Active measures
Based on Wikipedia: Active measures
In 1969, eighty-two airplanes were hijacked around the world. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian intelligence defector who would become the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc official to ever flee to the West, these hijackings weren't random acts of desperation or ideology run amok. They were, he claimed, funded by the KGB through the Palestine Liberation Organization. The KGB general who allegedly oversaw this program, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, reportedly boasted: "Airplane hijacking is my own invention."
Whether or not Sakharovsky's claim was literally true, it captures something essential about the Soviet approach to geopolitics during the Cold War. The Russians had a term for it: aktivnye meropriyatiya—active measures.
More Than Spying
Most people, when they think of intelligence agencies, picture spies stealing secrets—agents photographing documents, tapping phones, recruiting informants in enemy governments. That's intelligence collection. Active measures were something different. They were about shaping reality itself.
Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB major general who once ran foreign counterintelligence, put it bluntly:
Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
This was the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence, Kalugin said. Not finding out what your enemy was doing, but making your enemy do what you wanted—or, failing that, making them unable to do much of anything at all.
The toolkit was vast. Propaganda and media manipulation. Forged documents. Support for revolutionary movements. Assassination. Funding front organizations that appeared independent but took their orders from Moscow. Penetrating churches and persecuting dissidents. The operations ranged, in the clinical language of intelligence professionals, "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence."
The Origins
The term "active measures" dates back to the nineteen-twenties, to the earliest days of Soviet power. The Bolsheviks had just survived a civil war, foreign intervention, and internal chaos. They were paranoid, with some justification—the world's capitalist powers had indeed tried to strangle their revolution in its cradle.
But the Soviets weren't content to play defense. Almost immediately, they began projecting power through deception.
One of the earliest and most elegant examples was Operation Trust, which ran from 1921 to 1926. The State Political Directorate—the OGPU, one of the many alphabet-soup predecessors to the KGB—created a fake anti-Bolshevik underground organization called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia. This phantom resistance movement was designed to attract genuine opponents of Soviet rule, luring them into a trap where they could be identified, monitored, and neutralized.
The operation's greatest coup was drawing in Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly. Savinkov was a legendary revolutionary who had turned against the Bolsheviks. Reilly was a British spy so flamboyant that he would later inspire Ian Fleming's James Bond. Both men were lured into the Soviet Union by the promise of joining a thriving underground resistance.
There was no resistance. There was only the OGPU. Both men were arrested and killed.
The Art of the Fake
Disinformation—spreading false information to deceive an adversary—was central to active measures. According to Pacepa, Joseph Stalin himself coined the term in 1923, deliberately giving it a French-sounding name (dezinformatsiya) to make other nations think the practice had originated in France rather than Russia. The irony here is delicious: even the name of the technique was itself a small act of disinformation.
Actually, that story may itself be apocryphal. The French word désinformation exists independently, and the Russian term may simply be a translation. But the uncertainty is fitting. When you're dealing with professional deceivers, even the history of deception becomes murky.
What's not in dispute is how extensively the Soviets used it. They forged documents. They planted stories in foreign newspapers. They created elaborate cover stories for operations that never happened and denied operations that did. The goal was never just to spread a particular lie, but to create an environment where truth itself became impossible to verify.
Front Organizations and Useful Idiots
One of the most effective active measures techniques was the creation of front organizations—groups that appeared to be independent advocacy organizations but were actually controlled by or responsive to Soviet intelligence.
The World Peace Council, established in the late nineteen-forties on orders from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was the most prominent example. For over forty years, it campaigned against Western military actions, particularly American ones. The Council organized peace congresses, youth festivals, and campaigns against specific weapons systems. Many organizations controlled or influenced by Communists affiliated themselves with it.
Was everyone involved a knowing participant in Soviet influence operations? Certainly not. Vladimir Lenin supposedly coined the phrase "useful idiots" to describe Western sympathizers who could be manipulated into serving Soviet interests without understanding they were being used. (Whether Lenin actually said this is disputed—another layer of uncertainty in a hall of mirrors.)
The peace movement campaigns could be remarkably specific and technical. In the early nineteen-eighties, the Soviets had deployed a new intermediate-range ballistic missile in Eastern Europe called the RSD-10 Pioneer—NATO called it the SS-20 Saber. This was a mobile, concealable weapon carrying three nuclear warheads, each with a yield of one hundred fifty kilotons. Its range of about forty-seven hundred to five thousand kilometers was carefully calculated: far enough to hit Western Europe from deep inside Soviet territory, but just short of the fifty-five hundred kilometer threshold that would have classified it as an intercontinental ballistic missile subject to arms control treaties.
