NEW LIES FOR OLD
The Communist Strategy of
Deception and Disinformation
by Anatoliy Golitsyn
The Communist Strategy of
Deception and Disinformation
by Anatoliy Golitsyn
8
Sources of Information
PRECEDING CHAPTERS HAVE DESCRIBED IN DETAIL how the
program, strategy, organization, and operational philosophy at the
center of international communism developed in the period 1957 to
1960. How did it happen that the Western world almost entirely failed to
detect these changes and appreciate their significance? To discover the
answer, one must begin by examining the sources of information available to
Western analysts.
Western Sources
The main Western sources of information on communist countries are:
• The secret agents of Western intelligence services.
• The interception and decoding of communist communications.
• The monitoring of communist embassies and officials in non-communist
countries.
• Photographic and other observations of industrial installations, missile
sites, troop movements, and so forth from Western aircraft and satellites
flying over communist territory.
• The monitoring of nuclear and rocket tests by technical devices.
• The personal observations of Western diplomats, journalists, and visitors
in communist countries.
• Unofficial contacts in these countries of Western diplomats, journalists,
and other visitors.
• Scholars working on communist affairs.
• "Internal emigrants" or well-wishers in the communist states.
• Refugees from communist countries and parties and, in particular,
former officials and agents of their intelligence services.
These sources vary in their significance and reliability, in the
degree of access they provide, and in the manner in which they need
to be interpreted.
Because communist societies are closed societies and because their
governments' aims are aggressive, it is vital for the West to have
vigorous, healthy, and effective intelligence services capable of
obtaining reliable secret information of a strategic nature on the
internal affairs and external policies of the communist countries, on
their relations with one another, and on their relations with the
communist parties outside the bloc. The secret agents of Western
intelligence services are potentially the most valuable sources of all,
provided that they are operating in good faith and have access to
information at the policy-making level. The problem is that Western
intelligence services sometimes accept provocateurs as genuine
agents, and provocateurs are a favored channel for passing communist
disinformation.
The interception and decoding of communications can provide
valuable information, provided that the possibility of disinformation is
always kept in mind and properly assessed.
Likewise, the monitoring of communist embassies and officials can
be valuable, but it has to be remembered that the methods used by
Western counterintelligence and security services are well known and
in most cases are capable of being converted by the communist bloc
into channels for disinformation.
The technical monitoring of nuclear and rocket tests and the various
forms of aerial reconnaissance are valuable but cannot be regarded as
self-sufficient. Because of their limitations, the information they
provide always needs to be evaluated in conjunction with information
from other sources. All techniques have their individual limitations.
The general limitation which they all share is that, even if they
provide accurate information on what is present and what is
happening in a particular locality, they cannot answer questions on
why it is present or happening, who is responsible, and what their real
intentions are. For instance, from these sources alone, one cannot say whether the existence of troop concentrations on
the Sino-Soviet border is evidence of genuine hostility between the
two countries or evidence of joint intention on the part of the Soviet
and Chinese leaders to give the impression, for strategic
disinformation purposes, that there is hostility between them.
The personal observations of foreign diplomats, journalists, and
other visitors to communist countries are of limited value because of
the controls over their travels and their contacts. The value of
information from unofficial contacts should not be overestimated,
since the probability is that these contacts, however critical they may
be of the regime, are controlled by the security services. Given the
scale of operation of the communist security services, it is impossible
for a citizen of a communist country to remain for any length of time
in unauthorized contact with a foreigner. Investigative reporting of the
type so popular in the West is impossible in communist countries
without at least tacit cooperation from the security authorities.
Western academics can be extremely valuable as analysts, provided
they are given accurate information. Their value as sources is not
always great, since their visits to communist countries do not
necessarily give them access to inside information, and they are as
prone as other visitors to be misled by deliberate communist
disinformation. Their visits can also be hazardous.
"Internal emigrants," or well-wishers, are those citizens of communist
countries who, for political or other reasons, approach foreign
diplomats or visitors or attempt to enter Western embassies with
offers of secret information. They can be valuable sources, but the
problem is that there are many obstacles in their way. For example,
the Soviet security service used to practice a provocation technique
through which any well-wisher who attempted to establish contact by
telephone with the American or British embassies in Moscow would
be connected with specially trained officials of the security service.
These would pose as members of the American or British embassy
staffs and would arrange to meet the well-wisher outside the embassy,
with predictable consequences for the well-wisher concerned. Many
well-wishers attempted to contact Western embassies; few succeeded.
Even if they did, they were not always trusted by the embassies
because the Soviet security services deliberately discredited this type
of person by sending their own provocateurs to embassies under the guise of well-wishers.
Past experience indicates that the most valuable information
has been provided by refugees and defectors from communist
countries and communist parties. The most informative have
been those who occupied leading positions, such as Trotskiy,
Uralov, and Kravchenko, or those who worked in organizations
where policy is implemented, such as the intelligence and
security services (Aga-bekov, Volkov, Deryabin, the Petrovs,
Rastvorov, Khokhlov, and Swiatlo), military intelligence
(Krivitskiy, Reiss, Guzenko, Akhme-dov), the diplomatic
service (Barmine, Kaznacheyev), or the armed forces (Tokayev).
Important information was revealed by Yugoslav leaders during
the Soviet-Yugoslav split from 1948 to 1956. Valuable
information was also provided by former leading communists or
communist agents, such as Souvarine, Jay Lovestone, Borkenau,
Chambers, and Bentley.
The value of the information from such sources depends, of
course, on the degree of their access to information, and on their
education, experience, honesty, degree of emotionalism, and the
completeness of their break with communism. Trotskiy's
exposures were of limited value because his break was not with
communism but with Stalin. The same could be said of the
Yugoslav leaders. Some refugee information is affected by
emotionalism. During the cold war period, some of the literature
on communism published in the West was distorted for
propaganda reasons and can be used only with caution.
Above all, the value of information from defectors and
refugees depends on their good faith, since it is common practice
for the communist security and intelligence services to send
provocateurs abroad under this guise to act as channels for
disinformation.
Communist Sources
The communist sources need to be treated as a separate
category. They may be divided into official, unofficial, and
"secret" communist sources. The official ones are:
• The published records of international conferences of communist
governments and communist parties inside and outside the bloc.
• The public activities and decisions of the parties, governments, and
ministries of individual communist countries.
• The public activities and speeches of communist leaders and other
officials.
• The communist press: books, periodicals, and other publications.
• The official communist contacts of foreign diplomats, journalists, and
other visitors.
• The public activities and decisions of communist parties in non-communist
countries.
The unofficial communist sources are:
• Unofficial speeches and off-the-record comments by communist leaders
and officials.
• Unofficial contacts in communist countries of foreign diplomats, journalists,
and other visitors.
• Wall posters in China and underground publications in other communist
countries, such as samizdat in the Soviet Union.
• The books of communist scholars.
The "secret" communist sources are the occasional, often retrospective,
leakages or disclosures by the communist side, sometimes in documentary
form, of information that has earlier been treated as secret. These often relate
to polemics between members of the communist bloc and may cover:
• Secret activities, discussions, and decisions of the leading bodies of the
bloc.
• Secret activities, discussions, and decisions of the parties, governments,
and ministries of individual communist countries.
• The secret activities and speeches of communist leaders and officials.
• Secret party and government documents, particularly party circulars to
rank-and-file members.
The Analysis of Information
from Communist Sources
The possibilities of obtaining reliable information on the communist world
through communist sources should be neither ignored nor overestimated. Obviously, not all the items that appear in the
communist press are false or distorted for propaganda or disinformation
purposes. Though both are present to a significant degree, the
communist press also reflects, to a large extent accurately, the
complex life and activity of communist society. The party and the
population are kept informed through the press of major party and
government decisions and events; they are also mobilized and guided
through the press into carrying out those decisions.
For these reasons, study of the communist press is important for the
West. But the problem for Western analysts is to distinguish between
the factual information and the propaganda and disinformation to be
found in the press. Here certain Western tendencies tend to get in the
way: the tendency to regard certain communist problems as a
reflection of eternal, immutable world problems; a tendency to assume
that changes in communist society are spontaneous developments; and
a tendency to interpret developments in the communist world on the
basis of the experience, notions, and terminology of Western systems.
Undoubtedly there are eternal and universal elements at work in
communist politics (Stalin did have something in common with other
tyrants who were not communists). Some developments in the
communist world are spontaneous (the Hungarian revolt is a case in
point) and there are some similarities between the unfolding of events
in the communist and non-communist worlds. It is more important to
point out that there is also a definite ideological, political, and
operational continuity in the communist movement and its regimes,
the specific elements of which should not be overlooked or ignored.
There is a more or less permanent set of factors that reflect the essence
of communism and make it different from any other social or political
system, and there are certain permanent problems with which
communists deal with varying degrees of failure and success. These
factors and problems are, for example, class ideology, nationalism,
intra-bloc and inter-party relations, internationalism, revisionism, power
struggles, succession in the leadership, purges, policy toward the
West, party tactics, the nature of crises and failures in the communist
world, and the solutions or readjustments that are applied to them. To
overlook what is specifically communist in the content and handling
of all these problems is to fall into error. For example, attempting to
explain the purges of the 1930's in terms of Stalin's psychological makeup would be
skating on the surface. No less erroneous would be the analysis in
Western terms of the nationalism that undoubtedly exists in the
communist world.
Even those Western experts who recognize the specific nature and
continuity of communist regimes and have overcome the three
tendencies mentioned above often display a fourth tendency, which is
to apply stereotypes derived from the Stalin period to subsequent
developments in the communist world, thereby failing to take into
account the possibility of readjustments in communist regimes and the
adoption of a more rational approach to the abiding problems
confronting them. Historically speaking, communist ideology and
practice have both shown themselves capable of flexibility and successful
adaptation to circumstances: Lenin's N.E.P is a good example.
Continuity and change are both present in the communist system; both
are reflected in the communist press.
Analysis of the communist press is therefore important to an
understanding of the communist world but only if it is done correctly.
A knowledge of communist history and an understanding of the
permanent factors and problems and the manner in which they have
been tackled in different historical periods is essential. So also—and
hitherto this has been almost entirely lacking in the West—is an
understanding of the role and pattern of communist disinformation in
a given period and the effect it has on the validity and reliability of
sources.
9
The Vulnerability
of Western Assessments
GIVEN THAT COMMUNIST REGIMES PRACTICE DISINFORMATION
in time of peace on a scale unparalleled in the West, it is
essential to determine the pattern of disinformation that is being
followed if Western studies and assessments are to avoid serious error.
Once the pattern has been established, it provides criteria for
distinguishing reliable from unreliable sources and genuine
information from disinformation. Determining the pattern is difficult,
if not impossible, unless reliable inside information is available.
Here a distinction should be noted between the communist sources
and the Western sources. All the communist sources are permanently
available as natural channels for communist disinformation. Western
sources are in general less available as channels, but can become so to
a varying extent depending upon whether their existence is or is not
known to the communist side. With communist sources the problem is
to detect how they are being used for disinformation. With Western
sources the problem is twofold; to determine whether they have been
compromised to the communist side, and if so, whether they are being
used for disinformation purposes.
Since Western sources are in general less vulnerable than communist
to exploitation for purposes of disinformation, they tend to be
regarded as more reliable than the communist sources, which are
completely open to exploitation. However, if Western sources are
compromised (and particularly if the West does not know, or does not
wish to acknowledge, that they have been compromised),they can become unreliable and even dangerous. Conversely, if the
pattern of disinformation is known and if an adequate method of
analysis is used, even communist sources can reveal reliable and
significant information.
The ideal situation for the West is when its intelligence services
have reliable sources of information at the policy-making level, when
adequate methods of analysis are applied by the West to communist
sources, and when the pattern of communist disinformation is known.
These three factors react on one another to their mutual advantage.
The inside sources provide information bearing on the adequacy of
Western analysis; they also help to determine the pattern of
disinformation and provide timely warning of any changes in it. The
pattern of disinformation, once established, and a proper analysis of
communist sources together lead to an accurate assessment of Western
secret sources and to the exposure of the tainted ones among them.
