Active Measures Series: An Intro To the KGB Playbook

Our New Series on How Russia Attacked the 2016 U.S. Election to Help Trump Win

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Jul 28, 2025

Join us on Monday, July 27th, at 2:30 PM EDT for a Substack Live as we launch the podcast companion to this series. You can tune in here: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/46279

The Cold War strategy that never ended—and how it was reborn to destabilize American institutions and subvert democracies around the world.

Introduction

As Republicans work to rewrite history and obscure the reality of Russia’s multi-pronged assault on the 2016 U.S. election,

Olga Lautman

and I are launching our new series—Active Measures: Russia’s Attack on the 2016 U.S. Election—to challenge the gaslighting, expose the disinformation, and confront the collective amnesia that has settled across much of the media and political establishment. This project exists to set the record straight: to document, with clarity, evidence, and historical context, the decades-old KGB playbook that former KGB officer Vladimir Putin used to subvert Western democracies from within.

Before we dive into the tangled web of hacked emails, troll farms, kompromat, infiltration networks, and MAGA complicity, we must first look at the doctrine that made it all possible. Russia’s 2016 interference campaign was not a spontaneous gambit, but a methodical digital adaptation of Soviet political warfare—designed to infiltrate, fracture, and destabilize liberal democracies by exploiting their deepest societal divisions. Forged during the Soviet era by the KGB in its Lubyanka headquarters and later recalibrated under Putin, this doctrine has quietly evolved into one of the most durable and effective tools of modern geopolitical subversion.

What Are “Active Measures”?

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed a comprehensive doctrine of psychological and political warfare known as aktivnye meropriyatiya, or “active measures.” These were not conventional espionage operations focused on collecting intelligence. They were strategic campaigns of deception and disruption, designed to disorient adversaries, inflame internal divisions, and corrode public trust in democratic institutions. Occasionally, they involved targeted assassinations.

Rather than defeat enemies on the battlefield, the KGB sought to manipulate perception, weaponize grievance, and create societal confusion so profound that objective truth would collapse—and with it, the ability to govern.

As KGB defector Oleg Kalugin famously said:

“Active measures are the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.”

According to Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, 85% of KGB operations focused on subversion, not spying—aimed at destabilizing the West from within.

America’s Fault Lines: Racial Division, Religious Identity, and Public Distrust

The United States, with its openness, pluralistic values, and persistent internal contradictions, represented an ideal target for Soviet political warfare. Beginning in the 1960s, the KGB engineered operations designed to exacerbate the country’s most volatile fissures—particularly around race, religion, and political identity. They sent anonymous threats signed by the Ku Klux Klan and planted explosives in Black neighborhoods in an effort to inflame racial violence. In the lead-up to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Soviet operatives mailed forged letters from the KKK to African and Asian delegations threatening their athletes with harm if they entered the U.S.—a brazen psychological operation designed to brand America as racist and unwelcoming on the world stage.

They trafficked in conspiracy at an industrial scale, planting the false narrative that the CIA was behind the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—hoping to fracture public faith in democratic governance and stoke suspicion of the intelligence community. One of their most insidious operations, codenamed Operation INFEKTION, involved planting the lie that HIV/AIDS had been engineered by the U.S. military at Fort Detrick. That fabrication, circulated through pseudo-scientific journals and picked up by outlets from Berlin to New Delhi, outlived the Cold War itself and seeded enduring distrust in American institutions.

The Kremlin also strategically infiltrated American civil society. By the early 1980s, Soviet handlers had helped orchestrate and guide more than 150 so-called “peace committees” across the U.S.—organizations ostensibly promoting nonviolence and disarmament but secretly advancing Moscow’s geopolitical goals, particularly by opposing U.S. efforts to stem the tide of communism in Central America. (The Mitrokhin Archive)

To carry out these influence operations, the KGB relied on two key categories of human assets. First were the “useful idiots, polezniye duraki,”—well-meaning but naïve individuals, often journalists, professors, or activists, who unwittingly amplified Kremlin narratives under the sincere belief that they were advancing progressive causes or opposing American policy. Second were agents of influence—collaborators who knowingly echoed Moscow’s propaganda in exchange for ideological alignment, financial support, or under the pressure of blackmail and kompromat.

The exploitation of “useful idiots” goes back nearly a century. In the 1930s, New York Times journalist Walter Duranty downplayed the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor genocide) and repeated Kremlin narratives, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process, even as millions starved to death. In 1931, George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union as a guest of the government, where he toured model factories and workers’ collectives. Shaw said he had “never eaten better food” and that Soviet life was full of vigor and joy. After joining Stalin for dinner, he declared that “Stalin is a Georgian gentleman and a man no more capable of cruelty than a lamb.” He accused critics of the Soviet regime of being liars and dupes. At the time, millions of Soviet citizens were dying because of collectivization, starvation, and purges.

The pattern continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union. For instance, European protests against U.S. Pershing II missile deployments in the 1980s were heavily amplified and, in some cases, infiltrated by Soviet disinformation networks. While many of the protesters were genuine peace activists concerned about nuclear war, the KGB and other Soviet intelligence arms exploited the movement to advance the Kremlin’s strategic interests. The KGB and the East German Stasi orchestrated "active measures" campaigns, including forged documents implying U.S. plans for nuclear first strikes, planting stories in sympathetic media outlets across Europe, and financial and logistical support for peace groups and protest organizers.

