Disinformation / Dezinformatsiya

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union engaged in massive strategic deception against the United States - the “Main Enemy” (Glavny Protivnik). This effort, known as the Shelepin Plan, spread disinformation about Soviet military capabilities on a massive scale in an effort to prevent military confrontation with the West. Notably, Shelepin contributed to the late 1950’s “missile gap” wherein the United States overestimated the Soviets’ number of available ballistic missiles by orders of magnitude.

For the marshals it was obvious that the basis for the power of the Soviet Union should be classical heavy weapons: tanks, self-propelled artillery, heavy bombers, a large surface fleet. For Shelepin, the basis of the communist offensive to the West was the State Security Committee: the army had to play an auxiliary and sometimes even decorative role.

Shelepin's speech in May 1959 at a conference of senior KGB officers was, in Golitsyn's exposition: " the newly created department of disinformation should work in close interaction with the party-state apparatus. All party leaders, beginning with the first secretaries of the republican communist parties, must provide the KGB with all-round assistance..." After the conference, a number of reorganizations were carried out in the KGB. The counterintelligence department was expanded, whose tasks now included "influence", disinformation, as well as recruitment of agents from among foreign embassies, foreign public and cultural figures, scientists, as well as from the "internal" intelligentsia, including the scientific and religious.

In addition to managing the "D", led by Ivan Agayants (head of the Department of Political Intelligence in the Higher School of the KGB), a very mysterious disinformation department was created, personally led by Shelepin, closely cooperating not only with the Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Department of the Central Committee under the leadership of Boris Ponomarev, as if replacing the Comintern, but also by such a curious structure as the GKES (State Committee for Science and Technology), which not only formed an application to foreign intelligence to steal the necessary scientific and technological secrets, but also sent an office (six times, for example, by his own admission, with the help of Jermaine Gvishiani, went to the US Gavriil Popov) gave them the most professional instructions, what kind of information is interesting to the KGB and what misinformation it is necessary to introduce into the scientific and military circles of Western countries.

• The publication of 32 separate articles (by U.S. count) in the Soviet press blaming U.S. biological warfare experiments for the creation of AIDS from January through August 8, 1987 alone.
• The publication of allegations that the U.S. had deliberately microwaved British protesters at the Greenham Commons Military Facility, resulting in hair loss, fainting and miscarriages.
• The publication of a book by the Soviet Ministry of Justice alleging that the CIA was behind the murder of former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and the slaughter of more than 900 American citizens in Jonestown, Guyana.
• The printing of allegations that U.S. citizens are adopting Latin American children in order to use their body parts for transplant operations.
• Allegations that the U.S. has developed an ethnic bomb that only affects non-whites, including one by CPSU CC candidate member and Novosti Director Valentin Falin in a June interview reported by Izvestiya.

In Moscow "Shelepin's plan" - the mask of the democratic leader acceptable to Europe, which Shelepin composed and painted for himself, was put on Gorbachev. After the death of Andropov and a quarter of a century after Shelepin composed it for himself, it was Gorbachev who was to become that "young charismatic Soviet leader" who will talk about democracy and human rights, expand Soviet influence in the West, actively use the Soviet intelligentsia ("including the Orthodox") and thus not only solve the economic and political problems of the Soviet Union, but - now not only military methods, but also with the help of "peaceful" influence - will subjugate the whole of Europe.