The trouble is, however, that the effectiveness of Western intelligence
services cannot be taken for granted. Apart from the general
obstacles to the acquisition of reliable, high-level inside information
on the communist world, there are special risks of reliable sources
becoming compromised through their own mistakes or through
communist penetration of Western intelligence services. Some
Western sources—for example, listening devices—can be detected
and exploited by the communist side for disinformation purposes
without the Western services concerned being penetrated. But the
major factor that has damaged the effectiveness of Western services
has been penetration by their communist opponents; this has compromised
Western sources and enabled the communist side to use
them as channels for disinformation.
If Western intelligence services lose their effectiveness and themselves
become channels for communist disinformation, this in turn
damages Western analysis of communist sources and results in failure
to detect the pattern of communist disinformation and any changes
there may be in it. When all three factors—Western ability to obtain
secret information, Western ability to interpret communist sources,
and Western ability to understand disinformation— are themselves
adversely affected by the consequences of penetration and
disinformation, then the whole process of Western assessment of communist affairs is vitiated, and the real problems and real
changes in the communist world cannot be distinguished from
fictitious and deceptive ones. Doubtful information from official,
unofficial, or "secret" communist sources confirms or is confirmed by
disinformation fed through compromised Western secret sources.
Information deliberately leaked by the communist side is accepted as
reliable by the West. Genuine information, fortuitously received by
the West, may be questioned or rejected. In this way the errors in
Western assessments become not only serious, but also irreversible
unless and until the pattern of disinformation is correctly established.
The critical condition of the assessment process in the West is the
more serious because it is unrecognized and undiagnosed. If Western
assessments of the communist world are wrong, then Western
miscalculations and mistakes in policy will follow. These
miscalculations and mistakes will be exploited by the communist side
to their own advantage. When this happens and the Western mistakes
are recognized by the public, the politicians, diplomats, and scholars
associated with those mistakes are discredited and a basis is laid for
the emergence of extremist bodies of opinion. The rise of
McCarthyism in the United States after the failure of American
postwar policy in Eastern Europe and China is an obvious example.
The Consequences of Different
Patterns of Disinformation
The character of Western miscalculations depends to a large degree
on the pattern of communist disinformation. During a crisis in the
communist system when the facade and strength pattern of
disinformation is used, the West is confused about the real situation in
communist countries and fails to perceive the weakness of their
regimes. A convincing, but spurious, facade of monolithic unity is
built around the actual explosive realities of the communist world.
Spurious though it is, the facade is liable to be taken at its face value
by Western observers and even governments. Their overestimate of
the strength and cohesion of the apparent monolith inhibits them from
taking proper steps to exploit an actual crisis in the communist world.
The Crisis in the Bloc, 1949-56
Undoubtedly there was some realization in the West of the difficulties
in the communist world in the years immediately preceding
and following Stalin's death. But facade and strength disinformation
successfully concealed the existence of genuine Sino-Soviet differences
between 1950 and 1953; it also veiled the acuteness of the
revolutionary situation in Eastern Europe. If the depth of the crisis
there had been more fully appreciated in the West, a more active and
helpful Western response to the events in Poland and Hungary might
have been forthcoming; part or all of Eastern Europe might have been
liberated altogether.
During the implementation of a long-range policy, a weakness and
evolution pattern of disinformation is used. Again, the West is
confused about the real strength of communist regimes and, this time,
about their policies as well. A convincing picture is built up of the
decline of ideology and the emergence of competing national entities
in the communist world. Although this image is false and is
deliberately projected by the communist regimes, it is liable to be
accepted at face value by the West as an accurate reflection of
spontaneously occurring political developments. On this basis the
West tends to underestimate the strength and cohesion of the
communist world and is encouraged to overlook the necessity for
proper defensive measures. Furthermore it can be misled into taking
offensive steps that unintentionally serve the ends of communist
policy and provide opportunities for future exploitation by the
communist side, to Western disadvantage.
Of the two patterns of disinformation, the second has potentially the
more serious consequences for the West in that, if applied
successfully, it can adversely affect Western offensive and defensive
measures; the first inhibits Western offensive measures only and
serves to harden its defense.
The Second World War
Soviet expansionism was helped by disinformation during the
Second World War. Without in any way questioning the necessity of
the wartime antifascist alliance between the Soviet Union and the
Western allies, it is legitimate to point out that the alliance was successfully exploited by the Soviet Union to further its own
political objectives. There is scope for a detailed historical study of the
methods and channels used by the Soviet regime to influence and
dis-inform the American and British governments before the Tehran
and Yalta conferences about the real nature of the Soviet regime and
its intentions. American and British archives should yield additional
information on the influence exerted by Soviet agents in the US State
Department and British Foreign Office, such as Donald Maclean[L] and
Guy Burgess.[R]1
Meanwhile, a few points may be made to illustrate the
use of the themes of the decline of ideology, the rise in nationalist
influence, and the disunity and lack of cooperation between
communist parties.
During the wartime alliance ideological criticism of the United
States and Great Britain virtually disappeared from the Soviet press.
Revolutionary ideology, though never wholly abandoned, was soft pedaled.
Old Russian traditions were glorified; former czarist ranks
and decorations were restored in the Red Army. A new respect was
shown for religion; Stalin held a public audience for Russian church
leaders in 1943. The common dangers confronting the Soviet Union
and the West and their common interest in survival were emphasized,
and described as providing a basis for future cooperation. Western
statesmen and diplomats were told that a postwar liberalization of the
Soviet regime and its evolution into a national, Western type of
nation-state were inevitable; they were even flattered with the idea
that these changes would take place under Western influence. Soviet
acceptance of the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and signature of the United
Nations Pact on January 1, 1942, should be seen as part of the effort to
raise Western expectations of favorable developments in the Soviet
Union. But the most striking and significant deception designed to
mask continuing, active cooperation between communist parties and
convince the Western allies that revolutionary objectives had been
abandoned was the dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943, six
months before the Tehran conference. Allied with this deception were
the themes that the Soviet Union and the Red Army were fighting
only for the liberation of Eastern Europe from fascism and had no
thought of establishing communist regimes in that area.
10
Communist Intelligence
Successes,
Western Failures,
and the Crisis in
Western Studies
AT PRESENT, Western efforts to obtain secret political information
on the communist world, Western attempts to analyze
information from communist sources, and Western ability to
distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources—between genuine
information and disinformation—all appear to be suffering from at
least a temporary loss of effectiveness. This state of affairs is
symptomatic of the penetration of Western intelligence services by
their communist opponents.
Western intelligence has not always been unsuccessful. During the
post-Stalin crisis, the communist intelligence and security services
were weak. More people were disposed to help the West; five officials
of Soviet intelligence defected in 1954. Although the West has never
fully uncovered the extent of communist intelligence penetration of its
governments and societies, Western intelligence did nevertheless have
some reliable sources with access to policy-making bodies in the
communist countries. But as the communist world recovered from its
crisis, so its intelligence and security services regained their strength
and effectiveness. The effort to penetrate Western governments in
general and Western intelligence and security services in particular,
which had been continuous from 1917 onward, was revitalized with
success. This is not the place for a detailed study of the problem;
nevertheless, some examples to illustrate the argument must be given.
From his service in the NATO section of the Information Department
of the KGB's First Chief Directorate in 1959-60, the author
knows that at that time the Soviet and bloc intelligence services had agents in the foreign ministries of most NATO countries, not to
mention those of many of the non-NATO countries. This meant that
the Soviet leaders and their partners were nearly as well informed
about the foreign policies of Western governments as were those
governments themselves.
Symptomatic of the depth and scale of penetration were the cases of
the former British Admiralty official, Vassall; the former Swedish
military attache in the Soviet Union and later in the USA, Colonel
Wennerstrom; the former senior official in NATO headquarters in
Paris, Colonel Paques; and the forty concealed microphones belatedly
discovered in the American Embassy in Moscow in 1964.
There is also striking public evidence of communist penetration of
Western intelligence services. The British security and intelligence
services, the oldest and most experienced in the West, were gravely
damaged by Blunt, Philby, Blake, and others who worked for Soviet
intelligence inside them for many years before being discovered.
The exposure of the Felfe ring inside the German intelligence
service in 1961 showed that this service had been penetrated by the
Soviets since its rebirth in 1951.
The author's detailed information on extensive Soviet penetration of
French intelligence over a long period of time was passed to the
appropriate French authorities, who were able to neutralize the
penetration.
American intelligence suffered from Soviet penetration of allied
services with which it was collaborating. In 1957-58 American
intelligence lost an important secret agent in the Soviet Union,
Lieutenant Colonel Popov, as a result of KGB penetration.1
Particularly because the problem of disinformation has not been
understood, it is doubtful if adequate account has been taken of the
compromise of sources resulting from known instances of communist
penetration of Western intelligence.
Factors in Communist
Intelligence Successes
Three main factors contribute to the successes of the communist
intelligence services against the West. In the first place, they operate on a vastly greater scale. The intelligence potential of totalitarian
regimes is always greater than that of democracies because they rely
on secret police for their own internal stability. The determination of
communist regimes to promote their system in other countries entails
an expanded role for their intelligence services abroad. Accordingly,
communist regimes take intelligence and security work more seriously
and commit more human and financial resources to it than do
democracies. In the Soviet Union staff can be trained in these subjects
up to the equivalent of university degree level. They are encouraged to
enlarge their networks of informers on a massive scale both inside and
outside their own particular territories.
Second, communist leaders appreciate the importance of good
security work to their survival and the constructive contribution that
good intelligence can make to the success of their international
strategy. Communist intelligence and security services are therefore
free from the difficult if not impossible constraints imposed on the
activities of their counterparts in democratic countries. They have an
officially recognized and honored place in communist institutions.
They have no problems to contend with from the press or public
opinion in their own countries. They can afford to be more aggressive,
especially in the recruitment of new agents.
The third, and possibly the most important, factor is that from 1958-
60 onward the combined intelligence and security resources of the
whole communist bloc have been committed by the communist
governments to play an influential part in the implementation of the
new long-range bloc policy by assuming an activist political role,
which has entailed providing Western intelligence services with
carefully selected "secret" information from inside the communist
world.
It is an additional indication of the loss of effectiveness of Western
intelligence that this change in the role of the communist intelligence
services has virtually escaped attention in the West, just as did the
significance of the two conferences of leading KGB officials in the
Soviet Union in 1954 and 1959. There has been no sign, up to the
present, of any increased awareness of the new dimension of the
problem posed by the involvement of the communist intelligence
services in strategic disinformation. This seems to indicate that
whatever secret Western sources there may be have not reported on it.
Obsolete Western Methods
of Analyzing Communist Sources
Up to now Western analysts have normally used the content method of
analysis of communist sources, principally the communist press and
periodicals. Since the rules were formulated by the former German
communist, Borkenau, it is often known as Borkenau's method. Without
questioning the intelligence or integrity of Western analysts, one must
question their continuing and almost exclusive reliance on his method after
the new long-range bloc policy and the systematic use of disinformation had
been adopted.
The basic rules of Borkenau's method can be summed up as follows:
• Avoid being taken in by the facade of communist propaganda and strip
away the empty verbiage of communist statements in order to determine the
real issues and real conflicts in communist societies.
• Interpret these issues and forecast possible developments in the communist
world before they become public knowledge.
• Seek clues for the interpretation of developments in the communist
world in the national and local communist press in announcements of
appointments or dismissals of officials and in obituary notices.
• Make detailed comparisons of the speeches of leading communists in
the same country and in different countries in a search for significant
differences, especially in emphasis on and approach to doctrinal problems.
• Make similar detailed comparisons between communist newspapers,
other publications, and broadcasts in the same country and in different
countries, with the same purpose in mind.
• Interpret current developments in the light of knowledge of old party
controversies.
• Pay particular attention to struggles for personal power; trace the
background and careers of party bosses and study the grouping of their
followers.
