New lies for old: the communist strategy of deception and disinformation. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 7, 1984 by Arnold Beichman

ANATOLY GOLITSYN, now an American citizen, is a former major in the counterintelligence service of the KGB, which he joined in 1946. He defected in December 1961, at the age of 35, from his "cover" assignment as vice consul at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki. He lived in England until August 1963, when he left for the United States. Here Anatoly Golitsyn worked for the CIA under the vigorous sponsorship of James Angleton, for twenty years head of counterintelligence until he was fired in December 1974 by the then CIA Director William Colby.

Golitsyn began working on this book almost from the moment of his defection. (The published version contains only half of his 1,200-page manuscript.) The book opens with an extraordinary introduction signed by four former U.S. and British intelligence officers. Three of the men have known the author and his views for 12 years or more. All four "have the highest regard for his personal and professional integrity." (He is an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire.) They write n the introduction: Despite the rejection of his views by many of our former colleagues, we continue to believe that the contents of this book are of the greatest importance and relevance to a proper understanding of contemporary events . . . We commend the book for the most serious study by all who are interested in relations between the Communist and non-Communist worlds.

The need for these prefatory words will become apparent when we get to the summary of Golitsyn's thesis, which is breathtaking in its iconoclastic rejection of contemporary Sovietology. Golitsyn has been one of the most controversial personalities ever to have entered the CIA penumbra. The phrase "rejection of his views by many of our former colleagues" is laughable understatement of the enraged reaction toward Golitsyn and his views by former CIA officers, particularly those from the Soviet Bloc Division. (Some of these are quoted by name in David C. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors.)

Golitsyn's theme is that, beginning with the power struggle that followed Stalin's death in 1953, "the West has misunderstood the nature of changes in the Communist world and has been misled and outmaneuvered by Communist guile." From 1958 or so onward, the combined intelligence and security resources of the entire Communist bloc were committed by Comunist governments to playing an influential part in the implementation of the new long-range bloc policy. This has entailed providing Western intelligence with carefully selected "secret" information from inside the Communist world.

In other words, for more than a quarter-century the West has been victimized by disinformational events, ranging from false KGB defectors to the Sino-Soviet split, from KGB-controlled dissidents to Rumanian "independence," the Soviet-Yugoslav split after 1958, Soviet "liberalization," the Soviet-Albanian split, the 1968 "Prague Spring," power struggles in the Soviet, Chinese, and other Communist parties, and Eurocommunism. These "case history" happenings, says Golitsyn, are nothing more than beautifull planned and internationally coordinated KGB disinformation scenarios intended to gull the West into thinking that the Soviet Union is tossing about in a stormy ocean of opposition, both internal and external. In fact, the Communist movement remains a monolith despite any alleged evidence to the contrary. As Golitsyn puts it: "The feigned disunity of the Communist world promotes real disunity in the non-Communist world." While these scenarios were successfully hoodwinking Western statesmen and public opinion into thinking that time was on the side of the non-Communist world, the USSR and its allies were building up and projecting their military and political power throughout the world with insignificant opposition from the West. How does one deal with this epistemological topsy-turvy?

Well, there is the famous Minsk-Pinsk "disinformation" story. It seems that two Jewish merchants and business competitors, Muttel and Yussel, living in a small town in czarist Russia, meet one morning at the local railroad platform, luggage in hand. Muttel asks Yussel, "So where are you traveling?" Yussel responds, "To Minsk." Angered by the reply, Muttel shouts: "You, Yussel, are telling me that you're going to Minsk so that I will think you're really going to Pinsk. But I know for a fact that you're going to Minsk, so why do you lie to me that you're going to Minsk?"

However, before we succumb to the "Ninsk-Pinsk" temptation of laughing, albeit uneasily, at Golitsyn's theories, let us recall what occurred within a few days of Yuri Andropov's accession to power in 1982. Prestigious journalists and their newspapers swallowed hook, line, and sinker the fiction that the new Soviet dictator and former head of the KGB was a humane liberal from whom all blessings would flow if only Reagan would stop his old-fashioned cold-war blatherings. And this, after 65 years of documented Bolshevik tyranny!