COVERT & ILLEGITIMATE ACTIVE MEASURES
Most of the “covert” and “unlawful” actions have already been well described in many books by many Western authors (John Barron's “KGB Today” is one of the most recent). I shall list only several of them, known to be conducted through the Novosti Press Agency. Some of these active measures are harmful and unlawful enough to attract the attention of the law enforcement organs of the Free World, but remain unpunished for various diplomatic reasons, such as not wanting to “rock the boat” or “threaten the Russians,” or so as not to “harm the spirit of detente,” etc. Others are considered to be too unlikely to stand up in court, and, even if proven to be unlawful, too unlikely to result in punishment of the offender, that is the Soviet Government, by, say, collecting judgments or fines from the USSR, or for that matter from the administration of the Novosti Press Agency. In fact, there is a “catch”: the official Prospectus of APN specifics that “Novosti will not be legally responsible for any claims against the Soviet State,” and the other way around: the Soviet State is not accountable for claims against the Novosti (since it is a “non-government” organization).
Many of these active measures are “covert” only in a purely formal sense: every sensible member of the Western (or Eastern) security service knows perfectly well about Novosti mischief, and so does the media. Conservative and anti-Communist groups make this information available to the public and to government bureaucrats. It is being consistently ignored both by the bureaucrats and by the public, who prefer to remain in blissful ignorance about such unpleasant facts, leading to the uncomfortable realization that they are being duped.
So, with the support of, or in cooperation with, the KGB, with practically unlimited financing by the Soviet State (which in turn is being financed by the Western banks and the multinational corporations) with the assistance of foreign collaborators, and without any fear of being taken before any court of justice and punished, Novosti Press Agency performs the following dirty tricks and pays the following moneys (and awards) to the collaborators:
Service No. 1
Defamation and slander campaigns against Soviet citizens (dissidents, moral protesters, intellectuals, etc.) who fell into disfavor with the Soviet junta. If and when it is done in the Soviet media by a foreign collaborator, the “royalty” is paid either in Soviet rubles (the same rate as for the “overt” publication), or in a foreign currency, or through various “bonuses,” such as a free trip to the USSR. Thus, for defamation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet media, several Western writers and journalists were listed as “progressive” and their names were added to the lists for future invitations by the Novosti. For slandering Solzhenitsyn in Pravda, a Canadian writer by the name of Farley Mowat was awarded another free trip to Siberia, where he did research for another book-- a “bestseller” [this?] about the happy life of Soviet Eskimos. For slandering academician Sakharov in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, another Canadian “progressive” journalist, Mary Dawson, may simply have been paid some 3,000 decadent Canadian dollars in the innocent form of a “literary prize” from a Communist tabloid such as the Canadian Tribune.
Some of the remuneration to the collaborators comes in the form of a “valuable present,” as described above.
Due to the fact that Soviet dissidents have absolutely no opportunity to bring their foreign offenders to court (a Soviet or a Western one), most of the slanderers and defamers remain unpunished and free to enjoy Novosti payments and favors. Conversely, if a Soviet citizen would dare to say something “disrespectful” about any of the foreign stooges of the Kremlin, he may he charged with “defamation and slander” according to Articles 130 & 131 of the Soviet Criminal Code. The punishment may vary from a heavy fine to 3 years of imprisonment plus exile, unless “compounding ideological evidence” is found, in which case the Soviet dissident will end up either in the GULAG or in a psychiatric asylum.
Service No. 2
The same, but in the media of the Free World. In this case the foreign collaborator (slanderer) is being paid twice: once from the Novosti (in Rubles), and the second time in a foreign currency, by the publishers of the “progressive” media in the West.