When the United States proposed deploying Pershing II missiles in Western Europe as a counterweight, the KGB allegedly went into overdrive. According to Sergei Tretyakov, a former KGB agent, the Soviet Peace Committee was used to organize and finance anti-American demonstrations across Western Europe. Tretyakov went further, claiming that "the KGB was responsible for creating the entire nuclear winter story" to build opposition to the Pershing deployment. They fed misinformation to Western peace groups, he said, and thereby influenced scientific papers on the topic.
This claim remains controversial. Nuclear winter as a concept has scientific validity independent of Soviet machinations. But the allegation illustrates how deeply the Soviets allegedly tried to penetrate not just political movements but scientific discourse itself.
Assassination as Policy
Active measures weren't always subtle. Sometimes they were brutally direct.
Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary who fell out with Stalin and fled the Soviet Union, was hunted for years before an NKVD agent finally killed him with an ice axe in Mexico City in 1940. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer living in London, was killed in 1978 when someone jabbed him with an umbrella that injected a tiny pellet of ricin into his leg.
According to Pacepa, Nicolae Ceaușescu—the Romanian dictator—once told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill." The list allegedly included Hungarian leaders László Rajk and Imre Nagy, Romanian officials Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Czechoslovak figures Rudolf Slánský and Jan Masaryk, the Shah of Iran, Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, Chinese leader Mao Zedong, and—most explosively—American President John F. Kennedy.
These claims should be treated with caution. Defectors sometimes exaggerate their knowledge or tell their new hosts what they want to hear. But some Soviet assassinations are well documented. Hafizullah Amin, the second president of Afghanistan, was killed by the KGB's Alpha Group in December 1979 in a raid called Operation Storm-333, clearing the way for the Soviet invasion. Multiple presidents of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria—Dzhokhar Dudaev, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Aslan Maskhadov, Abdul-Khalim Saidullaev—were killed by Russian security services or forces working with them.
The Soviets even allegedly plotted against their own leaders. Russian historians have suggested that Stalin himself may have been killed by associates of his secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria. KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny was reportedly among the plotters who brought down Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. The failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 was organized by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.
The intelligence services, it seems, sometimes saw their own government as just another target.
Operation SIG
Perhaps the most ambitious alleged active measure was Operation SIG—short for "Zionist Governments"—supposedly devised in 1972. According to Pacepa, the goal was nothing less than turning the entire Islamic world against Israel and the United States.
KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov allegedly explained the logic:
A billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.
The idea was to harness the energy of over a billion Muslims and direct it against Soviet enemies. The KGB would provide training, funding, and propaganda support to groups willing to attack Western and Israeli targets.
How much of this actually happened as described? The Soviet Union certainly supported Palestinian groups and various revolutionary movements in the Middle East. Whether there was a coordinated master plan called Operation SIG, or whether Pacepa was describing a more diffuse reality with a dramatic label, remains debated.
What's not debatable is that the Soviets saw themselves as "the primary instructors of guerrillas worldwide," in the words of intelligence analysts. They provided training, weapons, money, and ideological support to insurgent movements across the globe, from Latin America to Africa to Southeast Asia.
The Vietnam Money
Stanislav Lunev, another high-ranking defector, claimed that the GRU—Soviet military intelligence—alone spent more than one billion dollars supporting peace movements against the Vietnam War. "A hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost," he reportedly said.
Lunev claimed that "the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad."
Here, as elsewhere, the truth is probably more complicated. By the nineteen-eighties, even the American intelligence community was skeptical that Soviet influence had directly controlled the non-aligned parts of the peace movement. Opposition to the Vietnam War had genuine roots in American society; you didn't need KGB money to think the war was a mistake.
But the KGB's attempts at influence were real and widespread. The Central Intelligence Agency categorized the World Peace Council as a Communist front organization. Soviet efforts to penetrate and influence peace movements in the United States, Switzerland, and Denmark were documented.
The most honest assessment might be that the Soviets tried very hard to influence Western peace movements, had some success at the margins, and probably exaggerated their own effectiveness in internal reports—just as the Americans probably exaggerated Soviet influence when it was politically convenient to do so.
Attacking the CIA
The CIA was a particular target. By KGB statistics, over two hundred fifty active measures were directed against the Agency in 1974 alone, generating denunciations of real and imaginary abuses in media outlets, parliamentary debates, and speeches by politicians around the world.
The Mitrokhin Archive—a collection of notes smuggled out by a KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin when he defected in 1992—detailed some of these operations:
- Using writer Philip Agee (codenamed PONT) to expose the identities of CIA personnel. Agee's publication CovertAction allegedly received assistance from both the KGB and Cuban intelligence.
