The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View

In practising what it calls disinformation, the Soviet union has for years sponsored grand deceptions calculated to mislead, confound, or inflame foreign opinion. Some of these subterfuges have had a considerable impact on world affairs. Some also have had unforeseeable consequences severely detrimental to Soviet interests. Ultimately, they have made the Soviet Union the victim of its own deceit... With KGB approval and support, the Czech STB in the autumn of 1964 initiated a vast deception campaign to arouse Indonesian passions against the United States. Through an Indonesian ambassador they had compromised with female agents, the Czechs purveyed to President Sukarno a series of forged documents and fictitious reports conjuring up CIA plots against him. One forgery suggested that the CIA planned to assassinate Sukarno; another 'revealed' a joint American-British plan to invade Indonesia from Malaysia. The unstable Sukarno responded with anti-American diatribes, which some Indonesian journalists in the pay of the KGB and STB amplified and Radio Moscow played back to the Indonesian people. Incited mobs besieged American offices in Djakarta, anti-American hysteria raged throughout the country, and US influence was eradicated. The former STB deception specialist Ladislav Bittman has written a history and analysis of the operation in which he participated. He states, 'We ourselves were surprised by the monstrous proportions to which the provocation grew.....