28 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
was broadly shared: Attorney General
William Barr also blamed “foreign ac-
tors” for looting and violence. Foreign
interference is now a trope in American
politics, at risk of becoming as cheap
and meaningless as the term “fake news”
became once it was co-opted by Trump.
Such externally guided operations
exist, but to exaggerate their prevalence
and potency ends up eroding the idea
of genuine bottom-up protest—in a way
that, ironically, is entirely congenial to
Putin’s conspiratorial world view. It also
provides an overly convenient explana-
tion for much of what is ugly and false
in our politics. When the immune sys-
tem overreacts to a foreign pathogen,
the result can be more damaging to the
host than the pathogen itself.
I
n the years after the 1917 Revolution,
the Bolshevik secret police planted
rumors of a fake pro-tsarist under-
ground resistance movement. The pur-
pose was to manipulate émigré leaders
into abandoning their efforts to over-
throw the nascent Soviet regime by
convincing them that the faux clandes-
tine cell needed more time to gather
strength. Such ruses came to be known
as “active measures,” and they soon
formed an essential prong of Cold War
aggression. For half a century, Soviet
intelligence backed Western protest
movements whose leaders were often
unaware that they were benefitting from
K.G.B. support, and passed both forg-
eries and legitimate secret information
to activists and journalists, who proved
eager for a sensational scoop. These op-
erations have evolved into the type of
disinformation campaign that Russia
conducts today.
In an encyclopedic and readable his-
tory of the subject, “Active Measures,”
Thomas Rid, a political scientist and
professor at the Johns Hopkins School
of Advanced International Studies, ex-
plains that “what made an active mea-
sure active was... whether it resonated
with emotions, with collectively held
views in the targeted community, and
whether it managed to exacerbate ex-
isting tensions.” To “activate” anything,
it had to hit at preëxisting tendencies
and pathologies in society: disaffection,
inequality, prejudice, aggression.
Rid tells a story from postwar Mos-
cow that shows how activation works.
In the late fifties, in an experiment to
test the efficacy of such techniques, Ivan
Agayants, the founding head of the
K.G.B.’s Department D, which oversaw
disinformation operations, dispatched
several officers to a village outside Mos-
cow. Their objective was to stoke an-
ti-Semitism; they kicked over Jewish
gravestones and painted swastikas around
town. The vast majority of the locals
were shocked and frightened, but a small
number of them were triggered into an-
ti-Semitic action. Inspired by this suc-
cess, K.G.B. provocateurs used similar
actions to spur local neo-Nazis in West
Germany, aiming to discredit the post-
war leadership by suggesting that the
West was inhospitable to Jews.
The fundamentals of democracy can
heighten susceptibility to such disin-
formation: a free press and a culture of
open debate allow conspiracy theories
to flourish and noxious ideas to com-
mingle with virtuous ones. How, then,
to respond? Democratic institutions de-
pend on the trust of citizens who share
a factual universe. “Active measures
erode that order,” Rid writes, “but they
do so slowly, subtly, like ice melting.”
Yet attempting to lock the doors through
which disinformation enters can have
its own deleterious effects. At a hear-
ing of the House Intelligence Commit-
tee in 1980, John Ashbrook, a hawkish
congressman from Ohio, exhorted John
McMahon, the C.I.A.’s deputy direc-
tor for operations, to take more aggres-
sive action against Soviet-backed “front”
groups in the United States. McMa-
hon responded, “I must point out that
the Communist Party is a very legal in-
stitution in the United States.” As Rid
observes, “Overreacting to active mea-
sures risked turning an open society
into a more closed one.” With the com-
plicating factor of technology, a bal-
anced response has only become harder.
It’s worth remembering that Amer-
icans, too, have long been experts in what
Rid describes as “covert truthful revela-
tions, forgeries, and outright subversion
of the adversary.” The practice grew out
“Would you do me the honor of taking on even more responsibilities
while my life remains largely unchanged?”
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