How the Soviet KGB created Conspiracy Theories

The black propaganda tools of a very shrewd and cynical Soviet KGB created many of the ideas that are still echoed today as "conspiracy theories". I have been reading and researching conspiracy-theories for the last 20 years and in time, my suspicions were aroused because so many of these theories were directed at the USA specifically. "Why is America always the culprit in these theories?" I asked myself. Is there an actual conspiracy behind these conspiracy-theories?

Ever since the early days of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians were very well-versed in spying, counter-intelligence, disinformation, propaganda, placing "sleepers" into various countries, recruiting American journalists, filmmakers and academics for their agenda. Compared to their expertise, Americans were, for the longest time, naive amateurs (as the recent NSA outings have shown, America is no longer an amateur). To give you a taste for the outrageous extent of their campaign these are three fairly popular examples of conspiracy-theories that were planted by the KGB. It often surprises me how supposedly suspicious and skeptical "conspiracy theorists" rarely ask about the origins of a theory and who benefits from certain information.

Example 1: Operation Infektion

Operation: INFEKTION was a KGB disinformation campaign to spread information that the United States invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Soviet Union used it to undermine the United States’ credibility, foster anti-Americanism, isolate America abroad, and create tensions between host countries and the U.S. over the presence of American military bases (which were often portrayed as the cause of AIDS outbreaks in local populations).

Source: Operation INFEKTION

This is former Soviet Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov who was the first to confess to "Operation Infektion":



The "AIDS Conspiracy Theory" is still quite popular, showing how easily disinformation, once disseminated, gains a life of its own and plenty of followers.

Example 2: The JFK Conspiracy Theory

One of the very first JFK-Conspiracy books to be published was in 1964 by Joachim Joesten. The book was titled "Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy" and was published prior to the Warren Report. In this book it was claimed that JFK was killed by the CIA and that Oswald was not a lone gunman. The book has been used by many subsequent conspiracy-theorists, including Oliver Stone and his movie JFK, to support their views. In fact, it is still parroted to this day.



Only decades later, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it was proven that Joesten was a paid KGB Agent and the publisher was a KGB Front. The purpose of this conspiracy-theory was once again to discredit America and the CIA and sow doubt and fear in the populace. It was quite a successful operation, judging from the thousands of books and articles that still emulate the original KGB-message.

Source: The Sword and the Shield (among other sources)

Example 3: Islamic Anti-Americanism

Evidence has been steadily mounting that Anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world is not exclusively a creation of American Interventionism, but has been generously fueled by the Soviet KGB as well.

One of the operating principles of the Soviets was to look for already existing antagonism toward the U.S. and blow it out of proportion through added disinformation. Another tactic was to wait for the U.S. to make mistakes - such as those in foreign policy - and to then emphasize and mass-publish those mistakes. Anything to create anger and rage toward America was a good tool for the KGB, whether it had a factual basis or not.



In a recent book titled "Disinformation", former KGB Agent Ion Mihai Pacepa (image above) writes that his colleague and acquaintance Yuri Andropov (image below), the head of the KGB in the 1960s, was taksed with reviving anti-semitism in conjuction with anti-Americanism among Arabs and Persians. The goal was to "convince muslims that America was ruled by Jews". For this purpose the "Palestinian Liberation Army" was founded and trained by KGB special ops and books were published that displayed Israelis, Zionists and Americans as the worlds foremost threat to peace. It was hoped that by teaching muslims that America was ruled by the "Council of the Wise Elders of Zion", who were plotting to take over the whole world, that violence and terrorism against the U.S. would follow. Pacepa writes:

"In 1972 I received from the KGB an Arabic translation of the old Russian forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” We also received "documentary" material in Arabic produced by the Soviet disinformation "proving" America was a Zionist country whose aim was to transform the Islamic world into a Jewish fief. My DIE was ordered to disseminate these documents within its targeted Islamic countries. During my later years in Romania, the DIE disseminated thousands of copies of “The Protocols” and similar “documents” each month. The fruit of the KGB’s disinformation campaign was seen on Sept. 11, 2001. The weapon of choice for that horrific act was a hijacked airplane – a concept invented and perfected by Andropov's disinformation machinery.

What is interesting about this campaign is that they may still be going on, decades after the Cold War ended. For example, among intelligence circles it is rumored that the Danish "Mohammed Cartoon" affair that transpired in 2005 and caused Islamic unrest and violence across the world, was orchestrated by the SVR - which is the successor of the KGB. Oleg Kalugin, former KGB Major, has gone public with this theory, saying that in the past the KGB has often used Danish journalists to disseminate agitation propaganda. He says it is no coindidence that the Jyllands Posten editor who commisioned the cartoons - Flemming Rose - was a correspondent to Moscow and has published several Russian-Propaganda articles against Chechnya. Flemming Rose was also married to the daughter of a KGB-officer. Next thing you know he is publishing articles that cause Islamic outrage against the West.

But if true (and thats really an IF in this case), why would modern Russia still be applying these Cold War tactics? Well, Russia is still in competition to the west for resources and oil and dominance. Their covert operation tools having worked in the past it follows that they would continue to use them.

Continued in next post...

There were many, many more ideas and theories planted into the American mind by the KGB. History will remember the KGB as the foremost experts of disinformation. Most of this propaganda was part of a kind of political warfare termed Active Measures by the Soviets.

Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration in churches, and persecution of political dissidents. Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations. Retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence": "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs." Active measures was a system of special courses taught in the Andropov Institute of KGB situated at SVR headquarters in Yasenevo, near Moscow.

A few more of the "active measures" taken by the Soviets were:

* Creating the conspiracy-theory that the moon landing was a hoax.
* Trying to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. as an "agent of the Government"
* Creating racial tensions between black and whites by writing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, distributing explosive packages in New York.
* Creating the conspiracy-theory that fluoridated drinking water was a US-Government conspiracy for population control.
* And much, much more, too much to go into here.

Source: The Mitrokhin Archive (among other sources).

My personal conclusion from all this is that when reading information I first ask: Where is it from and who benefits? Not all information is based on innocent research or inquiry.

Related Post: The Peace Movement was a Soviet Psy-Operation

oops

Originally posted by VoidHawk
According to THIS Conspiracy theories were created by the CIA

Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.

My post isn't about where the term conspiracy theory comes from, but where some of these theories themselves come from.

Greetings,

Skyfloating

Originally posted by Skyfloating
* Creating racial tensions between black and whites by writing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, distributing explosive packages in New York.
My personal conclusion from all this is that when reading information I first ask: Where is it from and who benefits? Not all information is based on innocent research or inquiry.

Related Post: The Peace Movement was a Soviet Psy-Operation

That struck me as really interesting! I have never considered that the KGB may have had a hand in escalating the race war in the 1960s..

It actually makes a lot of sense if your goal is to destabilize the enemy. wow. Mind blown.

Is a version of this still happening today?

Originally posted by clay2 baraka
Is a version of this still happening today?

I asked myself the same question. I dont know, but its a question I will continue to ask myself.

While there is less evidence for them than the above, the allegations of former Russian FSB Agent Litvinenko are quite staggering:

Litvinenko stated that "all the bloodiest terrorists of the world" were connected to FSB-KGB, including Carlos "The Jackal" Ramírez, Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Abdullah Öcalan, Wadie Haddad of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Hawi who led the Communist Party of Lebanon, Ezekias Papaioannou from Cyprus, Sean Garland from Ireland and many others. He said that all of them were trained, funded, and provided with weapons, explosives and counterfeit documents in order to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide and that each act of terrorism made by these people was carried out according to the task and under the rigid control of the KGB of the USSR.[62] Litvinenko said that "the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorism infection creeps away worldwide from the cabinets of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin".[63][64]

More from Litvinenko (who was poisoned in an assassination attempt on his life):

In a July 2005 interview with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Litvinenko alleged that Ayman al-Zawahiri, a prominent leader of al-Qaeda, was trained for half a year by the FSB in Dagestan in 1997 and called him "an old agent of the FSB".[62][65] Litvinenko said that after this training, al-Zawahiri "was transferred to Afghanistan, where he had never been before and where, following the recommendation of his Lubyanka chiefs, he at once ... penetrated the milieu of Osama bin Laden and soon became his assistant in Al Qaeda."[66] Former KGB officer and writer Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy supported this claim and said that Litvinenko "was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahiri's arrival in Russia; he was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996–1997.".[67] He said: "At that time, Litvinenko was the Head of the Subdivision for Internationally Wanted Terrorists of the First Department of the Operative-Inquiry Directorate of the FSB Anti-Terrorist Department. He was ordered to undertake the delicate mission of securing Al-Zawahiri from unintentional disclosure by the Russian police. Though Al-Zawahiri had been brought to Russia by the FSB using a false passport, it was still possible for the police to learn about his arrival and report to Moscow for verification. Such a process could disclose Al-Zawahiri as an FSB collaborator. In order to prevent this, Litvinenko visited a group of highly placed police officers to notify them in advance." According to FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko, al-Zawahiri was arrested by Russian authorities in Dagestan in December 1996 and released in May 1997.

Interesting.

Perhaps the old Soviet Union in their 'planning' stages prior to 1917 were in league with some kind of network that spanned beyond old Russia.

Many connections to the Communists in Europe and the United States existed.

One possibility is the J.P. Morgan media 'takeover' in that time period.

We now know that much of the 'media' is Leftist leaning.


1917: J.P. Morgan bought US corporate media to be 1%’s lying sacks of spin?

Congressional Record: JP Morgan & Co purchased all major media for propaganda: 1917. And now we have…?

reply to post by Skyfloating


OP, if you're saying that the first and only source for the JFK assassination conspiracy theory,
is the Soviet Union ? I must hotly contest that.

Originally posted by randyvs

OP, if you're saying that the first and only source for the JFK assassination conspiracy theory,
is the Soviet Union ? I must hotly contest that.

edit on 4-8-2013 by randyvs because: (no reason given)

I don't think you could quote where I say that.

Originally posted by xuenchen

Perhaps the old Soviet Union in their 'planning' stages prior to 1917 were in league with some kind of network that spanned beyond old Russia.

You bet. But I`m not sure of how, when, where.

reply to post by Skyfloating


First of all got to say yet another well presented and reasoned thread.

All good disinformation involves fabricating a web of deceit around a kernel of truth or exploiting and fuelling existing grievances.

I'm sure the US / UK / Israel etc have been 'guilty' of using exactly the same tactics, sometimes against the USSR.

Originally posted by clay2 baraka

Originally posted by Skyfloating
* Creating racial tensions between black and whites by writing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, distributing explosive packages in New York.
My personal conclusion from all this is that when reading information I first ask: Where is it from and who benefits? Not all information is based on innocent research or inquiry.

Related Post: The Peace Movement was a Soviet Psy-Operation

That struck me as really interesting! I have never considered that the KGB may have had a hand in escalating the race war in the 1960s..

It actually makes a lot of sense if your goal is to destabilize the enemy. wow. Mind blown.

Is a version of this still happening today?

I'm sure it is still happening.

The established tactics are well known.

Different generations use different tools, but the end goal is the same.

here's a good list to analyze;
THE COMMUNIST PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA FROM WITHIN


this one lends some merit to the Marxist-Corporatist theories....

Infiltrate and gain control of labor unions and big business

The J.P. Morgan media 'take over' around the dawn of the USSR may have been the dawn of the ideas behind the international corporations controlling governments (corporatism) and using some selective Marxist ideas to control things to their advantage.

Compare to today's world situations and you can draw some correlations.

Originally posted by Freeborn
I'm sure the US / UK / Israel etc have been 'guilty' of using exactly the same tactics, sometimes against the USSR.

The recent NSA thing shows clearly that we've caught up.

But this whole disinformation and spying culture has really been destructive to the world as a whole. I wonder where we'd all be today if it weren't for that.

Originally posted by clay2 baraka

Originally posted by Skyfloating
* Creating racial tensions between black and whites by writing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, distributing explosive packages in New York.
My personal conclusion from all this is that when reading information I first ask: Where is it from and who benefits? Not all information is based on innocent research or inquiry.

