Download or read book Active Measures written by Thomas Rid and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of subterfuge. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany's best jazz magazine.
Download or read book Russian Active Measures written by Olga Bertelsen and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions gathered in this fascinating collection, in which scholars from a diverse range of disciplines share their perspectives on Russian covert activities known as Russian active measures, help readers observe the profound influence of Russian covert action on foreign states’ policies, cultures, people’s mentality, and social institutions, past and present. Disinformation, forgeries, major show trials, cooptation of Western academia, memory, and cyber wars, and changes in national and regional security doctrines of states targeted by Russia constitute an incomplete list of topics discussed in this volume. Most importantly, through a nexus of perspectives and through the prism of new documents discovered in the former KGB archives, the texts highlight the enormous scale and the legacies of Soviet/Russian covert action. Because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its on-going war in Ukraine’s Donbas, Ukraine lately gained international recognition as the epicenter of Russian disinformation campaigns, invigorating popular and scholarly interest in conventional and non-conventional warfare. The studies included in this collection illuminate the objectives and implications of Russia’s attempts to ideologically subvert Ukraine as well as other nations. Examining them through historical lenses reveals a cultural clash between Russia and the West in general.
Download or read book Dezinformatsia written by Richard H. Shultz and published by Potomac Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The KGB and Soviet Disinformation written by Ladislav Bittman and published by Washington : Pergamon-Brassey's. This book was released on 1985 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fortæller om hvordan falske oplysninger udspredes og om fænomenets uhyggelige omfang. De enkelte operationer udføres meget dygtigere samt er meget farligere og meget vanskeligere at afsløre, end man i Vesten er klar over.
Download or read book Soviet Influence Activities written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Russia s New Tools for Confronting the West Continuity and Innovation in Moscow s Exercise of Power written by Giles Keir and published by Chatham House (Formerly Riia). This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Russian Influence Campaigns Against the West written by Kevin N. Mccauley and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia, under both the Soviets and Vladimir Putin, is in a struggle with Western civilization, and has conducted influence campaigns to weaken and undermine the West from within. This study of influence campaigns waged against the West by the Soviet Union and now by Russia under President Vladimir Putin is intended to present a detailed overview and analysis of the various influence campaigns. Methods and means employed by the Soviet Union included active measures, disinformation, propaganda, controlled international front groups, agents of influence, forgeries, and reflexive control. Campaign themes are examined, and two key campaigns against NATO deployment of the neutron bomb and intermediate-range nuclear force are analyzed as case studies of a successful and failed campaign. The influence campaigns waged by President Putin against the West combine time tested methods with new information age techniques not available during the Soviet era including internet trolls, social media, information warfare, and cyber operations. Both similarities and differences exist in the execution and objectives of influence campaigns conducted by the Soviet Union and Putin's Russia. While the ideologies differ, both Soviet Communist ideology as well as the new Russian nationalist ideology under President Putin contend that Russia is engaged in a long-term struggle with the West that continues during peace and conflict, and will likely end violently. President Putin's Russia is now employing asymmetrical warfare against former Soviet republics to intimidate as well as expand Russian influence and borders in order to create a Russian World. This so-called new generation or hybrid warfare, essentially a Russian version of a "color revolution," incorporates aspects of influence campaigns combined with the covert deployment of special forces to mobilize local ethnic Russian populations combined with cyber operations to disrupt an opponent, and prepare the battle and information space for possible military operations. Influence campaigns in the Soviet era and under President Putin represent an indirect, low risk approach to undermine and weaken an opponent from within in order to promote political objectives, and alter the correlation of power in Moscow's favor in order to win the clash of civilizations with the West. The West needs to develop a coordinated response to the information assault by the Kremlin. First and foremost, the West needs to recognize that they are engaged in a struggle with President Putin's Russia. An effort similar to that developed to identify, analyze and publicize Soviet active measures and disinformation campaigns needs to be established. Countering the Kremlin's influence campaigns is important, however, the West critically needs to conduct proactive, offensive influence campaigns against Russian efforts. A three tier Western influence campaign is required. Information campaigns need to counter Russian influence efforts in the West and actively promote Western policies to public audiences. Next, a strategic communications campaign is required for audiences in the former Soviet republics, in particular Russian speaking populations. These countries are critical as they are already under assault by the Kremlin's influence campaigns, and are potentially the next target of Moscow's asymmetrical new generation warfare. The final audience, the Russian public, represents the hardest target, but also the most critical in countering the new Russian World ideology. Detailed target audience analysis is required for this effort to identify key groups and developed highly specialized and effective messaging. While difficult, analysis to anticipate future Russian influence campaigns and actions is required to more effectively counter the Kremlin's strategy. NATO and friendly states must centralize and pool scarce resources to counter the Kremlin's actions and communicate a Western message to key target audiences.
