The KGB and Soviet disinformation: an insider's view

The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View, by Ladislav Bittman (Pergamon-Brassey, 227 pp., $16.95)

'WHEN THE SKY grew lighter, I stopped the car at a small rest stop, opened the door, and left the car. I stepped to the front of the car and tore off the CD sign giving me diplomatic immunity. I no longer needed it. I had crossed my Rubicon . . ."

Thus ended Ladislav Bittman's service to Communism, as told in The Deception Game, an autobiographical account of life as a disinformant, propagandist, and Czech secret agent that appeared 14 years ago. Since then, in between the university classes he teaches on the subject, Bittman has been gathering information about Soviet active measures for his second book, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View. Bittman tells about the rumors, lies, and terrorism that are all part of the KGB's ongoing campaign to demoralize and subdue the West witout war.

Bittman, a former major in Czech intelligence and deputy commander of Department D, the department of disinformation, was a top intelligence operative from 1954 to 1968. In The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, he writes instructively about active measures--aktivnyya meropriyatiya--"clandestine operations designed to extend Soviet influence and power around the world." Disinformation games have been a key active measure of the KGB since its inception.

Bittman describes, with diagrams, various versions of the disinformational "game plan, . . . in which the participants play one of three roles: operator, adversary, or unwitting agent." The adversary is usually a Western nation, often the United States; the unwitting agent, a Third World nation or an individual fellow-traveler; and the operator, the KGB or some other Eastern-bloc intelligence service.

Bittman gradually makes clear that disinformation is a "game" only in the same sense that "war games" are: It is a highly specialized field of study requiring the "operator" to understand the politics, history, psychology, foreign relations, culture, and weaknesses of both the "unwitting agent" and the "adversary." Additionally, Soviet active measures are part of a long-term strategy. "Moscow's disinformation specialists know that a single covert action . . . cannot tip the balance of power between the Western Alliance and the Communist bloc. But they believe that mass production of active measures will have a significant cumulative effect over a period of decades."

Bittman confirms two beliefs long held by knowledgeable critics of the media: a) Soviet disinformation is successful; and b) it is successful in large part because journalists think they are too sophisticated to be duped by Soviet agents.

Take, for example, the infamous "Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America," eargerly circulated by the far-left Pacific News Service and picked up first by an obscure British newsletter and, a few days later, by the Boston Globe and the New York Times. The paper, which urged an end to U.S. support for the Salvadoran government and a "nonmilitary, negotiated solution" in Central America, was supposedly written by "dissenting State Department officials." In fact, says Bittman, it was an "obvious forgery." Nevertheless, Stephen Kinzer, a leftish reporter then with the Boston Globe, wrote a front-page story on November 28, 1980, about its conclusions, attributing them to a "'group of disgruntled diplomats and intelligence experts.'"

On December 1, 1980, Bittman reports, "columnist Anthony Lewis gave it national publicity [in the New York Times] without verifying its authenticity." The Times learned the document was a forgery two months later, but only after Flora Lewis, another Times columnist, also wrote an article based on it.

Another instance: A March 20, 1975, article in the New York Times, coauthored by a "foreign-affairs consultant and writer on European-American relations," was in fact written by a highly paid, decorated East German spy.

So much for the "unwitting agents." When it comes to the "adversaries," the KGB will conduct active measures against anyone or anthing--even supposedly friendly Soviet-bloc countries. Targets have included Henry Kissinger, pegged at home as a KGB agent and abroad as the principal behind a "treacherous, selfish American foreign policy"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, condemned in his wife's KGB-inspired autobiography; and even Czechoslovakia, during the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968.

By then, Bittman had tired of playing the deception game. He had been deceiving himself all along. In the morning hours of August 21, 1968, after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the counter-revolutionaries, Bittman left his intelligence post in Vienna. Two months later he landed in the U.S. and began his new career as a writer and university professor, spreading information instead of disinformation.