August 20, 2020 39
a further push, the Russians bought
advertising on social media, including
at least 3,500 ads on Facebook. It’s il-
legal, of course, to use foreign funds to
influence a US election, but who was
to know? The Russians had stolen the
identities of several US citizens, so no
one could spot that their ad buys were
illegal. And, thanks to Facebook’s
microtargeting algorithms, those ads
reached exactly the right people: US
voters passionate about whichever
theme was being pushed, whether gun
rights or abortion.
Not content with mere online influ-
ence, the IRA moved its destabilization-
through- disinformation campaign from
the screen to the streets. Russia’s Face-
book pages convened rallies, hiring
US citizens to stage political stunts.
You might remember an image of an
American dressed up as Clinton in
a prison uniform, riding around in
a cage on the back of a flatbed truck.
Chances are high that you were look-
ing at a stunt produced, directed, and
funded by Russia. Worse, the Kremlin
staged demonstrations and counter-
demonstrations in the same place at
the same time. “In one case,” reports
Buchanan, “a Russian- run Facebook
group planned a rally called ‘Save Is-
lamic Knowledge’ in Houston while an-
other Russian- run group organized the
counterprotest: ‘Stop the Islamization
of Texas.’ Police were deployed to keep
the groups from physically clashing.”
The political logic here was not sub-
tle, with the Kremlin identifying the
fissures and fault lines of American life
and driving a well- aimed digital wedge
into each one. Russia wanted to elect
Donald Trump but, perhaps above all,
it wanted to intensify internal Amer-
ican rancor. Indeed, the former goal
was, in part, a means to the end of the
latter. Judged by that standard, it has
been an extravagant success.
The natural impulse is to see Russia’s
attack in 2016—and the one it is surely
preparing for 2020—as a radically new
feature of our hyperconnected world.
Everything about it, all those bots and
algorithms, seems novel. Yet Rid’s
book is devoted to persuading us that it
is in line with decades of history.
In rich detail, Rid walks us through
a hundred years of political warfare,
recounting the exploits powers both
major and minor inflicted on one an-
other via the disinformation units of
their intelligence agencies. Some of
the stories are hair- raising. We learn of
Operation NEPTUN in 1964, in which
Czech intelligence dispatched a team
of underwater divers to Bohemia in the
dead of night to drop four chests to the
bottom of a lake, each one full of what
purported to be Nazi documents. The
boxes had been suitably treated to ap-
pear aged by twenty years of corrosion;
inside were blank sheets of paper. The
plan was for those to be replaced by
authentic Nazi- era records supplied by
the KGB from Moscow, where they had
been held in state archives, along with
“two or three forgeries” that would
compromise several top officials in
West Germany by apparently exposing
them as onetime Nazis.
All went swimmingly. A Czech TV
crew duly discovered the crates and
h a u l e d t h e m t o t h e s u r f a c e , t h e n h a n d e d
them over to a team of unknowing gov-
ernment engineers who checked the
boxes for explosives before surrender-
ing the envelopes within, unopened, to
an approved “group of experts.” That
allowed the switch to happen, with the
experts dropping in the stash of papers
supplied by the KGB. The only problem
was that Czech intelligence could never
be sure that it hadn’t itself been played
by its Soviet counterparts in disinfor-
mation: at one point, it suspected Mos-
cow’s Service A might have forged all of
the documents, though the Russians in-
sisted they were genuine. Nevertheless,
within a few months the Czech interior
ministry was holding an international
press conference trumpeting a haul of
papers that reminded the world of the
Nazis’ crimes and boosted opposition
to West Germany throughout Western
Europe. Mission accomplished.
The cold war was full of such antics,
including a discreet and successful
Stasi operation to engineer the first
parliamentary vote of no confidence in
the history of the West German repub-
lic, a feat pulled off not in public but by
hoodwinking individual German poli-
ticians. The daring, the tradecraft, the
stolen signatures and fake letterheads,
the double- and triple- bluffs are hugely
entertaining, at least from the safe dis-
tance of several decades, even if a few
of the plots belong to the more outland-
ish, downmarket strain of spy fiction.
