A July 9 entry in Paul Goble’s “Window on Eurasia” blog calls attention to a recent article in the Ukrainian press, “The Jewish card in Russian operations against Ukraine,” which exposes what the article’s author says was a Russian disinformation ploy against Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko.

In 2008, Russia’s Regnum news service announced the publication of a book about Viktor Yushchenko’s father called Andrei Yushchenko: The Person and the “Legend” by Yuri Vilner. The book claims that Yushchenko’s father collaborated with the Nazis as a camp policeman and informer while a prisoner of war during World War II.

Ukrainian poet Moses Fishbein, who wrote the “Jewish card” article, read the book on the Internet and called the person to whom it was dedicated, Aron Shneer of Israel, to ask about the author, Yuri Vilner, identified as an Israeli historian.

Shneer had never heard of Vilner and Fishbein eventually concluded that “no one either in Israel or in Russia—or anywhere else for that matter—neither scholars nor journalists” knew of Vilner.

Fishbein then checked the book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number), which provides a unique identification for books published internationally. It was 969-228-292-5.

The first group of numbers in a 10-digit ISBN denotes the country in which the book was published. The numbers 969 are for books published in Pakistan, not Israel. The number for Israel is 965.

In addition, ISBNs for books published in 2007 or later have 13 digits, not 10, another indication the Yushchenko book is a fake.

Fishbein says the fraudulent book was exposed in the Ukrainian press in 2008 and on an Israeli Web site, but that “Russian secret services” continue to use disinformation in “special operations” against Ukraine.

(Paul Goble, who spotted the Fishbein article, is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in Russia and the former Soviet Union.)

During our Dec. 22 conversation referenced below, Thomas Boghardt, the historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, noted that it was curious that the Soviet Union had launched a series of vicious anti-American disinformation campaigns during the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. On the surface, this seems incongruous.

Thomas is right. The Soviets AIDS disinformation campaign began in earnest in October 1985, after languishing following an initial covert press placement in 1983, described below. In 1987, the Soviets began disinformation on the false “baby parts” story and also published 100,000 copies of the disinformation book The Jonestown Carnage: Crime of the CIA, which blamed the 1978 mass killing in Jonestown, Guyana on the KGB’s favorite target for slander.

Oleg Kalugin, former Major General in the KGB and a member of the Spy Museum’s advisory board, offered a possible explanation. During Gorbachev’s time, he said, the communist political leadership relaxed its supervision of the KGB. The intelligence professionals had more freedom to pursue initiatives in a way they wished, without as much political oversight. Since standard KGB policy was to heap as much abuse as possible on the United States, they pursued this task with gusto.

(Oleg also mentioned that one of the Jonestown book’s co-authors, Andrei Itskov, was a former KGB colleague of his. Itskov is also identified in Christopher Andrew’s The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB as a KGB Service A active measures officer who worked with CIA defector Philip Agee in Agee’s efforts to discredit his former employer.)

But, at the same time the KGB was doing its disinformation thing, the Soviet political leadership was attempting to wage conciliatory political warfare centered on the theme of “eliminating the enemy image” of the USSR. Georgi Arbatov, head of the USSR’s Institute on the United States and Canada, stated in The New York Times in 1987, “We have a ‘secret weapon’ that will work almost regardless of the American response – we would deprive America of The Enemy.”

This contradiction between trying to “eliminate the enemy image” of the USSR while launching vile, anti-American disinformation campaigns created an opportunity that we exploited. By exposing Soviet disinformation vigorously in the late 1980s, the U.S. government was able to demonstrate to the Soviets that they could not have their cake and eat it, too. As a result, in 1987, the Soviets stopped spreading AIDS disinformation in Soviet media and in 1988 and 1989 they dramatically decreased their overt sponsorship of other anti-American disinformation campaigns.

I had an interesting conversation on Dec. 22 with Thomas Boghardt, the historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, and Oleg Kalugin, former Major General in the KGB, who is a member of the museum’s advisory board.

Thomas is researching the Soviet Bloc AIDS disinformation campaign and wanted to talk with me about it. I showed him a copy of the original covert disinformation press placement on this issue – a July 16, 1983 story in the Indian English-language newspaper Patriot, which was set up by the KGB.

The article, “AIDS may invade India: Mystery disease caused by US experiments,” purported to be an anonymous letter from a “well-known American scientist and anthropologist.” But several language errors revealed it was not written by a native English speaker.

First, it referred twice to the “virus flu,” instead of the “flu virus,” as English speakers say. At another point, it talked about the “real danger that AIDS may rapidly spread to India with the grave consequences to the people of the country.” A native English speaker would say “grave consequences,” not “the grave consequences,” probably followed by “for” instead of “to.” There is no definite article, aka the word “the,” in Russian, so Russian speakers frequently use a “the” when they shouldn’t – a further clue to the article’s origin.

The article also showed the signs of thorough, professional research characteristic of KGB’s Service A, which was responsible for disinformation. It cited The Army Research, Development and Acquisition Magazine, an odd magazine for an anthropologist to be reading. Oleg Kalugin noted that Soviet intelligence officers pored through obscure U.S. government publications on a regular basis, searching for something that could be taken out of context and used for their purposes.

