Official Washington has been horrified to learn that Moscow successfully channeled disinformation through the CIA into the highest levels of the American government. According to a CIA report released to Congress, bogus information from Kremlin double agents overestimating Soviet military strength conned the United States into some spending on military hardware it didn’t need during the Cold War. CIA director John M Deutch admits the agency failed to inform the White House and Pentagon that its tainted information was coming from Soviet informants.
This would be a good moment to recall that disinformation, the deliberate planting of falsehoods, was a two-way street during the Cold War. As a purveyor of disinformation itself, the United States government ought to have been in a position to recognize it when it saw it. The Pentagon should have been especially wary of Soviet intelligence, since its own disinformation scare had induced the Soviets to invest billions in military hardware it didn’t need, thus helping to bankrupt the Kremlin.
In the mid-1980s, the Pentagon secretly rigged an experimental target rocket with bombs and artificially heated it so that a “Star Wars” missile equipped with heat sensors could more easily lock on and destroy the target. The Pentagon not only fooled the Russians, whom it knew was monitoring such tests, into believing Star Wars worked. It also snookered the U.S. Congress into funding Star Wars technology research with additional billions.
American disinformation has a long and sordid history. To discredit Britain during the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, considered the father of United States disinformation, planted a newspaper story claiming that American Indians were scalping fetuses torn from the bellies of young women, and then sending their scalps to London to please their British masters.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union bribed newspaper and wire service reporters overseas to manipulate news coverage. The CIA bribed a newspaper and TV station in Chile to generate stories detrimental to pro-Castro President Salvador Allende, creating such activity that United States agents began picking up false information in Chile that the CIA had planted itself, and reported it back to Washington (a phenomenon called “hugger-mugger” in the covert world).
The KGB bankrolled India’s Patriot newspaper, which carried stories that the United States had invented an AIDS ethnic weapon that killed only blacks, and was butchering babies in Central America and selling their body parts for medical research. Such stories were eventually picked up by other news outlets and in time gained some legitimacy.
In September 1983 the U.S. government told the world that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a passenger aircraft, killing 269 people, when a Korean jetliner strayed over a Soviet missile installation. Soviet fighter pilots, claimed the United States, had not attempted to warn the intruding plane in advance of firing on it. American officials knew all this was untrue. The State Department, meanwhile, informed President Reagan it was “developing on an urgent basis a public diplomacy strategy to exploit this incident.”
The Korean airliner disaster enabled the United States to put the competence of the Soviet military in considerable doubt, doing serious damage to the Kremlin’s “peace” campaign to dissuade West European NATO allies from placing upgraded American nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union on their soil.
Later it was disclosed that the Soviets mistook the aircraft for an American military RC-135 reconnaissance plane. There were regular flights of them near where the passenger plane was shot down.
During the Cold War the superpowers seized every opportunity short of waging a shooting war to attack each other, and disinformation was a potent weapon. With the assistance of CIA mole Aldrich Ames and KGB double agents, the Soviet Union sold the United States a bill of goods on an invulnerable Russian military machine, at a time when vodka was being rationed to make more alcohol available for missile fuel. “We didn’t have a damn thing,” admits one former Soviet official. As in every successful disinformatin campaign, there was just enough truth in the mix coming from the Kremlin to make disinformation believable.
It is hypocritical for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Sens. Bob Kerry and Arlen Specter, as well as CIA Director Deutch, to express horror and surprise that disinformation hoodwinked the United States. They know better. It was all part of the Cold War spin.
Copyright The Washington Post, December 27, 1995