[2][6][7] Eventually, the Soviets were defeated at the battle of Warsaw, but they learned from the war of the importance of foreign propaganda that could sway Western public opinion, and would continue to use similar strategies in the future.
They included: In October 1981, the Danish authorities expelled Vladimir Merkulov, a Soviet Embassy second secretary and KGB operative, whom they charged with passing money to Arne Herløv Petersen, a member of the WPC's Danish affiliate, the Copenhagen-based Liaison Committee for Peace and Security, to finance a newspaper campaign calling for the establishment of a Nordic nuclear weapons-free zone.
[14][15] The main activity of the WPC was organizing enormous international peace conferences with thousands in attendance; they condemned western military action, armaments and weapons tests but refrained from criticizing Russian aggression.
[16] Because of the energetic propaganda of the WPC from the late 1940s onwards, with its big conferences and budget from the Soviet Union, some observers saw no difference between a peace activist and a communist.
"[21] Richard Felix Staar in his book Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union says that non-communist peace movements without overt ties to the USSR were "virtually controlled" by it.
[30] In November 1981, Norway expelled a suspected KGB agent who had offered bribes to Norwegians to get them to write letters to newspapers denouncing the deployment of new NATO missiles.
[21] In 1985 Time magazine noted "the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter hypothesis was promoted by Moscow to give antinuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America's arms buildup.
"[31] Sergei Tretyakov claimed that the data behind the nuclear winter scenario was faked by the KGB and spread in the west as part of a campaign against Pershing II missiles.
[32] He said that the first peer-reviewed paper in the development of the nuclear winter hypothesis, "Twilight at Noon" by Paul Crutzen and John Birks (1982),[33] was published as a result of this KGB influence.
[21] In 1983, MI5 and MI6 reported to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Soviet contacts with the peace movement, based on the testimony of KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky.