My Usual Charming Self

The latest in secret information about KGB intrigue in the Third World was released in the US just in time to consider the continuing effect of Soviet Cold War disinformation campaigns on our mass media today. The odor of the connection was strong in the initial media reports from New Orleans. Rather than presenting an objective analysis of the disaster, the media assaulted the world with an organized political attack on the basic principles of the United States.  National news outlets frantically expectorated a spew of strangely familiar rhetoric: The United States, capitalism and free market principles have failed in New Orleans, where the "rich" were allowed to flee, leaving the "poor" to the ravages of the hurricane. Or, since the US is a war-mongering imperialist empire, President Bush deployed the Louisiana National Guard to Iraq when they should have been home to help prevent the looting and violence in the wake of the storm.

And my favorite: Katrina was caused by global warming that could be prevented if the US would sign the Kyoto Protocol calling for the curtailment of industrial output to hold back the rising tide of ocean levels-leaving out that environmental activists successfully stopped the Corps of Engineers plan to build locks in Lake Ponchatrain and re-route the Mississippi River to shore up the system of levees.

National Public Radio broadcast four alleged "news" stories in sequence one morning, using sources in government and politics to say:

America's allies "don't want to work with us anymore," having lost faith in the ability of the US to compete on the global stage based on its inability to manage the damage from the storm; Third World nations say they can no longer rely on the principles   of the US as a standard since it "can't take care of its own" in New Orleans; The US is going broke and will lose its economic vitality trying to pay for Katrina and Iraq; US oil companies are taking advantage of the Katrina disaster  and profiteering by gouging oil and gas prices while they can.

Then there is our very own John Edwards, who took to the national airwaves to call for, among other things, the redistribution of wealth in the wake of Katrina, citing a mantra right out of the Cold War Comintern playbook. Edwards and company-the ludicrous Ted Kennedy, the political strumpet Nancy Pelosi, the discredited Jesse Jackson-shamelessly climbed on the backs of the victims of Katrina to open a frontal assault on the White House and the self-esteem of the nation. Again, the whiff of organized "active measures" to exploit catastrophe to further socialist goals permeates the atmosphere, just as Soviet disinformation campaigns attacked the efficacy of America at every opportunity during the Cold War.

You can discover this connection yourself by reading The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB And The Battle For The Third World, newly released secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive by Cambridge intelligence scholar Christopher Andrew, the keynote speaker at the first Raleigh International Spy Conference in 2003. The book is the second volume revealing the deepest secrets from the KGB archives, compiled by the recently deceased Vasali Mitrokhin, a KGB colonel who smuggled out highly classified information from the spy agency's archives over a 10-year period from 1980 to 1990.

Part One of the Mitrokhin Archive, The Sword and the Shield, published in 2000, revealed KGB activities against the West, most notably America, the "main adversary." Part Two covers the Soviet battle for the Third World beginning in the early 1960s. The KGB decided that seducing into the communist sphere the newly independent nations emerging from the end of colonization after World War II was more effective than direct confrontation with the West. The massive undertaking found the Soviet Union-via the KGB rather than the Soviet Foreign Office-launching "charm offensives" in India, revolutions in Africa and Latin America, funding Palestinian terror groups in the Middle East and contorting history to label the US as an imperial power. A report to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev by the KGB identified 6000 Third World "projects" in a 10-year period.

Andrew's introduction to the book reminds readers that the Bolshevik Revolution was not specific to Russia, but established to plant communism worldwide. In 1919, the Communist International was founded to spread the revolution using communist party cells in western democracies to undermine elections by discrediting democratic parties and candidates, spying on elected officials and running party mechanisms to recruit new members of the Comintern. After 1943, the Comintern was abandoned and the KGB stepped in as the main force for world revolution.

While popular culture depicts the KGB as goons in badly fitted blue suits and brown shoes, agents were in reality an elite-the Jesuits of communism. They were required to know several languages and to possess skills that can be used for cover, including cultivated conversation for embassy postings, political skills to organize active measures and journalistic training to run disinformation campaigns. In India, the KGB ran 10 newspapers as well as a press agency to disseminate fake news stories detrimental to the US and the West. During 1972, the KGB planted 3789 articles in Indian newspapers, including false reports that the US used biological weapons in Thailand and Vietnam. English-language reports from KGB-controlled Indian press agencies were lapped up and published in the US, notably the fake story that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dressed in women's clothes. Latin America served as a source for fake news stories that were reported in the US without regard to the source or the ludicrous nature of the report. A disinformation news release about the US market for "baby parts" is still in circulation and widely believed in Mexico and Latin America.

Selected candidates from the Third World were brought to Moscow for "training" at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and Patrice Lumumba Friendship University, later to be installed back into their native countries to engage in destabilization campaigns that manipulated elections and planted anti-western propaganda in newspapers and other media.

It should be clear from these revelations that the massive 30-year KGB disinformation campaign in the Third World was successful in compromising a large segment of the university community and the media in the US. The persistent anti-American slant in college classrooms and in the mass media today was inherited from the era. It continues its grip today on many of our best-known writers, broadcast presenters and Old Left activists who cannot face the alarming truth: Most of the information they rely on to sustain their doctrinal allegiance to world socialism and aversion to American principles was Soviet propaganda and disinformation.

No wonder they deny the stream of revelations that destroy their dearly held beliefs. They begin with Chris Andrew's book KGB: The Inside Story in 1990 with former KGB colonel Oleg Gordeivsky; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 and the brief opening of the Comintern archives; the release of the Venona Files in 1995-decrypted messages from Moscow to American Soviet agents that verify the guilt of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss and, to date, 350 others; the spew of books by former KGB agents and, now, the long-awaited Mitrokhin Archive Part Two.

As you stare with disbelief at the coverage of Katrina, remember Vasily Mitrokhin.

The hysteria in New Orleans was personified by the panic of elected leaders who did not institute a well-rehearsed disaster plan and instead dissembled and covered up their incompetence by blaming George Bush, FEMA and the American system. Lost in the hysterical media coverage was a quiet comment by the President that the federal government cannot on its own march into a sovereign state without permission.

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If education in this country ceased its preoccupation with multi-cultural platitudes and politically correct curriculum, maybe journalists would know the history behind federal power and states rights as played out in the New Orleans political carnival. But their damage is done and has struck deep inside the national psyche, demonstrated by the lunacy of the plans for the 9-11 Ground Zero memorial in New York City. Rather than celebrating bravery and properly mourning the dead, the memorial, to be named the International Freedom Center, is envisioned to depict the struggle of blacks during Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the genocide of American Indians and pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Is nothing sacred to the PC activists?

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Speaking of public monuments, Andrew Ferguson echoed my sentiments in a magazine piece about the Washington, DC, Mall, noting the sheer monumentalism instituted after 9-11 that defeats visitors and security issues and creates constant construction impediments and detours. Ferguson almost said what I think: the problem in America with public places is the lack of integration with commercial outlets. If the Mall in DC, or the new Ground Zero monument-or, to bring it home, Raleigh's government installations and the proposed Art Museum Park-would allow cafs and coffee shops (with Cinzano umbrellas naturally), visiting these spaces would not be an ordeal. Visitors could even locate a bathroom. Think Paris and Rome.

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The witty columnist Mark Steyn, writing in the London Spectator, noted that the pooh-poohing of the new Iraqi constitution, which he demonstrates is an admirable document, has it all over the recent European Union constitution voted down recently. And for good reason. The EU effort typifies central state control and bureaucratic rule making. The Iraq document appears clear and concise and nobly addresses the issues at hand.