74 Books & arts The EconomistMay 16th 2020
21that disinformation is not the same as fab-
rication. In fact, it can be most effective
when “larger truths” are “flanked by little
lies”. The kgbcirculated genuine accounts
of racial violence in America in the 1960s
through fake black activist groups, just as
real emails were spread through phoney
cut-outs in 2016. But precisely because ac-
tive measures exploit pre-existing divi-
sions, it can be hard, if not impossible, to
measure whether they are effective or not.Can you believe it?
A second lesson is that disinformation is
not only corrosive to open societies, which
depend on collective trust in facts, but also
takes a subtler toll on the perpetrator.
“When vast, secretive bureaucracies en-
gage in systemic deception, at large scale
and over a long time,” warns Mr Rid, “they
will...undermine the legitimacy of public
administration at home”. Soviet propagan-
dists often deceived themselves, he notes.
“It is impossible to excel at disinformation
and at democracy at the same time.”
That did not stop America from trying,
argues Mr Weiner. Though Kennan be-
lieved that “the disrespect of Russians for
objective truth” led them “to view all stated
facts as instruments for furtherance of one
ulterior purpose or another”, the ciaitself
would come to own or underwrite 50 news
outlets around the world. America’s most
illustrious newspapers all employed “at
least one journalist working or moonlight-
ing for the cia”, claims Mr Weiner. Radio
Free Europe, a cia-funded station, was at
best a source of vital news in Soviet-occu-
pied Europe; at worst it was “a poison fac-
tory”, one former employee says, devoted
to “creating chaos”.
Both countries used information as a
crowbar to widen social or political divi-
sions in the other, but Mr Rid denies any
moral equivalence. The cia, he says, “re-
treated from the disinformation battlefield
almost completely”. When it did wage in-
formation war, it was often of a different
character: distributing translated copies of
“1984” into Ukraine or smuggling news-
print into Poland. America’s worst excesses
in political warfare were typically curbed,
eventually, by checks and balances that did
not trouble Soviet agencies. “What they do
to us we cannot do to them,” as Estonia’s
president noted after a landmark cyber-as-
sault in 2007.
That becomes clearer when turning to
the other arrows in Russia’s quiver. Mr Cor-
era’s account of Russian spies who bur-
rowed into American suburbs in the 1990s,
having stolen the identities of dead in-
fants, is gripping. Many raised their unwit-
ting children as bona fide Americans and
retired there. That reflects the stamina of
Russian intelligence, but also an asymmet-
ric advantage. No young ciaor mi6officer
would want to “spend two decades workingin Volgograd pretending to be a Ukrainian”,
points out Mr Corera.
Ms Blake’s book explores another one-
sided battle. She describes how associates
of Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who fell
out with Vladimir Putin, died one after the
other in London, at a rate which “defied
natural explanation”. American spies re-
peatedly told their British counterparts
that Mr Putin’s agents were probably re-
sponsible, but pusillanimous British lead-
ers, mindful of the roubles flooding into
London’s property market, swept these
concerns aside. Ms Blake’s argument rests
on eyebrow-raising claims that Russian
spies have developed undetectable poisons
that can cause fast-acting cancers and
“mood-altering substances” to induce de-
pression and suicide.
The evidence for that lurid suggestion is
slender. But it relates to the third of Mr
Rid’s arguments: that technology has
transformed the arena of political warfare.
This is evident from Mr Corera’s account of
the revolution in Russia’s illegals pro-
gramme. The age of biometric border con-
trols and social-media backstories made it
significantly harder to create aliases that
would stand up to scrutiny. A new and
more prosaic generation of illegals trav-
elled between Russia and the West under
their real names, hidden in a flood of émi-
grés, says Mr Corera. But as technology
closed one door, it opened another.
Soviet disinformation had to be laun-
dered into the West, typically through the
media. “If they did not have press freedom,
we would have to invent it for them,” the
kgb’s disinformation chief quipped in- The internet changed the nature of
that conduit. Information could be stolen
in vast quantities and spread anonymous-
ly, quickly and cheaply, often through cred-
ulous activists and amplified by harried
journalists untroubled by its provenance.
“A significant and large proportion of the
disinformation value-creation chain was
outsourced to the victim society,” con-
cludes Mr Rid. More perversely, the West-
ern panic around false news stories often
overstated the effectiveness of those cam-
paigns—and thus compounded their dis-
orienting effects.
Like Kennan in 1948, Western intelli-
gence officers and soldiers are now re-
learning how to wage political warfare. Last
year General Carter launched a new divi-
sion of the British army devoted to “infor-
mation manoeuvre and unconventional
warfare”. It “routinely conduct[s] opera-
tions below the threshold of armed conflict
in the virtual and physical dimensions”,
boasts Britain’s defence ministry, some-
what cryptically. One of its units, the 77th
Brigade, has been active in countering dis-
information around covid-19. Whether it
also sends customised horoscopes to Rus-
sian spies is not disclosed. 7
V
incentvangoghoncelivedinBrix-
ton, where the fledgling artist fell in
love with his landlady’s daughter. Formerly
famous as a hub of post-war British Carib-
bean life, more recently a magnet for gen-
trifying hipsters, the south London neigh-
bourhood boasts a rich cultural history.
Until now, though, the area’s literary
chroniclers have overlooked the Jewish
families who settled in the place Gerald Ja-
cobs calls a “dynamic urban village”.
A long-serving literary editor of Brit-
ain’s Jewish Chronicle, Mr Jacobs has writ-
ten a spirited and entertaining novel of
Brixton in the mid-20th century, peopled
with characters who balance on a knife-
edge between “legit gesheft” (above-board
business) and more rackety sorts of enter-
prise. At times, it reads almost like a low-
key, south-of-the-Thames version of “The
Sopranos”, but with slices of Bakewell tart
in place of Sicilian cannoli.
After the death of Benny Pomeranski in
2000 his son Simon—who has swapped the
retail hustles of his parents’ generation for
the more genteel profession of drama lec-
turer—learns about the misadventures
that shaped his father’s life. Benny, along
with his pals, migrated south from the war-
battered streets of the East End (a more fa-
miliar stamping-ground for earlier Jewish
novelists of London). In Brixton, BennyBritish fictionDown to Brixton
Pomeranski.By Gerald Jacobs. Quartet
Books; 256 pages; £12The social fabric