This method was valid and effective for the period of Stalin's dictatorship
and for the power struggle that followed his death. The elimination of the
Zhdanov group by Stalin in 1948-49, the existence of Sino-Soviet differences
in the Stalin period, and Khrushchev's "victory" over the majority of the
Presidium in June 1957 were all susceptible to more or less accurate
interpretation and assessment by these means.2
Factionalism, policy disputes, political
maneuvers, and the struggle for power were all real problems at that
time, and the analysis of them on Borkenau's lines justified itself and
provided a key to the understanding of the realities of the communist
world and its policy.
During the initial post-Stalin period, from 1953 to 1957, the most
spontaneous and uncontrolled period in communist history, there were
some new developments. Genuine nationalism and revisionism took
on significant proportions. Different interest groups emerged (the
military, the party, and the technical administration), together with
groups of Stalinists and moderates, liberals, and conservatives. These
new factors were taken into account by Western analysts, who
modified their technique accordingly.
However, the spontaneous period ended with the reestablishment
of the authority of the communist parties in the bloc. Readjustments
in the communist world reversed the original significance and meaning
of the various factors studied by Western analysts. Since the latter
failed to apprehend these readjustments, their method of analysis of
communist sources was invalidated.
The adoption of the long-range policy firmly established the principle
of collective leadership, put an end to real power struggles,
provided a solution for the problem of succession in the leadership,
and established a new basis for relations between the different members
of the communist bloc. Whereas the methods of assessing
nationalism and revisionism were relevant to the crisis period of 1953
to 1956, in which there was a loss of Soviet control over the satellites
and spontaneous revolts occurred, notably in Poland and Hungary,
they ceased to be relevant once the leaders of the communist parties
and governments had been given tactical independence and all of
them, including the Yugoslavs, had committed themselves to the new
long-range bloc policy and international communist strategy. The
forces of nationalism and revisionism ceased to determine communist
policy anywhere; communist policy determined the use that could be
made of them. It was because this fundamental change was
successfully concealed from Western observers that subsequent
Western analysis of Soviet-Albanian, Soviet-Yugoslav, Soviet-Romanian,
Soviet-Czechoslovak, Soviet-Chinese, and Soviet-Polish
relations, based on the old, obsolete methodology, became
dangerously misleading.
The reestablishment of the authority of the parties put an end to the
influence of the interest groups. This can be illustrated with the case
of the military group. Under Stalin the military were a potentially
important group because they were persecuted by him. They knew all
about Stalin's methods from personal experience. For that reason an
anti-party move by the military was always a possibility. During the
power struggle from 1953 to 1957, party control over the Soviet
military was weak, and the military played a significant role first in
unseating undesirable leaders like Beriya and later, through Zhukov,
in Khrushchev's "victory" over the opposition. After Zhukov's
removal the military came under sounder party control and were freed
from the threat of persecution. Similarly, party control over the
military in China was reaffirmed from 1958 onward. The military
cannot and do not make policy in either country. The "discovery" by
Western analysts of a military pressure group in the Soviet Union in
1960 and the emphasis on the role of the former Chinese minister of
defense, Lin Piao, were both mistaken. The military leaders, like the
so-called technocrats, are all party members under the control of the
party leadership. In their separate fields they are all active participants
in the implementation of the long-range policy.
Once collective leadership had been established in the Soviet Union
and reaffirmed in the Chinese party in 1959-60, factionalism lost its
meaning. There could no longer be actual groups of Stalinist's, neo-Stalinist's,
Khrushchevites, or Maoists, but such groups could be
invented if required by policy considerations. The personality factor in
the leadership of communist parties took on a new significance. A
leader's personal style and idiosyncrasies no longer determined
communist policy; on the contrary, the long-range bloc policy began
to determine the actions of the leaders and to exploit their differences
in personality and style for its own purposes. Stalin used the cult of
personality to establish his own personal dictatorship; Mao used it, in
part, to conceal the reality of collective leadership. Since the adoption
of the common long-range policy also solved the problem of
succession, power struggles lost their former significance and became
part of the calculated and controlled display of difference and disunity
within the bloc. The existence of genuine groups of Stalinist's and
liberals, hard-liners, and moderates in the Soviet Union is as illusory
as the existence of pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet groups, or groups of conservatives and pragmatists in the
Chinese leadership. It is true that there have been representatives of
the older and younger generations in both leaderships, but attempts to
find differences in the ideology or policy of the different generations
cannot be substantiated by hard evidence. Both generations in both
parties were, and are, equally committed to the long-range policy of
1958-60.
When there was a real power struggle in the Soviet Union, it made
sense to scan the communist press for clues, hints, and significant
omissions, to read veiled criticism between the lines or to seek
divergences of emphasis on a given subject in different papers or by
different leaders in one party or in different parties. It made sense
particularly in the years before and after Stalin's death. After 1960,
however, continued analysis on these lines was not only useless but
positively dangerous, since the bloc's strategists knew all about the
Borkenau technique and its cliches and used their knowledge in
planning their strategic disinformation. They knew all the pointers on
which exponents of the Borkenau method had come to rely for their
insight into the workings of the communist system; they knew the
fascination exercised by actual and potential splits in the communist
world; they knew when and how to drop hints in the media or in
private conversation suggesting apparent shifts in the balance between
apparent rival groups in the leadership; they knew where and how to
disclose the texts of secret speeches and discussions reflecting
apparent discord between parties; and, finally, they learned how to
conduct controlled public polemics between party leaders realistically
enough to convince the outside world of the reality of Soviet-Albanian
and Sino-Soviet hostility while at the same time preserving and
strengthening unity of action within the bloc in accordance with the
mutually agreed long-range policy and strategy.
The Western Failure to Detect
Disinformation and Its Current Pattern
Conventional methodology tends to regard a secret source as
reliable if the information it provides is broadly compatible with other
information openly available; conversely, a source reporting information that conflicts with the generally accepted view of the
situation in the communist world may be discounted or rejected. In the
absence of disinformation, this methodology would be valid. But the
Shelepin report of May 1959 marked the reintroduction of a
systematic program of disinformation. It is true that in the late 1960s
an increase in communist disinformation activity, mainly of a tactical
nature involving the fabrication and leakage by the communist side of
alleged Western documents, attracted Western attention and was
reported by the CIA to the Congress of the United States. But the fact
is that when Shelepin delivered his report to the KGB conference in
1959, the West apparently had no sources capable of reporting on it;
its contents and implications remained unknown to, and unexplored
by, any Western intelligence service until the author gave his account
of them. Bearing in mind the public references to the long-range
political role of the KGB at the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress, the
good faith of any KGB source or defector who has described the KGB
conference of 1959 and Shelepin's report to it as routine is open to
serious doubt.
Not only did the West lack specific information on the Shelepin
report; communist use of disinformation in general has been consistently
underrated in the West, and the purpose of the weakness and
evolution pattern is virtually unknown.3
If the West had been aware of
the Shelepin report and had appreciated its implications, Western
methodology should, and probably would, have been turned upside
down; it would have been realized that a reliable source would give
information conflicting with the generally accepted picture. The
communist concept of total disinformation entails the use of all
available channels to convey disinformation; that is to say, all the
communist sources and all the Western sources except, obviously, any
that are unknown to the communist side and those that, for some
practical reason, are unsuitable. If the communist and Western sources
reflect the same image of the communist world, it is a good indication
that the Western as well as the communist sources are being used
successfully for disinformation purposes.
Against the background of the superior communist security and
intelligence effort and its known successes in penetrating Western
intelligence services, the odds are heavily against the survival of
reliable, non compromised Western secret sources at the strategic political level in the communist world. If, despite the odds, such a
source were to have survived, it should have produced information at
variance with that from all other sources. At a time when the facade
and strength pattern of disinformation was in use, a reliable source at
the right level should have drawn attention to the existence of a
critical situation in the communist world that the communist side was
anxious to conceal. Conversely, after the weakness and evolution
pattern had been reintroduced in 1958-60, a reliable secret source
should have drawn attention, in contrast with other sources, to the
underlying strength and coordination of the communist world.
Because the West failed to find out about or understand communist
disinformation after 1958, it failed to change its methodology; because
it failed to change its methodology, it has continued to accept as
genuine information from all sources, both communist and Western,
reflecting disunity and disarray in the communist world. The fact that
all the sources, Western and communist alike, continue to tell much
the same story on this subject is a good indication that the
disinformation effort has been both comprehensive and effective. The
most dangerous consequence of Western failure to detect and
understand communist disinformation and its patterns is that, in the
absence of any correcting influence from reliable Western secret
sources, the version of events transmitted through communist sources
has increasingly come to be accepted as the truth. Conventional
Western views on the Sino-Soviet "split," the "independence" of
Romania and Yugoslavia, the "Prague spring," Euro-communist
dissidence, and other subjects discussed in Part 2 were devised for the
West and communicated to it by the communist strategists.
11
Western Errors
THE FAILURE OF WESTERN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES to adapt their
methodology to take into account the changes in communist
policy and strategy in the period 1957-60 and the reintroduction
of disinformation on the weakness and evolution pattern meant that
those services lost their ability to produce or contribute to accurate
and balanced assessments of the situation in the communist world;
they unwittingly became vehicles for the further dissemination of
disinformation deliberately fed to them by their communist opposite
numbers. Since they failed to convey adequate warnings either about
the mobilization of the bloc's intelligence potential for political action
or about the techniques and patterns of disinformation, it is not
surprising that Western diplomats, academics, and journalists should
also have overlooked the calculated feeding of disinformation through
the communications media and should increasingly have accepted at
face value the "disclosures" made to them by communist leaders and
officials in unofficial, off-the-record conversations.
Acceptance of the new brand of disinformation from 1958 onward
was by no means total and immediate. Until 1961 at least, there were,
broadly speaking, two schools of thought among serious Western
students of communist affairs. There were those who, on the basis of
their long experience and acquaintanceship with communist duplicity
and deceit and their intuitive mistrust of evidence and "leakages"
emanating from communist sources, adopted a skeptical attitude
toward the early manifestations of divergences and splits in the
communist world and warned against the uncritical acceptance of these manifestations at their face value. Skepticism about the authenticity of Sino-Soviet differences was expressed in
different ways and on different grounds by, among others, W. A.
