Weapons of Chaos
A history of KGB Active Measures: from the JFK Assassination to the anti-vaccine and science-denialist movements
TLDR
In my own flurry of baseless* speculation, I invent my own conspiracy theory: that a KGB Active Measures operation (a kind of propaganda) from the 1980s called Operation Denver (a real thing) - meant to convince the world that HIV was somehow created in a US bio-warfare lab - has continued in various forms up to this very day, expanding and evolving since the Soviet era, and is fuelling the modern anti-vaccine movement.
Furthermore, I suspect the Russian Security Services, notably the SVR, - successor to the KGB - along with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), used the Covid-19 emergency to blast the English-speaking world - primarily the United States - with a fire-hose of anti-vax, virus-denialism, and 5G-paranoia, for the purpose of destabilising the US and the western world in general.
Lastly, I suspect it’s working perfectly.
The Long Version
Described by Major General Oleg Kalugin, the KGB’s highest ranking defector, as “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence,” these “active measures were well integrated into Soviet policy and involved virtually every element of the Soviet party and state structure, not only the KGB.”
Steve Abrams, Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s Russia (2016)
Question: Are Russian intelligence services helping to amplify conspiracy theories around science denialism and vaccines in order to sow chaos, confusion, and political extremism?
Answer: Sometimes, conspiracies are real.
Here's another real one: During its entire existence, the KGB conspired to destabilise the "capitalist" west using specialised forms of propaganda.
We know this because there are copious archives, documents and defectors that managed to sneak out from under the Iron Curtain, as well as after its collapse. There is still much archival material hidden away, and likely a vast quantity which was destroyed before it could be published.
According to defectors from the old Soviet Union, a major proportion of the KGB's efforts were spent not on traditional espionage, but on something they called Active Measures, a kind of long-term agitation propaganda (agitprop).
They would find existing cracks and fissures in a target country, typically related to domestic politics, and do everything they could to amplify it.
The purpose: to destabilise targeted governments and societies by sowing chaos and confusion, stoking rage and alienation internally, and distrust externally. Sometimes, as these myths spread, they would reveal even more fissures and cracks that could be exploited, sometimes for more specific geopolitical purposes; for example, dissuading developing nations from cooperating with the United States or United Kingdom militarily, as was the case with opportunities that presented themselves when African governments began to distrust the US thanks to the KGB’s AIDS = Bioweapon propaganda in the 1980s.
We also know that today, the successor to the Soviet Union - a state called The Russian Federation, ruled by the short-statured former-KGB-man Vladimir “squeaky little mouse” Putin - has continued to evolve its security services under new names; among them, the SVR, the FSB, and the GU, along with new-style digital-media arms such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). As part of this evolution, they have embraced the digital information age at an industrial scale. The troll farms that have been uncovered so far are vast in size, but there is likely so much more yet to be found.
The hacker groups are there, too; years ago, I even observed one such group as they developed and deployed a series of gradually-more-sophisticated supply chain attacks, by breaching developer accounts in NPM and other package managers. Early on, their code was littered with Cyrillic code comments. Eventually, they must have wisened up, and at some point the comments were no longer being included.
This is a story about the long shadow of the Cold War and the KGB’s Active Measures operations. We will explore how these operations worked historically, look at conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and HIV which were co-opted by the KGB and amplified, and then speculate with wild abandon how modern-day Russian Active Measures could be the driving force of today’s anti-science paranoia in the Western World.
The Soviets and JFK
At their peak, it is estimated that the Soviet active measures campaign employed up to 15,000 people – more than the number of diplomats serving in the post-9/11 US Department of State.
Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s Russia
If you live on planet Earth, you've no doubt heard at least one conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. (If you do not live on this Earth, please contact me, we need to talk.)
However, did you know that some of the earliest speculation about that event was part of a Soviet Disinformation program?
The thing about the Soviet Union throughout its entire existence: the leadership was continually obsessed with conspiracy theories. Not only did they actually believe a whole lot of arbitrary speculative crap that they often came up with, they used this very same skill-set to generate conspiracy theories they knew to be false, for various purposes; sometimes it was used to distract others from things the Soviets were up to, or hide their involvement by creating a cloud of doubt and “alternative facts”. Most of the time however, they ran ongoing operations generating disinformation for the purpose of destabilising other countries. An entire department of the KGB was dedicated to this task: Service A of the First Chief Directorate (FCD).
