Active measures

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Active measures ( English active measures , Russian Активные мероприятия , transliteration aktivnye meroprijatija ) is a term in the language of the secret services from the Cold War era . The term was introduced by the Soviet KGB for secret service actions with the help of which world events should be influenced.

A distinction was made between covert and overt active measures, as well as between nonviolent actions and those in which violence was also used against individual persons. The latter were also referred to as special actions. Nonviolent active measures were mainly used to discredit the enemy - especially the US - through targeted actions in front of the world public. The KGB tried to recruit agents who could exercise political or journalistic influence in the respective countries in order to bring about favorable media coverage for the Soviet Union. Active measures included disinformation , spreading conspiracy theories , propaganda and discrediting individuals.

The term active measures became particularly important in the 1960s when the Soviet Union tried to exert influence abroad by more subtle means than threats of military force. This change of direction was initiated primarily by the removal of Vladimir Semitschastny and the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the new KGB head in May 1967. The fifth head office of the KGB was responsible for active measures.

In the GDR , the Central Enlightenment Administration (HV A) in the Ministry for State Security was responsible for internationally implemented “active measures”, with a focus of activities in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Well-known examples

  • In December 1963, the KGB spread rumors that oil tycoon HL Hunt was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the month before. He is said to have planned and financed the attack with two befriended racist entrepreneurs and hired the actual assassin Lee Harvey Oswald through Jack Ruby . Soviet media claimed to have learned about it through a Polish informant. In the years before the attack, Hunt had repeatedly attracted the attention of the American public with harsh statements, which is why this theory was partially believed.
  • During the Vietnam War , the KGB used the World Peace Council in Helsinki , which it covertly financed , to turn the image of the world public against the USA in its favor.
  • Beginning in 1983, following an anonymous letter to the editor in an Indian magazine called Patriot, the claim was made that HIV was introduced into the human population through activities by the United States Armed Forces at Fort Detrick as part of bioweapons activities . The biologist Jakob Segal , who works in East Berlin , claimed, contrary to the Soviet thesis of unintentional origin (according to the journal Literaturnaja Gaseta ), that the hybrid virus was specifically created in a genetic laboratory. Actively promoting the spread of this conspiracy theory was codenamed Operation Infection . According to Erhard Geißler, however, the former Stasi Lieutenant Colonel Günter Bohnsack and "former Chekists " claimed that HIV had been constructed in Fort Detrick and that it was an "active measure" operated by Department X of the HV A. However, according to Geißler, this proves to be "disinformation in the square".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RCS Trahair: Encyclopedia of Cold War espionage, spies, and secret operations , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-31955-6 (English, p. 391)
  2. ^ Stefan Karner : Prager Frühling: Articles , Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20207-1 (page 58/59)
  3. ↑ Hubertus Knabe , Bernd Eisenfeld : West-Arbeit des MfS , Chapter 5.1 Foreign espionage and "active measures" in the Federal Republic - Headquarters A , Ch. Links Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-86153-182-1 (p. 133 ff )
  4. ↑ RCS Trahair: Encyclopedia of Cold War espionage, spies, and secret operations , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-31955-6 (English, pp. 148/149)
  5. ↑ RCS Trahair: Encyclopedia of Cold War espionage, spies, and secret operations , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-31955-6 (English, p. 339)
  6. ↑ E. Geißler, " AIDS and its pathogens - a web of hypotheses, findings and conspiracy theories". In: Andreas Anton, Michael Schetsche and Michael Walter: Konspiration, sociology of conspiracy thinking. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2013, 113-137. Geissler E. and Robert H. Sprinkle: “Disinformation squared. Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth a Stasi success? "Politics and the Life Sciences 32/2, 2013, in press.
  7. ↑ Erhard Geißler: Disinformation in the square in new Germany from February 8, 2014