Propaganda and Persuasion

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Propaganda and Persuasion

Russian dezinformatsia, taken from the name of a division of the KGB devoted to black propaganda. Disinformation means "false, incomplete, or misleading information that is passed, fed, or confirmed to a targeted individual, group, or country" (Shultz & Godson, 1984, p. 41). It is not misinformation that is merely misguided or erroneous information. Disinformation is made up of news stories deliberately designed to weaken adversaries and planted in news papers by journalists who are actually secret agents of a foreign country. The stories are passed off as real and from credible sources. Ladislav Bittmann, former deputy chief of the Disinformation Department of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service, in testimony before the House Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. Congress in February 1980, said, If somebody had at this moment the magic key that would open the Soviet bloc intelligence safes and looked into the files of secret agents operating in Western countries, he would be surprised. A relatively high percentage of secret agents are journalists. . . There are newspapers around the world penetrated by the Communist Intelligence services. (Brownfield, 1984, p. 6) The documentation of the manner in which Moscow has placed false stories in the non-Communist press is massive. In one instance, Alezander Kasnechev, the senior KGB officer in Rangoon, Burma, who defected to the U.S. in 1959, described the Soviet effort to plant such stories. His department was responsible for receiving drafts of articles from Moscow, translating them into Burmese, and then seeing that they were placed in local publications to appear as if they had been written by Burmese authors. The final step was to send copies back to Moscow. From there they were quoted in Soviet broadcasts of publications as evidence of "Burmese opinion" that favored the Communist line. (p. 6) Among the more sensational Soviet disinformation campaigns was one that charged the United States with developing the virus responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) for biological warfare. The story first appeared in the October 1985 issue of the Soviet weekly Litera turnaya Gazeta, and it quoted the Patriot, a pro-Soviet newspaper in India. Although it was a Soviet tactic to place a story in a foreign newspaper to give it credibility, this time no such story had appeared in India. Despite denials by the U.S. Department of State, the story appeared in the news media of more than 60 countries, including Zimbabwe, while the nonaligned countries were having a conference there and in the October 26, 1986, issue of London's Sunday Express after Express reporters interviewed two people Allan C. Brownfield (1984), reporter for the Washington Inquirer, wrote,