Service No. 3
Slander, defamation or libel directed against a foreign person-- a politician, writer, publisher, etc.-- preferably an influential and anti-Communist (conservative, patriotically-minded person), resisting Soviet influence in his own country. The list of most desirable targets for the Novosti-KGB-orchestrated process of character assassination includes virtually every prominent public figure of the Free World daring to criticize Soviet foreign policy or Soviet practices at home. In India during my career with the Soviet embassy, such [a] target was Mr. Morarjee Desai, leader of “conservative opposition” to Indira Gandhi's ruling National Congress party. With financial and ideological encouragement from Novosti, collaborators in the leftist liberal media poured gallons of venom on that person, describing him as a “reactionary, fascist, ultra-right-wing fanatic, lackey of Western imperialism, etc.” Apart from name-calling, Novosti-sponsored radical tabloids published bits and pieces of rumors, half-truths and pure fabrications, designed to discredit this politician. It is difficult to distinguish, sometimes, a locally created hate campaign against a conservative politician from a Novosti-orchestrated one. To my knowledge, the role of many collaborators is often simply to fan the flames of slander hysteria. And it is difficult, indeed (unless one has an “insider” within the Soviet embassy), to establish the fact of payment to a collaborator. Even if payment could be proven, the law enforcement body of a target country has the problem of proving that the payment relates to specific seditious lies circulated in the media.
After my defection to the West and settling in Canada, I came across a classic example of how the libel (or character assassination) process is initiated. A Canadian journalist and broadcaster with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a Mr. Mark Starowicz, for several years was supplying KGB agent Konstantin Geiwandov (officially a Pravda correspondent in Ottawa) with all sorts of information of a rather private nature about several members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Mr. Starowicz was handsomely paid for his services. He knew perfectly well the purpose of comrade Geiwandov's curiosity: that information was needed for only one possible purpose-- defamation. He also knew that what he was doing is described in Canadian law as “violation of privacy” and “spreading of gossip, harmful to individual(s).” But when the whole story was revealed in a conservative Canadian newspaper, The Toronto Sun, Mark Starowicz was not even reprimanded by the management of the CBC. On the contrary, he was promoted to the position of managing producer for one of the most popular and politically influential TV programs (“Sunday Magazine.” [The Journal?]) Interviewed by journalists, Mr. Starowicz responded to the effect that “writing for a foreign newspaper (Pravda), and receiving money for that, is not a crime in Canada.” He was right. Legally speaking.
A recent example of a character assassination campaign in the Western media which looks to me like a typical APN-KGB trick is The New York Times' charges against Salvadorian politician Roberto D'Aubuisson of being involved in “a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador.” To this date, The New York Times has failed to produce a single shred of evidence, or, for that matter, any common-sense logical explanation-- why would a leader of the second biggest political party in El Salvador be interested in murdering an American ambassador? (Especially on the eve of the U.S. Congress debate on the issue of U.S. financial aid to El Salvador.)
What we did during my career with the Novosti-KGB was indeed very simple. We would first plant a fabrication like that (against D'Aubuisson) in a lousy, insignificant leftist or Communist tabloid in a target country. Step two: Pravda (or one of APN's publications, press releases, etc.) would reprint that “news item,” referring to the source of information as an “influential progressive newspaper.” Step three: The New York Times (or Washington Post, or some other respectable Western paper) would quote Pravda, repeating the accusation. Step four: one of the Soviet commentators (Vladimir Pozner of Radio Moscow, incidentally my former colleague within APN-KGB; or Gennadi Gerasimov, or George Adamov) would quote The New York Times during an interview, such as on “ABC Nightline” referring to the news item as an expression of Western opinion. By the time the lie reaches the western public, it is nearly impossible to trace it all the way back to the third-rate tabloid, least of all to the originator of the slander-- Novosti Press Agency. This is exactly what happened to the “opinion” that the ill-fated KAL 007 was indeed “on a spy mission for the CIA” and that its shooting down by the Soviet MIGs was a justified “response. “The main objective of that disinformation trick is achieved: Western public opinion is skillfully SIDE-TRACKED from the real issues, which are: 1. The cold-blooded murder of 269 passengers of a civilian aircraft; 2. Soviet violations of the SALT treaties, which fact they were trying to hide; 3. There is hardly anything “secret” about Sakhalin Island-- every square inch of it has been photographed by United States satellites thousands of times. A simple and common-sense explanation of the incident never occurred to the minds of the Western analysts. The true nature of the Soviet system is being obscured again. The Western public was once more lured into wishful thinking and “forgiveness.” This is exactly what “active measures” are designed for.
