Based on Hieronymus Bosch. Death and the Miser [Fragment], c. 1490

By Alexander Perepechko

Published on January 24, 2021

In parts 1 and 2 of this paper, we explored a few important features of Russian revisionism in Eastern Europe-2 (Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).

Irredentism and other manifestations of the Russian world are, above all, a façade of the personal interests of Vladimir Putin and his group. Since the legal infrastructure of private property rights and security of a person do not have sufficient basis in Russia, this cabal managed to restore Russia’s historical patrimonialist system and adjust it to the era of globalization. Globalization allows Russia’s elites to maximize their gains by keeping domestic markets open for their predation while minimizing their own personal risk by depositing profits in secure offshore accounts.

Under the Putin regime a new breed of globally minded criminal businessmen and politicians emerged and took center stage in the Russian Federation. This regime is about the kleptocracy where thieves rule. It is also about the adhocracy because in reality the elite in this regime is defined by its service to the needs of the Kremlin rather than by any specific institutional or social identity.

Relations between strategy, policy, and the personal interests of Putin’s siloviki – politicians from the security and military services who came into power – look unusual for a westerner. Putin and his strongmen see their personal interests as state interests and routinely resort to the aid of the state apparatus to defend these interests. We have the unfortunate case in which 1) military strategy is intended to defend the personal interests of Putin and his circle as state interests and 2) politics, including the politics of the Russian world, is subordinated to this strategy. In other words, policy is subordinated to strategy and strategy serves the personal interests of Putin and his group.

Also, some special circumstances have led to the regrettable situation when organized crime has been weaponized and access to information has been monetized in Russia.

Putin’s career path greatly aggravates this situation. It seems as though Lieutenant Colonel Putin is a protégé of the powerful “caste” of the Colonel Generals and a creature of the world of criminal businessmen and politicians. One cannot exclude that this caste looks at him as a “custodian” of their offshore banking accounts, real estate, and businesses in the West and elsewhere.

Putin and almost all members of his inner circle have records of service in the KGB and its successors. It is not surprising that active measures (also called subversion, “hybrid warfare,” hostile measures, or sharp power) are used by Russia as a policy instrument to influence and now and then control foreign states using non-kinetic and sometimes kinetic methods.

Do Putin’s active measures have historical antecedents? The late Soviet period gives us some clues.

Active measures in the late Soviet period

In Byzantine strategic culture, subversion was among the essential norms of the operational code and was considered the best path to victory. In his classic study “The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire,” Edward Luttwak, a founding father of American strategy, wrote: “It is so cheap as compared to the costs and risks of battle that it must always be attempted, even with the most unpromising targets infused with hostility or religious ardor” (2011: 417).

Active measures are poorly understood and infrequently countered systematically by western governments (Jones & Conley, 2018). At the same time, they have been well integrated into Soviet and Russian policy and involved in practically every element of the Soviet and Russian political system, not only their secret services. In 1982, the total Soviet annual expenditure for such activities was in the range of 3 to 4 billion dollars (Soviet Active, 1985: 4). So, active measures are not cheap anymore!

The use of conventional military tools in Soviet/Russian active measures operations was and is limited, while the role of diplomatic, economic, information and cyber tools were and are essential. Asymmetric strategy and tactics are usually associated with non-state actors. Also, these active measures often allow a weaker Russian state to outmaneuver or even wear down superior states and alliances (see Watts, 2018: 129-131)…

Cold War concepts and practices in the 1960s-1980s can influence current patterns of Russian behavior. Contemporary Russian subversion builds from foreign policy and activities of the Soviet Union and from Russia’s domestic and foreign policy since 1991. Over time, the regional scale and goal of Soviet and Russian subversion has varied. Where it is most resolute, it has focused on pursuing control in Eastern Europe, exercising influence in other parts of the West, and shaping western policy to reduce the threat at home (Radin, Demus, Marcinek, 2020).