Douglas Jackson, J. Burnham, J. Lovestone, Natalie Grant, Suzanne
Labin, and Tibor Mende. For example, Jackson wrote: "In the latter
part of 1959 and throughout 1960, as a result of different views
expressed in statements issued in Peking and Moscow, the notion of a
possible falling out between the two powers gained considerable
momentum in some Western capitals. The desire to see a conflict
develop between the CPR and the USSR is a legitimate one, but it
may tend to blind the West to fundamental realities if undue weight is
given to seemingly apparent signs of rift, when in fact nothing of a
fundamental nature may exist."1
James Burnham pointed out in the National Review that the Sino-Soviet
conflict seemed to be a subject of conversation much favored
by communist hosts for Western statesmen and journalists during their
visits to Moscow and Peking; he wondered whether statements about
the Sino-Soviet dispute were a "deliberate deception by the
communists or wishful thinking by non-communists, or a fusion of
both."2
Suzanne Labin repeated in her book the opinion of a refugee from
Communist China, Dr. Tang, according to whom Sino-Soviet
differences stemmed from a division of labor between the USSR and
China.3
Tibor Mende, who visited China at that time, warned against
exaggerating the importance of existing differences and observed that
"when China and the Soviet Union meet it is not merely to bargain,
but also to concert their actions."4
Natalie Grant, well-versed in the history of the Trust, went further,
suggesting that "a careful study of the material forming the alleged
grounds for concluding that there is a serious Sino-Soviet conflict
proves the absence of any objective foundation for such a belief ... all
statements regarding the existence of a serious disagreement between
Moscow and Peking on foreign policy, war, peace, revolution, or
attitude toward imperialism are an invention. All are the fruit of fertile
imagination and unbased speculation." She also said that much of the
"misinformation" on Sino-Soviet relations was communist-inspired
and "reminiscent of that almost forgotten era dominated by the
Institute of Pacific Relations."5
The opposite school of thought applied Borkenau's methods to the
new situation and devoted great attention to the study of what came to
be known as "symbolic," or "esoteric," evidence, which began to
appear in the communist press from 1958 onward, of divergences and
doctrinal disputes between different members of the communist bloc.6
The esoteric evidence of Sino-Soviet differences was supported by
various unofficial statements by Soviet and Chinese leaders, such as
Khrushchev's critical remarks about the Chinese communes to the late
Senator Hubert Humphrey on December 1, 1958, or Chou En-lai's
"frank admissions" to Edgar Snow in the autumn of 1960.7
Further
support came from off-the-record comments by communist officials in
Eastern Europe.8
Throughout 1960 and much of 1961, opinions fluctuated between
the sceptics and the believers in the esoteric evidence. Then, at the
Twenty-second CPSU Congress held in October 1961, Khrushchev
delivered a public attack on the Albanian Communist party leadership
and Chou En-lai, leader of the Chinese delegation, withdrew from the
congress. The Soviet-Albanian dialogue had ceased to be esoteric and
had become public. As the public polemics between the Soviet and the
Albanian and Chinese leaders developed, retrospective accounts
began to appear in the West of disputes that had allegedly occurred
behind closed doors at the congress of the Romanian Communist
party held in Bucharest in June 1960 and the congress of eighty-one
communist parties held in Moscow in November 1960. The most
notable of these disclosures were those made in Edward Crankshaw's
articles in the London Observer for February 12 and 19, 1961, and
May 6 and 20, 1962. They were followed by the publication of official
documents and statements in the press of the Italian, French, Belgian,
Polish, and Albanian Communist parties. This material confirmed and
added to the content of the Crankshaw articles.9
By the end of 1962 the combination of esoteric evidence, public
polemics between communist leaders, and the largely retrospective
evidence of factionalism at international communist gatherings proved
irresistible; acceptance of the existence of genuine splits in the
communist world became almost universal The esoteric and the
unofficial evidence from communist sources had proved themselves
reliable and accurate. The continuing validity of the basic premises of
the old methodology had been reconfirmed and its practitioners vindicated. The ground was cut from under the
sceptics' feet. Some changed their minds. Those who retained their
doubts lacked solid evidence with which to back them and had no
option but to keep silent. Study of the splits built up its own
momentum, creating on the way a variety of personal commitments to
and vested interests in the validity of an analysis that demonstrated
the accelerating disintegration of the communist monolith. New
students entering the field had no incentive and no basis for
challenging the accepted orthodoxy or for reexamining the basic
premises of the methodology or the validity of the evidence on which
they were founded.
The development of splits in the communist world appeals to
Western consciousness in many ways. It feeds the craving for sensationalism;
it raises hopes of commercial profit; it stirs memories of
past heresies and splits in the communist movement; it shows that
factionalism is an element in communist as in Western politics; it
supports the comforting illusion that, left to itself, the communist
world will disintegrate and that the communist threat to the rest of the
world will vanish; and it confirms the opinions of those who, on
intellectual grounds, reject the pretensions of communist dogma to
provide a unique, universal, and infallible guide to the understanding
of history and the conduct of policy. Not surprisingly, therefore,
evidence in official communist sources that conflicts with the image
of disunity and disarray in the communist world and that points, or
can be interpreted as pointing, to continuing cooperation between the
Soviet Union, China, Romania, and Yugoslavia and continuing
coordination in the implementation of the long-range bloc policy has
been discounted or ignored. The focus of attention is almost
invariably on the evidence of discord. So exciting has this evidence
been and so lacking has been Western understanding of the motives
and techniques of communist disinformation that less and less
attention has been paid to the communist origin of the evidence.
Virtually all of it has in fact been provided to the West by communist
governments and parties through their press and intelligence services.
Failing to take this into account, Western observers have fallen deeper
and deeper into the trap that was set for them.
The present situation is reminiscent of the N.E.P period with one
important difference: In the 1920's Western mistakes related only to Soviet Russia; now the mistakes relate to the whole communist
world. Where the West should see unity and strategic coordination
in the communist world, it sees only diversity and disintegration;
where it should see the revival of ideology, the stabilization of
communist regimes, and the reinforcement of party control, it sees the
death of ideology and evolution toward or convergence with the
democratic system; where it should see new communist maneuvers, it
sees moderation in communist policy. Communist willingness to sign
agreements with the West for tactical reasons on a deceptive basis is
misinterpreted as the reassertion of great-power national interests over
the pursuit of long-range ideological goals.
Two further tendencies have helped to compound the series of
Western errors: the tendency to apply cliches and stereotypes derived
from the study of conventional national regimes to the study of
communist countries, overlooking or underestimating the ideological
factor in their internal systems and their relations with one another;
and the tendency toward wishful thinking.
Both tendencies favor the uncritical acceptance by the West of what
communist sources, official and unofficial, say in particular about the
Sino-Soviet dispute. Much of the Western literature on the subject
lumps together historical evidence on rivalry between the two
countries when they were governed by czars and emperors with the
controversies between them in the 1920's through the 1960's—all this
in an effort to substantiate the authenticity of the current dispute
without any serious attempt to study the different factors in operation
in different periods. The focus of Western attention is always on the
split and not on the evidence from the same communist sources,
scanty though it is, of continuing Sino-Soviet collaboration. Western
analysts, inside and outside government, seem to be more concerned
with speculation on future relations between the communist and
non-communist worlds than with critical examination of the evidence
on which their interpretation of events is based.
Nationalism was an important force in communist parties during
Stalin's last years and the crisis after his death. Various parties were
affected by it, particularly those in Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and
Georgia. It is important to realize, however, that nationalist dissent in
the parties at that time was a reaction to Stalin's departures from Leninist principles of internationalism. Once Stalin's
practices had been condemned and the necessary readjustments had
been made from 1956-57 onward in the conduct of communist affairs,
particularly with regard to relations between the CPSU and other
communist parties, the basis for nationalist dissent in those other
parties progressively disappeared. From then on, nationalist feelings
in the respective populations were a factor that the communist regimes
could deal with by an agreed diversity of tactics and by the calculated
projection of a false image of the national independence of communist
parties. Whatever the appearances, since 1957-60 the regimes in
China, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Dubcek's Czechoslovakia have not
been motivated by different brands of national communism; their
actions have been consistently dictated by Leninist ideology and
tactics directed toward the pursuit of the long-range interests and
goals of the communist bloc as a whole, to which the national
interests of the peoples of the communist world are subordinated.
The fundamental Western error throughout has been to overlook the
adoption of the long-range bloc policy and the role and pattern of
communist disinformation. Either disinformation is not taken into
account at all or it is assumed that a facade and strength pattern is
being followed. In reality the weakness and evolution pattern has
applied since 1958-60. Disinformation on this pattern has laid the
basis for erroneous Western assessments of the communist world,
which in turn have engendered mistakes in Western responses and
policies. As a result the communist world has been allowed
systematically to implement its long-range policy over a period of
more than twenty years.
Conventional methodology frequently attempts to analyze and interpret events in the communist world in isolation and on a year to year basis; communist initiatives are seen as spontaneously occurring attempts to achieve short-term objectives. But because the years 1957- 60 saw a readjustment in intra-bloc relations and the formulation and adoption of a new long-range policy for the bloc as a whole, a proper understanding of what occurred in those years provides the key to understanding what has happened since. The first, and basic, principle of the new methodology is that the starting point for the analysis of all subsequent events should be the period 1957-60.
• The readjustments in relations between members of the communist bloc, including Yugoslavia, from 1957 onward and the adoption of a common long-range policy.
• The settlement of the question of Stalinism.
• The establishment of collective leadership, the ending of power struggles, and the solution of the succession problem.
• The phases and long-range objectives of the policy.
• The historical experience on which the policy was based.
• The preparations made to use the party apparatus, the mass organizations, and the diplomatic, intelligence, and security services of the whole bloc for purposes of political influence and strategic disinformation.
• The adoption of a weakness and evolution pattern of disinformation.
• The new appreciation by communist strategists of the use that could be made of polemics between different members of the communist bloc.
From these new factors new analytical principles can be derived. Each factor will be considered in turn.
Before the new policy began to be formulated, and as one of the essential preconditions for its formulation, a new relationship between the regimes of the communist bloc was established in 1957. Soviet domination over the East European satellites and Stalinist attempts to interfere in Chinese and Yugoslav communist affairs were abandoned in favor of the Leninist concepts of equality and proletarian internationalism. Domination gave way to genuine partnership and mutual cooperation and coordination in pursuit of the common long-range interests and objectives of the whole of the communist bloc and movement; account was taken of the diversity of the specific national conditions within which each communist regime and party was operating.
Obsolete, conventional methodology failed to spot the significance of this change; it continued to see the Soviet party as striving, often unsuccessfully and in competition with the Chinese, to exert its influence over the other communist parties so as to ensure their conformity with the Soviet pattern. Once it is realized that, by mutual agreement between the eighty-one parties that signed the Manifesto of November 1960, diversity within the communist movement was sanctioned, it is easy to see that arguments and disputes between communists over the orthodoxy of different tactics are artificial, contrived, and calculated to serve particular strategic or tactical ends. The new methodology starts from the premise that the eighty-one parties all committed themselves to the new long-range policy and agreed to contribute toward its objectives according to the nature and scale of their resources. Furthermore, since diversity was licensed, there could be a division of labor between parties and any one of them could be allotted a special strategic role in accordance with its national specifics and Lenin's suggestion, in an earlier historical context, that "we need a great orchestra; we have to work out from experience how to allocate the parts, to give a sentimental violin to one, a terrible double-bass to another, the conductor's baton to a third."1 The decisions of 1957-60 gave the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, Romanian, Czechoslovak, Vietnamese, and other parties their different instruments and parts to play in a symphonic score. The old methodology hears only the discordant sounds. The new methodology strives to appreciate the symphony as a whole.
The new interpretation of the evidence available from official communist sources leads to the identification of six interlocking communist strategies and illustrates the different strategic roles allotted to different communist parties within the overall design.
The congress of bloc communist parties in 1957 agreed on a common, balanced assessment of Stalin's mistakes and crimes and on the measures needed to correct them. The basis for differences between communists on the question of Stalinism and de-Stalinization was removed; the issues were settled. The old methodology took little or no account of this and continued to see them as matters in contention between different Soviet leaders and between the Soviets and the Chinese and Albanians. The new methodology sees Stalinism from 1958 onward as a dead issue that was deliberately and artificially revived and used for the projection of a false image of warring factions among the leaders of the communist bloc. An understanding of the constituent elements of de-Stalinization and the way they were exploited provides a key to the understanding of communist tactics and technique in the rest of the program of related disinformation operations dealing with, for example, the alleged conflicts between Yugoslav and Soviet "revisionism" and Chinese and Albanian "Stalinism," or the "independence" of Romania.
From 1958 onward the concept of collective leadership widened progressively to cover far more than agreement on policy between the individual members of the Presidium or Politburo. It began to embrace all those who were in a position to contribute toward the formulation of the policy and the development and application of ways and means of achieving its ends, including not only the leaders of all the bloc and some of the more important non-bloc parties, but also senior officials in the Central Committee apparatuses, the diplomatic and intelligence services, and the academies of sciences.
The settlement of the issue of Stalinism, together with the establishment of collective leadership in this sense and the downward diffusion of power and influence that it entailed, effectively removed the grounds for genuine factionalism, power struggles, and succession problems in the leadership of the bloc communist parties. Thenceforward these phenomena were available to be used as the subjects of disinformation operations in support of long-range policy, and it is in this light that the new methodology regards them. Kremlinologists and China-watchers were caught out when they continued to try to rationalize the ups and downs of Soviet and Chinese leaders by using the outdated methodology, which took no account of disinformation. According to the new methodology, promotions and demotions, purges and rehabilitation's, even deaths and obituary notices of prominent communist figures—formerly significant pointers for the Borkenau method of analysis—should be examined for their relevance to communist attempts to misrepresent shifts in policy as dictated by personal rather than strategic or tactical considerations.
