Active measures
The Soviet and later Russian intelligence term for covert political warfare: forgeries, planted stories, front organizations, and the cultivation of agents of influence, run as long campaigns to weaken an adversary from within. The ancestor of the modern influence operation.
Aktivnye meropriyatiya was the KGB's own name for a category of work that was neither espionage nor sabotage but something between them: operations whose product was a change in what the other side believed. The forged document leaked to a friendly journalist, the front organization that spoke for peace while taking instructions, the rumor planted in one country so that it could be reported as foreign news in another, were all active measures. The Service A department of the First Chief Directorate ran them, with a budget and a planning cycle like any other line of work.
The best-documented case is the campaign, from 1983, to spread the claim that AIDS had been engineered at Fort Detrick. It began as a letter in an Indian newspaper, was picked up by Soviet outlets as foreign reporting, acquired a scientific-looking pamphlet from an East German biologist, and ran for years before the Soviet government acknowledged it in 1987. The pattern, plant abroad, launder through real media, add a borrowed authority, is the one Thomas Rid's history traces across a century.
The term is used today of Russian operations in particular, but the methods are generic and have been copied widely. On this site they appear as Leak And Plant, Citation Laundering, Front Groups, and Paid Expert.
Compare influence operation and disinformation.
Sources
- Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. ISBN 978-0374287269
- Bittman, Ladislav. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View. Washington: Pergamon- Brassey's, 1985.
- United States Department of State. Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986–87. Washington: Department of State, 1987.