Service No. 4
Infiltration into political organizations and groups which are considered by the KGB to be “anti-Soviet” or “reactionary,” and destroying these groups from within, using blackmail, corruption, bribery, sex scandals; exposing members of these organizations to local law enforcement agencies, and to pressure groups and “special interest” groups; filing suits in court against these organizations by charging them with “violation of civil rights,” etc.; and orchestrating vicious smear campaigns in the liberal media. Here Novosti plays the role of catalyst in this process. Rank-and-file members of the Liberal attackers seldom suspect that several (or one) of their leaders are in fact collaborators of APN-KGB. They probably would not care even if they knew it for sure.
Service No. 5
Slander campaigns against émigré groups and organizations in Western countries; spreading racial and ethnic hatred among various communities of immigrants from Communist (or Socialist, Soviet-controlled) countries, with the ultimate purpose of neutralizing them as a political force, isolating them from the natural democratic political process, preventing them from using freedom of the press and associations; preventing them from influencing and educating public opinion in the host countries by revealing the truth about the systems from which they have escaped. By calling the people from Communist countries “crazy ethnics” and “fringe lunatics,” collaborators of APN-KGB among the Liberal left in the West do their greatest service to the Soviet propaganda. They dismiss the information and opinions of the immigrants as “ravings of emotionally unbalanced people, paranoids, who see a Communist under every bed.”
I have met a number of such collaborators in Canada, where they are very active and effective. Some of them have a sympathetic ear in the Liberal government of Canada and the Civil Service.
Service No. 6
Financial, organizational and moral aid to local groups of radicals, militants, and outright terrorists. Novosti collaborators act in this area as middlemen to obscure the direct Soviet involvement in subversive and terrorist active measures in foreign countries. APN-KGB maintains a large network of useful contacts in many universities for the purpose of selecting and cultivating future recruits for “national liberation movements” and similar organizations. During my career in India, for example, one of my functions was to compile lists of young “progressively-minded” people, who could be recommended later for enrollment in “studies” at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow. The first step to such an objective is to befriend young people by regularly inviting them to various “social occasions” organized by the APN together with the “Cultural Department” of the Soviet embassy.
Financial aid to such groups in target countries (when they are created and led by graduates of Lumumba University) is affected through the above-mentioned front organizations and Novosti-created “organs of progressive mass media.” Moral support comes in the form of a steady flow of propaganda literature, edited and translated in Moscow by APN, but printed by friendly local publishers.
Service No. 7
With the help of foreign collaborators, APN-KGB orchestrates defamation and disinformation operations directed against the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the target countries. This process is well-described by John Barron (“KGB Today”) and by Arnaud de Borchgrave & Robert Moss in their classic novel “The Spike.”
What I have described here is nothing new. Thousands of defectors from Communism have been telling the same stories for the past half-century. One of the latest defectors from the KGB, incidentally my former schoolmate from the Institute of Oriental Languages, Stanislav Levchenko, succeeded where I have failed for the last 14 years since my defection: he convinced John Barron to present the sensitive issue of ideological subversion (active measures) to the Western public. In its essence, the process of subversion is also not new-- it has not been invented by the Russians, or Communists-- it is as old as mankind itself. In 500 B.C., Chinese philosopher and strategist Sun-Tzu formulated the main principle of subversion very simply: “The highest art of war is not to fight on a battle field, but to subvert the enemy by destroying all the moral values in your enemy's country.”
