Willing Accomplices was published in 2011. My goal was to provide American voters with an evidence-based argument against putting Barack Obama into the White House in 2008. But the politics of the neo-conservatives who were the power structure in "conservative" publishing in 2007, blocked my work from appearing until three years later. But that's a whole 'nother story.
Willing Accomplices, in its entirety, is a professional research, analysis and examination of the anti-Normal-American political bloc. The book provides a foundation for understanding the origins, belief system, and objectives of Politically Correct Progressivism. The book provides answers to who/when/why/what/where/how the belief system of PC-Progs' invaded and destroyed Normal-American culture.
However, it is clear that Willing Accomplices is too much, covering too many issues, over too long a period of history for most busy people to digest.
Therefore, I’m posting a series of excerpts from Willing Accomplices. The intent is to provide a more digestible, and more focused, guide to each of the issues dealt with in Willing Accomplices.
This series of posts explores each of the issues covered in Willing Accomplices in bite-sized chunks.
Soviet Active Measures
Active Measure operations differ from collection operations in one very important aspect—the effects of Active Measure operations can continue forever.
Human Intel Collection Operations.
Say “KGB spy.” What do most people envision when they hear these words? Those who have watched too much TV or movies see assassinations and fancy weapons. If you’re more grounded in reality, or a historian, you likely see the Rosenbergs, Kim Philby, Rick Ames, Jim Nicholson, John Walker and his family, or Alger Hiss.
These were all recruited agents of the KGB. Most of their work for the KGB was collecting and reporting secrets to the Russians. The Rosenbergs collected secrets on America’s atomic bomb production program. John Walker collected secrets on the U.S. Navy’s communications encryption systems. Jim Nicholson reported secrets about the CIA’s operations and personnel (including my own life story and personality assessment, which he reported to the KGB when he was my operations instructor, severely curtailing my operational options).
Each of these agents collected and reported secrets to their handlers. These are the prototypical intelligence agents. Most historians who study the KGB and its operations focus on these types of agents—intelligence collectors.
From the point of view of managing espionage operations, collection ops are resource intensive. Collectors need to have headquarters defining the requirements for collection. Headquarters are directed by policy makers, who identify unanswered questions they’d like answered. Targeters identify people that might have access to information to answer the requirements. Case officers hit the streets, meet, assess, develop and recruit agents in response.
Once intelligence collection agents are recruited, case officers must meet them securely, keep them motivated and focused, collect the secrets, and write reports based on the collected secrets. Requirements must be constantly refined and communicated to the collectors. The agent must be directed and his reporting fine-tuned.
The human intelligence collection enterprise is a highly resource-intensive and finely balanced affair. If any one of the steps is compromised or disrupted, the whole operation can be ruined. If the agent loses his access, the operation is over. If the agent dies, is arrested, or incapacitated, or loses his access, the collection operation is over. When the Rosenberg op was disrupted, there was no more product, no more secrets—the op finally died with the communist agents in the electric chair.
The most striking weakness of human intelligence collection operations is their limited life-span. As soon as the policy makers no longer are interested in the intelligence produced from the operation, it is over. Very quickly what was once hot, high-level, intelligence becomes historical trivia.
No matter how well the intelligence collection apparatus works, no matter how skillful the analysts, targeters, and case officers are a human collection operation is limited in duration. It has a life-span. It has a birth, and a death. When it is over, it is over. Once the agent is no longer providing information, once the information is no longer needed or timely, the operation is over. It is dead. The information becomes history, not intelligence.
There are no lingering after-effects when a human collection operation is over. When it’s over, it’s over. No more intelligence reports, no more interest in the information. The agent is terminated, the relationship ended.
Active Measures Can Live Forever
Now let’s consider different sorts of intelligence operation. They are linked to human collection operations in that they also have important roles for human agents. Soviet intelligence called these other types of operations Active Measures. U.S. intelligence terminology is different. But most of the operations the Soviets called Active Measures would be Covert Action in American terminology.