So when the news came out of Dallas about the assassination of JFK, at first, the Kremlin was in a state of utter shock. They had developed an enormous respect for the young President, and were legitimately shaken by his murder; after a rocky start with the Bay of Pigs, they’d seen his incredible leadership, courage and patience during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They began to see Kennedy as a man that would not be so brash as to launch a first-strike, while being strong enough domestically to ensure no rogue elements in the US military industrial complex would do so, either.
The Soviets were genuinely frightened by the idea of a US first strike, probably more than the US was afraid of a Soviet first strike. Every time the presidency changed hands in the United States, the Soviets were sweating bullets.
Therefore, as was tradition for them, as soon as they heard the news, they immediately began to speculate: was this a coup d'état? Were the ultra-right-wing war hawks (as the Soviets believed) attempting to overthrow Kennedy and place their own man in power? Were they going to accuse the Soviet Union of masterminding the killing, then use that as a pretext for launching thermonuclear war?
Khrushchev seems to have been convinced by the KGB view that the aim of the right-wing conspirators behind Kennedy’s assassination was to intensify the Cold War and “strengthen the reactionary and aggressive elements of American foreign policy."
Cristopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin: The Sword and The Shield (1999), a.k.a The Mitrokhin Archive
To divert the United States away from any focus they might have on the Soviets, the Kremlin tasked the KGB with implementing Active Measures in order to muddy the waters as much as possible, and in the process, they hoped some of that mud might even stick, and uncover the "real plot" they believed must exist. According to the Mitrokhin archive, they began by seeking out American authors and independent investigators who were receptive to these conspiracy theories. Some had already begun working on their own theories in books and articles, which was perfect for KGB purposes: they could simply hijack and then amplify these existing theories, further obscuring their involvement.
With the assistance of the Italian-American Communist and long-time Soviet agent Carl Marzani (codename NORD, who ran a book publishing agency), the KGB were able to secretly provide funds and additional documentary materials - some real, some forged - to various authors in order to encourage their efforts, while simultaneously shaping the narrative direction. This included Mark Lane, the New York Lawyer who would go on to write some of the most commercially successful books on the subject, such as "Rush to Judgement" which became the best-selling paperback of 1967.
Today, theories on the JFK Assassination are an entire cottage industry. The vast majority have expanded on the idea of an internal US government or military plot, sometimes relying on KGB-forged "source" materials which aimed to place the blame on various right-wing and corporate figures such as Texas Oil magnate and all-round nutcase Howard Hunt. Despite there being no shortage of conspiracy theories about Soviet involvement, it is notable that the most popular and well-known all tend to point inward, rather than outward.
All in all, while no specific objectives were achieved, the operation was still seen as a remarkable success, and much was learned: the KGB found they were able to substantially shape the narrative regarding major world events, even in a place like the United States.
…forgeries were used to promote media campaigns: among them, in 1987, a forged letter from the DCI, William Casey, on plans to overthrow the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi; in 1988, bogus instructions from Reagan to destabilize Panama; and in 1989, a fabricated letter from the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, referring to a sinister but non-existent secret agreement with the United States.
The Mitrokhin Archive
Operation Denver
On July 17th 1983, as the coming AIDS catastrophe was first emerging in the Western press, a little-known English-language newspaper in India called "The Patriot" ran a story on the front page of their Sunday edition under the headline “AIDS May Invade India.” Purporting to be a Letter to the Editor, from an anonymous “well-known American scientist and anthropologist,” it begins:
AIDS, the deadly mysterious disease which has caused havoc in the US, is believed to be the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.
It goes on to mix known facts and recent news and events with conclusions seemingly plucked out of thin air, though described in terms which suggest “everybody knows," as though their veracity could not be in doubt.
The thing about the Patriot newspaper: it was a well-known KGB propaganda outlet. The story went almost entirely unnoticed for several years, until further propaganda efforts in the mid-1980s cited it as a way to add legitimacy; yes, KGB-manufactured news articles and other propaganda often cited other KGB-manufactured news articles for this very purpose.