The core of active measures consists of a consistent effort to demoralize the public, the majority of the population in the West. The media is the most convenient vehicle for such demoralization. Whether the “useful idiots” of the media do it for profit, for self-glorification, or due to ignorance or fear of “Mother Russia,” is totally immaterial. The rewards which APN-KGB collaborators receive are pathetic by Western standards, but they have to be taken into consideration. Here they are:
Material rewards
Regular payments in Soviet or foreign currency; free trips to the USSR for tourism, pleasure, indoctrination, or medical treatment in special clinics and sanatoriums; valuable gifts, from “Matreshka dolls” to automobiles.
Rewards of a material nature
Moneys paid in the form of “Lenin's (or some other dictator's) Prizes” which accomplishes two jobs at one time: vindicating a dictator and corrupting the prize-winner); covering expenses for publications of the collaborator's books and other works; admitting the collaborator's children to Soviet schools and universities for “free education.”
Rewards of a prestigious nature
Granting the title of “progressive” journalist (or writer, etc.); invitation to an international forum or a conference organized by APN-KGB; arranging meetings with “rare and famous” personalities in the USSR (space pilots, ballerinas, etc.); invitation to attend a celebration of something or other (like the October Revolution) at the Soviet embassy with lots of booze and nice girls (KGB “Lastochkas”); a trip to a “closed location,” such as a nuclear research center; an honorary scientific “degree” from one of the Soviet universities; a replica of “Sputnik.”
Rewards of [an] amoral nature
Sex (often perverted), alcohol, drugs.
And in exchange for these miserable (by Western standards) rewards, the foreign collaborators of Novosti trade to the Soviet tyrants something priceless-- the collective consciousness of their own nations, freedom of thought and sanity of judgment, and-- in the long run-- FREEDOM itself.
If we believe that the Communist threat is a MORAL problem, the solution to it exists, probably, somewhere in the realm of the IMMATERIAL, moral, or even SPIRITUAL existence of humans.
[Another collaborator of Novosti-- Mr.Kumaramangalam, accompanied by the author during his trip to Samarkand. Mr.Kumaramangalam refused to yield to the KGB-Novosti pressure to influence his brother-- Chief of General Staff of Indian armed forces. Several years later he died in an air crash.]
PENTAGON'S GUN FODDER OR AMERICA'S CONSCIENCE?
For a long time I refused to believe that our anti-American propaganda, even with a little help from such friends as Jane Fonda and Harrison Salisbury, could so successfully mislead the world that no one seemed able to see who the real aggressor was in Vietnam. Until I met four US Army deserters.
It happened on September 16, 1968, while Novosti staffers were still recuperating from the shock inflicted on us by the “normalization” of fraternal Czechoslovakia by our tanks. I was summoned by our Asia Department boss, comrade Pushkov. In his office I was introduced to an unsmiling comrade in civilian clothes, whom I identified as a GRU (military intelligence) officer. For a KGB he lacked that peculiar expression of dishonesty and artificial politeness on his face. It was explained to me that, together with the serious comrade and an APN photographer, I was to visit a group of Americans, “honest young men, the conscience of America,” said the boss. “Communist defectors,” I thought. “How boring!”
A black APN Volga took us by Leningradskoye shosse about 70 km north of Moscow. It was getting dark when we turned east into an unpaved country road, and went on through mud and large puddles for another half hour. On the way we passed two small gray collective farms, where, despite the total electrification achieved after the seventh five-year plan, not a single “Ilyich light bulb” was to be seen. Finally we entered an old estate on the bank of a small river. It looked like a large neglected park or a pioneer camp, with sandy driveway, rare flower beds, and numerous propaganda posters on plywood boards stuck wherever possible. The slogans were in English and Russian.
