomas Rid's history (2020) traces the practice from early Soviet deception through the KGB's Service A to the Internet Research Agency, and identifies a constant structure: a kernel of truth, a forged or exaggerated addition, a cut-out that hides the origin, and an amplification path through the target's own media. Ladislav Bittman, a Czechoslovak intelligence officer who defected in 1968, described the craft from inside — the aim was less to sell one lie than to widen existing cracks and set factions against each other. The lever is the target society's own divisions and its press freedom, which supply both the material and the distribution; a good active measure is one that citizens of the target country spread for their own reasons. The concept is not exclusively Soviet: Western services ran comparable covert political action, and the modern term influence operation covers all of them. The tell is a story that fits a domestic grievance perfectly but rests on a document nobody can trace.

Real-world examples

  • •Operation INFEKTION (1983–1987) seeded the claim that the U.S. military created HIV in a laboratory, beginning with a letter in an Indian newspaper and reaching print in dozens of countries; Russian officials acknowledged the KGB's role in 1992 (Boghardt, 2009).
  • •Operation Neptune in 1964, which Bittman helped run, planted crates of genuine Nazi documents in a Bohemian lake so that their staged discovery would revive attention to West German war criminals ahead of a statute-of-limitations debate.
  • •A forged supplement to a U.S. Army field manual, FM 30-31B, surfaced in the 1970s purporting to authorize American subversion of allied governments and was reprinted by sympathetic European outlets; U.S. congressional hearings and State Department reports documented it as a Soviet forgery.
  • •The CIA covertly funded Italian Christian Democrats in the 1948 election and, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines such as Encounter until the arrangement was exposed in 1967 — covert political action by a democracy, differing from Soviet practice in its ends but not in the concealment of sponsorship.
  • •The Internet Research Agency's 2014–2017 campaign is the digital descendant: the Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee described the same structure of fronts, forgeries, and amplification by domestic audiences.

Historical case studies

Operation INFEKTION: the AIDS-as-US-bioweapon campaign

1983–1987Cold War

In 1983 an anonymous letter in a small pro-Soviet Indian newspaper claimed that AIDS was the product of Pentagon biological-weapons experiments. From 1985 the KGB, with help from the East German Stasi, pushed the story worldwide, leaning on a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, to supply a scientific-sounding report. By 1987 the claim had appeared in the press of dozens of countries. Soviet scientists publicly disavowed it that year under US diplomatic pressure, and in 1992 Russian intelligence chief Yevgeny Primakov acknowledged the KGB had been behind it. Versions of the story still circulate.

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The Internet Research Agency and the 2016 US election

2014–2017Russia / United States

The bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency ran thousands of fake American personas across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, posing as activists on both the right and the left, and that its activity increased after election day. The committee concluded the operation sought to harm one candidate and help the other at the Kremlin's direction, and that it targeted African-American audiences more than any other group. The report documents reach and intent; it does not claim to measure how many votes, if any, were changed, and later academic work on that question has found small or undetectable effects.

Source →

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Concealing the sponsor of a political message is the defining deception; the content can be true and the operation still a fraud on the audience.
  • ●Democracies that run covert influence abroad forfeit some standing to object when it is run against them, and should hold their own services to disclosure and oversight.
  • ●Labeling domestic opponents as agents of foreign active measures without evidence is itself a technique from the same playbook.

How to defend against it

  • ►Trace the document: forgeries and planted stories almost always enter through an obscure outlet in a third country; find the first appearance with date-limited search and archive tools before accepting a claim that cites it.
  • ►Ask the Bittman question — which existing division does this story widen, and who benefits from that division deepening — and weigh the story's provenance accordingly.
  • ►Read the declassified record (the State Department active-measures reports of the 1980s, the Mitrokhin material, the 2019 Senate reports) so that recurring patterns — fake letters from officials, front groups with grand names, sudden foreign-press scoops — become recognizable.
  • ►Verify leaked material item by item, because a mostly genuine archive is the standard vehicle for a forged insert (see leak-forgery).
  • ►Apply the same provenance standard to stories that flatter your side; active measures are designed to be carried by willing hands, and the willing hands are usually sincere.

From the Defense Playbook

The Two Independent Sources Ruleminutes

Do not treat a consequential claim as established until two sources that obtained the information separately both support it, and check that they really are separate, because ten outlets repeating one origin are still one source.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Rid, T. (2020). Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    The century-long history and the recurring structure of kernel, forgery, cut-out, and amplification.
  2. Bittman, L. (1985). The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View. Pergamon-Brassey's
    A defector's account of the craft, including Operation Neptune and the goal of widening existing divisions.
  3. Boghardt, T. (2009). Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign. Studies in Intelligence, 53(4)
    The AIDS-origin campaign and its 1992 acknowledgment.
  4. Andrew, C., & Mitrokhin, V. (1999). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books
    Archival detail on KGB active measures, forgeries, and agents of influence.
  5. Saunders, F. S. (1999). Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Granta Books
    CIA covert funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its exposure in 1967.
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