The report detailed how Russia was suspected of using forgeries and planted stories to wreak havoc in the West during the Cold War through influence operations rather than with military might. And these tactics didn't stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, social media and the cloak of online anonymity it provides have only made it easier and potentially more effective for governments and bad actors to engage in a similar playbook of dirty tricks — ranging from disseminating forged or hacked documents online to creating fake reporters to promote them.
It's this modern-day digital disinformation playbook that US intelligence agencies will almost certainly be watching out for ahead of November's presidential election -- especially after Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election caught the country off guard. But to fully understand Russia's use of tactics like false news stories and leaked materials, it's useful to examine the country's long history of painstaking influence operations dating back to an analog era.
Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy who lived undercover in the US in the 1980s, explained how it was done back in his day in an interview with CNN Business last year.
The KGB would take great care to furnish a convincing forgery of a US government document, often with the goal of implicating the US in something tawdry and designed to appear to confirm an existing conspiracy theory. That forgery would then be given to a sympathetic, unwitting reporter, sometimes from an obscure outlet in a far-flung corner of the world. It would be printed as news, and if the Soviets were lucky, it might eventually get picked up by more established outlets.
Oleg Kalugin, another KGB agent who lived in the US undercover, recounted in his book "Spymaster" how the KGB paid Americans to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. This tactic had the potential to inflame tensions in the US and give the Soviet-controlled press a negative story to tell Russians back home about their capitalist foe.
In the decades since, our lives have largely moved online — and so have Russia's attempts at disinformation and meddling in US affairs.
In groundbreaking work from the Atlantic Council and the online investigations company Graphika, researchers showed how a suspected Russian group has been distributing forged documents online over the past few years. These efforts included a fake letter purporting to be from a US senator and another letter designed to look like it came from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
The same Russian group is believed to have been behind a fake tweet from Sen. Marco Rubio claiming that a purported British spy agency planned to derail the campaigns of Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The fake tweet was picked up and falsely reported as real by RT, a Russian state-controlled news outlet. There's no evidence of coordination between RT and the Russian group that promoted the fake tweet but RT did not issue a correctio