Western agents of influence also proliferated during the Cold War. Just one example is Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking U.S. Treasury official during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and one of the chief architects of the post–World War II global economic order, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Though he was never convicted in court, declassified Venona Project decrypts and Soviet archival material later confirmed that White passed classified information to Soviet intelligence while serving in government. He provided insights into U.S. diplomatic strategies, wartime policy, and financial negotiations—most notably advocating positions at international conferences that subtly aligned with Soviet interests. White also reportedly used his influence to push for pro-Soviet policies, such as encouraging U.S. recognition of Communist China and delaying support for anti-communist factions in Eastern Europe. Though he denied wrongdoing before dying of a heart attack in 1948, White’s case remains one of the most significant examples of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government during the 20th century.

In Britain, the Cambridge Five helped the Soviet Union by providing a sustained flow of top-secret intelligence from the heart of the British government, severely compromising Western operations during World War II and the early Cold War. Embedded in MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, and even wartime codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, they passed thousands of classified documents to Moscow—ranging from atomic secrets and diplomatic cables to counterintelligence strategies and wartime military plans. Their intelligence enabled the Soviets to build their nuclear weapons program faster, outmaneuver Western intelligence operations, and expose and dismantle anti-Soviet networks in Eastern Europe, often resulting in the imprisonment or execution of agents. Because they were part of Britain’s elite, their positions gave them broad access and shielded them from suspicion for years, making their betrayal one of the most damaging espionage successes in Soviet history.

The Putin Doctrine: Old Playbook, New Platforms

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not mark the end of active measures—as many in the West naively assumed—but rather their quiet transformation. Once Putin consolidated power, he began executing a long-simmering revenge campaign against the West, reviving Russia’s imperial ambitions through asymmetric means—most notably, by turning democratic elections into battlefields. Shaped by his KGB training and driven by a revanchist vision to restore Russian imperial influence, Putin understood that the internet is a borderless, real-time, and anonymous battlespace where the instruments of ideological subversion could be unleashed at unprecedented scale—veiled in plausible deniability, amplified by algorithmic reach, and executed at a fraction of the cost of traditional military confrontation.

In 2013, the Kremlin formalized this approach by launching the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg-based troll operation engineered to weaponize Western social media platforms against their own citizens. By the time the 2016 U.S. presidential election approached, operatives from the Internet Research Agency had built a sprawling digital ecosystem of counterfeit American identities.

They masqueraded as Americans from every walk of life—Black Lives Matter activists, white supremacists, evangelical ministers, gun rights crusaders, law-and-order advocates, anti-immigration organizers, disillusioned voters, defenders of traditional values, and local community leaders—spreading content across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to mimic grassroots engagement and inflame social and political tensions.

The Kremlin flooded the media zone not just through the IRA but also directly, through Russia Today (now known simply as RT). Russia Today launched its U.S. operations in 2010 under the name RT America, as part of the Kremlin’s broader effort to influence global opinion and project soft power abroad. Funded entirely by the Russian government, RT America presented itself as an alternative to Western mainstream media, often positioning its coverage as edgy, anti-establishment, and critical of U.S. foreign and domestic policies. While it featured some legitimate journalism, RT became known for promoting conspiracy theories, amplifying social divisions, and giving platforms to fringe voices on both the left and right—all consistent with broader Russian “active measures” to sow distrust in democratic institutions. The U.S. intelligence community identified RT as a key player in Moscow’s propaganda strategy, especially during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when it helped spread disinformation and undermine public trust. In 2017, RT was forced to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Russian influence, RT America shut down its operations in March 2022, marking the end of one of the most prominent Russian state media platforms on American soil.

In every sense, Russia has carried out a precision-engineered information warfare campaign, designed to manipulate public opinion and reshape political discourse. Rather than persuade, it has sought to deepen divisions, amplify emotional content, and flood the public sphere with conflicting narratives, eroding any shared sense of reality. It is Cold War-era KGB tradecraft—modernized for the digital age and supercharged by algorithms that spread Kremlin narratives faster and farther than any Soviet agent could have imagined.

Why It Matters

Russia’s 2016 election interference was not an isolated event—it was the 28th case in a broader campaign targeting democracies since 2004. Blending Soviet-era doctrine with digital tools, the Kremlin aimed not to persuade but to divide, destabilize, and erode trust in democratic institutions from within.

Divide societies along racial, religious, and ideological lines
Distract with manufactured controversies and viral lies
Discredit trusted institutions and the idea of shared truth
Destabilize democratic governments from within

Where once the KGB forged letters and mailed them to Black communities under Klan letterhead, today their digital descendants manufacture entire communities online—designed to amplify pain, manipulate emotion, and exploit trauma for geopolitical gain. The platforms have changed. The doctrine has not.

In the Putin era, these active measures involve weaponizing the West’s strengths to achieve its aims, including the freedom of speech, which allows Moscow to flood Western media with misinformation, and open markets, which allow Kremlin-linked billionaires to use strategic investments, lobbying, and philanthropy to co-opt elites, buy political access, and shape policy.

We hope you’ll follow and share this series widely—because in the face of Trump and GOP’s coordinated efforts to rewrite history, it’s more important than ever to stay informed, uphold the truth, and resist the erasure of what really happened.

Stay tuned for our next installment, Seeding The Plot…

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