The idea that HIV was an invention by some American Biological Weapons program wasn’t entirely new. Some of the earliest speculation in this direction can be seen in Boston’s Gay Community News in June of the same year, more than one month before the Patriot article:
There is, however, a frightening likelihood that AIDS has been funded all along by the federal government. If the theory of Jane Teas (Harvard School of Public Health) is correct that AIDS is caused by a virus related to the African Swine Fever Virus, then there is evidence that the CIA itself is responsible for introducing the disease in the western hemisphere.
Charley Shivley, “The CIA-CDC-AIDS Political Alliance” - Gay Community News (9th/6/1983)
In this case, it seems the KGB may have picked up on this existing conspiracy theory as well, amplifying it far and wide. It was a particularly powerful conspiracy theory on the African continent, where the KGB played it up to sow distrust of the Western powers. In doing so, they made use of allied and subject nations intelligence services, like the East German Stasi and Bulgarian State Security.
We are conducting a series of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS” [...]
The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.KGB, Information Nr. 2955 [to Bulgarian State Security] (1985)
As part of this operation, they recruited and used a Russian-born East-German biologist - Jakob Segal, along with his wife Lilli Segal - to manufacture their own “proof” for their AIDS conspiracy theory. The Soviets, being what they were, produced written plans which were shared with cooperating agencies in East Germany and Bulgaria detailing their intentions and the assistance to be provided by these agencies.
In fact, most of what I’ve written here could probably be replaced by the KGBs own analysis of the Operation’s progress up to 1987:
The AIDS issue
A complex of [active] measures regarding this issue has been carried out since 1985 in cooperation with the [East] German and to some extent the Czech colleagues.
In the initial stage, the task was resolved of spreading in the mass media the version regarding the artificial origin of the AIDS virus and the Pentagon’s involvement in by means of the military-biological laboratory at Fort Detrick. As a result of our joint efforts, it was possible to widely disseminate this version.
Independent of us, it was picked up by a number of bourgeois newspapers, in particular, the English “Sunday Express,” which gave it additional credibility and authority.*
The articles and brochures of Jacob Segal, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin**, attained great renown. The aforementioned version gained considerable resonance in African countries, which have persistently rejected as racist the theory propagated by the Americans that the AIDS virus originated in African green monkeys.
KGB, Information Nr. 2742 [to Bulgarian State Security], p. 4 (1987)
*emphasis added
**correction added
Although late in 1987 the United States told Gorbachov in no uncertain terms to stop promoting the AIDS-bioweapon conspiracy theory - and they subsequently did - the damage was already done, and the theory still floats around to this day, notably having appeared in the lyrics of a Kanye West song, and feeding into the overall HIV/AIDS denialist conspiracy landscape.
In 2005, polling showed that 50 percent of African Americans still believed that AIDS was a man-made virus. That claim featured in a 2005 Kanye West hit song, perhaps unsurprising given “Ye”’s more recent airing of conspiracy theories.
Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West - Simon and Schuster (2023)
It continued to mutate, particularly forming into the claim that, as a bioweapon, it was designed to eradicate African and Hispanic populations as well as homosexuals. Such claims fed off of distrust due to the immoral, unethical and racist Tuskegee Syphilis experiment run by the US Government between 1932 and 1972, only halting after it was exposed by the press.
Putin's Active Measures
Much of the world believed that things would change after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a "Democracy" - though it had only barely begun to resemble one by the time Putin arrived and cut it off at the knees.
The world was sorely mistaken.
In 2014, we discovered just how mistaken we were, when the Russians unleashed the disinformation fire-hose in an attempt to protect themselves from the charge that they had shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 as it crossed the skies over Eastern Ukraine.
They had, in fact, shot it down, with their own 9M38 anti-aircraft missile.
It was almost certainly a tragic accident, resembling the shooting down of the Korean Airlines 747 by the Soviets in 1983, which they had mistaken as either a spy plane or a deliberate provocation; however, like clock-work, in the immediate aftermath of both events, the Russians deployed Active Measures disinformation to obscure Russian involvement and divert blame anywhere and everywhere else.