In March 1992, then-Russian foreign intelligence chief (and later Russian Prime Minister) Yevgeni Primakov admitted that the KGB had concocted the AIDS-made-by-Pentagon story. The Russian newspaper Izvestiya reported on March 19, 1992:

[Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists’ “crafty” plots were fabricated in KGB offices.

In Oleg’s estimation, Russian disinformation and “active measures” went through a period of relative dormancy after the collapse of the USSR, but have revived. More on that later.

In an interesting opinion article in the November 21st New York Times, Cathy Young, who grew up in Moscow and lives in the United States, writes about Russian anti-Americanism.

She cites Russian journalist Leonid Radzikhovsky, who wrote, “the existential void of our politics has been filled entirely by anti-Americanism,” and that renouncing this rhetoric “would be tantamount to destroying the foundations of the state ideology.”

Young writes:

In the post-Soviet era, many Russians are angry because their country has neither the stature nor the living standards that they believe it deserves. … As frustrations mount, it is often easier to blame an external force than the country’s own failings. … The result is an inferiority complex toward the West and, in particular, the United States, as the pre-eminent Western power and cold war rival. This widespread sentiment combines admiration, envy, grievance, resentment, and craving for respect and acceptance as an equal.

Young notes, “in recent years, anti-Americanism has been carefully cultivated by official and semi-official propaganda, especially on government-controlled television, which manipulates popular insecurities and easily slides into outright paranoia.”

As examples, she cites the 2005 statement by a Russian official that “the avian flu was a myth created by the Americans to destroy Russia’s poultry farming industry” and this year’s airing on Russian television of a conspiracy theory film on the September 11 attacks.

Young does not foresee a U.S.-Russian honeymoon when President-elect Barack Obama takes office. She thinks, in contrast, that the Russian government “may be especially anxious to ratchet up anti-Americanism in response to the election of Mr. Obama, who is likely to make it more difficult for Russia to exploit animosity toward the United States in Europe and even the Third World.”

On November 19, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause wrote an account of what happened when he was shot and wounded while accompanying U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Ryan’s visit prompted Jonestown leader Jim Jones to murder Ryan and others in his party as well as 909 Jonestown residents, who died in a revolutionary “mass suicide.”

Krause recalls his encounter at that time with Mark Lane, a lawyer for Jonestown and author of one of the most influential conspiracy theory books on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment. Lane had accompanied Ryan, Krause and others in their visit to Jonestown, but escaped the carnage.

Krause writes:

A few days after the killings, Lane asked me if I had eaten the cheese sandwiches served to us that day before we left for the airstrip where I was wounded and Ryan was murdered. When I said yes, I had eaten the sandwiches, Lane said he had not – because he’d been told they were poisoned. Why hadn’t he told Ryan and the rest of us, I asked. There was no response.

Lane’s ethical lapses are also evident in Rush to Judgment. Vincent Bugliosi writes, in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “if the reader checks Lane’s assertions against the evidence produced by the [Warren] Commission … he or she will find that Lane’s contentions are either distortions or outright fabrications.”

Bugliosi notes that Lane says that none of the doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas observed a bullet entry wound in the back of his head. This would seem to indicate that Oswald, who was behind Kennedy, could not have been the assassin. But Bugliosi says the reason the doctors saw no entry wound is that they did not turn over Kennedy’s body to look at the back of his head. Their concern was treating his visible injuries to try to save his life.

It sounds like it’s not wise to trust either a cheese sandwich served by Lane’s employers or a book produced by him.

In a related historical footnote, when Vasili Mitrokhin, senior archivist for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 with thousands of transcribed summaries of KGB documents, he revealed the KGB had sent Lane, through an intermediary, $2000 to support his work on Rush to Judgment. Lane says he did not know these funds had come from the KGB, although the KGB suspected he might have guessed.

Thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978, Jim Jones ordered the mass “revolutionary suicide” of 909 of his followers in Jonestown, Guyana, as well as the murder of a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan, and others who accompanied him on his visit to investigate Jonestown.

Jones was a communist who admired Stalin and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, and who wanted to move his commune to the USSR. He was not religious. He stated, “We do not accept religion,” characterizing it, in Marxist terms, as the “opiate” of the people.

Jones was plagued by conspiratorial delusions. Deborah Layton Blakey, a member of Jones’ Peoples Temple for seven years, wrote in a June 15, 1978 affidavit:

Jones saw himself as the center of a conspiracy. The identity of the conspirators changed from day to day along with his erratic world vision. … He convinced black Temple members that if they did not follow him to Guyana, they would be put into concentration camps and killed. White members were instilled with the belief that their names appeared on a secret list of enemies of the state that was kept by the C.I.A. and that they would be tracked down, tortured, imprisoned, and subsequently killed if they did not flee to Guyana.

Blakey wrote: “in Jonestown, the concept of mass suicide for socialism arose. Because our lives were so wretched anyway and because we were so afraid to contradict Rev. Jones, the concept was not challenged.”

Mass suicides were rehearsed and, following Ryan’s visit, one was ordered by Jones. In a final act, he tried to give seven million dollars he had hoarded to the Soviet Communist Party. The letter to the Soviet consul in Guyana explained, “we, as Communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world.”

The 918 people who died 30 years ago at Jonestown were victims of Jones’ megalomania, conspiracy thinking, and communist delusions.