This is going to be speculative, as all too much of what is written today is, as well as a partial book review. It is about a pattern and trying to understand it. It is provisional and may be far off base - more thinking aloud than serious research at this point.
One of the most interesting, and I think important, historical works of the year is Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a detailed history of disinformation and political warfare and its transformation into the "cyberwarfare" of today. It is largely successful in documenting his main point.
The phrase "active measures" is an old KGB term for disinformation campaigns, while "political warfare" is the term the CIA preferred in the fifties and sixties.
The book starts with the early days of the Soviet Regime and its operations, largely against its exiled opponents and the Western intelligence services that supported them. These were launched under the auspices of the head of the Cheka, (the predecessor the the later alphabet soup of Soviet and Russian security and intelligence service), Felix Dzerzhinsky himself. That disinformation campaign was spectacularly successful, dividing and neutralizing the movement and resulting in the entrapment and death of the most famous spy of the century, Sydney Reilly.
Rid does not just focus on the Soviets, having a great deal about mid-century CIA operations,; however, it is the later portions of the book, dealing with Soviet and Russian campaigns since 1980, that are present interest. This was the period when Soviet disinformation began to change and focus as much on sowing disinformation (which could be complete forgeries, partial forgeries, or even real documents obtained by other means but taken out of context) to creating an atmosphere of general distrust, division, and disbelief, breaking down the shared sense of reality on which democracies depend.
The most interesting chapters in the book may be the ones dealing with Soviet operations against the peace movement of the 1980s and on the rise of disinformation about AIDS. Given recent events, the AIDS story is particularly relevant. (There is also an excellent article that goes into more detail of part of what Rid covers that appeared recently: Douglas Selvage, "Operation 'Denver': The East German Ministry of StateSecurity and the KGB's AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986 (Part 1)," Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 21, Number 4, Fall 2019, pp. 71-123 - Part 2 has not yet appeared. Rid gives more overall context while Selvage delves more deeply into the specifics of the campaign.)
The AIDS conspiracy story seems to have first emerged in an article by Charlie Shively in the 9 July 1983 issue of the Gay Community News in Boston citing another article from the New York Native, suggesting that HIV had originated in the African Swine Fever Virus, supposedly imported as a bioweapon for use against Cuba by the CIA. Shively took this further and asked one of those hypotheticals so dear to conspiracists, wondering if the CDC and/or Pentagon, had deployed it as a genocidal weapon against homosexuals, Haitians, and drug users. (Rid, 302; Selvage, 78-79) This was a home grown theory, but it came at a time when the Soviet Union was smarting under US reports of widespread and illegal chemical weapons use in Afghanistan, and was already retaliating with a story that a University of Maryland malaria research lab in Lahore, Pakistan, was actually a US government lab weaponizing encephalitis and dengue fever to be transmitted by mosquitos. (Rid, 300-301)
Shively's piece was apparently picked up by the Soviets, unless it was just a coincidence, and the KGB-backed Indian Patriot published a similar piece eight days later. That had little affect, but is the first bit of disinformation from the Eastern Block that appeared on the subject. The real offensive started with an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta (LG) by Valentin Vasilevich Zapelov in October 1985. This quoted the Patriot article and was the first salvo in a disinformation campaign coordinated by the KGB and Department X of the East German HVA. Selvage documents how this coevolved with developments in the West, where Lyndon LaRouche was arguing for AIDS being a Soviet bioweapon and John Seale in London was making the case for it being a bioengineered weapon. There were also a series of articles by Nathaniel Lehrman, a psychiatrist who was quoted by the New Amsterdam News. He was initially spread by a series of experiments carried out by the CIA on gays, African Americans, and drug users. He denied say that, but did suggest that the CIA might have intentionally spread the disease in Africa. (Selvage, 88-89, 91; Rid, 308)
These were not Communist plants, but the ideas were picked up and modified in Moscow and Berlin. The campaign really took off in 1986, when the East German biologists, Jakob and Lilli Segal produced a pamphlet, "AIDS - Its Nature and Origin" which was passed around at a major summit in Harare, Zimbabwe. This pinned the development of HIV squarely on the US Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick in Frederick Maryland. (Selvage, 93, 100-114; Rid, 308-310) From that point, the campaign began to attract attention in major Western media outlets and spread. There was much more to the campaign, and there were other factors, not just the formal active measures of this disinformation campaign, but I want to keep it in site for a bit longer.
The belief in HIV/AIDS as an American (or occasionally Russian), engineered, bioweapon targeted at specific ethnic, sexual, or other marginal groups has persisted, as have a lot of other myths about the causes of the disease. For some it is likely a deeply held belief, for others, it is just politically convenient. We are now living through a new pandemic and wild ideas have been floated about the causes and origins, among the most common being that COVID-19 is either a Chinese or American, engineered, bioweapon targeted at specific ethnic groups. That sounds very familiar. We do know that belief in one conspiracy often primes an individual to believe in similar conspiracies, as well as in apparently unrelated conspiracies. (See, for instance, Thomas Milan Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America, Chicago, 2019, 277-278; Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, Bloomsbury, 2015, 88; Jonathan Kay, Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, Harper Collins, 2011, 51; and more generally, Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2013, 231ff.)