In a large guest room of an ancient pre-revolutionary mansion, we found four young boys in blue jeans and worn-out sweaters, looking like anything but the US Army soldiers we used to see on photographs in the Soviet media, with sarcastic captions such as “Pentagon’s gun fodder,” “American military war criminals,” etc. Two of them had long, untidy hair, one sported a beard “a-la-Russ,” and the fourth desperately wanted to look like Che Guevara. The “gun fodder” or “America's conscience” were playing billiards and were obviously bored. Our arrival was a welcome change for them.
Their story sounded like many other stories about Vietnam I had read in West European and Canadian newspapers. Charles Nathan Smith, Sarry Tipton, Robert Fiorris and Joseph Parra met in a hospital in Japan, where all four of them had been sent for treatment of minor wounds and detoxification from drug abuse. Released from the hospital, the GIs spent some time with Japanese girls, following the Beatles' slogan, “make love not war,” and decided to dedicate the rest of their lives to the struggle for peace.
For smiling red-head Sarry Tipton, it was “a hopeless war” because, as he said, the moment the Americans left, it would take the Communists two days to liberate the South. Charles Smith's excuse was “fear of becoming a professional killer.” Handsome Mexican-looking field doctor Joseph Parra expressed the desire “to treat, not wounds, when it is too late, but peoples' heads, before they go to war.” Robert Fiorris, the one with Czar Nicholas' beard, had a good reason to desert. It is criminal, he said, to kill the Vietnamese just because they want to live under Communism.
Having come to these profound conclusions, the four GIs one day walked right into the Soviet embassy and asked for political asylum and a chance to tell the world the truth about Vietnam. Both requests were promptly granted. The deserters were flown to Moscow and introduced to the expert on truth: Novosti.
The “press-conference” lasted hardly a quarter of an hour. The deserters, it seemed, knew all of my questions ahead of time, and I definitely knew in advance everyone of their answers. Putting my tape recorder aside, I tried to get rid of the GRU comrade by inviting the boys for a walk in the park, hoping for something more sincere in an informal atmosphere. Nothing doing! Even then, the boys went on playing back our propaganda to me: the United States was bad, Hanoi was good; killing the North Vietnamese with American bombs was a crime, killing the South Vietnamese with Soviet-made rockets was an anti-colonial struggle, therefore it was “good.”
The damn “rest home” had no bar, where I could pump some vodka into the Americans to make them less progressive, and the GRU agent was uncooperative when I suggested that we send our Volga to the nearest village store for a bottle. So, my efforts to get a “balanced” picture of the Vietnam War failed miserably. Time was running short, and the Novosti photographer, having exposed all his film, had lost interest in geopolitics and was impatient to go back home. So, we shook hands, pronounced meaningless “goodlucks” and “see-you-laters,” and left.
On the way back to Moscow it suddenly dawned on me that the Americans may actually have been telling me the truth, the way they saw it. Why would they care who is the real aggressor and who is the victim? They wanted to survive, and to enjoy life. And any “truth” which helped them to survive was OK with them. What do they care if that “truth” happens to be a big Communist lie, fabricated for the ultimate purpose of “liberating mankind,” which means destroying the society that has given them birth, life, and freedom, and which society now asked that they defend it by risking their lives? Their choice was clear: to die defending the better and freer society, or to survive in the worst one. Dead or red? They have chosen red and alive, and they do not want to be called traitors for making that choice. They'd rather be called “America's conscience.”
I, too, was contemplating defection. I would gladly have changed places with these GIs. But how about dying? And what sort of truth I would offer to justify my treason? Would anyone believe me if I said that betraying my country's inhuman and aggressive system, to help the West, is an act of conscience, self-sacrifice, and heroism?
These thoughts were driving me crazy. At moments like these, I needed a glass of vodka or a good friend to talk to. Or both. And, sending our photographer and Volga to the office, I flagged down a taxi and zoomed by the Ring Road to Kuntsevo Hospital, reserved for apparatus of the Central Committee and nomenklatura. There, behind the tall barbed-wire fence, in a “special” room with a TV set, my former schoolmate Vadim Smirnov was recuperating after an operation on his eye. (He had lost one eye in a stupid fight in Pitsunda, a Central Committee Black Sea resort, where, he said, a group of Georgians and local thugs trespassed onto the “Party property” and started a squabble with the Muscovites).