The characters, though, are pure le
Carré, not least Ladislav Bittman, the
architect of the NEPTUN deception,
who defected to the US and whom Rid
meets in his home on Cape Ann, Mas-
sachusetts, where the old man stares
out at the Atlantic Ocean, passing the
hours of his retirement making mod-
ernist paintings. He could be Smiley,
he could be Karla. In one fascinating
passage, Rid muses:It took a special kind of person to
work in disinformation, on both
sides of the Iron Curtain. Spotting
weakness in adversarial societ-
ies, seeing cracks and fissures and
political tensions, recognizing ex-
ploitable historical traumas, and
then writing a forged pamphlet or
letter or book—all of this required
officers with unusual minds...
free and unconventional thinkers,
bookworms, writers, perceptive
publicists with an ability to com-
prehend foreign cultures.That “both sides” is important, be-
cause of course the Americans were
in the disinformation business too, es-
pecially in the immediate postwar de-
cade. Their methods involved not only
well- known ploys such as the Congress
of Cultural Freedom but also assorted
other front organizations and publica-
tions, including, intriguingly, jazz and
astrology magazines aimed at the East
German market.
The objectives for the two sides were,
true to the spirit of le Carré, the same.
Just as Moscow sought to undermine
the image and self- confidence of the
West, so the West, and the US in par-
ticular, sought to do the same to Mos-
cow. But what Rid discovers is that
while Russia kept going right until the
bitter end, “the West deescalated” its
disinformation hostilities following the
construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Rid doesn’t offer much by way of ex-
planation, leaving the reader to suspect
that Western spymasters concluded
that there was no active measure they
could concoct that would better alien-
ate citizens of the Eastern bloc fromtheir masters than de facto imprison-
ment behind a high wall topped with
barbed wire. (Count that as one more
reason to doubt the rumors, now the
subject of a hit podcast, that the Scor-
pions’ post–Berlin Wall hit, “Wind of
Change,” was a CIA job.)
Not that “active measures” were ever
solely a cold war phenomenon. Until
2016, the greatest- ever act of foreign
electoral meddling was one committed
against the United States not by Mos-
cow but by London. Buchanan recalls
Britain’s efforts to draw the US into
the war against Nazi Germany, efforts
that did not rely solely on the rhetorical
gifts of Winston Churchill. Before the
Republican convention in 1940, for ex-
ample, delegates seemed in a mood to
nominate an antiwar, isolationist can-
didate to take on Franklin Roosevelt.
But opinion shifted after the publi-
cation of a poll, which surprisingly
showed that three in five convention
delegates backed Britain in its struggle
against Hitler. That helped the former
Democrat Wendell Willkie to win the
GOP nomination, from which perch he
offered no opposition to Roosevelt’s
transfer of American destroyers to the
Royal Navy and kindly lost the election
to FDR, both of which outcomes de-
lighted London.
But here’s the thing: that poll never
existed. It was one of multiple exploits
by a team led by William Stephenson—
later immortalized in A Man Called
Intrepid by William Stevenson—who
cooked up stories galore to discredit
the isolationists and boost the case for
war among the US public. In case the
parallel with 2016, operational if not
moral, isn’t clear, Buchanan writes:Here was direct interference in
United States presidential politics
by a foreign actor, aided by the
spread of false information, the
manipulation of popular media,
the clever timing of leaks and lies,
and the creation of propaganda
that aligned with preexisting
narratives.In other words, active measures were
not invented in twenty- first- century
Russia. They were such a routine fea-
ture of the last century that the US and
the Soviet Union, Buchanan estimates,
meddled in more than one hundred
elections in other countries.
There might be some comfort in that,
as if the current assault on facts and
truth were merely the latest iteration
of a threat we have lived with for de-
cades and which we can, demonstrably,
survive. That, though, depends on the
answer to a tricky question: Is today’s
disinformation merely different in de-
gree from that of the past, or different
in kind?
The continuities are clear enough.
The longevity of Russia’s commitment
to active measures is striking. Rid be-
gins his book with a delicious tale of
early Bolshevik intrigue, in which a
White Russian aristocrat was turned
and used to feed false comfort to his
fellow tsarists, assuring them there
was no need to take action because the
Communist regime would soon col-
lapse from within. In Rid’s account,
Moscow’s pursuit of active measures
continued even after the Soviet Union
crumbled into dust. The end of the cold
war did not mean the end of hostili-
ties. It was, writes Rid, no more thanA must-take journey for anyone
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search for “the ever-elusive truth.”
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Perfect Assignment reminds
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