Conventional methodology tries to analyze developments in the situation and policies of the communist world either in terms of short term objectives or in terms of the rival, long-range great-power national interests of the Soviet Union and China. It seldom appreciates the marked influence, especially since 1958-60, of dialectical thinking on communist policies, which frequently entail their own opposites: communist detente diplomacy, for example, implying the calculated raising of international tension over specific issues and its subsequent relaxation when specific communist objectives have been achieved; the disgrace of communist leaders, implying their later rehabilitation; the harassment or forced exile of dissidents, implying their eventual pardon or return to their homeland.
The new methodology examines current developments in relation to the objectives of the long-range policy. It sees that policy as having three phases, like its predecessor, the N.E.P. The first phase is the creation of favorable conditions for the implementation of the policy; the second is the exploitation of Western misunderstanding of the policy to gain specific advantages. These two phases, like the phases of an alternating current electric supply, are continuous, overlapping and interacting. The beginning of the third, and final, offensive phase is marked by a major shift in communist tactics in preparation for a comprehensive assault on the West in which the communist world, taking advantage of the West's long-term strategic errors, moves forward toward its ultimate objective of the global triumph of international communism.
In the first phase of the N.E.P, economic reform was used both to revive the economy and to foster the illusion that Soviet Russia had lost its revolutionary impetus. Favorable conditions were thus created for the second phase, that of stabilizing the regime and winning diplomatic recognition and economic concessions from the Western powers. The third phase began with the reversal of the economic reforms in 1929 and the launching of ideological offensives internally through the nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture and externally through Comintern subversion. The success of both internal and external offensives was prejudiced by the distortions of the Stalinist regime. The corresponding first two phases of the current long-range policy have already lasted over twenty years. The final phase may be expected to begin in the early 1980's.
The intermediate objectives of the policy may be summarized as follows:
• The political stabilization and strengthening of the individual communist regimes as an essential precondition for the strengthening of the bloc as a whole.
• The correction of the economic deficiencies of the bloc through international trade and the acquisition of credits and technology from the industrially advanced non-communist countries.
• The creation of the substructure for an eventual world federation of communist states.
• The isolation of the United States from its allies and the promotion of united action with socialists in Western Europe and Japan, with a view to securing the dissolution of NATO and the United States-Japan security pact and an alignment between the Soviet Union and a neutral, preferably socialist, Western Europe and Japan against the United States 2
• United action with nationalist leaders in Third World countries to eliminate Western influence from those countries as a preliminary to their absorption into the communist bloc.
• The procurement of a decisive shift in the balance of political and military power in favor of the communist world.
• The ideological disarmament of the West in order to create favorable conditions for the final offensive phase of the policy and the ultimate convergence of East and West on communist terms.
The new methodology aims to see how developments in the communist world may relate and contribute to the achievement of these objectives in each phase of the policy. The decisions of November 1960 authorized the use of all forms of tactics—right and left, legal and revolutionary, conventional and ideological—in pursuit of communist aims. Conformity with the Soviet pattern having ceased to be a criterion of orthodoxy, the most potent cause of actual and potential splits in the communist world had vanished. The new methodology therefore examines the so-called splits as a new form of tactic and tries to see how they serve the aims of policy. Once it is realized that licensed anti-Sovietism can in fact yield dividends for overall communist strategy, it is easy to see that the anti-Sovietism of leading dissidents inside the Soviet Union and Euro-communists outside it, like the anti-Sovietism of the Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, and Romanian leaders, is artificially contrived to serve the ends of long-range policy.
The old methodology takes little or no account of the history of the N.E.P and other periods in which disinformation was important. It cannot therefore appreciate or illuminate the implementation of the long-range policy that was based largely on a reexamination of that history. The new methodology applies the lessons of the N.E.P. The elements in it most relevant to the 1960's, and therefore most useful to the new methodology for purposes of comparison, were:
• The stabilization of the Soviet regime by the creation of spurious, controlled opposition movements and the effective use of those movements to neutralize genuine internal and external opposition.
• The creation of favorable conditions for an activist Soviet foreign policy aimed at securing diplomatic recognition by, and increased trade with, the Western powers.
• The experience of the Treaty of Rapallo, of entering into a secret political and military alliance with a capitalist state for acquiring military technology.
• The successful projection of a false image of the Far Eastern Republic (DVR) as an independent regime.
• Lenin's tactical advice to communist parties on overcoming their isolation, establishing united fronts with socialists, and increasing their influence in parliaments and trade unions.
The genuine Tito-Stalin split in 1948 provided the communist strategists ten years later with a model on which to base their planning of spurious splits in the future. The history of Soviet-Yugoslav relations from 1948 to 1955 therefore provides the new methodology with a set of criteria for judging the authenticity of subsequent splits.
The decision to use the intelligence potential of the bloc for strategic disinformation purposes, embodied in the Shelepin report in 1959 and related documents, destroys the notion, implicit in much of conventional methodology, that the communist intelligence services are engaged solely in espionage and security work. The new methodology takes into account the Shelepin report and the important role allocated to Soviet officials, trade unionists, scientists, priests, academics, artists, and other intellectuals in the implementation of policy through the exercise of political influence. The new methodology tries to see how their activities and public statements may serve the interests of policy.
To create favorable conditions for the implementation of that policy, the bloc's strategists adopted the weakness and evolution pattern of disinformation used successfully in the N.E.P period in the Soviet Union and extended since 1958-60 to cover the whole communist bloc. The new methodology therefore dictates that all information reaching the West on the communist world and the international communist movement, including Euro-communism, should be assessed in relation to that pattern.
A significant contribution to the formulation of the long-range policy and disinformation technique about splits was made by the Yugoslav leader Edvard Kardelj, whose book Socialism and War was published shortly before the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960. In it Kardelj wrote that differences of opinion between communists "are not only not harmful but are the law of progress."3 According to Kardelj the domestic and foreign policies of the Yugoslav communist party could not be independent of the interests of socialism but could be independent of the "subjectively concocted notions"4 of other parties, such as the CPC. One should not be content with "interpreting this or that phenomenon in the course of development by the simple repetition of stereotyped dogmatic phrases."5 "When making an objective analysis, one should try to separate what is subjective from what is objective, that is, not allow slogans or political declarations to conceal insight into the real substance of things."6 Tito made much the same Leninist point when he said in 1958 that "internationalism is practice— not words and propaganda."7
For obvious reasons Kardelj and Tito could not openly announce that spurious polemics between communist parties were thenceforward to be used as part of the technique of communist disinformation. Nevertheless, the distinction clearly drawn between the subjective nature of polemics and the objective nature of common interests and socialist solidarity expressed in unity of actions provided a theoretical basis on which the genuine polemics between Tito and Stalin could be transmuted, when required by the interests of long-range policy, into spurious polemics between communist leaders without endangering the fundamental ideological and practical unity of the communist world.
An up-to-date restatement of Kardelj's point has been made by Yuriy Krasin: "Complete unanimity can hardly be a precondition of joint action. . . . What is needed is not static, monolithic unity, but a dynamic system of views and positions marked by differences on particular issues but developing on the basis of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism common to all."8
From such statements and their implications, five related principles can be derived. The first is not to assume that where there are polemics between communists there are necessarily divisions. The second is to assess whether or not there are any solid and consistent grounds for the existence of disputes. The third is to seek evidence of unity of actions behind the disunity of words, to look for secretly coordinated joint actions by apparent enemies or rivals. The fourth is to seek correlations in timing between outbursts of polemics and major communist initiatives or negotiations with Western powers (SALT, for instance) or meetings with Western leaders. The fifth is to assume that polemics form part of a disinformation operation and examine them to see if, regarded in that light, they could contribute toward the achievement of communist objectives. To take some obvious examples, Khrushchev's charges of Chinese warmongering and Chinese countercharges of Soviet revisionism and pacificism in the 1960s should be examined to see if they helped to build up Khrushchev's image in the West as a moderate with whom it was possible to negotiate concrete deals. Yugoslavia's continued exclusion from the communist bloc, despite Tito's secret participation in the formulation and execution of the new long-range policy, should be considered in relation to the buildup of Yugoslavia's credibility as a leader of the nonaligned movement in the Third World. Soviet attacks on conservative Western leaders in the last few years should be viewed in conjunction with Chinese efforts to cultivate closer relations with those same leaders. The escalation of Sino-Soviet hostilities in 1969-70 should be considered as intended to facilitate both the SALT talks between the Soviet Union and the United States and Chinese rapprochement with the advanced industrial nations. In short, the study of polemics, if they are read as disinformation, may throw light not on the existence of splits, but on the long-range policy and strategic interests that apparent splits are intended to promote.
If conformity with the normal pattern of information coming from the communist world is an indication of the unreliability of sources, the converse principle is that greater weight should be given to evidence that conflicts with that pattern even if it comes only from a single source. For example, the personal observations of a Western visitor to a Chinese commune in 1961, who reported that commune dwellers were no worse off in material terms than they were before and that the Chinese people were inevitably becoming more closely identified with the communist regime, should not have been discounted on the grounds that the observations conflicted with the generally accepted opinion of the time that the situation in the communes was disastrous.9
Total disinformation, to be effective, necessitates the release by the communist side of a volume of accurate information about itself, including genuine secrets, in order to give credibility and weight to the disinformation it is seeking to convey. In the Stalin period the release of secret information by the communist side was impossible. With the adoption of the long-range policy and disinformation program, the position changed. The Leninist concept of primary and secondary types of sacrifice was reintroduced. The primary communist secret is the existence and nature of the long-range bloc policy and strategy and the role of disinformation. Military, scientific and technical, economic, and counterespionage secrets are secondary; they form a reservoir from which information may be drawn and given away for strategic purposes, particularly if there is some reason to think that it may already have been compromised by genuine leakages or technical means. For example, the identities of secret agents who for one reason or another are reaching the end of their usefulness to the communist side may be given away through a source in whom the communist side is seeking to establish Western confidence. The good faith of Western secret sources or of defectors from the communist side is not therefore automatically established by the fact that they produce quantities of information on military, economic, scientific and technical, or counterespionage subjects or that they give vent to spectacular denunciations of communism. A more important criterion is what they have to say on communist long-range policy and the use of disinformation. The number of communist leaders, officials, and intellectuals who have full knowledge of the scope and scale of the disinformation program is very limited, but the number who participate in one or other of its aspects is very large. Most secret sources or defectors, if they have genuinely transferred their allegiance to the West, should have something of value to say on current communist techniques in this field even if they themselves do not realize the full significance of their own knowledge.
In evaluating scientific and technical information reaching the West, due regard should be paid to the fact that Shelepin, in his May 1959 report and articles for KGB staff in Chekist, called for the preparation of disinformation operations designed to confuse and disorientate Western scientific, technological, and military programs; to bring about changes in Western priorities; and to involve the West in costly, wasteful, and ineffective lines of research and development. It is to be expected, therefore, that information available in the West on Soviet space projects, weapons systems, military statistics, and developments in science and technology will be found to contain an element of disinformation.
Given that a program of total disinformation is in operation and given that the communist side is well aware of Western interest in intercepting its communications, evidence derived from communist communications in plain language or weak codes and ciphers is particularly suspect; in fact, it should be treated in the same way as evidence from official communist sources. According to the Western press, some at least of the evidence on casualties in the Sino-Vietnamese "war" in 1979 fell into this category.
Basing themselves largely on retrospective evidence about disagreements at the Eighty-one-Party Congress, most Western analysts concluded that the decisions of that congress represented a compromise between the positions of the various conflicting communist parties that signed the congress Manifesto with varying degrees of reluctance or commitment to abide by the congress's decisions. The conclusion was incorrect. The congress lasted several weeks. No doubt many different parties aired many different views, as they had every right to do, according to Leninist principles of democratic centralism, before the policy had been adopted. Once the discussions had concluded and the policy had been ratified by the majority decision, all parties which signed the Manifesto undertook a serious commitment to work for the implementation of the policy. Any party that had genuinely dissented from the congress's decisions would not have signed the Manifesto and would have been ostracized by the international communist movement. Any party wishing to maintain its standing in the movement must be able to demonstrate that it has made consistent efforts to put the decisions of the congress into effect. If communist parties in general did not take the decisions of the higher organs of authority seriously and strive consistently to implement them, they would not be the disciplined and effective bodies they are known to be. The element of political determinism should not be overlooked, considering that it has been revealed daily in the statements and actions of communist parties inside and outside the bloc, in the proceedings of their national party congresses during the past twenty years, and in their implementation of the policy and its concomitant strategies.