Vladimir Putin is a small man indeed, measuring in at 5 foot 7 (I am somewhat taller than he is, a fact of which I am quite proud). His ambitions, however, reflect the all-too-common insecurity with such small and weak men who wish to be seen as big and tough: they are expansive. It has been speculated that his objective is to recreate the territorial empire of the Russian Tzars, by gobbling up most of the former Soviet Bloc territories, by force if necessary.
This is despite the fact that Russia, even without those former Soviet territories, is still the largest nation state by land-mass on Earth, and it’s not even close. At over 16 million km^2 (squared), you could almost fit the entire land-masses of both Australia and Canada inside it at once.
Which just goes to show: it doesn’t matter how much they already have, it’s never enough for little mouse-man Putin.
Today, he continues the Russian information war in all spheres, across many modalities. Social Media and the ease of the re-post has made it so much easier to reach audiences the Soviets could never have dreamed of. One critical thing has changed in Russia’s approach to Active Measures: they no longer seek to promote one side of any argument.
Today, they typically promote many sides (though not to equal measure), while directly tying-in one particular side of an argument with a particular political issue. They turn things like pro/anti-vaccination into a left/right issue, for instance. It has been extremely, monumentally effective. Despite my political leanings not having been disclosed, one Russian troll called myself and other pro-vaccine pro-science commenters “alt-leftists”, whatever that means.
Modern-Day
Now, although I said this would be unsubstantiated speculation on my part: I lied.
It’s not.
They really are behind a lot of today’s anti-vaccine and 5G-paranoia content.
Research has found that not only do known Russian twitter bots and trolls tweet vaccine-related content far more than the average twitter user does, they commonly make a point of stoking outrage on all sides.
Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots post content about vaccination at significantly higher rates than does the average user. Content from these sources gives equal attention to pro- and antivaccination arguments. This is consistent with a strategy of promoting discord across a range of controversial topics—a known tactic employed by Russian troll accounts.
Broniatowski et al., Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate. (2018)
What’s additionally fascinating is the finding that traditional spam-bot networks - not associated with Russia or Intelligence Services - also promote anti-vaccine content almost exclusively, suggesting that real people with an anti-vaccine agenda are making use of marketing tactics to promote their nonsense.
Then, there are the hybrids: suspected “cyborgs”, accounts that seem to be both controlled by a human sometimes and a bot other times. These are by far the heaviest proponents of an anti-vaccine agenda, and it is not well known whether these are affiliated with Russia:
The highest proportion of antivaccine content is generated by accounts with unknown or intermediate bot scores. Although we speculate that this set of accounts contains more sophisticated bots, trolls, and cyborgs, their provenance is ultimately unknown.
Broniatowski et al., 2018
There is a fun little fact we can close this article out on. A little bit of shits and giggles.
Russia is clearly not all-powerful, even on the anonymous internet. In fact, Russia is keen for its chaos-causing Active Measures propaganda to disseminate among its enemies, while spreading truthful messaging (when the truth is useful) to its own people and its allies.
In such an interconnected world, however, that becomes ever more difficult, and may have distinctly backfired during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Russia having had very low-rates of Vaccine uptake during 2021. VOA (Voice Of America, traditionally a US Propaganda outlet itself) published a piece on the subject:
For more than a year, Russian-aligned troll factories overseeing thousands of social media accounts have been accused by Western countries and disinformation experts of spreading anti-vaccine messages in an aggressive campaign to spread conspiracy theories and cast doubt on Western coronavirus vaccines.
But the year-long offensive appears to have backfired.
Jamie Dettmer, Russian Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Backfires (2021)
Poor little mouse Putin. Quite literally having the taste of his own medicine, and he does not like it.
Thank you so much for reading! This post took a spectacular amount of effort to research, write, and illustrate. I think, for the most part, we are done with looking at science-denialism and conspiratorial thinking. I want to get back to writing about the history behind actual scientific discoveries on the mind and brain. As always, I’d be so very grateful if you would share this with everyone you know.
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What a spectacular mountain of research this must have taken!!
It’s really quite fascinating how people flock to certain conspiracy theories but shy away from other, objectively cooler and juicier ones. This is a brilliant one. Absolutely love everything about this, gold stars all around.
a right riveting read... but what is their master plan by spreading this disinformation?