[2] During the Vietnam War, Johnson had ordered the CIA to monitor certain American citizens, notably the Black power and antiwar movements, which he feared were supported and infiltrated by foreign communists.
[3] In October 1979 Stanislav Levchenko, head of the Active Measures Line of the KGB Rezidentura in Tokyo, contacted American officials and was granted political asylum in the United States.
Levchenko's information, combined with that of Ladislav Bittman, who had been the deputy head of the Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service's Disinformation Department, was instrumental in helping the CIA understand many of the operations that were being carried out against the United States.
[3] The formation of the Interagency Active Measures Working Group was encouraged by William Casey, Director of the CIA, had high level State Department support from Lawrence Eagleburger, and the input of John Lenczowski of the National Security Council.
[3] The Interagency Active Measures Working Group combined the information gathered at USIA international posts, CIA reporting, and FBI investigations.
For example, the group initially published a report by David Hertzberg, a young INR analyst who had started his career with State just two years earlier while he was still an undergraduate at George Washington University.
In addition to special reports, the group published a series of State Department Foreign Affairs Notes that USIA distributed to journalists, academics, and other interested persons abroad.
[3] The group also held press conferences to expose Soviet forgeries and distributed copies of the fake documents to attending journalists.
[1] The group averaged presentations in two countries per week and visited NATO headquarters annually for meetings on Soviet active measures.
These visits were also geared toward gathering information from foreign governments about Soviet active measures campaigns conducted in their respective countries.
The Active Measures Working Group then reported conclusively that the letters were Soviet forgeries, which allowed USIA and the State Department to reassure the targeted African countries.
Gingrich also added an amendment to unrelated legislation stipulating that the State Department must produce a public report on Soviet active measures.
Responsibility for the report was assigned within the State Department to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which was headed by Ambassador Morton Abramowitz.
This report, as well as a Foreign Affairs Note published the month before, focused on the Soviet disinformation campaign seeking to attribute the AIDS virus to the U.S. Government.
In October 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev waved a copy of this report at U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, complaining that publishing such information undermined relations between their countries.
The State Department held a press conference (a video of which is here) to release the Report, which had a copy on its cover of the Pravda cartoon that accused the U.S. of creating the virus.
In June 2020, Michael McCaul announced that he would introduce legislation to recreate a modern version of the Active Measure Working Group to combat Chinese Communist Party propaganda and disinformation.