The KGB, ACTIVE MEASURES, DISINFORMATION and SUBVERSION

​Click here to view this article as a PowerPoint with pictures.

​

​​Cheka
A term of terror in the Soviet Union, the KGB was the Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union. Initially it was named the Cheka (Emergency Committee) and founded 20 December 1917, by the instruction of Vladimir Lenin. The Cheka was established by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was tasked by the Soviet Politburo with arresting, torturing and executing many tens-of-thousands of dissidents, deserters, reactionaries and counter revolutionaries.

NKVD and the GULAG
In 1922 the Cheka was renamed the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). The NKVD included the regular public police force of the USSR, including traffic police, border guards and archives. The NKVD is most notorious for running the GULAG forced labour camps, conducting mass extra-judicial executions, espionage, political assassinations and enforcing Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries. GULAG was the acronym for Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps.
The Reign of Terror
The NKVD was officially responsible to protect the State Security of the Soviet Union through massive political repression, including kidnappings, murders and assassinations, both locally and internationally. Those designated "enemies of the people" were sent to GULAG camps and many hundreds-of-thousands were executed by the NKVD. The families of those designated "enemies of the people", including their children, were automatically repressed according to NKVD order number 00486. The NKVD organised the Show Trials and Great Purge of order 00447.
Active Measures
Active Measures was a Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet Security services (Cheka, NKVD and KGB), to influence the course of world events (in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it). Active Measures included: media manipulations through disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, infiltrating churches, intimidating dissidents, character assassinations, fines, imprisonments and assassinations.


The Heart and Soul of Soviet Communism
Active Measure included the establishment and support of international front organisations such as the World Peace Council, setting up terrorist groups, or Wars of National Liberation, in Third World countries, infiltrating the World Council of Churches, educational institutions, the entertainment industries and the news media. KGB General Oleg Kalugin described Active Measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet Intelligence".
Infiltration and Subversion
Kalugin described Active Measures as: "Subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord amongst allies, to weaken the United States alliance to the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground."
The Andropov Institute
The Andropov Institute of the KGB in Yasenevo, near Moscow, taught Active Measures as a system of special courses. The head of the Active Measures department was Yuri Modin, the former controller of the Cambridge Five Spy Ring, which effectively undermined British intelligence for decades.
Disinformation Campaigns
Some of the famous Active Measures conducted by the KGB that are documented by now declassified archives, include: stirring up racial tensions in the United States by staging incidents and mailing bogus letters reported to come from the Klu Klux Klan, placing explosive packages in Negro sections of the American population (under operation PANDORA) and fabricating the story that the AIDS virus was manufactured by US scientists.
Exploiting Peace Movements
One Soviet department, the GRU, alone, spent more than US$1 Billion, to fund the peace movements in America, protesting the Vietnam War. They described these movements as "A hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost." Stanislav Lunev claimed that the GRU and KGB helped to fund just about every anti-war movement and organisation in America, Great Britain, throughout Europe and South Africa.
The Battle for Hearts and Minds
According to Oleg Kalugin: "Soviet Intelligence was really unparalleled… a KGB programme which would run all sorts of congresses, peace congresses, youth congresses, festivals, women's movements, trade union movements, campaigns against the US in Europe… allegations that AIDS was invented by the CIA, all sorts of forgeries and fake materials were targeted at politicians, the academic community and at the public at large."
Toppling Governments and Setting up Puppet Regimes
The KGB was involved in undermining and installing governments. The KGB played a key role in installing puppet communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, the Peoples Republic of China, North Korea and Afghanistan. The KGB coordinated mass political repressions and the establishment of subordinate secret services in all occupied territories. The last attempted coup organised by the KGB in the uprising against Boris Yeltsin during the Russian constitutional crises of 1993, led to the abolition of the KGB and its replacement with the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.
Agent Provocateurs
One of the tactics used by the KGB was an Agent Provocateur (inciting agent). An Agent Provocateur is an undercover agent who acts to entice another person to commit an illegal, or rash act, or falsely implicates others in taking part in the illegal act. The goal of the Agent Provocateur is to discredit, or harm, another group by provoking them to commit a crime, or implicating them in a crime to undermine the group, protest, or movement, as a whole. In the Trust Operation (1921-1926) the Soviets set up fake anti-Bolshevik underground organisations, including the Monarchist Union of Central Russia, to control and neutralise monarchists and other counter-revolutionaries. The KGB used Provocateurs to entrap and discredit anti-communist groups, which they described as reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries.

