Chapter 2 - Russia, the West and the geopolitics of disinformation
The disinformation campaign carried out by the Kremlin and its connected oligarchical networks is a direct descendent of the KGB’s ‘active measures’, increased in volume, speed and potency by modern technology. Its purpose is to control public opinion in Russia, and undermine Western democracies by creating division within targeted groups. Widely dispersed web sites, troll centre and hackers partly obscure the common origin of the fake and distorted news.
A century and a half before KGB Director Yuri Andropov made disinformation a central element of Soviet intelligence activity,Footnote 9 William Blake noted “A Truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent”Footnote 10.Such kernels of truth told with bad intent will be found at the heart of all disinformation properly defined, and are part of what makes disinformation so difficult to combat.
In this discussion, the adversary will be described wherever possible as ‘the Kremlin’ or other terms related to Vladimir Putin and his associates, rather than as ‘the Russians’ or ‘Russia’. No good interest is served by representing the Kremlin’s activities as Russia versus the West. In fact, the Kremlin’s main adversary has always been, and still is, Russia itself. Virtually every type of action it has undertaken against the West was first implemented in Russia, against the Russian people, and against Russia’s many ethnic, national and religious minorities. The Kremlin is a reference both to the presidential administration and the social networks of business leaders, organised crime bosses, as well as veteran officers, agents and assets of Soviet intelligence services, all of whom have ties to the Kremlin, and to Putin and his closest associates. This state-within-a-state, interacting with but standing apart from formal elements of the Government of the Russian Federation, has been described as an adhocracy.Footnote 11 People move in and out of the presidential administration, performing tasks as needed, by turns acquiring or shedding what cover—or aura of legitimacy—a direct association with the Russian state may offer.
Disinformation, regardless of the entity engaging in the activity, is aggressive marketing of information in support of political objectives. The segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) model has been a staple of marketing research and practise since at least the 1970s.Footnote 12 Social media platforms dramatically increase the amount of information available to guide the identification of market segments and the development of content most likely to influence the target audience. What is new is not so much the techniques, but rather the ease and rapidity with which disinformation can be simultaneously aimed at highly-segmented groups of people throughout the entire population of a country, at very little expense, and with little or no oversight or government regulation. Another important factor is the naïveté of technology companies, futurists, the general public and public policy-makers, who struggle to appreciate how much damage can be done to Western democracies by an unscrupulous adversary.
The methodology of disinformation may largely resemble contemporary marketing practise, but the stuff of disinformation, the content at the heart of the activity, is shaped by the political objectives being pursued, and by the absence of any moral or ethical constraints. Andropov himself defined disinformation by its observable effects, noting “Disinformation is like cocaine—sniff once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it every day, though, it will make you an addict—a different man.”Footnote 13
We do not know if Andropov meant to suggest a physiological component to disinformation and its ability to capture the attention and compromise the mental capacity of those who consume it, but this may be a factor worthy of study. It is as though there is a ‘disinformation receptor’ in the human brain, and once stimulated, this receptor convinces the brain that it must have more. The apparent physiological component of disinformation is likely enhanced by the many (largely negative) effects of computer-mediated communications and experience. The history of Soviet use of the term disinformation is itself an example of disinformation. First coined in Russia, the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and their allies were ordered in the early 1950s to spread a story indicating that the term was actually French, and described a weapon of information warfare deployed by the capitalist West against the USSR and people’s democracies throughout the world.Footnote 14
The Kremlin very much remains an adversary of the West. Putin and his associates are Andropov’s children, recruited into the KGB in the 1970s as part of the Andropov levy, an effort to bring fresh blood and new ideas to bear on the many problems that beset the Soviet state.Footnote 15 While information technology in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, create new opportunities for the practise of disinformation, the playbook is largely unchanged. Just as jazz standards remain recognisable regardless of the players and the arrangements, so too do disinformation campaigns. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Western intelligence services had amassed an impressive body of knowledge regarding disinformation, and the larger set of tactics known as ‘active measures’. Subsequent defections to the West and declassification of formerly secret reports mean we enter this new stage of antagonism with a much-improved understanding of what the Kremlin is doing, how, and to what ends.
Active measures had as their objective not intelligence collection but subversion. They sought to weaken Western countries internally, foster divisions among countries in the West, among NATO members and neutral European states, among the developed countries of Europe and North America and the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.Footnote 16 Soviet active measures targeted political leaders, opinion-makers, the media, business leaders and the general public of Western countries. The methods used went well beyond merely marketing information or promoting Communist ideology. False and deliberately misleading information was placed in the media; stolen and/or forged documents were leaked through cut-outs; disruptive political movements were promoted where they existed and created where they did not; and subject matter experts were cultivated to shape policy in ways that served the Kremlin's interests. Aggressive use was made of diplomatic, commercial, academic and journalistic cover. Just as disinformation cannot be viewed apart from active measures, active measures are an integral part of Kremlin statecraft.Footnote 17 As it was then, so it is now.
But whereas before the West was confronted by a monolithic Soviet state, today’s Kremlin adhocracy provides new opportunities for combatting its efforts. While much attention has been paid to a single Kremlin troll factory in Saint Petersburg, the fact is much of what can be observed with regards to disinformation and other active measures online is as likely to originate from an advertising agency in Zurich, for example. Acting at the behest of current officers of Russian military intelligence (GRU) in Moscow, a ‘Patriotic Journalism’ club in Omsk, in Russia, may create an alternative media web site purporting to cover conflicts in the Middle East. The women in Omsk, who answer to a board of directors composed of veteran Soviet GRU Spetsnaz officers, make use of services provided by ethnic Russian criminal hackers in Spain, who have servers in a data centre in Amsterdam and an address of convenience in Hong Kong. All this to bring a web site online for a team recruited from among retired analysts formerly employed by Warsaw Pact intelligence services. This scenario is not uncommon, and while tracing the lines of communication back to Moscow may take time, the nature of the personnel involved in the operation means tradecraft will be inconsistent and oftentimes ad hoc, creating investigative opportunities.Footnote 18
What is to be done? Disinformation can be confronted on many levels. The most pernicious effects can be mitigated. Targeted populations can be rendered more resistant. Both non-state and state-sponsored purveyors can be confronted, convinced—one way or another—to cease and desist. To the extent human populations are hard-wired to accept disinformation, to believe the worst of their fellow humans, there will never be a total victory. The attraction of disinformation appears directly associated with the attraction of authoritarianism. Democratic Western pluralism is vulnerable for the same reasons it is valuable. Without effort, it will not survive. Certain truths need to be inculcated in each generation, first among them that there is such a thing as truth—that there is an objective reality that cannot be wished away. There is a need to understand how technology exacerbates the problem of disinformation, and if possible find ways to alter how information is delivered in order to affect how it is received and experienced by each of us. Enemies both foreign and domestic who use disinformation to undermine democracy and the rule of law must be confronted and exposed for what they are: subversives. It has taken centuries of concerted effort to raise societies above humankind’s more base, destructive and intolerant tendencies. Finally, those who are involved in the study of disinformation, who publicly confront the issue, and the state and non-state actors engaged in the activity, need to keep in mind that there are no passive observers. There are no front lines—the war is total—and there is no neutrality. Driving wedges between people is sure to be one objective of the Kremlin, and it is incumbent upon everyone to make an effort to not be pawns in a Kremlin game.
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