He noted for example, studies showing that images displayed for milliseconds -- too short for people to perceive consciously -- may influence someone's mood. Over the long term, the ongoing exposure of Soviet disinformation efforts sparked a backlash internationally, helped discredit Soviet propaganda agencies and created effective pressure on the Soviet Union to curtail or at least to limit its activities. He described the process as "a great . Mcdermott, one of our first and thus veteran reporters, is also a data analyst for select independent news and media organizations in the United States. He describes information warfare tactics used by the Soviet Union, which they internally referred to as disinformation, intended to fool and defraud others. Getentrepreneurial.com: Resources for Small Business Entrepreneurs in 2022. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons. They thus rejected the mainstream medical science on HIV/AIDS and came to promote various unproven alternative therapies some mentioned above for treating the disease. The operation targeted an Ambassador from Indonesia through a honeypot espionage ploy, tempting him with attractive women. "We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. They learned that if you bombard human subjects with fear messages nonstop, in two months or less most of the subjects are completely brainwashed to believe the false message. On social media, there's a campaign to get the upcoming presidential debate fact-checked. For example, officials from the Reagan Administration were perturbed that Dan Rather reported the Soviets accusations about AIDS and Fort Detrick on the CBS Evening News in 1987 without requesting a US government response. #DemVoice1 . The use of Denver had apparently created some confusion. The two co-creators of the West German film strenuously deny that the Stasi covertly financed the film or was involved with it in any other way. "There's no question your brain is able to perceive things below your ability to consciously express or identify," Schoenbaum said. One particularly reprehensible episode was the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the US Public Health Service had observed the long-term effects of syphilis on infected African-American sharecroppers and their offspring for four decades, from 1932 to 1972, without providing them with effective medical treatment, even after penicillin had proven effective against the disease. Before long, immense numbers of people around the world (including in the US) came to believe, falsely, that the US government was responsible for AIDS. Douglas Selvage:Based on statements by KGB and Stasi officers to their Bulgarian counterparts in 1986-9, the Stasis foreign intelligence branch (Hauptverwaltung Aufklrung, HVA) played a central role in the disinformation campaign alongside the KGB. Many leaders, journalists and intellectuals in Africa welcomed the Segals thesis of a US origin of HIV as an alternative to the hypothesis of many leading US and Western scientists at the time. Forty years ago the U.S. Congress changed the rules; informed consent is now required for any government-funded medical study involving human subjects. The goal of these measures, the KGB wrote, is to create a favourable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control., Around a year later, the Stasi wrote to the Bulgarians about Operation Denver, its contribution to the KGBs AIDS disinformation campaign. and a Legum Magister (LL.M. Another such forgery claimed that the CIA plotted a covert assassination attempt on the Indonesian president. Smirnov's technology reappeared on the U.S. government's radar screen through Northam Psychotechnologies, a Canadian company that serves as North American distributor for the Psychotechnology Research Institute. The result you can see is most of the people who graduated in 60s are drop outs or half-baked intellectuals who are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, the educational system; you are stuck with them. This article has been republished from The MIT Press Reader. In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible; to rid society of these people you have, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of the United States society and yet these people have been programmed and as you say in place, are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept, these are the very people who would be marked for extermination. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist's chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. Made a Major Difference", "Before 'fake news,' there was Soviet 'disinformation', After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, COVID-19 misinformation in the Philippines, Historical distortion regarding Ferdinand Marcos, Disinformation in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_KGB_and_Soviet_Disinformation&oldid=1109385507, Non-fiction books about Soviet repression, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 9 September 2022, at 14:55. "That kind of thing is reasonable, and there's good experimental evidence behind it. To help settle the debate, Albarracin and her colleagues conducted what they believe to be the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View is a 1983 non-fiction book by Lawrence Martin-Bittman (then known as Ladislav Bittman), a former intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czech Intelligence Service and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. True Anomaly, a startup backed by US senator JD Vance's VC firm, plans to launch prototype pursuit satellites on a SpaceX flight later this year. The second-ranked search engine is getting a new chatbot interface that attempts to synthesize information from sites across the web. Bu kartu, st dzey yazdrma kalitesi ve yksek kt verimi salamak iin tasarlanmtr. From my perspective, it would be even more important, especially for the long term, to train students as early as elementary school to differentiate between facts and opinions and to identify not only propaganda techniques, but also fallacies in