Obviously, Soviet and Russian active measures have taken into account the geopolitical schemes of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. The author of this paper recently discussed this topic in detail with Dmitry Shchigelsky, Ihar Tyshkevich, and Youras Ziankovich at Holas Medyia (2020) and at Geostrategy. An Analysis of Geopolitics, Geostrategy, and Elites (Perepechko et al., 2020).

“Active measures” is the English translation of “aktivnyye meropriyatiya,” the name of the Soviet KGB unit charged with implementing these activities (Kux, 1985). In the 1960s, the Active Measures Department (Department A for short) was a unit within the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence). This Directorate was responsible for active measures as part of its charter to collect foreign intelligence and conduct overseas intelligence operations. In the mid-1970s, Department A was organizationally upgraded to Service A and placed under the command of a KGB general.

Organized along functional and geographic lines, it had a half dozen departments with a few hundred employees. Service A also drew on temporary and contract professionals with specialized skills, such as linguists.

In the late 1970s-early 1980s, the activities of Service A were increasingly used as a policy tool by the Soviets. KGB residencies made active measures, along with traditional espionage, a key part of their work. Within these residencies, the active measures cell was part of political intelligence (Line PR unit). KGB officers in these cells managed agents and sent proposals for new active measures to Moscow. Monitors in Moscow approved proposals, provided technical support for operations, and coordinated active measures with KGB regional and country desks. Time and again Moscow itself can instruct residencies to conduct operations. Moreover, each officer of the First Chief Directorate had to spend about 25% of his or her time working on projects pertaining to active measures (Andrew & Gordievsky, 1991).

Service A cooperated with the International Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet communist party, which provided direction to communist fronts and communist parties abroad. Also, Service A worked with the International Information Department, which coordinated Soviet foreign propaganda and public relations.

Soviets regarded communist fronts and parties, certain international organizations (e.g., peace, trade union, youth, professional, religious, women’s, and journalist), United Nations agencies, and bilateral friendship societies as useful active measures instruments. Moscow saw these organizations as platforms for its political influence operations. Moscow planned, directed, and controlled these semi-overt “gray” activities and was a source of funding and trained cadres for such activities.

For instance, the Soviets used the Communist Party of the United States in the mid-1980s to conduct a campaign intended to undermine the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) (Soviet Active, 1987). But since this party did not have significant support in America and Soviet propaganda looked crude to Americans, this campaign was not successful.

To distort the rival’s perception and public opinion, “black” activities were used. These activities involve agents of influence and corrupting politicians, and disseminating forgeries and fake documents. To be effective, these operations need to be clandestine. Once exposed, they lose all usefulness. Examples include circulating false or misleading news stories, spreading rumors, and broadcasting over secret radio transmitters. For example, KGB tried in the 1980s to link U.S. government biological warfare research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, with the newly discovered AIDS virus (Boghardt, 2009). About 15% of Americans to some extent bought this rumor. This disinformation contributed to public discontent with the U.S. government.

Discreditation actions against dissidents were among the major tasks of the First Chief Directorate and the Fifth Directorate, responsible respectively for foreign intelligence and countering ideological subversion.

Numerous attempts to discredit and demoralize the leading dissident Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner were among well-known failed active measures. In early 1977 the First Chief and Fifth Directorates designed 32 active measures within the Soviet Union and abroad against “public enemy number one” and his spouse (Andrew, 2018: 699). None of these actions succeed.

Perhaps the most renowned success story of this KGB service was the East German agent of influence Günter Guillaume, who worked as a personal assistant to Willy Brandt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972-1974 (Whitney, 1995). The KGB also managed to organize active measures to influence the peace movement against American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe and to organize opposition against the enhanced radiation weapon (“neutron bomb”).

As for the collection of political intelligence, the Soviets had a predictable advantage over the West (Andrew, 2018: 693). Indeed, it is harder to target totalitarian secretive one-party political systems and authoritarian systems than to target democracies.

At the same time, the Soviets had a disadvantage in intelligence analysis. In one-party and authoritarian systems, intelligence assessment is inevitably distorted by the unrelenting demands of political correctness. Usually autocrats are told what they want to hear. Consequently, intelligence analysis works as a tool for reinforcing rather than correcting dictators’ misconceptions of the outside world…

During the Cold War the Soviets used active measures to prepare and shape the battlefield – the geopolitical space of contest – before and in the early stages of conflict with NATO (Palmer, 2015).

