Soviet disinformation

[4] William Safire wrote in his 1993 book, Quoth the Maven, that disinformation was used by the KGB predecessor to indicate: "manipulation of a nation's intelligence system through the injection of credible, but misleading data".

[9] Ion Mihai Pacepa, former senior official from the Romanian secret police, said the word was coined by Joseph Stalin and used during World War II.

[10] Soviet intelligence used the term maskirovka (Russian military deception) to refer to a combination of tactics including disinformation, simulation, camouflage, and concealment.

[1][5] Pacepa recalled that the Soviet manuals said the origins of disinformation stemmed from phony towns constructed by Grigory Potyomkin in Crimea to wow Catherine the Great during her 1783 journey to the region—subsequently referred to as Potemkin villages.

[14] A major disinformation effort in 1964, Operation Neptune, was designed by the Czechoslovak secret service, the StB, to defame West European politicians as former Nazi collaborators.

[18] According to American journalist Max Holland, Soviet archives, particularly those released by Vasili Mitrokhin, "prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination."

Among other incidents, Holland stated that the KGB planted a false story in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera alleging that Clay Shaw, whom New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison indicted in connection with the assassination, was a high-level "CIA operative".

Holland writes that "Arguably, [JFK] is the only American feature film made during the Cold War to have, as its very axis, a lie concocted in the KGB's disinformation factories.

"[19] According to senior SVR officer Sergei Tretyakov, the KGB had been responsible for creating the entire nuclear winter story as an attempt to stop the deployment of Pershing II missiles.

[20] Tretyakov said that in 1979, the KGB started work to prevent the United States from deploying the missiles in Western Europe and that they had been directed by Yuri Andropov to distribute disinformation, based on a faked "doomsday report" by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

[14] That posture changed during the Carter administration, however, after the White House had been made the subject of a propaganda operation by Soviet intelligence to affect international relations between the U.S. and South Africa.

[14] Prior to the revelation by Powell, an advance copy of the 18 September 1980 issue of San Francisco-based publication the Sun Reporter had been disseminated, which carried the fake claims.

[14] Sun Reporter was published by Carlton Benjamin Goodlett, a Presidential Committee member of a Soviet front group, the World Peace Council.