DEPARTMENT OF DIRTY TRICKS, SOVIET STYLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404400005-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 3, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000404400005-6
tTiCLE
03 P :Gy
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
3 March 1980
While Russia's diplomats talked peace
and reconciliation, her secret agents were
busy concocting bogus documents
to blacken America's image. A new CIA
report spells out what happened.
Now coming to light is the most complete disclosure yet
of how the Soviet Union-even when detente was in full
flower-systematically staged "dirty tricks" to discredit the
U.S. among its allies and other nations.
Details of the secret campaign were made public on Feb-
ruary 19 by the House Intelligence Committee. The panel
released a report by the Central Intelligence Agency that
was sent to lawmakers as congressional debate heated up
over proposals to give the CIA a freer hand to conduct co-
vert operations of its own.
The study portrays a clandestine anti-U.S. propaganda
drive that started after World War II and reached a peak in
intensity and sophistication during 1978 and 1979, th6 peri-
od in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union were wrapping
up a new strategic-arms-limitation treaty.
I
Among other things, Moscow is accused of using forged
documents in various attempts to link the U.S. with terror-
ism around the world, including the 1978 assassination of
former Italian Premier Aldo Moro.
U.S. bureaucratese duplicated. The CIA says the Soviets
have made near-flawless forgeries of everything from se-
cret U.S. Army field manuals to classified State Department
communiques. Not only have they obtained the proper
inks, paper, printing presses and letterheads, but Soviet ex-
perts have become masters at duplicating the writing style
of American bureaucrats.
In the 105-page report, complete with voluminous docu-
mentation, the CIA says the Soviets called a halt to their
dirty tricks for four years in the mid-1970s for reasons that
remain unclear. But by 1978, the Kremlin had streamlined
its foreign-propaganda apparatus into an International In-
formation Department, bankrolled it heavily and, as a mark
of its new importance, installed as its boss a longtime crony
of President Leonid Brezhnev's.
The agency reports directly to the Politburo and works
hand in glove with the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, as it
carries out covert "disinformation" operations that rely
heavily on forgery. The CIA believes that, as many as 50
KGB technicians are detailed to a forgery squad.
According to the CIA's reckoning, the Soviets in-1979
poured at least 200 million dollars into a variety of special
campaigns-using both propaganda and covert opera-
lions-to isolate the U.S. from its friends. "Moscow does not
see any basic incompatibility between its official policy of
expanding bilateral relations with Washington and practic-
ing dirty tricks," John McMahon, the CIA's deputy director
of operations, testified before the panel. "The ;Soviet
Union's willingness to conduct its foreign policy in, accor-
partment memos criticizing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and `~ ~"` ! r ` "rte
dance with the
served by both si
tente has steadil,
Among the rei
Doctoring a i i
One of the slit
manual that has
poses. Bearing tl
moreland, the n
on how the Are
Communist fore
The manual s?
meddle in the i
even use leftist c
into adopting h,
book appears to
es-authentic in
jargon and swee
to the regulatior
The bogus ma
but the Soviets
Aldo Moro kidnappii,~; .,.
Communist with ties to Soviet and Cuban intelligence
agencies-published in two Madrid newspapers an article
citing the manual as evidence of L.S. involvement with the
Italian Red Brigades, the terrorist killers of the Christian
Democratic leader.
Excerpts from the forged manual and the article were
widely reprinted in Europe, especially in Italy. "Within
days of the Moro kidnapping, the Soviet propaganda appa-
ratus had begun a campaign of suggestion and innuendo to
falsely link the U.S. to this murder," says the CIA study.
"But Moscow had enjoyed little success without proof to
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