Propaganda was an instrument to influence and mobilize the target population.

Special operations forces (“Spetsnaz” in Russian) utilized deception and camouflage to conduct unconventional operations.

Covert agents and sleeper agents from Warsaw Pact civilian and intelligence services aimed at an array of warfare related spying activities.

Radio-electronic combat – the predecessor of cyber warfare – aimed to incapacitate the enemy’s command control and communications and to disrupt fixed-base and mobile networks.

For example, Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 included the use of illegals (elite corps of deep cover intelligence agents posing as foreign nationals), the creation of necessary communication networks in advance, and the employment of Spetsnaz personnel.

To conceal preparations for a full-scale attack or limited act of aggression (e.g., land grab), Soviets offensive plans always included active measures. At the opening stage of attack, campaigns of intimidation and coercion aimed to deteriorate the political and military situation in individual NATO members and break this organization.

NATO leadership knew well that ambiguity, uncertainty and risk of accidental escalation suited Soviet offensive plans, especially near borders with the Warsaw Pact region. Consider the following scenario, which comes with maps that reveal the intended operational art. This is not strategy (see Gray, 2018: 92). The planned movement of troops in a campaign can only contribute to wartime strategy. Movement of troops and equipment, though essential, is strictly within the domain of operational art and logistics.

Figure 54. Geostrategic context of Soviet active measures during the Cold War. Based on Smith & Canby, 1987: 52.

Soviets capture the geographically exposed city of Kassel (figure 54, table 10). Kassel is a gate to the Hessian Corridor and from this location Soviets can move via Autobahn E4 toward Frankfurt and the Main River. Active measures agents “leak” information that this limited incursion can be followed by an attack of Soviet tanks through the Fulda Gap toward Frankfurt, the Main River and France. As if that is not bad enough the Spetsnaz soldiers are spotted by locals near Göttingen. Soviets can reach the Ruhr industrial area, the manufacturing core of West Germany, via the Göttingen Corridor and through Paderborn and Duisburg… At the very last minute of this drama, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes the statement that the Soviet Union will return Kassel to West Germany in exchange… for France, Great Britain, and the United States terminating their military presence in West Berlin (figure 54). The curtain falls…

Table 10. Germany: Several East to West invasion routes during the Cold War

Source: Based on Smith & Canby, 1987, 57-58.

For this kind of situation, NATO developed a forward defense (figure 55). This defense comprised the enhanced surveillance of the Inner-German Border in peacetime and the deployment of the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force with portable tactical nuclear weapons in case of Soviet attack (see Maloney, 2004).

Figure 55. The Cold War scenario for defense of the Fulda Gap. Based on “Fulda Gap,” n.d..

Can we infer that active measuresin the late Soviet period were successful?

Tactics and operational art constitute the material from which strategy is made. And strategy is about consequences of intelligence activity and military action for political results (Gray, 2018: 92). Any strategy is based on some assumptions without sufficient reliable proof. Assumptions refer to matters of common knowledge that pass for empirical evidence in their support.

Obviously the intelligence most needed by top political leaders is that which is most difficult to collect (Gray, 2018: 87, 94). In particular, it is extremely difficult to collect evidence of the future intentions of an opponent. An opponent that decides to attack would certainly conceal this intention by actions intended to mislead.

Therefore it is hazardous when top political leaders operate based on false assumptions in matters of the highest national concern (Gray, 2018: 86-88, 92-94). The conjunction of political correctness with conspiracy theories and paranoia can have grave consequences. The mishandling of intelligence activities and information by an autocratic system can lead to major mistakes and even calamity.

At the beginning of the first Reagan administration, Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev made the incorrect assumption that the United States and its NATO allies had plans to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR (Andrew, 2018: 695-698). These Soviet leaders allowed their fear to overpower realistic expectation.