Active Measure operations differ from collection operations in one very important aspect—the effects of Active Measure operations can continue forever. This is the root of Willing Accomplices, and a fact that is overlooked by almost all historians and commentators. It’s worth repeating, with emphasis: The effects of Active Measures can last forever.
For example, let’s say a politician, Mr. Jones, intent on impugning the integrity of a political rival, Mr. Smith, during an election, plants false stories about Mr. Smith in the popular press. Let’s say Mr. Jones accuses Mr. Smith of siring a child out of wedlock. The stories about the child are picked up by other media, and repeated. The Mr. Smith takes “the high road,” and ignores the stories about the child. So, there is no printed evidence of Mr. Smith refuting the false stories. Mr. Smith wins the election, and goes on to achieve national prominence.
Fifty years later a historian is researching a book on Mr. Smith. The historian uncovers the contemporary press accounts of the bastard child. Of course, these press accounts are false, part of the active measure of denigration/disinformation. But the historian finds the false stories repeated in numerous publications, with no balancing denials by Mr. Smith. The historian includes the story of the bastard child in his book on Mr. Smith. The bastard child story, seemingly dead and buried decades earlier, now takes on a life of its own.
The book is used as a reference for encyclopedia (today, Wikipedia) articles about Mr. Smith. The encyclopedia is quoted and referenced hundreds of times, becoming the standard reference article on Mr. Smith. The “bastard child” story is now embedded in history, and lives forever.
While most Active Measure operations require human agents to initiate and run, once the operation is moving, it becomes a virtual perpetual motion intelligence machine.
The most striking example of the perpetual effects of an Active Measure operation is PC today. PC is a direct result of the communist covert influence operations, which planted their payloads in American academia, education, media, and Hollywood. PC’s accepted anti-American dogma is nearly directly quoted from the messages implanted by Willi Muenzenberg, as we’ll see in a later chapter.
Birth and Control of Soviet Active Measures
From the early 1920s through the beginning of World War 2, the KGB conducted a flurry of recruitments in America. While there is no record of the ratio of intel collection operations to Active Measures, Andrew’s reading of the Mitrokhin notes shows that by spring of 1941, the KGB’s “agent network in the United States numbered 221."
A former chief of Active Measures in KGB headquarters, an experienced case officer who had been the KGB’s COS in Vienna in 1961, in his unpublished memoirs said,
[Active Measures] did get an early start in Soviet Russia. Lenin’s longtime revolutionaries who took power in November 1917 were so imbued with clandestine tricks that it was second nature to transmute them into government policy.
The KGB Active Measures specialist, who rose to the rank of general in 1967, said that the goal of KGB Active Measures since 1923 was, “upsetting the counterrevolutionary plans and activities of the opposition.”
As the Soviet Union evolved into Stalin’s dictatorship, the KGB received orders to step up Active Measures. One goal was “weakening or misleading…our adversaries.”
This Active Measures connoisseur and leader claimed that his specialty was the “intellectual approach to clandestine intelligence,” in contrast to “the more mechanical approach of ‘practitioners.’”
The KGB general in recounting his experience with Active Measures said that these operations were controlled from the highest levels of the Soviet government. He described his specialty:
Active Measures’ were clandestine actions designed on the one hand to affect foreign governments, groups and influential individuals in ways favoring the objectives of Soviet policy and, on the other hand, to weaken the opposition to it. Such actions might or might not involve misinforming an adversary by distortion, concealment or invention, but in practice we got better results by exposing truth—selectively. We usually made the distinction clear. When someone would propose a measure, for instance, we would frequently ask him, ‘How much deza [disinformation] is involved in it?
The KGB general discussed keeping intelligence collection operations separate from Active Measures, “We tried to avoid using…foreign journalists whom we had recruited as information sources [note: intelligence collectors]. That would expose their true political sentiments and reduce their ability to gather intelligence from circles hostile to us.” This clarifies the KGB’s tendency, at least in the Cold War era, to compartment its Active Measure operations from intelligence collection ops.