In accepting the evidence that the Eighty-one-Party Congress signified a watershed in the disunity of the communist world rather than the opposite, Western analysts, unaware of the disinformation program, made a fundamental error on which it was easy for the communist strategists to build in the development of their major strategies in Europe, the Third World, and the military and ideological fields. Largely because of this error, later "evidence" in official communist sources on communist disunity came to be almost automatically accepted in the West at its face value.
Given that the disinformation program is directed primarily (though not exclusively) at the non-communist world, it is imperative to distinguish those communist speeches, publications, and broadcasts that are primarily intended for communist audiences from those that are primarily intended for non-communist audiences. Obviously the second category is likely to contain more disinformation than the first. It is not possible wholly to conceal the policy and its implementation from those who are expected to carry it out. For that reason the basic decisions of the period 1958 to 1960 were published, as were the findings of the congress of communist parties in 1969, which reviewed progress in the first decade of the policy. To a greater extent than elsewhere, progress in the coordination and consolidation of the communist bloc, particularly through Comecon and the Warsaw Pact organization, is recorded in the annual supplements of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia which are available only in Russian. Naturally, they do not disclose the nature of the disinformation program. Nevertheless, items are occasionally included that figure less prominently, if at all, in publications directed at the West and that call into question the depth and authenticity of splits and crises in the bloc.
In particular the Encyclopedia reflects the continual exchange of visits of communist leaders and delegations between communist countries and parties that are supposed to be at odds with one another. Sometimes these meetings are publicized elsewhere in the communist press, accompanied by photographs of, for example, Brezhnev warmly embracing Dubcek, Tito, or Ceausescu. Western commentators, in their obsession with splits in the communist world, automatically assume that such meetings are held in attempts, usually unsuccessful, to resolve the differences between the parties and that the photographs are intended to mask the hostility between the leaders. They forget that in the years of the genuine Tito-Stalin split it would have been more than Tito's life was worth to have visited Moscow, and they overlook the possibility that the meetings in the 1960's and 1970's have been taking place in order to coordinate the display of bogus differences intended to serve the interests of long-range policy.
The Western scholars who devoted so much attention to esoteric evidence in the communist sources pointing to splits between the Soviet Union and China and Albania seldom seemed to realize that only a privileged few in the communist world, and mainly those concerned with policy and the disinformation program, were in a position to make detailed comparisons between the press of their own party and the press of other parties. Even if foreign newspapers or broadcasts were available, few Russians could read or understand Chinese or Albanian and not many Albanians or Chinese could read or understand Russian. Radio Moscow broadcasts in Albanian in 1960-61 may not have been audible in Albania unless re-transmitted by an Albanian station. They were, however, picked up by the BBC and other interested Western organizations and circulated to Western analysts in Summaries of World Broadcasts and similar publications. The communist intelligence services were well aware of this, but few Western analysts spotted that some of the polemics between communist leaders may only have reached a Western audience.
In their preoccupation with finding and examining splits in the communist world, Western analysts focused all their attention on the passages in communist speeches and articles that betrayed differences in approach between different parties or different leaders. Passages dealing, for example, with communist unity and commitment to the decisions of the Eighty-one-Party Congress were ignored or written off as lip service to communist shibboleths. This is not necessarily the way in which they were read and understood by members of the communist parties concerned.
Because Western analysts have not been sufficiently on the lookout for disinformation, they have paid inadequate attention to the origin and authenticity of the texts of important communist statements and speeches, particularly in cases where more than one text has been available.
Even where disputes in the communist world are reflected in official communist publications available to the West, the perception of them by the party membership in the countries concerned is likely to be very different from the perception of them in the West. By using various devices such as those suggested above, the party leadership is in a position to project simultaneously two different images of the same "dispute." To the West, it may seem to be of profound significance; in the East, it may well be a "little local difficulty" whose consequences for the leaders of the parties concerned may be wholly beneficial. To take a concrete example. As far as the author was aware, no information or guidance was issued to C.P.S.U members on the Soviet-Albanian dispute before the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress in October 1961, when Khrushchev publicly attacked the Albanian leaders. The only knowledge that the author had of anything unusual in Soviet-Albanian relations up to that point was derived from statements by two senior colleagues in the KGB in 1959 that a disinformation operation on Soviet-Yugoslav and Soviet-Albanian relations had been planned during 1958-59.
In the preface to his book The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: "I am also grateful to several officials of various communist states, for their willingness to discuss matters they should not have discussed with me." No explanation is offered in the book of the reasons why communist officials should have been willing to speak frankly to a prominent anticommunist scholar and citizen of the leading "imperialist" power, nor is any reference made in the book to the possibilities of disinformation. But if the existence of a disinformation program is taken into account, together with the controls over the communist officials in contact with foreigners, the explanation for these indiscretions is obvious. Almost all the Western commentators on the "Prague spring" of 1968 and Euro-communism in the 1970's have shown a similar tendency to believe what they have been told by leading communist participants in the events and debates concerned.
Against the background of the methods of provocation used during the NEP period and the known facts of the intensified political use of scientists, writers, and other intellectuals by the KGB from 1959 onward, the authenticity of the form of underground literature known as samizdat, which made its appearance in the Soviet Union in the 1960's, must be regarded with skepticism. Its significance cannot be fully assessed unless the extent of its circulation inside the Soviet Union is known. There is no justification for assuming that because it reaches a fairly wide audience abroad, it is also widely read at home. It may be in fact that few in the Soviet Union see it other than those authorized by the KGB to do so. In short, it should be regarded as falling within the category of unofficial communist sources.
Similar considerations apply to the Chinese wall posters from which the West derived much of its knowledge of the Cultural Revolution, of power struggles in the Chinese leadership, and of the Chinese attitude to the Soviet Union, especially in 1966-70. What can be said with certainty is that wall posters would not have appeared at all in this period unless the Chinese leadership had wished them to do so and that the Chinese authorities were well aware of the attention paid to them by non-communist diplomats, journalists, and other foreign representatives in China. This alone provides grounds for reconsidering their contents against the current pattern of communist disinformation. Their full significance cannot be judged without knowing precisely by whom they were put up and what guidance was given to party members about them through the normal channels of party communication.
next
PART TWO
The Disinformation Program
and Its Impact on the West
12
The New Methodology
HERE ARE TWO WAYS of analyzing and interpreting each of the
major developments since 1958 in world communism described
in Part 2. According to the conventional view, based on the old,
obsolete methodology, each of these developments is a manifestation
of the spontaneous growth of fissile tendencies in international
communism. The new methodology leads to the radically different
conclusion that each of them forms part of an interlocking series of
strategic disinformation operations designed to implement long-range
bloc policy and its strategies. The essence of the new methodology,
which distinguishes it from the old, is that it takes into account the
new policy and the role of disinformation. Conventional methodology frequently attempts to analyze and interpret events in the communist world in isolation and on a year to year basis; communist initiatives are seen as spontaneously occurring attempts to achieve short-term objectives. But because the years 1957- 60 saw a readjustment in intra-bloc relations and the formulation and adoption of a new long-range policy for the bloc as a whole, a proper understanding of what occurred in those years provides the key to understanding what has happened since. The first, and basic, principle of the new methodology is that the starting point for the analysis of all subsequent events should be the period 1957-60.
Factors Underlying the
New Methodology
From the account of those years already given, based largely on inside
information, eight new factors can be isolated. Only if all these factors and
the interaction between them are understood and taken into account together
can analysis of the developments of the past twenty years yield correct
results. These factors are: • The readjustments in relations between members of the communist bloc, including Yugoslavia, from 1957 onward and the adoption of a common long-range policy.
• The settlement of the question of Stalinism.
• The establishment of collective leadership, the ending of power struggles, and the solution of the succession problem.
• The phases and long-range objectives of the policy.
• The historical experience on which the policy was based.
• The preparations made to use the party apparatus, the mass organizations, and the diplomatic, intelligence, and security services of the whole bloc for purposes of political influence and strategic disinformation.
• The adoption of a weakness and evolution pattern of disinformation.
• The new appreciation by communist strategists of the use that could be made of polemics between different members of the communist bloc.
From these new factors new analytical principles can be derived. Each factor will be considered in turn.
Before the new policy began to be formulated, and as one of the essential preconditions for its formulation, a new relationship between the regimes of the communist bloc was established in 1957. Soviet domination over the East European satellites and Stalinist attempts to interfere in Chinese and Yugoslav communist affairs were abandoned in favor of the Leninist concepts of equality and proletarian internationalism. Domination gave way to genuine partnership and mutual cooperation and coordination in pursuit of the common long-range interests and objectives of the whole of the communist bloc and movement; account was taken of the diversity of the specific national conditions within which each communist regime and party was operating.
Obsolete, conventional methodology failed to spot the significance of this change; it continued to see the Soviet party as striving, often unsuccessfully and in competition with the Chinese, to exert its influence over the other communist parties so as to ensure their conformity with the Soviet pattern. Once it is realized that, by mutual agreement between the eighty-one parties that signed the Manifesto of November 1960, diversity within the communist movement was sanctioned, it is easy to see that arguments and disputes between communists over the orthodoxy of different tactics are artificial, contrived, and calculated to serve particular strategic or tactical ends. The new methodology starts from the premise that the eighty-one parties all committed themselves to the new long-range policy and agreed to contribute toward its objectives according to the nature and scale of their resources. Furthermore, since diversity was licensed, there could be a division of labor between parties and any one of them could be allotted a special strategic role in accordance with its national specifics and Lenin's suggestion, in an earlier historical context, that "we need a great orchestra; we have to work out from experience how to allocate the parts, to give a sentimental violin to one, a terrible double-bass to another, the conductor's baton to a third."1 The decisions of 1957-60 gave the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, Romanian, Czechoslovak, Vietnamese, and other parties their different instruments and parts to play in a symphonic score. The old methodology hears only the discordant sounds. The new methodology strives to appreciate the symphony as a whole.
The new interpretation of the evidence available from official communist sources leads to the identification of six interlocking communist strategies and illustrates the different strategic roles allotted to different communist parties within the overall design.
The congress of bloc communist parties in 1957 agreed on a common, balanced assessment of Stalin's mistakes and crimes and on the measures needed to correct them. The basis for differences between communists on the question of Stalinism and de-Stalinization was removed; the issues were settled. The old methodology took little or no account of this and continued to see them as matters in contention between different Soviet leaders and between the Soviets and the Chinese and Albanians. The new methodology sees Stalinism from 1958 onward as a dead issue that was deliberately and artificially revived and used for the projection of a false image of warring factions among the leaders of the communist bloc. An understanding of the constituent elements of de-Stalinization and the way they were exploited provides a key to the understanding of communist tactics and technique in the rest of the program of related disinformation operations dealing with, for example, the alleged conflicts between Yugoslav and Soviet "revisionism" and Chinese and Albanian "Stalinism," or the "independence" of Romania.
From 1958 onward the concept of collective leadership widened progressively to cover far more than agreement on policy between the individual members of the Presidium or Politburo. It began to embrace all those who were in a position to contribute toward the formulation of the policy and the development and application of ways and means of achieving its ends, including not only the leaders of all the bloc and some of the more important non-bloc parties, but also senior officials in the Central Committee apparatuses, the diplomatic and intelligence services, and the academies of sciences.
The settlement of the issue of Stalinism, together with the establishment of collective leadership in this sense and the downward diffusion of power and influence that it entailed, effectively removed the grounds for genuine factionalism, power struggles, and succession problems in the leadership of the bloc communist parties. Thenceforward these phenomena were available to be used as the subjects of disinformation operations in support of long-range policy, and it is in this light that the new methodology regards them. Kremlinologists and China-watchers were caught out when they continued to try to rationalize the ups and downs of Soviet and Chinese leaders by using the outdated methodology, which took no account of disinformation. According to the new methodology, promotions and demotions, purges and rehabilitation's, even deaths and obituary notices of prominent communist figures—formerly significant pointers for the Borkenau method of analysis—should be examined for their relevance to communist attempts to misrepresent shifts in policy as dictated by personal rather than strategic or tactical considerations.