Consequently, Soviet intelligence entered an alarmist mood. For the first time the KGB and GRU (glavnoie razvedyvatelnoie upravleniye), the foreign military intelligence of the General Staff of the Soviet Army, collaborated in a global intelligence operation codenamed RYAN (raketno-yadernoie napadenie) – “Nuclear Missile Strike.”

Operation RYAN was meant to collect intelligence on the presumed but non-existent American plans (Andrew, 2018: 740-741). KGB and GRU leadership asked intelligence collectors abroad for reports on the existence of nuclear first strike plans but did not instruct these collectors to look for and report cases in which sources who might have known about such plans in fact saw nothing.

Soviet intelligence officers stationed in the West and involved in active measures activities shifted priorities towards the search for evidence in support of the false assumptions of the Kremlin. This “group think” led intelligence analysts and managers in Moscow to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of nuclear first strike plans and to ignore or minimize evidence that the United Stated did not have these plans.

Also, to conform to Soviet thinking, intelligence officers had to write their reports in ideological language. We can only imagine some “surrealistic” pictures of Reagan’s “plans” revealed in these reports!

The preoccupation of the KGB and GRU with the alarmist geopolitical imagination of the Kremlin rather than with real facts is known in the strategic studies as the Eisenhower dictum (see Andrew, 2010). This dictum states that intelligence on what an opponent does not have is often as important as information on what the opponent does have. Ignorance of the feared opponent always leads to overestimation of opponent’s strength and has a destabilizing effect. In the early 1980s the false assumptions of Andropov and Brezhnev led to a shortage of reliable intelligence and generated the dangerous Soviet myth that the balance of power, especially in Europe, had shifted against the Warsaw Pact.

These factors played an important role in bringing Mikhail Gorbachev to power. His foreign policy of “new thinking” started with a damning indictment of political correctness. In his strict memorandum to the KGB Gorbachev spoke of the impermissibility of distortions of fact in messages and informational reports sent to political leaders (Garthoff, 1996).

New information that has become available since the end of the Cold War permits a detailed reassessment of the technical capabilities and developments in the Soviet Union, with respect to both strategic nuclear forces and conventional weapons (see Bluth, 2010). If the Soviet Union can be said to have lost the arms race, it was with respect to conventional technology.

Ironically, detailed reports on signs of American and NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike continued until November 1991 (Andrew & Gordievsky, 1991). Overall Gorbachev supported active measures…

Nevertheless the active measures efforts of the late Soviet period were not in vain.

At the time of former KGB chief Andropov, the Soviet secret services split into “progressives” and the “old guard” (Belton, 2020: 449). While the old guard fought any change, progressive security men like Yevgeny Primakov (Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Moscow) and Mikhail Milshtein (Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, Moscow) pushed and prepared for a transition to a market economy.

Progressives were well aware of new trends in the world economy and saw opportunities offered by globalization. Experts in long-term active measures operations in different parts of the world, they learned the weak points of the West and knew how to use security services to penetrate western societies and states.

In 1990 a secret decree of the Central Committee of the Soviet communist party ordered the KGB to build a network of businesses and accounts covertly connected to the party. Billions of dollars were funneled rapidly and secretly from state coffers into these accounts (Dawisha, 2015: 21-24). The money was never found. Along with party managers and accountants, active measures officers played a key role in this operation.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and money and other assets flowed to the West, KGB agents were already embedded and the cash networks that they had created were still under their control. Heather Conley and her associates at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC wrote: “The early and ongoing economic and democratic transition period in Central and Eastern Europe – with weak democratic institutions and nonexistent monitoring and control systems – proved to be fertile ground for fostering a highly corrupt network of transactions and interests between Russia utilizing its Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and intelligence networks, which has served to further enrich a closely knit circle of Russian oligarchs whose interests the Kremlin has embedded in its political and economic agendas” (2016: V)…

In sum, Putin’s active measures have late Soviet roots.

Has Vladimir Putin, like his Soviet predecessors, fallen into a trap of false assumptions? If the answer is yes then how does he use active measures to justify these assumptions?

I will continue in my next post.

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