"Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare".

• Author: Schoenfeld, Michael
• Position: Book review

"Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare"

By Thomas Rid

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2020

ISBN-10 : 0374287260

ISBN-13 : 978-0374287269

528 pages

"The goal of disinformation is to engineer division by putting emotion over analysis, division over unity, conflict over consensus, the particular over the universal," notes Thomas Rid in his richly detailed and eminently readable "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare."

While that description could have been ripped from any of the infinite number of op-eds and cable news panels on the U.S. elections and the corrosive impact of malignant state actors manipulating public opinion on social media, it is also the animating concept of a century's worth of operations that sometimes seemed as if they were ripped from Mad Magazine's classic "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon, but were in fact deadly serious.

A professor of information security at Johns Hopkins University, Rid brings his personal experiences as a German-born political scientist and a longtime student of disinformation. In addition to the limited material available from Russian and East German records, declassified files from the U.S. and personal interviews, Rid appears to have hit the archival jackpot with Bulgarian state security, which was one of the KGB's most loyal and aggressive acolytes.

Rid deftly recounts the four waves of disinformation that can be traced back to the formation of the Soviet Union in the early part of the 20th century, starting with the opening of the truly mass media, which included rapid and inexpensive distribution of printed material, the telephone and telegraph, and then radio.

The post-war era, and the start of the Cold War, saw that tactics and techniques that had been honed to near perfection by all sides of the global conflict turned into an equally serious conflict between the American "political warfare" and the Soviet "disinformation." This led directly to the third wave in the late 1970's when the clash of ideologies was positioned as a struggle, literally, for the survival of civilization and the human race. And then, of course, technology disrupted politics, and politics disrupted technology, as the internet democratized disinformation and created the most pernicious of level playing fields.

During this time, the Soviets and the Americans tested their messages on every part of the disinformation spectrum. But certain patterns emerged...