logic. While Conn said the lack of testing bothered him, the relationship ended when he found out Northam Psychotechnologies went to SRS Technologies, now part of ManTech International Corp. Semyon Ioffe, the head of Northam Psychotechnologies, who identifies himself as a "brain scientist," declined a phone interview, but answered questions over e-mail. To the point that no amount of clear information they are shown, to the contrary, can change . They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. Are our representatives in Government voting Constitutionally? It sounds absurd that an obscure US company with a hastily constructed website could have driven international health policy and brought major clinical trials to a halt within the span of a few weeks. SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. Rusalkina markets the technology as a program called Mindreader 2.0. DS: The KGB informed its Bulgarian colleagues in September 1985 that it had initiated a campaign of "active measures" that is, covert propaganda regarding HIV/AIDS. The US military, the Segals claimed, had used the very new technology of genetic engineering to construct HIV from two other dangerous viruses, including one that infected sheep. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Selvages article appeared a few months before COVID-19 burst into public consciousness. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logical behavior. Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News. . Its not a Fat problem, its a muscle problem. They learned that if you bombard the human subjects with fear messages nonstop, in two months or less most of the subjects are completely brainwashed to believe a false message(i.e. Yuri Bezmenov, known by the alias Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet KGB informant who defected to Canada. (The former KGB foreign intelligence archive has never been accessible to researchers.). Students and others would also benefit from training in internet literacy: What sources can one trust, and how can one fact-check various claims, especially before reposting them? The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The author defines disinformation as "a carefully constructed false message leaked to an opponent's communication system in order to deceive the decision-making elite or the public". Smirnov is best known in the United States for consulting with the FBI during the 1993 Waco siege. [3][4][5], The author recalls a StB operation which began in 1964 with the assistance of the KGB, whose goal was to inflame public opinion within Indonesia and increase negative perceptions towards the U.S. What were the main types of disinformation activities? They promoted the claim that a Soviet fifth column had infiltrated the National Institutes of Health through the World Health Organisation and then genetically engineered the AIDS virus at the National Cancer Institutes facilities at Fort Detrick. In particular, a specific false report stated a fictitious strategy supposedly planned by the United Kingdom jointly with the U.S., to invade Indonesia through Malaysia. fact checked by Jamie Frater. They found that if you bombard human subjects with fear messages nonstop, in two months or less most of the subjects are completely brainwashed to believe the false message--to the point that no amount of clear information they are shown to the contrary will change their minds. She says it works faster than a polygraph and can be used at airports. [7] The other reviewer, Peter C. Unsinger, wrote "At times his examination is superficial, and for depth into some specific events, the reader will have to look at Bittman's earlier work". One term that never came up in talks between the Stasi and their Bulgarian counterparts, let alone in talks between the KGB and the Bulgarians, was Operation Infektion. Despite this fact, practically the entire internet continues to use this incorrect codename in discussing the KGBs AIDS disinformation campaign. What possible reasonable reason could there be for leaving a paper that is a lie in their journal without even an expression of concern, much less a retraction? These cookies do not store any personal information. Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com 2000 Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.46a. International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Media censorship and disinformation during the Gezi Park protests, "The Spy Who Came Into the Classroom Teaches at Boston U. [3], The KGB and StB ruse succeeded in causing paranoia and the Indonesia president began to make public statements highly critical of the U.S. Reporters within the employ of the two Soviet intelligence agencies promptly capitalized on Sukarno's remarks and incensed the Indonesians with broadcasts of the false reporting on Radio Moscow and groups of angry citizens attacked U.S. buildings in the city of Jakarta. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Mark Krameris director of Cold War Studies at Harvard Universitys Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies. The contract is a small victory for the Psychotechnology Research Institute and its leaders, who have struggled for years to be accepted in the West. It is a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and its divided in four basic stages. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/opioids-inc/, S this film is unavailable, just a wee trailer , The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong? Photo: Nathan HodgeAccording to Rusalkina, the Soviet military enlisted Smirnov's psychotechnology during the Soviet Union's bloody war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They looked at 127 research articles representing 248 independent samples and over 27,000 individuals from experiments conducted between 1962 and 2014. [1][2][3] The book is about the KGB's use of disinformation and information warfare during the Soviet Union period. [2][4][5] This division was under the control of the Soviet secret police. Key Takeaways. 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