“We don’t stop the enemy. We let him go.”
Wrote this in 2020. Posting now.
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet journalist who defected to the United States in 1970.
By the early 1980s he was writing and speaking (1, 2) widely to anti-Communist audiences about the use by Soviet intelligence services of “active measures” to subvert the political processes of countries around the world, including the United States. Bezmenov was not alone in issuing these warnings. At about the same time the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Public Communication (then led by my father, Paul Auerswald), issued this report about “Soviet Active Measures;” the U.S Congress also held multiple hearings on this topic (1, 2) — precursors to the hearings held since 2016. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the KGB, concern over Russia’s use of active measures waned. The general assumption was that this Cold War technique for advancing the aims of global Communism would die with Communism itself.
In the past decade — well before publicity around the DNC hack July 2016 began to bring the story of Russian “active measures” out into the open — a relatively small number of particularly well-informed people began to understand, and to communicate, how the intelligence services of the Russian Federation, under the direction of President Vladimir Putin, had not only resurrected but intensified their use of these techniques — initially in Eastern Europe, and subsequently elsewhere on the European Continent (including the United Kingdom). These notably include Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev, Josh Marshall, and the RAND Corporation (e.g. 1, 2, 3). Some even foresaw how active measures might be used in, and against, the United States. (I wrote my own first post on this topic on July 30, 2016, just after the DNC hack became public.) Their work provides essential background for anyone seeking to understand Russian interference in U.S. elections and long-term attempts to undermine U.S. institutions of democracy.
Yet the warnings first issued by Yuri Bezmenov a quarter-century ago continue to have an eerie, almost poetic resonance today. Bezmenov’s account is also of current interest because he described the approaches employed by Soviet intelligence services at exactly the time that Vladimir Putin (himself also a career KGB agent) was training in counter-intelligence methods at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad.
“In reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all.” Bezmenov said in an 1984 interview.
He continued:
According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’ — ‘активные мероприятия’ in the language of the KGB — or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
In an earlier, 1983 talk, he offered an elaboration, using the analogy of martial arts (into which I have added my own editorial and current context-setting links):
Sometimes when I describe all the methods, students ask me a question: Are you sure this is the result of Russian influence? Not necessarily.
You see the tactic of subversion is similar to the martial art of judo.
If an enemy is bigger and heavier than yourself, it would be would be very naive and counter-productive to stop his blow. Judo tells us what to do: First to avoid the strike. Then grab [your adversary’s] fist and continue his movement in the direction it was headed … until the enemy crashes into a wall.
So, what happens here: the target country starts by doing something wrong. (1, 2, 3).
If it’s a free democratic society there are many different movements within the society. Obviously, in any society, there are people who are against the society. There may be simple criminals, ideologues in disagreement with the state policy, conscientious enemies, simply psychotic people who are against anything. And finally, there are a small group of agents of a foreign nation: bought, subverted, recruited.
The moment all these movements will be directed in one direction, this is the time to catch that movement and to continue until the movement forces the whole society into collapse, into crisis.
That is exactly the martial art tactic. We don’t stop the enemy. We let him go.
The above text — with one word modified, “Soviet” replaced with “Russian” in the first sentence — is verbatim as spoken by 10:42–12:53, in this video.
Here’s the point: Putin did not create the circumstances that led to Trump’s victory in 2016. But he capitalized on those circumstances, using the decades-old techniques of “active measures” turbo-charged for the twenty-first century with social media targeting and cyber-warfare.
Putin — a judo prodigy and eighth-degree black belt — kept the tools of the KGB in which he was trained and ditched the (Communist) ideology.
To state the obvious, he is doing the same right now.
A bit about my own personal history, as a preface to this post and my others from 2016: “Our political process is bigger than our political parties”
For those interested in history, I recommend these two books: I (in particular, chapter 15 on Ukraine), and II (worth buying for story of the fall of the Berlin Wall alone).
