Still active measures

National Review, July 8, 1991

ACTIVE MEASURES" is the translation of a sly Russian phrase for one of the KGB's traditional activities against the West-hardball political warfare via front groups, disinformation, and other forms of covert and overt manipulation of Western political opinion. One of the innovations of the Reagan era was a U.S. decision to blow the whistle on these activities. Bipartisan concern gave rise to a law requiring the State Department to issue regular reports on the subject.

What is striking is how much of this political warfare is still going on against us, even in the Gorbachev era-and even as Gorbachev turns desperately to the West for economic aid. Some of the more egregious disinformation is subsiding-like the instigated rumors that the U.S. was testing biological weapons that worked only on blacks, or that we had developed AIDS as a weapon, or other gems-but it subsided only after the U. S. pressed the matter hard at high levels of the Soviet government. Communist front organizations like the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and the International Youth Organization went through a period of disarray after the Revolution of 1989, but they seem to be back in business again, and well funded. Soviet Communist Party figures who were always closely involved with such activities remain in high positions, such as Gennady Yanayev, now vice president of the USSR, and Valentin Falin, now head of the International Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat. Falin's star has been rising since the departure of Eduard Shevardnadze from the Foreign Ministry; he was the third-ranking member of Gorbachev's delegation in Japan and accompanied Yanayev to Rajiv Gandhi's funeral.

This subject ought to be on our agenda with the Soviets whenever they talk of economic aid (as ought their defense buildup, aid to Third World thugs, and industrial espionage). Needless to say, the free world has no interest in subsidizing such warfare against it, and a Soviet leadership that truly wanted to demonstrate its conversion into a constructive member of the international community would put a stop to it.