Spycraft - Melton [182]
In 1959, KGB forgers were consolidated into their own organization when the First Chief Directorate created Department D (for the Russian word dezinformatsiya) and staffed it with between forty and fifty specialists. When Western officials exposed the work of Department D, the KGB simply changed the name to Department A and continued turning out bogus documents.36
So intense was the Soviet forgery campaign, the U.S. Senate called for hearings. Testifying before a Senate Subcommittee in 1961 and using analysis supplied by Crown and other TSD document examiners, then Assistant Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Richard Helms presented 32 examples of forgeries or disinformation from the Soviet Bloc offensive.37 “Of the 32 documents packaged to look like communications or from American officials, 22 were meant to demonstrate imperialistic American plans and ambitions,” Helms testified. “Of these, 17 asserted U.S. interference in the affairs of Communist-selected free world countries. The charge of imperialism is the first of the two major canards spread by the Soviet bloc in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and wherever else they command suitable outlets.”
The second theme, Helms pointed out, was that the United States was a menace to “world peace.”38 Other documents charged everything from secret agreements to plots by private businesses to take over local industries.39 In a world where new nations were emerging from former European colonies, the spread of Soviet lies could prove both destabilizing to fragile nations and devastating to U.S. foreign policy.
Technically and linguistically, the Soviet forgeries had little in common with the amateurish work of Walker and his documents filled with misspellings and convoluted syntax. Unlike the fiery editorials or self-serving news stories printed in Pravda and broadcast over state-run airwaves, the Soviets gave their forged documents credibility by eschewing the stultifying political rhetoric common to official Kremlin pronouncements. In fact, the forgeries often appeared first in newspapers or press reports outside the Soviet Bloc countries before turning up as “news” in the USSR’s government-run press.
These government-manufactured forgeries followed a pattern that separated them from the work of a single con man. They employed talented graphic artists who produced nearly flawless reproductions of letterheads and official stamps, paid close attention to the smallest details, such as the quality of the paper, and appropriately used colloquial or official language.
After British MI6 officer Harold “Kim” Philby defected to the USSR, he found work in the early 1970s in the KGB’s Active Measures Department churning out fabricated documents. Working from genuine unclassified and public CIA or U.S. State Department documents, Philby inserted “sinister” paragraphs regarding U.S. plans. The KGB would stamp the documents “top secret” and begin their circulation. For the Soviets, the Cambridge-educated Philby, a one-time journalist and senior British intelligence officer, was an invaluable asset, ensuring the correct use of idiomatic and diplomatic English phrases in their disinformation efforts. 40
One favorite KGB tactic was a pattern of “surfacing” a grainy photocopy or reprint of a slightly out of focus photograph, rather than a sham original document. The fuzzy photograph or barely legible photocopy not only added clandestine credibility to the spurious document for the gullible, it also made detailed analysis all the more difficult for the expert. “Newsworthy” documents were often distributed to several recipients anonymously by a “concerned citizen” who asked for no payment in return.41 The KGB developed distribution lists of sympathetic newspapers or well-known writers whose replay of the information would add even more credibility.
Unlike the work of amateurs, who often overreached by professing to uncover large and complex plots filled with international