Kuntsevo hospital is heavily guarded by militia, but one has to know our Soviet security system. I sneaked into the area through a fox-hole under the face, about two hundred meters away from the brightly lit gateway. Once inside, no internal guard had the right to stop me. I got to the 8th floor uneventfully, and found comrade Smirnov in a rather depressed state of mind. His eye ached, and his reputation, as the youngest apparatchik in the India section of the International Department of the CC, was in question.
Nevertheless, Smirnov was glad to see me, and as usual, ready to listen to my problems or crazy ideas. I relayed to Smirnov the story of my meeting with the four American deserters, including their excellent playback of our propaganda, and then I shared some of my thoughts with him. How come, I asked, we're hysterical about the “psychological war of the Pentagon,” but the American GIs I had just met were so shamelessly “unbrainwashed”? How come the US Army is unable to occupy the whole damn country of Vietnam, if they're really the “warmongers” our propaganda claims? How come the war goes on-- on the territory of South Vietnam, not the North, if, as we claim, the “democratic” Vietnamese are a “peace-loving nation”? How do we, the Soviet people, benefit from supporting the Communists in Vietnam?
The young apparatchik was silent for a while, and then, instead of an answer, almost like a biblical prophet he told me a story, a dream he had had recently. The symbolism of my friend's dream shook me strongly.
“I found myself in an armored personnel carrier as it climbed onto the steep bank of a marsh, coughing out clouds of exhaust. In front of us, somewhere beyond a cluster of bushes and palm trees, we could hear sharp bursts of machine gun fire and the occasional blasts of mortars. My companions were strong, healthy boys, and I could not tell if they also were feeling the same sickening fear in their stomachs, as I did. With tightly pursed lips, and calm eyes with flickers of steel in them, they serenely looked at the scenery from under their camouflaged helmets set low above their eyebrows, as if they were on a sightseeing tour of Vietnam, not at war. They sat in straight but relaxed postures, casually holding their carbines. Some quietly chatted with their neighbors. A black soldier next to me was elegantly smoking something suspicious. There were about twenty of them, plus a sergeant. Their lazy laughter and crude jokes, which I did not understand, were in screaming discord with my own mood, and they irritated me. I felt out of place among these American soldiers, with my own fears, my dogmatic ideas, in the middle of a strange war which, in a way, was inexplicably a concern of mine.
“‘Laugh your stupid heads off,’ I mumbled in a trembling voice. ‘Damned cowboys!’ Why bother yourselves with such things as conscience?’
“Nobody responded. No one even turned his head to look at me. Fear and anger swelled in my chest, and words uncontrollably started pouring out of me, before I could realize what the hell I was talking about.
“‘Who gave you the right to kill the Vietnamese?’ I asked in a loud voice, tense with indignation I did not really feel. ‘Why don’t you go home to your color TVs and pumpkin pies, and leave the Vietnamese alone, to decide what they really want, communism or your so-called democracy?’ I almost shouted at the soldiers.
“Again, there was no response. The black soldier looked through me and tossed a roach over his shoulder. There was an ominous pause, and in the hot humid air the sound of my voice competed with the roar of the engine and bursts of gunfire. I knew I should shut up, but I could not.
“‘You are the professional killers!’ I shouted at the top of my lungs. ‘You are the brainless gun fodder of the Pentagon! You are the ‘universal soldiers,’ as your own Bob Dylan calls you! You are... you…’
“Someone behind me asked in a soft voice ‘Who the hell is he?’ And I didn’t know whether he was asking about me, or Bob Dylan.