The KGB general described his Active Measures group using the British defectors, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, in their ops. The British turncoats were most useful in turning the Russians’ English translations into vernacular English. The KGB officer notes that Burgess, while difficult to work with—the Russian describes having to deal with the young boys Burgess introduced as “his girlfriends,” supplied by the KGB—did produce good work for the KGB. On the other hand, Philby was less useful, and provided input mainly through his case officer, Yuri Modin.
The KGB specialist carefully differentiates his operations, during the Cold War, from those of the International Department (ID) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He admits that both the KGB’s Active Measures groups and the ID were “attacking some of the same targets by developing campaigns and demonstrations…” And KGB officers would usually be the conduits for clandestine payments to the ID’s covert influence fronts—“international organizations of lawyers or peace lovers or students…” But he notes that there was no “single coordinated program” of Soviet Active Measures.
The KGB general is adamant about the bureaucratic differentiation of the operations run by the ID—which was the successor to the Comintern’s OMS—from the KGB proper’s Active Measure operations. From an outsider’s perspective, this is interesting because it confirms analysis that Muenzenberg’s Covert Influence operations were run under cover of the OMS.
The Active Measures specialist described covert influence operations:
To deliver our policy line to key foreign government people in ways that did not seem to come from us, we would use friendly Westerns who were close to them. Our assets—sometimes just trusted persons without being fully recruited agents—included political activists, journalists, scientists, or government and military officials—and even sometimes businessmen. Sometimes we would get our own diplomats to drop ‘indiscreet’ remarks to their Western colleagues.
In the end, the main goal of Covert Influence Active Measures against the U.S. was to move political and public opinion “away from the conservative parties that were opposing our policies,” in the words of a KGB Active Measures manager.
Taxonomy of Soviet Active Measures
Thomas Boghart, writing in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, provided a taxonomy of the activities that the Soviets considered Active Measures. According to Boghart, “The basic goal of Soviet active measures was to weaken the USSR’s opponents — first and foremost the “main enemy” (glavny protivnik), the United States — and to create a favorable environment for advancing Moscow’s views and international objectives worldwide.” Weakening and if possible destroying the U.S. was most effectively and efficiently done by attacking from within. Striking America’s inner strength required hitting its cultural transmission institutions. As we’ll see, they did just that.
Disinformation or Deception is planting false stories, usually in media not affiliated with Russia or the KGB. These operations never reveal the sponsor of the information. A disinformation operation could be an activity as simple as starting rumors. Forging documents, letters, orders, treaties that cast the target in a bad light is another form of deception or disinformation.
A classic disinformation campaign illustrates the longevity of Active Measures. In 1983 the KGB planted a false story in an Indian newspaper. The story, the “payload” of the operation, attributed to an unnamed American scientist, claimed that the AIDS virus was created by American bio-weapons laboratories. The initial publication did not have much of an impact. But in 1985, the sprout began to grow. A Soviet newspaper took up the initial claims, and elaborated—now the Russians claimed that not only had the Americans created AIDS, but also that they had purposely infected Haitians, homeless, homosexuals, and drug addicts in experiments to test the disease.
The story was picked up, amplified, added to, and exaggerated, until, during the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2008, we learned the preacher of Barack Obama’s Black Liberation Theology church parrot the payload. In April 2003, twenty years after the America-invented-AIDS Active Measure operation began, Reverend Jeremiah Wright thundered from the pulpit of Trinity Church of Christ in Chicago, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”
At the time, Barack Obama, who would five years later be the President of the U.S., was an active participant in Wright’s racist congregation. Did Obama sit in the pews the day Wright delivered this KGB Active Measure payload? It’s not clear, but it is clear that Obama did not reject Wright’s virulent Soviet-inspired anti-American rants until they became public in 2008.
Denigration Operations during the Cold War are probably closest to the early Soviet Comintern-covered Muenzenberg covert influence operations designed to destroy the American culture. The goal of these was, just as Muenzenberg’s goal, to destroy American exceptionalism, to destroy specific targets—individual people, organizations, or countries. Although the KGB does not make a distinction between covert influence and denigration, there is a fine difference. However, to the KGB operators, these were just another deza operation.