Conventional methodology tries to analyze developments in the situation and policies of the communist world either in terms of short term objectives or in terms of the rival, long-range great-power national interests of the Soviet Union and China. It seldom appreciates the marked influence, especially since 1958-60, of dialectical thinking on communist policies, which frequently entail their own opposites: communist detente diplomacy, for example, implying the calculated raising of international tension over specific issues and its subsequent relaxation when specific communist objectives have been achieved; the disgrace of communist leaders, implying their later rehabilitation; the harassment or forced exile of dissidents, implying their eventual pardon or return to their homeland.
The new methodology examines current developments in relation to the objectives of the long-range policy. It sees that policy as having three phases, like its predecessor, the N.E.P. The first phase is the creation of favorable conditions for the implementation of the policy; the second is the exploitation of Western misunderstanding of the policy to gain specific advantages. These two phases, like the phases of an alternating current electric supply, are continuous, overlapping and interacting. The beginning of the third, and final, offensive phase is marked by a major shift in communist tactics in preparation for a comprehensive assault on the West in which the communist world, taking advantage of the West's long-term strategic errors, moves forward toward its ultimate objective of the global triumph of international communism.
In the first phase of the N.E.P, economic reform was used both to revive the economy and to foster the illusion that Soviet Russia had lost its revolutionary impetus. Favorable conditions were thus created for the second phase, that of stabilizing the regime and winning diplomatic recognition and economic concessions from the Western powers. The third phase began with the reversal of the economic reforms in 1929 and the launching of ideological offensives internally through the nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture and externally through Comintern subversion. The success of both internal and external offensives was prejudiced by the distortions of the Stalinist regime. The corresponding first two phases of the current long-range policy have already lasted over twenty years. The final phase may be expected to begin in the early 1980's.
The intermediate objectives of the policy may be summarized as follows:
• The political stabilization and strengthening of the individual communist regimes as an essential precondition for the strengthening of the bloc as a whole.
• The correction of the economic deficiencies of the bloc through international trade and the acquisition of credits and technology from the industrially advanced non-communist countries.
• The creation of the substructure for an eventual world federation of communist states.
• The isolation of the United States from its allies and the promotion of united action with socialists in Western Europe and Japan, with a view to securing the dissolution of NATO and the United States-Japan security pact and an alignment between the Soviet Union and a neutral, preferably socialist, Western Europe and Japan against the United States 2
• United action with nationalist leaders in Third World countries to eliminate Western influence from those countries as a preliminary to their absorption into the communist bloc.
• The procurement of a decisive shift in the balance of political and military power in favor of the communist world.
• The ideological disarmament of the West in order to create favorable conditions for the final offensive phase of the policy and the ultimate convergence of East and West on communist terms.
The new methodology aims to see how developments in the communist world may relate and contribute to the achievement of these objectives in each phase of the policy. The decisions of November 1960 authorized the use of all forms of tactics—right and left, legal and revolutionary, conventional and ideological—in pursuit of communist aims. Conformity with the Soviet pattern having ceased to be a criterion of orthodoxy, the most potent cause of actual and potential splits in the communist world had vanished. The new methodology therefore examines the so-called splits as a new form of tactic and tries to see how they serve the aims of policy. Once it is realized that licensed anti-Sovietism can in fact yield dividends for overall communist strategy, it is easy to see that the anti-Sovietism of leading dissidents inside the Soviet Union and Euro-communists outside it, like the anti-Sovietism of the Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, and Romanian leaders, is artificially contrived to serve the ends of long-range policy.
The old methodology takes little or no account of the history of the N.E.P and other periods in which disinformation was important. It cannot therefore appreciate or illuminate the implementation of the long-range policy that was based largely on a reexamination of that history. The new methodology applies the lessons of the N.E.P. The elements in it most relevant to the 1960's, and therefore most useful to the new methodology for purposes of comparison, were:
• The stabilization of the Soviet regime by the creation of spurious, controlled opposition movements and the effective use of those movements to neutralize genuine internal and external opposition.
• The creation of favorable conditions for an activist Soviet foreign policy aimed at securing diplomatic recognition by, and increased trade with, the Western powers.
• The experience of the Treaty of Rapallo, of entering into a secret political and military alliance with a capitalist state for acquiring military technology.
• The successful projection of a false image of the Far Eastern Republic (DVR) as an independent regime.
• Lenin's tactical advice to communist parties on overcoming their isolation, establishing united fronts with socialists, and increasing their influence in parliaments and trade unions.
The genuine Tito-Stalin split in 1948 provided the communist strategists ten years later with a model on which to base their planning of spurious splits in the future. The history of Soviet-Yugoslav relations from 1948 to 1955 therefore provides the new methodology with a set of criteria for judging the authenticity of subsequent splits.
The decision to use the intelligence potential of the bloc for strategic disinformation purposes, embodied in the Shelepin report in 1959 and related documents, destroys the notion, implicit in much of conventional methodology, that the communist intelligence services are engaged solely in espionage and security work. The new methodology takes into account the Shelepin report and the important role allocated to Soviet officials, trade unionists, scientists, priests, academics, artists, and other intellectuals in the implementation of policy through the exercise of political influence. The new methodology tries to see how their activities and public statements may serve the interests of policy.
To create favorable conditions for the implementation of that policy, the bloc's strategists adopted the weakness and evolution pattern of disinformation used successfully in the N.E.P period in the Soviet Union and extended since 1958-60 to cover the whole communist bloc. The new methodology therefore dictates that all information reaching the West on the communist world and the international communist movement, including Euro-communism, should be assessed in relation to that pattern.
A significant contribution to the formulation of the long-range policy and disinformation technique about splits was made by the Yugoslav leader Edvard Kardelj, whose book Socialism and War was published shortly before the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960. In it Kardelj wrote that differences of opinion between communists "are not only not harmful but are the law of progress."3 According to Kardelj the domestic and foreign policies of the Yugoslav communist party could not be independent of the interests of socialism but could be independent of the "subjectively concocted notions"4 of other parties, such as the CPC. One should not be content with "interpreting this or that phenomenon in the course of development by the simple repetition of stereotyped dogmatic phrases."5 "When making an objective analysis, one should try to separate what is subjective from what is objective, that is, not allow slogans or political declarations to conceal insight into the real substance of things."6 Tito made much the same Leninist point when he said in 1958 that "internationalism is practice— not words and propaganda."7
For obvious reasons Kardelj and Tito could not openly announce that spurious polemics between communist parties were thenceforward to be used as part of the technique of communist disinformation. Nevertheless, the distinction clearly drawn between the subjective nature of polemics and the objective nature of common interests and socialist solidarity expressed in unity of actions provided a theoretical basis on which the genuine polemics between Tito and Stalin could be transmuted, when required by the interests of long-range policy, into spurious polemics between communist leaders without endangering the fundamental ideological and practical unity of the communist world.
An up-to-date restatement of Kardelj's point has been made by Yuriy Krasin: "Complete unanimity can hardly be a precondition of joint action. . . . What is needed is not static, monolithic unity, but a dynamic system of views and positions marked by differences on particular issues but developing on the basis of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism common to all."8
From such statements and their implications, five related principles can be derived. The first is not to assume that where there are polemics between communists there are necessarily divisions. The second is to assess whether or not there are any solid and consistent grounds for the existence of disputes. The third is to seek evidence of unity of actions behind the disunity of words, to look for secretly coordinated joint actions by apparent enemies or rivals. The fourth is to seek correlations in timing between outbursts of polemics and major communist initiatives or negotiations with Western powers (SALT, for instance) or meetings with Western leaders. The fifth is to assume that polemics form part of a disinformation operation and examine them to see if, regarded in that light, they could contribute toward the achievement of communist objectives. To take some obvious examples, Khrushchev's charges of Chinese warmongering and Chinese countercharges of Soviet revisionism and pacificism in the 1960s should be examined to see if they helped to build up Khrushchev's image in the West as a moderate with whom it was possible to negotiate concrete deals. Yugoslavia's continued exclusion from the communist bloc, despite Tito's secret participation in the formulation and execution of the new long-range policy, should be considered in relation to the buildup of Yugoslavia's credibility as a leader of the nonaligned movement in the Third World. Soviet attacks on conservative Western leaders in the last few years should be viewed in conjunction with Chinese efforts to cultivate closer relations with those same leaders. The escalation of Sino-Soviet hostilities in 1969-70 should be considered as intended to facilitate both the SALT talks between the Soviet Union and the United States and Chinese rapprochement with the advanced industrial nations. In short, the study of polemics, if they are read as disinformation, may throw light not on the existence of splits, but on the long-range policy and strategic interests that apparent splits are intended to promote.
The New Methodology
and Western Sources
The existence of a program of disinformation operations has
implications for every type of source of information on the communist world. Continued failure to take disinformation into account will
lead to the continuing proliferation of errors in Western assessments
of, and policy toward, the communist world. Given the communist
concept of total disinformation, any Western reassessment of the
situation, if it is to have meaning, should cover information from all
sources, open and secret, human and technical. The assumption that if
secret and open sources in general support one another, the reliability
of both is confirmed should be dropped; it should be realized that the
two streams of information, open and secret, may well have a
common point of origin in the Central Committees and disinformation
departments of the bloc parties and intelligence services. If
information from Western secret sources is in line with information
from open sources, including official communist sources, that alone
calls the reliability of the Western secret sources into question. Those
Western secret sources whose information since 1958-60 conforms
with the weakness and evolution pattern need particularly careful
scrutiny to see whether they have become known to the communist
side through compromise or other means. If conformity with the normal pattern of information coming from the communist world is an indication of the unreliability of sources, the converse principle is that greater weight should be given to evidence that conflicts with that pattern even if it comes only from a single source. For example, the personal observations of a Western visitor to a Chinese commune in 1961, who reported that commune dwellers were no worse off in material terms than they were before and that the Chinese people were inevitably becoming more closely identified with the communist regime, should not have been discounted on the grounds that the observations conflicted with the generally accepted opinion of the time that the situation in the communes was disastrous.9
Total disinformation, to be effective, necessitates the release by the communist side of a volume of accurate information about itself, including genuine secrets, in order to give credibility and weight to the disinformation it is seeking to convey. In the Stalin period the release of secret information by the communist side was impossible. With the adoption of the long-range policy and disinformation program, the position changed. The Leninist concept of primary and secondary types of sacrifice was reintroduced. The primary communist secret is the existence and nature of the long-range bloc policy and strategy and the role of disinformation. Military, scientific and technical, economic, and counterespionage secrets are secondary; they form a reservoir from which information may be drawn and given away for strategic purposes, particularly if there is some reason to think that it may already have been compromised by genuine leakages or technical means. For example, the identities of secret agents who for one reason or another are reaching the end of their usefulness to the communist side may be given away through a source in whom the communist side is seeking to establish Western confidence. The good faith of Western secret sources or of defectors from the communist side is not therefore automatically established by the fact that they produce quantities of information on military, economic, scientific and technical, or counterespionage subjects or that they give vent to spectacular denunciations of communism. A more important criterion is what they have to say on communist long-range policy and the use of disinformation. The number of communist leaders, officials, and intellectuals who have full knowledge of the scope and scale of the disinformation program is very limited, but the number who participate in one or other of its aspects is very large. Most secret sources or defectors, if they have genuinely transferred their allegiance to the West, should have something of value to say on current communist techniques in this field even if they themselves do not realize the full significance of their own knowledge.
In evaluating scientific and technical information reaching the West, due regard should be paid to the fact that Shelepin, in his May 1959 report and articles for KGB staff in Chekist, called for the preparation of disinformation operations designed to confuse and disorientate Western scientific, technological, and military programs; to bring about changes in Western priorities; and to involve the West in costly, wasteful, and ineffective lines of research and development. It is to be expected, therefore, that information available in the West on Soviet space projects, weapons systems, military statistics, and developments in science and technology will be found to contain an element of disinformation.