Betrayal of Resistance Fighters
After the Second World War, many NKVD agents were sent to join and penetrate independence movements and to create puppet rebel forces, who were even permitted to attack local Soviet authorities, to gain credibility and exfiltrate senior NKVD agents to the West and to neutralise and betray true resistance movements and partisans.
Promoting and Directing Global Terrorism
KGB General Alexsandr Sakharovsky declared: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made worldwide force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." Ion Mihai Pacepa declared that the KGB was the primary instructor of guerrillas worldwide. General Sakharovsky claimed that: "Aeroplane hijacking is my own invention." In 1969 alone, 82 aircraft were hijacked worldwide by the KGB financed PLO. The KGB established the PLO, the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (in 1964 with the help of Ernesto Che Guevara), the National Liberation Army of Columbia (1965), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1969), SWAPO, ZANU-PF, Frelimo, MPLA, ANC and PAC in Southern Africa.
Assassination Attempt
The KGB was also implicated in Mehmet Ali Agca's 1981 assassination attempt against pope John Paul II because of his strong links with the anti-Communist Solidarity Movement in Poland.
America Under FDR
The GRU (Military Intelligence of the Soviet Union) recruited Alger Hiss, an American lawyer and State Department official, who later was the first General Secretary of the United Nations. Alger Hiss was identified by Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member. Chambers also identified Laurence Duggan and Michael Straight in the State Department and Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, as Soviet Agents.
The Profumo Scandal
The Profumo scandal which brought down Harold McMillan's Conservative government in Great Britain and brought the Labour Party to power in the 1964 general election, was a masterful example of KGB Active Measures, including entrapment, propaganda and assassination. John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in Britain. He was involved for a short time in an affair with Christine Keeller, a 19 year old model, who was also the girlfriend of Captain Yevgeny Ivanhov, the Soviet Naval Attaché.
Timing and Assassination
Although this affair had ended in 1961, the KGB Active Measures timed the publication of the scandal for 1963, just before the general elections. With the Conservative government disgraced by this public scandal, the way was clear for Hugh Todd Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party to become the next prime minister of Great Britain. The abrupt and strange death of Gaitskell, at age 56, left an opening for Harold Wilson to exploit and seize control of the Labour Party and therefore become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. Peter Wright's 1987 book, Spycatcher and Soviet defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, claimed that Gaitskell was assassinated by the KGB in order to place their agent of influence, Harold Wilson, into the key position of Prime Minister of Great Britain. Wilson oversaw the disastrous betrayal of Rhodesia and other key aspects of the British Common-wealth, as well as the implosion of the British economy and escalation of the war in Northern Ireland.
Neutralising British Military Intelligence
A spate of Soviet agents infiltrated British Intelligence agencies during, and after, the Second World War and throughout much of the Cold War. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Antony Blunt, John Cairncross, Kim Philby and Sir Roger Hollis, are some of the better known names of highly placed Soviet Agents that caused incalculable damage to Great Britain and the Free World.
The Most Destructive Force in Modern History
It is unlikely that any other Intelligence agency in history has been responsible for as many arrests, tortures, imprisonments, murders, massacres, assassinations, launching of foreign wars, sponsoring and training of foreign terrorist movements, toppling of governments and funding of so many revolutionary movements worldwide.
Mass Murder
The Black Book of Communism catalogues over 100 Million deaths between 1917 and 1991 alone, caused by communist governments, most of them controlled by the Soviet Union, or its agents. If one was to add the casualties of the Wars of Liberation, and revolutions sponsored worldwide by the Soviet Union and carried out by its KGB, the body count could double.
"While they promised them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption." 2 Peter 2:19
The Vision of Daniel
"But there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets… This great image, whose splendour was excellent, stood… a Stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces… And the Stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth… And in the days of these kings the God of Heaven will set up a Kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the Kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever." Daniel 2:28-44
The Lord Jesus Christ declared: "The Stone which the builders rejected has become the chief Cornerstone. Whoever falls on that Stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder." Luke 20:17-18
The Statue and the Stone
In Lubyanka Square, in Moscow, about 900m North East of Red Square, a huge statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which later became the KGB, was erected in 1958. This statue was directly in front of the Lubyanka, the notorious Headquarters of the KGB, wherein many Christians were interrogated, tortured and murdered. In 1991, the statue of Dzerzhinsky was removed and a simple stone from the Solovki Monastery from Solovetski Island, which had been the first prototype Concentration Camp of the Soviet Union, was placed in the square where the statue of Dzerzhinsky had once stood. The symbolism of the Victory of Christ over Communism is striking.
"And whoever falls on that Stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder." Matthew 21:44
Dr. Peter Hammond
Reformation Society
P.O. Box 74
Newlands 7725
Cape Town South Africa
Tel: 021-689-4480
Email:  [email protected]
Website: www.ReformationSA.org