I went through the trouble of assembling a searchable pdf from this government report, prepared at the request of the United States House of Representatives. It deals extensively with what is known about the psychological war waged on the free world by the soviet union under the banner of "Active Measures", but concentrates on the "post cold war" era 1988-91.
It categorises the different kinds of operations into black white and grey, true and false, and conciliatory, derogatory and alarmist.
Alarmist disinfomation is a particularly interesting sub-genre, because the propagator cannot be dismissed by facts, atleast for quiete a few years. The global warming racket is without a doubt the best alarmist disinfo campign ever waged on the free world by the international left.
I believe many people underestimate the importance of these "active measures" and the overall destructive goals of the International Information Department, who conducted most of the operations. The reason for this is probably that the true scale of it is not appreciated, because people tend to forget that all the hard work of intelligence gathering had already been done by the KGB as such, and was then simply fed to the international department, where the informatioon was skillfully streamlined into slogans and "arguments" to gain strategic advantages. Imagine the boost any news outlet would gain, if it were fed all needed information directly from the CIA.
Surely, this meant an immense advantage, and enabled them to constantly provide new "stories" with sufficient evidence, to the anti-western leftist journalists, who then made headlines and refused to disclose their "sources".
This has been going on for so long now, that selfcriticism seem to have become the norm in most news media.
The Soviet Communist Party created what was, in all likelihood, the most formidableSoviet Active Measures in the "Post-Cold War" Era 1988-1991
political influence machine in the modern world. Although the Soviets had the
disadvantage of "selling" an enormously unpopular "product," they evolved a great deal
of manipulative and deceptive techniques to try to compensate for this disadvantage. A
close examination of how they sought to influence foreign publics and governments by
orchestrating and spreading carefully selected information, disinformation, and a variety
of crude, sophisticated, derogatory, conciliatory, and alarmist arguments and slogans
contains important lessons for the future in understanding how other totalitarian and
extremist regimes conduct active measures, and how some groups and states within the
Commonwealth of Independent States continue to try to achieve political influence using
these methods.