Given that a program of total disinformation is in operation and given that the communist side is well aware of Western interest in intercepting its communications, evidence derived from communist communications in plain language or weak codes and ciphers is particularly suspect; in fact, it should be treated in the same way as evidence from official communist sources. According to the Western press, some at least of the evidence on casualties in the Sino-Vietnamese "war" in 1979 fell into this category.
The New Methodology and
Communist Sources
All communist sources are permanently available for use as channels
for disinformation; all must conform to the current pattern if the
credibility of the pattern is to be maintained. Nevertheless, it is
possible to distinguish between sources that are more or less likely to
be used for conveying disinformation to the West and those that are
more or less likely to contain revealing information on the
implementation of the long-range policy.
Official Communist Sources
Beginning with the official statements and decisions of international
communist gatherings, those in the period 1957 to 1960 are of
fundamental importance, not only because that was the period of the
formulation and adoption of the long-range policy, but also because of
the nature of the policy itself. An essential element in it was that its
existence and modus operandi should not be appreciated in the West.
It was to be expected, therefore, that once it had been adopted
subsequent official policy statements should have been less revealing
about long-range objectives and the methods of achieving them than
the fundamental documents of the period of policy formation. The
latter should be considered as including the documents of the congress
of bloc communist parties in 1957, the Twenty-first CPSU Congress
in January-February 1959, the congress of eighty-one communist
parties in November 1960, and Khrushchev's strategic report of
January 6, 1961. Basing themselves largely on retrospective evidence about disagreements at the Eighty-one-Party Congress, most Western analysts concluded that the decisions of that congress represented a compromise between the positions of the various conflicting communist parties that signed the congress Manifesto with varying degrees of reluctance or commitment to abide by the congress's decisions. The conclusion was incorrect. The congress lasted several weeks. No doubt many different parties aired many different views, as they had every right to do, according to Leninist principles of democratic centralism, before the policy had been adopted. Once the discussions had concluded and the policy had been ratified by the majority decision, all parties which signed the Manifesto undertook a serious commitment to work for the implementation of the policy. Any party that had genuinely dissented from the congress's decisions would not have signed the Manifesto and would have been ostracized by the international communist movement. Any party wishing to maintain its standing in the movement must be able to demonstrate that it has made consistent efforts to put the decisions of the congress into effect. If communist parties in general did not take the decisions of the higher organs of authority seriously and strive consistently to implement them, they would not be the disciplined and effective bodies they are known to be. The element of political determinism should not be overlooked, considering that it has been revealed daily in the statements and actions of communist parties inside and outside the bloc, in the proceedings of their national party congresses during the past twenty years, and in their implementation of the policy and its concomitant strategies.
In accepting the evidence that the Eighty-one-Party Congress signified a watershed in the disunity of the communist world rather than the opposite, Western analysts, unaware of the disinformation program, made a fundamental error on which it was easy for the communist strategists to build in the development of their major strategies in Europe, the Third World, and the military and ideological fields. Largely because of this error, later "evidence" in official communist sources on communist disunity came to be almost automatically accepted in the West at its face value.
Given that the disinformation program is directed primarily (though not exclusively) at the non-communist world, it is imperative to distinguish those communist speeches, publications, and broadcasts that are primarily intended for communist audiences from those that are primarily intended for non-communist audiences. Obviously the second category is likely to contain more disinformation than the first. It is not possible wholly to conceal the policy and its implementation from those who are expected to carry it out. For that reason the basic decisions of the period 1958 to 1960 were published, as were the findings of the congress of communist parties in 1969, which reviewed progress in the first decade of the policy. To a greater extent than elsewhere, progress in the coordination and consolidation of the communist bloc, particularly through Comecon and the Warsaw Pact organization, is recorded in the annual supplements of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia which are available only in Russian. Naturally, they do not disclose the nature of the disinformation program. Nevertheless, items are occasionally included that figure less prominently, if at all, in publications directed at the West and that call into question the depth and authenticity of splits and crises in the bloc.
In particular the Encyclopedia reflects the continual exchange of visits of communist leaders and delegations between communist countries and parties that are supposed to be at odds with one another. Sometimes these meetings are publicized elsewhere in the communist press, accompanied by photographs of, for example, Brezhnev warmly embracing Dubcek, Tito, or Ceausescu. Western commentators, in their obsession with splits in the communist world, automatically assume that such meetings are held in attempts, usually unsuccessful, to resolve the differences between the parties and that the photographs are intended to mask the hostility between the leaders. They forget that in the years of the genuine Tito-Stalin split it would have been more than Tito's life was worth to have visited Moscow, and they overlook the possibility that the meetings in the 1960's and 1970's have been taking place in order to coordinate the display of bogus differences intended to serve the interests of long-range policy.
The Western scholars who devoted so much attention to esoteric evidence in the communist sources pointing to splits between the Soviet Union and China and Albania seldom seemed to realize that only a privileged few in the communist world, and mainly those concerned with policy and the disinformation program, were in a position to make detailed comparisons between the press of their own party and the press of other parties. Even if foreign newspapers or broadcasts were available, few Russians could read or understand Chinese or Albanian and not many Albanians or Chinese could read or understand Russian. Radio Moscow broadcasts in Albanian in 1960-61 may not have been audible in Albania unless re-transmitted by an Albanian station. They were, however, picked up by the BBC and other interested Western organizations and circulated to Western analysts in Summaries of World Broadcasts and similar publications. The communist intelligence services were well aware of this, but few Western analysts spotted that some of the polemics between communist leaders may only have reached a Western audience.
In their preoccupation with finding and examining splits in the communist world, Western analysts focused all their attention on the passages in communist speeches and articles that betrayed differences in approach between different parties or different leaders. Passages dealing, for example, with communist unity and commitment to the decisions of the Eighty-one-Party Congress were ignored or written off as lip service to communist shibboleths. This is not necessarily the way in which they were read and understood by members of the communist parties concerned.
Because Western analysts have not been sufficiently on the lookout for disinformation, they have paid inadequate attention to the origin and authenticity of the texts of important communist statements and speeches, particularly in cases where more than one text has been available.
Even where disputes in the communist world are reflected in official communist publications available to the West, the perception of them by the party membership in the countries concerned is likely to be very different from the perception of them in the West. By using various devices such as those suggested above, the party leadership is in a position to project simultaneously two different images of the same "dispute." To the West, it may seem to be of profound significance; in the East, it may well be a "little local difficulty" whose consequences for the leaders of the parties concerned may be wholly beneficial. To take a concrete example. As far as the author was aware, no information or guidance was issued to C.P.S.U members on the Soviet-Albanian dispute before the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress in October 1961, when Khrushchev publicly attacked the Albanian leaders. The only knowledge that the author had of anything unusual in Soviet-Albanian relations up to that point was derived from statements by two senior colleagues in the KGB in 1959 that a disinformation operation on Soviet-Yugoslav and Soviet-Albanian relations had been planned during 1958-59.
Unofficial Communist Sources
It is not uncommon for disclosures in the communist press about
dissension in the communist world to be backed up by off-the-record
remarks by communist leaders and officials to their Western
counterparts and friends. Bearing in mind that the KGB and the other
communist security services together can count the total numbers of
their informers as literally in the millions, it is a relatively simple
matter for them to control the few thousands of their citizens who are
in any regular form of official or semiofficial contact with foreigners.
Communist regimes are not tolerant of disclosures of information by
their servants to foreigners. As Khrushchev himself put it, in
repudiating the idea that he had spoken out of turn to the late Senator
Hubert Humphrey in 1958 on the subject of Chinese communes: "The
mere suggestion that I might have confidential contact with a man
who boasts of having spent twenty years fighting communism can
only give rise to laughter. Anyone who understands anything at all
about politics, to say nothing of Marxism-Leninism, will realize that a
confidential talk with Mr. Humphrey about the policies of communist
parties and relations with our best friends, the leaders of the
Communist Party of China, is inconceivable."10 Yet many Western
observers and scholars claim to have benefited from such disclosures. In the preface to his book The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: "I am also grateful to several officials of various communist states, for their willingness to discuss matters they should not have discussed with me." No explanation is offered in the book of the reasons why communist officials should have been willing to speak frankly to a prominent anticommunist scholar and citizen of the leading "imperialist" power, nor is any reference made in the book to the possibilities of disinformation. But if the existence of a disinformation program is taken into account, together with the controls over the communist officials in contact with foreigners, the explanation for these indiscretions is obvious. Almost all the Western commentators on the "Prague spring" of 1968 and Euro-communism in the 1970's have shown a similar tendency to believe what they have been told by leading communist participants in the events and debates concerned.
Against the background of the methods of provocation used during the NEP period and the known facts of the intensified political use of scientists, writers, and other intellectuals by the KGB from 1959 onward, the authenticity of the form of underground literature known as samizdat, which made its appearance in the Soviet Union in the 1960's, must be regarded with skepticism. Its significance cannot be fully assessed unless the extent of its circulation inside the Soviet Union is known. There is no justification for assuming that because it reaches a fairly wide audience abroad, it is also widely read at home. It may be in fact that few in the Soviet Union see it other than those authorized by the KGB to do so. In short, it should be regarded as falling within the category of unofficial communist sources.
Similar considerations apply to the Chinese wall posters from which the West derived much of its knowledge of the Cultural Revolution, of power struggles in the Chinese leadership, and of the Chinese attitude to the Soviet Union, especially in 1966-70. What can be said with certainty is that wall posters would not have appeared at all in this period unless the Chinese leadership had wished them to do so and that the Chinese authorities were well aware of the attention paid to them by non-communist diplomats, journalists, and other foreign representatives in China. This alone provides grounds for reconsidering their contents against the current pattern of communist disinformation. Their full significance cannot be judged without knowing precisely by whom they were put up and what guidance was given to party members about them through the normal channels of party communication.
"Secret" Communist Sources
The remaining category of communist sources is the leakage or
disclosure, documentary or otherwise, of information on the
proceedings of secret party meetings and international conferences. A
conspicuous feature of the evidence on disagreements between parties
at the Romanian Communist party congress in June 1960 and at the communist Eighty-one-Party Congress later in the same
year is that most of it was retrospective and much of it reached the
West with some delay. This is a significant factor, given the existence
of a disinformation program. It is a difficult matter to stage a whole
conference for disinformation purposes, but it is a simple operation to
fabricate or distort the record at leisure after the conference is over
and to choose appropriate channels to transmit it to the West.
To Sum Up . . .
The new methodology provides explanations for many contradictions
and anomalies in the communist world on which the old
methodology throws no light. It explains the confidence of the
communist world and the loyalty and dedication of the vast majority
of its officials. It explains the reasons for disclosures of information
by the communist world about itself and relates them to the requirements
of long-range policy. It explains the seeming tolerance of a
totalitarian system toward dissension openly expressed by its citizens
in their contacts with foreigners. It provides criteria for assessing the
reliability of sources, for distinguishing genuine secret agents and
defectors from provocateurs, for distinguishing genuine information
from disinformation and propaganda. It provides pointers to the
identification of agents of influence in the West. It suggests that
disinformation, recognized as such, can provide clues to the intentions
of its authors. It offers guidance on the relative importance of the
official and unofficial communist sources. It diverts attention from
spectacular communist polemics between parties and focuses it
instead on the solid advances in the groundwork of communist
cooperation and coordination. It points the way to recovery from the
crisis in Western studies and assessments of communism. It could
help to revive the effectiveness of Western security and intelligence
services. It explains the communist victory in the Vietnam War
despite the Sino-Soviet split. Above all, it explains the willingness and
ability of the communist world, despite the appearance of disunity, to
seize the initiative and to develop and execute its strategies in relation
to the United States, the other advanced industrial countries, and the
Third World in the quest for the complete and final victory of international communism. So far,
the new methodology is the methodology of a minority of one. Only
time will show whether it will survive; whether it will stimulate new
lines of research; whether it will replace the old, obsolete
methodology; and whether it will help the West to see in a new light
the real meaning and dimensions of the communist problem.next
PART TWO
The Disinformation Program
and Its Impact on the West
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