Download or read book The Compatriots written by Andrei Soldatov and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of The Red Web examine the shifting role of Russian expatriates throughout history, and their complicated, unbreakable relationship with the mother country--be it antagonistic or far too chummy. The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem. Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB--and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world. The exodus created a rare opportunity for the Kremlin. Moscow's masters and spymasters fostered networks of spies, many of whom were emigrants driven from Russia. By the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of spies were in New York City gathering information for Moscow. But the story did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some émigrés have turned into assets of the resurgent Russian nationalist state, while others have taken up the dissident challenge once more--at their personal peril. From Trotsky to Litvinenko, The Compatriots is the gripping history of Russian score-settling around the world.
Download or read book Russian Social Media Influence written by Todd C. Helmus and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia employs a sophisticated social media campaign against former Soviet states that includes news tweets, nonattributed comments on web pages, troll and bot social media accounts, and fake hashtag and Twitter campaigns. Nowhere is this threat more tangible than in Ukraine. Researchers analyzed social media data and conducted interviews with regional and security experts to understand the critical ingredients to countering this campaign.
Download or read book The Spy and the Traitor written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
Download or read book Putin s People written by Catherine Belton and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a best book of the year by The Economist | Financial Times | New Statesman | The Telegraph "[Putin's People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism." —Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic "This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades." —Peter Frankopan, Financial Times Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it? In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche—a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad. Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach—and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match—Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
Download or read book Rethinking the Soviet Experience written by Stephen F. Cohen and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.
Download or read book Rigged written by David Shimer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the covert struggle between Russia and America to influence elections, why the threat to American democracy is greater than ever, and what we can do about it. This is "the first book to put the story of Russian interference into a broader context.... Extraordinary and gripping" (The New York Times Book Review). Russia's interference in the 2016 elections marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations—by the KGB, the CIA, and Vladimir Putin's Russia—to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from leading officials in both the Trump and Obama administrations to CIA and NSA directors to a former KGB general. Throughout history and in 2016, both Russian and American operations achieved their greatest success by influencing the way voters think, rather than tampering with actual vote tallies. Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to comprehending the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.
Download or read book How to Lose the Information War written by Nina Jankowicz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.
Download or read book Battleground Berlin written by David E. Murphy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two veteran intelligence agents, one from the CIA and the other from the KGB, join together in an unprecedented collaboration to trace the activities of the two intelligence agencies at the start of the Cold War in postwar Berlin. UP.
Download or read book Virtual Politics written by Andrew Wilson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States like Russia and Ukraine may not have gone back to totalitarianism or the traditional authoritarian formula of stuffing the ballot box, cowing the population and imprisoning the opposition - or not obviously. But a whole industry of 'political technology' has developed instead, with shadowy private firms and government 'fixers' on lucrative contracts dedicated to the black arts of organizing electoral success. This book uncovers the sophisticated techniques of the 'virtual' political system used to legitimize post-Soviet regimes; entire fake parties, phantom political rivals and 'scarecrow' opponents. And it exposes the paramount role of the mass media in projecting these creations and in falsifying the entire political process. Wilson argues that it is not primarily economic problems that have made it so difficult to develop meaningful democracy in the former Soviet world. Although the West also has its 'spin doctors', dirty tricks, and aggressive ad campaigns, it is the unique post-Bolshevik culture of 'political technology' that is the main obstacle to better governance in the region, to real popular participation in public affairs, and to the modernization of the political economy in the longer term.
Download or read book Soviet Culture and Power written by Katerina Clark and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many. The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.
