The creation and dissemination of misleading or false information to injure the image of the targeted enemy. The term is attributed to the Soviet KGB, which made frequent use of the practice. Typical KGB disinformation operations involved forged documents designed to discredit the United States.
In June 1957, for example, KGB disinformation specialists fed Egyptian newspapers copies of letters allegedly written by Abba Eban, Israel's ambassador to the United States, to Charles Malik, Foreign Minister of Lebanon. Eban supposedly wrote that "bitter hostility between our countries... cause me as much distress as they cause you." Both Israel and Lebanon denounced the forgeries. But they had been so widely broadcast and published in Egyptian media that many Egyptians did not believe the denials. That is one of the purposes of disinformation: By the time the truth is known, the damage has been done.
In another forgery incident, the Soviets in 1986 distributed to U.S. news media copies of a fake letter purportedly from an official of the U.S. Information Agency to Senator Dave Durenberger, chairman of the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, laying out a propaganda plan to exploit the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe. The committee later published the forgery and an analysis of how the disinformation deed was done. In 1981 the KGB forged a letter from President Reagan to the king of Spain; the forgery was discovered, and no incident resulted.
The Soviets used the term "active measures" to describe such operations. Usually, they were short-term. But some lasted a long time, such as a persistent campaign to discredit U.S. policy in India by claiming that the CIA was aiding separatist movements to split the country.
U.S. Army Sgt. Robert Lee Johnson, who spied for the Soviets in Europe, handed them a copy of a war plan that included a list of European targets for tactical U.S. nuclear weapons. In the early 1980s, versions of these documents surfaced in Europe. The KGB, having used them militarily to analyze U.S. strategy, then recycled them for propaganda purposes during antinuclear campaigns in Europe. The documents were authentic only up to a point. KGB disinformation specialists could not resist adding more Western European "targets" to the actual list.
The KGB coined the Russian word dezinformatsia. It came into the English language as disinformation.
