# Washington fought Moscow's planted stories by publishing them under its own name

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  Washington fought Moscow's planted stories by publishing them under its own name
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A small interagency group under the State Department, later run through USIA, collected Soviet forgeries and planted stories and released them

When1981ActorU.S. interagency Active Measures Working Group, chaired by the State Department and later run…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

The group's product was a report with a government seal on it. The first was Special Report No. 88, four pages, dated 9 October 1981, titled Soviet Active Measures: Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations. The State Department sent 14,000 copies to newsrooms, agencies and other readers. It gave Americans a Russian term, aktivnyye meropriyatiya, and a list of what it covered: spoken and written disinformation, control of foreign media, front groups and Communist parties, clandestine radio, blackmail and influence operations.

Later reports named specific fakes. One was a letter bearing Ronald Reagan's signature that urged King Juan Carlos to bring Spain into NATO. Another was a counterfeit U.S. Army field manual that Soviet outlets offered as evidence that the CIA was running Italy's Red Brigades. The August 1987 report, Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87, gave a full chapter to the AIDS story. The last, written by Todd Leventhal and published by USIA in June 1992, carried the title Soviet Active Measures in the "Post-Cold War" Era 1988-1991.

The sharpest line in the record came from the Secretary of State in person. On 23 October 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev told George Shultz that the latest report offended the spirit of glasnost, Shultz said the Soviet Union had been peddling bum dope about AIDS.

## Who made it and why

The Active Measures Working Group was a part-time committee, not an agency. It formed in the summer of 1981 under Dennis Kux of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who chaired it to January 1984. CIA Director William Casey pushed for it. Lawrence Eagleburger supported it inside State, and John Lenczowski of the National Security Council took part. The CIA, FBI, Defense Department, DIA, Justice Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency sat on it. Kathleen C. Bailey, a deputy assistant secretary of state, took it over in 1985, when accounts describe it as "moribund," and ran it until late 1987. Herbert Romerstein, at USIA from 1982, and his assistant Todd Leventhal did much of the tracking.

The working method was to gather what USIA posts, the CIA and the FBI turned up, check it, and publish an unclassified version. Calder Walton (2022) summarizes the sequence as detect, attribute, expose. One case shows the tradecraft: Romerstein had handed a Czechoslovak diplomat a letter carrying a hidden mark. When a forgery with that mark turned up in August 1986, USIA held a press conference, and the Washington Post ran the story.

The AIDS campaign is the case the group is remembered for. In 1983 the Indian paper Patriot printed a story, credited to an unnamed American scientist, that the disease had been made at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in a Pentagon weapons program. Ilya Dzhirkvelov, a KGB officer who defected in 1980, said the paper had been started at the KGB's request as a disinformation outlet. In October 1985 the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta picked the claim up. In 1986 the retired East German biophysicist Jakob Segal co-wrote a 47-page pamphlet giving it scientific dress. The story reached more than 80 countries in over 30 languages and ran 40 times in Soviet media in 1987. Thomas Boghardt, in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (2009), used the code name "INFEKTION." Douglas Selvage, working from Stasi files (2019), says the Stasi called it "Denver," and that Segal, though helped by the Stasi, seems to have believed what he wrote.

## What it got right or wrong

On AIDS the group was right, and the other side eventually said so. In 1992 Yevgeny Primakov, chief of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, acknowledged that the KGB had stood behind the Soviet articles. Soviet scientists, among them the virologist Viktor Zhdanov, had already said in public that the virus was not man-made. The State Department's charge was a documented charge, made openly, about a lie told by a foreign intelligence service. That is what a government information office is for.

The administration did not hold every claim to that standard. In late 1982 President Reagan said "Soviet agents" had helped instigate the nuclear freeze movement. Edward Boland, chairman of the House intelligence committee, answered in a press release:

On the basis of my own review of the material submitted by the FBI, it is my personal assessment that Soviet agents have had no significant influence on the nuclear freeze movement.

Rep. Edward Boland, chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, news release, late 1982, as recorded on the FRAME case study.