- Operation PANDORA: attempting to stir up racial tensions by mailing bogus letters purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan and placing an explosive package in a predominantly Black neighborhood in New York.
- Planting claims that John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated by the CIA.
- In 1975, circulating claims identifying forty-five world leaders as victims of CIA assassination attempts.
- Creating about one hundred fifty committees in the United States to oppose American military aid to El Salvador during the Reagan administration.
Perhaps the most persistent disinformation campaign claimed that the AIDS virus had been manufactured by American scientists at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biological research facility. This story was spread by Russian-born biologist Jakob Segal. Markus Wolf, the former East German spymaster, admitted during a visit to Italy in 1998 that his service, the HVA, had helped spread AIDS conspiracy theories as part of coordinated operations with the KGB.
Blowback
There's a dark comedy embedded in all this deception. Sometimes the disinformation the KGB planted in foreign sources would filter back through their own intelligence networks and end up in reports to Soviet leadership. The lies they created to deceive their enemies wound up deceiving themselves.
Intelligence professionals call this "blowback." Lawrence Bittman, in his book on Soviet disinformation, noted that "there are, of course, instances in which the operator is partially or completely exposed and subjected to countermeasures taken by the government of the target country." But the subtler problem was internal: how do you maintain accurate intelligence assessments when your own fabrications have polluted the information environment?
This is one of the underappreciated costs of systematic deception. You can lie to your enemies, but you can't always control where those lies end up. In a world you've worked to make more confusing, you too become confused.
The Basmachi Template
One of the earliest templates for active measures came from Soviet Central Asia. The Basmachi movement—Islamic guerrillas who resisted Bolshevik rule—posed a serious threat in the years after the Russian Revolution.
The movement had its roots in 1916, when the Russian Empire began drafting Muslims for army service in World War One and touched off violent resistance. After the Bolsheviks took power, Muslim political movements in Turkestan tried to establish an autonomous government in the city of Kokand, in the Fergana Valley. In February 1918, the Bolsheviks assaulted the city and carried out a massacre of up to twenty-five thousand people.
The massacre backfired spectacularly, rallying support to the Basmachi. The guerrillas seized control of large parts of Central Asia under leaders like Enver Pasha (a former Ottoman military commander) and Ibrahim Bek.
The Soviet response was creative and ruthless. They deployed special military detachments disguised as Basmachi forces. These fake rebels received support from British and Turkish intelligence, who didn't realize they were helping the enemy. The fake Basmachi operations allowed the Soviets to penetrate the real resistance movement from within, ultimately facilitating its collapse and the assassination of Pasha.
It was a blueprint that would be used again and again: create fake opposition movements, infiltrate real ones, turn enemies against each other, make truth impossible to determine.
The Baltic Puppet Partisans
After World War Two, partisan movements in the Baltic states, Poland, and Western Ukraine fought against Soviet occupation. The NKVD responded with the Basmachi playbook.
They sent agents to join and penetrate the independence movements. More audaciously, they created entire fake rebel forces—puppet partisans that were actually controlled by Soviet intelligence. These fake rebels were permitted to attack local Soviet authorities, which gave them credibility with the real resistance.
Why would the Soviets let fake rebels attack their own people? Because the long game was more important than short-term losses. The puppet partisan units could identify genuine resistance fighters, exfiltrate senior NKVD agents to the West (establishing them as trusted anti-Soviet figures), and sow confusion about who could actually be trusted.
In a world of active measures, even your allies might be your enemies pretending.
The Legacy
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but active measures didn't end. The current Russian intelligence service, the SVR, has allegedly continued working to undermine governments in former Soviet satellite states like Poland, the Baltic states, and Georgia. During a 2006 espionage controversy, Georgian authorities accused Russian GRU officers of preparing sabotage and terrorist acts.
The techniques developed over decades of Cold War practice—disinformation campaigns, support for divisive political movements, exploitation of social tensions, creation of uncertainty about basic facts—have proven adaptable to the internet age. The specific operations change; the underlying approach persists.
Understanding active measures matters because the playbook remains in use. When you see information designed to inflame rather than inform, when you encounter sources that seem credible but feel slightly off, when facts become impossible to verify and every claim has a counterclaim—you may be looking at the descendants of techniques refined over nearly a century.
The goal was never just to spread particular lies. It was to create an environment where shared truth becomes impossible, where every institution is suspect, where people retreat into tribal certainties because the alternative—careful evaluation of competing claims—becomes exhausting.
In that sense, active measures were always about more than geopolitics. They were about epistemology: how we know what we know, and whether we can know anything at all.