Related Post: The Peace Movement was a Soviet Psy-Operation

That struck me as really interesting! I have never considered that the KGB may have had a hand in escalating the race war in the 1960s..

It actually makes a lot of sense if your goal is to destabilize the enemy. wow. Mind blown.

Is a version of this still happening today?

I'd like to add one more observation: The documents state that an attempt was made to discredit Martin Luther King while at the same time Soviets were falsifying actions posing as the KKK. In other words, they were playing both sides of the conflict to ignite a race war. Using that formula, we must assume that if Putin's Russia (and it is literally Putin's) , is continuing this practice of fomenting civil unrest, then they have agents on both sides of the political and racial divide..

Food for thought.

Originally posted by clay2 baraka

I'd like to add one more observation: The documents state that an attempt was made to discredit Martin Luther King while at the same time Soviets were falsifying actions posing as the KKK. In other words, they were playing both sides of the conflict to ignite a race war. Using that formula, we must assume that if Putin's Russia (and it is literally Putin's)

, is continuing this practice of fomenting civil unrest, then they have agents on both sides of the political and racial divide..

Food for thought.

Thats an interesting observation. Its classical Machiavellianism to be both sides. I assumed the new Russia to be minding their own Business, but Putin being ex-KGB, who knows whether he's not up to their old tricks.

The current "race conflict" we have in the U.S. does feel kind of "staged" to me. I walk the streets of various U.S. cities and don't feel any "racial conflict", but I hear about it all the time in the media.

Further Sources:

Lists of Eastern Block Defectors

I know this is a lot about past events but I'd say RT news channel is obviously a machine that works in this way by having 'conspiracy theorists' or people with different opinions on.

I'm not saying they are any worse than any other news channel, in fact I enjoy it as a different opinion but they also seem to do well at just reporting news with very little slant at times for non news.

It can seem like you are watching news from a different planet at times and it cannot be a bad thing that we can access it.

Originally posted by Freeborn

I'm sure the US / UK / Israel etc have been 'guilty' of using exactly the same tactics, sometimes against the USSR.

But just to add one thing though: 99% of all conspiracy theories you will find here, on ATS, for instance, are not directed at the KGB or Russia. The majority have either America, Israel, "The Illuminati" (Jews), "the Bankers" (Jews), "The Government" (Americans), American Corporations, Secret Societies (European-American) as the source and cause of evil. It is very, very rare that you read about the secret machinations of KGB, FSB, SVR.

On the poisoning of Whistleblower Litvinenko:

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised. His illness was later attributed to poisoning with radionuclide polonium-210 after the Health Protection Agency found significant amounts of the rare and highly toxic element in his body. However, the London coroner's inquest is yet to be completed. Media claims of polonium poisoning, therefore, lack official substantiation.[85][86][87] In interviews, Litvinenko stated that he met with two former KGB agents early on the day he fell ill – Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi. Though both denied any wrongdoing, a leaked US diplomatic cable revealed that Kovtun had left polonium traces in the house and car he had used in Hamburg.[88] The men also introduced Litvinenko to a tall, thin man of central Asian appearance called 'Vladislav Sokolenko' who Lugovoi said was a business partner. Lugovoi is also a former bodyguard of Russian ex-Acting Prime minister Yegor Gaidar (who also suffered from a mysterious illness in November 2006). Later, Litvinenko had lunch at Itsu, a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly in London, with an Italian acquaintance and nuclear waste expert, Mario Scaramella, to whom he made the allegations regarding Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi.[89] Scaramella, attached to the Mitrokhin Commission investigating KGB penetration of Italian politics, claimed to have information on the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, 48, a journalist who was killed at her Moscow apartment in October 2006. In Litvinenko's last known public statement, he indicated that he believed it was Scaramella who poisoned him.[90] Marina Litvinenko, widow of the deceased, accused Moscow of orchestrating the murder. Though she believes the order did not come from Putin himself, she does believe it was done at the behest of the authorities, and announced that she will refuse to provide evidence to any Russian investigation out of fear that it would be misused or misrepresented.[91]