Library:Active Measures
| Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare | |
|---|---|
| Author | Thomas Rid |
| First published | 2020 |
| ISBN | 978-0-374-28726-9 |
| Role | Analysis |
| Domains | Politics & Elections History |
| Tactics | Fabrication Imposture Manipulation |
Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare is a 2020 book by Thomas Rid.
Summary
Thomas Rid, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, published this history of disinformation in 2020. Drawing on archival research and interviews with former intelligence officers, he traces a century of organized political deception, from the early Soviet state to the 2016 US presidential election.
What active measures are
"Active measures" was the Soviet term for operations meant to influence events abroad through deception: forgeries, front organizations, planted stories and covert support for useful groups. Rid argues that the most effective disinformation is rarely pure invention. It mixes the authentic with the forged, the true with the false, so that it is hard to disprove and easy to believe.
The early history
The book begins in the 1920s with the Soviet secret police's "Trust" operation, a fake anti-Bolshevik underground organization used to entrap opponents of the regime abroad. Rid also documents American operations in the early Cold War, when the CIA ran its own covert political warfare in divided Germany, showing that the practice was not confined to one side.
The classic Cold War operations
The heart of the book covers the KGB and its allies, particularly the East German Stasi, in the decades after. Rid details forged documents attributed to the US government, campaigns to exploit racial tensions in America, and the operation that spread the false claim that the US military had created the AIDS virus, which began with a planted story in an obscure newspaper and eventually reached mainstream media around the world.
The digital turn
The final chapters show how the internet transformed the craft. Operations became cheaper, faster and harder to attribute. Rid examines the 2016 hack-and-leak operations against the US Democratic Party and the activity of Russia's Internet Research Agency. He also argues that the measurable effect of such operations is often overstated, and that exaggerating their impact can serve the operators' own goals.
The deeper damage
Rid's central argument is that disinformation corrodes the distinction between fact and fiction itself. Its greatest harm may lie less in any single false story than in the erosion of trust in institutions, and in a public that stops believing that anything can be known. Open societies, he argues, are especially vulnerable because their openness is what these operations exploit.
Relevance to Bullshitopedia
This is the definitive history for the Politics & Elections and History domains where state deception is concerned. Its lesson about mixing the true and false is essential for editors: many claims cannot be judged as simply true or false, and entries should separate the authentic elements from the forged ones.