Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Thomas Rid

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Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Thomas Rid

Russia’s disinformation campaign during the 2016 election wasn’t the first covert bid of its kind by one nation to disrupt an adversary on the home front. According to Thomas Rid, the honor for being first might belong to the CIA, which ran extensive disinformation schemes against East Germany in the 1950s. Yes, that was decades before the Internet.

Active Measures is a large, ambitious book in which disinformation—as its subtitle suggests, is a subset of the larger topic of “political warfare.” This cousin to espionage covers a range of (in plain English) dirty tricks played to entrap or trip-up opposing factions. Rid begins his account in 1921 when the Bolsheviks set up a phony, counter-revolutionary monarchist group to draw out real Russian counter-revolutionaries.

Deception is endemic to warfare and forgery is one the tools of deceit. Rid touches briefly on another Russian crime, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the purported outline of a Jewish plot for world domination. Forged by elements of the czarist secret police, The Protocols continue to circulate among anti-Semites even today. However, Rid devotes more attention to the Tanaka Memorial, the (circa 1925) supposed plan by Japan to conquer China and attack the U.S. The document had too many inconsistencies to be authentic and yet, because of its Nostradamus-like foretelling of a sequence of actual events, gained currency even among academic historians.

Rid believes that the Tanaka Memorial was initially forged by Chinese nationalists to discredit the Japanese but the chief of the KGB’s predecessor agency quickly circulated an edited version for his own purposes. Because of the secrecy at the top levels of the Kremlin, the Soviets and their successors never realized it’s a fake—they continue to believe that securing a copy of the “top secret” Tanaka Memorial was one of their greatest espionage coups. The forgery was, as Rid puts it, shielded “under the armor of a larger truth—that of Japan’s militarism and Tokyo’s aggressive foreign policy.” The best lies contain an element of reality.

The Road to 2016

Many readers will want to skip ahead past the Cold War and into 2016 but if so, they’ll miss some important context. The KGB became masters of disinformation in the analogue age. In the early 1960s they mailed fake KKK flyers and invented a make-believe black nationalist group to oppose them. A graduate of the KGB, Putin understood the potential for capitalizing on divisions in American society.

Rid acknowledges that the privately owned, pro-regime “troll factory” in St. Petersburg whose “content creation followed a recipe that was half a century old.” However, Rid is skeptical that large numbers of Americans were influenced by the prolific but unprofessional postings of fake news and inflammatory comments. Although the most successful Russian-engineered site garnered thousands of impressions, the overall level of activity “was lower than reported” in the American media and “the Russian messaging mostly stayed within echo chambers.” It was part of the noise of 2016.

Far more significant was the hacking of the Democratic National Committee by Russian military intelligence and the posting of that material by Donald Trump’s favorite hacker, Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks gleefully dumped documents online without context or consideration of their impact. And then, with much less media attention (or comprehension), came the “Shadow Brokers” who stole the NSA’s hacker codes and dispersed them to all takers. Another Russian plot? “The identity of the Shadow Brokers remains unknown,” Rid concedes.

Active Measures isn’t simply a selective chronicle of a century of political warfare. Rid is an information security professor at Johns Hopkins University and went through graduate school in the era of fashionable academic deconstructions of reality. He ponders the eternal question “What is truth?” Is it based entirely on observable facts or on beliefs “relative to a specific community with shared values”? He wonders about the post-‘60s “assault on the factual,” the various philosophies that deemed “facts” as “constructed” by power systems.

Are the methods of Foucault much different than Putin, even if their end goals were worlds apart?