The FBI's own 29-page report in March 1983 said the Bureau did not believe the Soviets have achieved a dominant role in the U.S. peace and nuclear freeze movements, or that they directly control or manipulate the movement. The same report found Soviet front groups had helped organize some pro-freeze demonstrations. Both halves matter. Soviet fronts did take part. Americans who marched for a freeze were not Moscow's instrument, and the President's sentence implied more than his own Bureau would sign.

Whether the group changed minds is not shown. No study measured its effect on any audience. Moscow's retreat from the AIDS story came in the glasnost thaw, so the reports' share in it cannot be isolated. Schoen and Lamb (National Defense University, 2012) credit the group with raising the price of Soviet deception, and that is a judgment, not a measurement. A 2005 RAND and Oregon State survey of 500 African Americans found about 27 percent agreed that "AIDS was produced in a government laboratory." The survey does not say where that belief came from. It does show that being right in a State Department report is not the same as being believed.

## Answer a foreign lie in public, under the government's name

A free country may answer a foreign lie. The test is how. This group put its findings in public documents, with the government named as author, where reporters and Congress could argue with them, and Boland did. That is the legitimate form of government speech: attributed, rebuttable, and aimed at a foreign intelligence service's conduct, not at a citizen's opinion.

The same years show the other form. The State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, set up in 1983 to build support for the administration's Central America policy, was found by the Comptroller General on 30 September 1987 to have engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities" with appropriated money. The Iran-Contra committees reported that it placed pro-Contra newspaper articles by paid consultants who hid the connection. Earlier, the Church Committee had reported in April 1976 that about 50 of the CIA's covert relationships were with American journalists or media employees, and that the agency had produced or sponsored well over 1,000 books by the end of 1967. A hidden sponsor is the Patriot method whatever the flag. The record shows the United States exposed its own version through a Senate inquiry; the Soviet version was exposed mainly by its adversary, and admitted after 1991.

The libertarian caution is about scope. Jeffrey Whyte (2024) argues that the group's appointees framed the American anti-war movement as both a target and a carrier of Soviet measures. Where that reading is honestly open, it deserves weight: a federal office that catalogs foreign forgeries is useful; one that starts to describe domestic dissent as a channel for them has drifted toward the business the First Amendment forbids. The freeze episode shows how short that drift can be.

## Its legacy

The group did not end cleanly. Accounts say Shultz, annoyed that the 1987 report had caused a scene in Moscow, told staff to stop producing them, and the work moved to USIA. Schoen and Lamb date the end of the working group to January 1989; its reports continued through USIA until June 1992. Nothing replaced it. An essay on the Army War College's War Room site has since asked whether it should be revived against Russian operations, and Gavin Wilde (2024) warns that fear of foreign propaganda can outrun the evidence that it works.

The useful lesson for later offices, including the one examined in the Disinformation Governance Board case, is narrow. Name the foreign author, publish the proof, sign it, and leave Americans free to disagree. The contrast case is the FBI's unsigned press work under COINTELPRO, where the government hid its hand from its own citizens.

## Sources

- FRAME case study "The Active Measures Working Group (1981 to 1992)," for the chronology, membership, chairs, report titles, the AIDS campaign route, the Boland and FBI statements, the Shultz exchange, Primakov's 1992 acknowledgment, and the same-method record.

- U.S. Department of State, Special Report No. 88, Soviet "Active Measures": Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations, October 1981 (GovInfo).

- U.S. Department of State, Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87, August 1987 (Internet Archive).

- U.S. House History, Art & Archives, news release on Soviet active measures (Boland); CIA Reading Room and The Battalion, 10 March 1983, on the 1983 FBI report.

- Schoen, F. and Lamb, C. J., Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference, NDU Press, 2012.

- Walton, C., "What's Old Is New Again," Texas National Security Review 5(4), 2022; Whyte, J., International Political Sociology 18(3), 2024; Wilde, G., Texas National Security Review 7(2), 2024.

- Boghardt, T., "Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign," Studies in Intelligence 53(4), 2009; Selvage, D., "Operation 'Denver'," Journal of Cold War Studies 21(4), 2019.

- Bogart, L. M. and Thorburn, S., JAIDS 38(2), 2005, and RAND press release, 25 January 2005.

- U.S. GAO, B-229069, 30 September 1987, on the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean; Church Committee final report, April 1976, as cited by FRAME.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/active-measures-working-group/