“The carrier braked sharply and stopped in a cloud of red dust. ‘Dismount!’ ordered the sergeant in a strangely un-military tone. And the soldiers started jumping out of the carrier, lightly and gracefully as cats. Several GIs stepped right over me, as if I were an object. The sounds of guns grew louder and closer. Somewhere above, an Army chopper rattled through and disappeared beyond the tops of the palm trees. While I was watching it, the American soldiers silently moved into the bush, leaving me alone in the carrier. There was a wild orgy of gunfire, several blasts, and then a deafening silence. The tops of the bushes swayed, ahead of the carrier. In a moment I saw the tip of a machine gun popping out of a grass thicket. Then the black-haired head of a Vietcong soldier. Then another. And another from the right. With trembling hands I reached into the pocket of my shirt and produced a handful of badges with Lenin’s profile on a red background, and a couple of postcards with views of the Red Square and the Kremlin.
“‘Don’t shoot!’ I pleaded. ‘I am Friend! Russki! Freedom! Peace! Communism!’ I shouted in a strained, hoarse voice, waving the postcards at the Vietcong. They silently encircled the carrier. The leader of the group guardedly walked up to me, and with a movement of his Kalashnikov barrel ordered me to step down. Keeping the muzzle aimed at me with one hand he took the badges and the postcards with the other, and stuffed them into his tunic pocket, eyeing me all the time unemotionally. I tried to smile, and stretched out my hand as a sign of friendship. The Vietnamese pulled the trigger and shot three times into my stomach, sending me back against the carrier. The last things I saw were his calm, hateful eyes, and the steel-covered butt of his Kalashnikov crushing my skull against the steel wall of the carrier…
The only way I could interpret this dream of the Central Committee’s apparatchik is: guilt, the feeling most of my generation of the Soviet “new class” desperately want to suppress. Because, unlike the American “peaceniks,” we know perfectly well who is the aggressor, and our conscience bothers us.
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TOMAS SCHUMAN has been personally involved with the world-wide propaganda efforts of the Soviet regime. Like a true-life Winston Smith, from George Orwell’s “1984,” Tomas Schuman worked for the communist equivalent of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth--The Novosti Press Agency. Novosti, which means “News” in Russian, exists to produce slanted and false stories to plant in the foreign media. The term for this K.G.B. effort is “disinformation.”Mr. Schuman was born under the name of Yuri Bezmenov in Moscow in 1939, the son of a senior officer in the Red Army. Consequently, he went to good schools. At the age of 17 he entered the Institute of Oriental Languages of Moscow State University.
After graduating, he worked for Novosti, then spent two years in India as an interpreter and public relations officer with Soviet Refineries Constructions. He returned to Moscow in 1965 to work for Novosti, serving as Economic Editor for the Hindi, Urdu and English Editions of Soviet Land Magazine. In 1969 he went back to India and continued propaganda efforts for Novosti in New Delhi, working out of the Soviet Embassy in a department called Research and Counter-Propaganda. Due to his growing disgust, he began to plan defection.
In February of 1970 he disguised himself as a hippie complete with beads and wig and joined a tour group to escape to Athens. He contacted the United States Embassy and, after a long debriefing by U.S. Intelligence, was granted asylum and went to Canada.
In Canada, he studied political science at the University of Toronto for two years, taught Russian language and literature and in 1972 was hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s International Service as a Producer/Announcer, broadcasting to the Soviet Union, The K.G.B. forced him out of the job in 1976, so he began free-lance journalism and worked on a variety of projects.
Today he is a political analyst for PANORAMA in Los Angeles. He is married, and has two children. He is the author of two yet unpublished books.
You can order this book by mailing your check made to N.A.T.A. (New American Talent Association)-- $5.00 plus 60 cents for postage-- to: Almanac, [address omitted], Los Angeles, Ca 90036. Tape-cassettes with Schuman’s talk on KGB’s Active Measures are available for $5 a piece plus postage.
ALMANAC
Los Angeles, 1985
ISBN 0-935090-14-2
Copyright by Tomas Schuman
[Thanks again.]