The KGB specialist describes a couple of denigration operations. One was designed to destroy the NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns. The KGB circulated “false allegations that he had misused official funds.” The op proved successful when Luns retired a year later. The KGB officer heard, “through agent sources that these allegations, though unproved [since they were untrue], had indeed played a role in his departure.”
The KGB general also claimed that his office ran a denigration operation against the German scientist, Werner von Braun, who helped America with its rocket program, after WW2.
In Oleg Gordievsky's book KGB: The Inside Story, he described a forgery planted by the KGB in the United States in 1982:
In late October the Washington main residency implemented Operation Golf, designed to plant fabricated material discrediting the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, on the unsuspecting American correspondent of the London New Statesman. On November 5 the New Statesman duly carried an article entitled “A Girl's Best Friend,” exploring "the often secret relationship" between Jeanne Kirkpatrick and South Africa. The article included a photograph of a forged letter to Ms. Kirkpatrick from a counselor at the South African embassy conveying "best regards and gratitude" from the head of South African military intelligence and allegedly enclosing a birthday present "as a token of appreciation from my government." The use of the word "priviously" [sic] indicated that, as sometimes happens with its forgeries, Service A had forgotten to check its English spelling.
Propaganda is an overt, loud, in-your-face communication that does not attempt to disguise its source or intent. A poster declaring “The Soviet Union is the Fatherland of all Peace-loving Peoples” is propaganda. Radio Moscow broadcasts are propaganda. Propaganda is like advertising that is not ashamed to be advertising. The Voice of America is a U.S. propaganda channel, albeit much more subtle than most communist propaganda ever was.
Foreign Communist Parties were almost all controlled by the Soviet Union. Anything that an indigenous communist party, for example the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), did or said was tightly controlled by the KGB. The Soviet Union’s leadership, through the KGB, the Comintern’s OMB, the KGB, and other means, provided funds and the party line for the CPUSA. The leadership and membership of the CPUSA parroted the Soviet party line from the beginning of the party through the end of the Soviet Union.
Control of supposedly independent political parties, in the free countries of the West, provided the KGB with many opportunities for Active Measures. The long-time leader of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, inserted the Soviet line in political discussions. His status as an “independent, American” politician was taken for granted by naïve American journalists. Thus, Browder’s Stalinist point of view was reported as an authentic American point of view, throughout his tenure in the CPUSA.
Front Organizations were used to influence unsuspecting Westerners, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union. The controlling hand of the KGB was hidden from view of members of the fronts, and from the media. The first fronts began as seemingly spontaneous international organizations to provide relief to the Soviets during the famine of 1921. The famine was caused by a combination of drought, communist seizures of crops, and lingering effects of the Russian Civil War, ended just a year earlier.
Working for the Comintern, Willi Muenzenberg, the brilliant and energetic German communist, veteran organizer, and confidante of the Bolsheviks, headed the Foreign Committee for the Organization of Worker Relief for the Hungry in Soviet Russia. This committee was created by Lenin as a counter-balance to the embarrassing fact that the American government was actually providing real aid. Herbert Hoover directed an organization, the American Relief Administration, that actually fed millions of Soviet citizens every day.
Muenzenberg created an intertwined network of fronts that raised millions of dollars, mostly in the U.S. Americans were suckers for fronts. In response to Muenzenberg’s front organization entreaties, Americans poured in contributions to help the starving proletarians in the Soviet Union. In contrast, Europeans were less receptive to the communist Active Measure. Muenzenberg was frustrated with the amount collected in Germany, France and England. He turned his attention to the fertile operating ground in North America.
Muenzenberg created another front in the U.S., the Friends of Soviet Russia (FSR) society, which he used to raise funds, ostensibly for famine relief. The front made political statements, such as the FSR famine fund-raising letterhead logo, “Give without imposing imperialistic and reactionary conditions as do Hoover and others.” Muenzenberg learned from this first success, and went on to much greater front successes during the years between the World Wars, as we’ll see later.
Paramilitary Operations are clandestine military operations, such as training of insurgent or guerilla forces. A good example of this type of operation was the CIA’s training and insertion of forces on Cuba during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The KGB has funded and armed a wide variety of guerilla and terrorist groups active against the U.S. and its allies—for example, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Viet Cong.
Kidnapping and Assassination are two facets of the same Active Measure, sometimes known as wet ops. The Russian communists had none of the moral and legal constraints that the U.S. faces during peace-time (or at least during a non-declared war). They were ready to employ physical violence to meet their intelligence goals. The KGB planned and carried out the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. The KGB likely was instrumental in the killing of Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov in London. Recently, it is likely that the KGB’s successor planned and carried out the killing of ex-KGB whistleblower Litvinenko, also in London.
Covert Influence involves inserting a desired message (the payload) into the culture of an enemy. The origin and intent of the message is hidden by using an Agent of Influence. The Agent is usually a native of the enemy culture and has access to the targeted culture’s communications line. If the objective was to influence the American planning for the war strategy conference with the Soviet Union in Yalta, the KGB would seek an agent within the U.S. government who was involved in those talks. The agent of influence, ideally someone close to the planners, respected and knowledgeable, would be provided with the Soviet line. Whenever possible, the agent of influence would argue the Soviet line, as if it was his own. An agent of influence never reveals his true master, and sometimes is not even aware of his being manipulated.
Some agents require a “fig-leaf,” an ostensible excuse for their actions. Even though they likely understand the reality of what they are doing, it is sometimes psychologically easier to deny the reality, and maintain independence from the case officer running them. A good case officer understands this, assesses his agent’s personality, and provides the agent with a fig-leaf if necessary.
For example, it’s likely that George S. Counts, an extremely productive covert influence agent, was provided a fig-leaf that masked the true identity of his handlers. He was provided with massive amounts of payload material, which he parlayed into a successful career as America’s premier expert on Soviet education. The payloads he inserted into American education and academia resonate today, in PC attacks on American exceptionalism.
While it is likely that Alger Hiss, a recruited Soviet spy, provided intelligence collection services to the KGB, the secrets to which he had access were nearly of no value, when compared to the value he could provide as an agent of influence. Hiss was involved in policy formulation in the Department of State, and was a major player in the strategic planning talks between Roosevelt and Stalin in Yalta.
Covert influence is the classic example of a Soviet Active Measure that has no expiry date. As we’ll see, the KGB, with Muenzenberg providing the operational and organizational savvy, ran a brilliant covert influence operations designed to destroy America’s self-pride and sense of exceptionalism. Muenzenberg, crushed by the pitiless might of Stalinist oppression, likely never dreamed that his creation of hate-America-first would grow and spread like kudzu, creating PC and weakening his target, right up to 2010.
Using experienced operatives and highly compartmentalized operations, the KGB sought to insert covert influence “payloads” designed to call into question the fundamental bases on which American society and culture had been built. Many progressives eagerly carried out these covert operations for the Communists. Others not involved in the operations received the covert messages and accepted them as gospel.
The agents of influence denigrated American patriotism, capitalism, and individualism, and called into question American foreign policy, all of which seemed to form the philosophical basis of an elite attitude, which coalesced during the Great Depression and was nurtured and strengthened by the American transmitters of the KGB’s covert influence operations: journalists, screenwriters, and professors, among others. A Willing Accomplice in Hollywood, in the 1950s, commented that by participating in the anti-anti-communist groups, “I would be spared the agony of thinking my way through difficult issues: all the thinking would be done for me by an elite core of trained [thinkers]…”
The goal of the KGB’s covert influence operations was to make Americans feel that their country was bad. The KGB utilized Willing Accomplices to spread the message that America was an evil, racist, imperialist war-monger and that Communism was a benign, noble experiment designed to rid the world of corruption, oppression and injustice. Muenzenberg used his fronts as cover to run innovative and staggeringly successful covert influence operations against the U.S.