This is the first bit of speculation on my part, something I cannot prove at this time and would likely require a lot of digging to document one way of the other, so from one point of view, I am simply using a common tactic of conspiracy mongers. I strongly suspect that there is a carry over from the older set of conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS to the current conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
I am not suggesting that these are being spread by a Russian disinformation campaign. What I am suggesting is that both the habits of mind and the tropes that appear in today's conspiracy memes are inherited not only from the conspiracy theorists of the last century (and the one before that), but also shaped and influenced by a century of active disinformation campaigns by major governments (and, though Rid does not explore them, of corporate and other groups).
Beyond that, there are parallels between formal disinformation campaigns and the spread of conspiracy theories in America and Britain, particularly in the age of the internet. As Rid notes in his last chapters, the art of disinformation has gotten easier (due to social media), operations have generally gotten sloppier (he is particularly critical of both the GRU and the Russian company IRA), and it has become much harder to measure their effectiveness). I think the same may be said for today's conspiracy pundits. Social media has facilitated their message, but that message often makes no sense at all to outsiders or is internally contradictory. I am not sure that it is more difficult to measure their effectiveness than it was, it has always been a nightmare to figure out how much influence a conspiracy theory has had.
One of Rid's themes is the extent to which disinformation campaigns have played into the strengths and weaknesses of the media. He quotes more than one former Eastern European intelligence officer regarding the importance of Western journalists in spreading their material. What he describes sounds in some ways like a symbiotic relationship. Often he sees the coverage of the story by the press, even when the lies have been exposed, as equally or more important than the message of the intelligence agencies, for it facilitates the atmosphere of distrust and confusion that had become one of the goals of active measures.
In the course of the last two months, the New York Times has pursued this in a different way through its Rabbit Hole Podcast, which, as of this writing, has eight episodes, (https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole). The journalists who created the podcast are also exploring the effectiveness of conspiracists in a new way, as far as I can see. The focus is mainly on YouTube, though some other forms of social media are discussed, and it is a deep dive, a series of case studies. They interview people who have been caught up in fringe belief systems (including QAnon) through YouTube and have emerged as skeptics, but also people who have a deep understanding of how YouTube's algorithms and policies have evolved. The result is the beginning of an understanding of the relationship between successful purveyors of these beliefs, their audiences, and the way the algorithms function, reinforcing certain behaviors. This is not itself a conspiracy theory, rather, they document how changes that were made to YouTube for business or political reasons, inadvertently ended up reinforcing the beliefs and encouraging community formation, around these conspiracies.
With QAnon, we see something that really does look more like a disinformation campaign than a traditional conspiracy, in fact it looks more and more like a cult as well. Whether consciously or not, the person or persons behind Q seem to have internalized a lot of the lessons that earlier disinformation campaigns have taught the world. That would make sense if the perpetrators are intelligence professionals as they claim, though I doubt that. They may simply be following a track laid down in the 1990s by Bill Cooper, the most important conspiracy pundit of the era, sometimes compared to Alex Jones, but really a very different sort of character altogether. Over the course of twenty years, he went from promoting the truth about UFOs he claimed to have learned from secret intelligence documents in the Navy, to proclaiming that UFOs were a hoax, part of the New World Order conspiracy that sought too take over the world, became a key part of the Patriot and Militia movement, influenced both White and Black Nationalists (he claimed not to be racist), and ended his life in 2001 as one of the very first 9/11 Truthers. Perhaps they have picked up lessons from David Ickes, who at various points in his career has claimed to be the Second Coming of Jesus and developed a large following for his wild ideas that we are controlled by shape-shifting, baby-eating lizards, such as the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Hope. Or maybe they have learned their lessons from any number of religious and cultic movements of the last two centuries.
Whatever the case, QAnon has created a kind of pocket reality, split off from the mainstream, even splitting families. At their best, the KGB and HVA never achieved this kind of thing. Q emits cryptic messages that his (he always seems to be seen as male) interpret in their community of chat rooms and message boards. The messages are frequently disproven as dates pass and events do not, but the belief and the movement continue on. In some regards this does not look like any of the classic active measures that Rid discusses, but it might have a shared philosophy with them.
I noted earlier that the direction of Soviet disinformation broadened around 1980 to include not just targeted disinformation, but also to sow confusion and erode the consensual reality on which democracies must rely, or as Rid puts it, disinformation is not just a matter of epistemology for democracies, but an existential threat. (Rid, 425-426) It would be very easy to see QAnon as exactly that, as a tool not to spread a particular piece of disinformation, or even one particular viewpoint, but to create an environment in which no truth from outside could be accepted, in which everyone had their own, particular truth and unique reality, and the consensus needed to maintain a healthy democracy, let along a healthy society, no longer existed.
I am not saying that QAnon is some foreign operation against the United States. For one thing, it would require a level of understanding of American culture that Rid argues the Russian intelligence agencies never attained, and which he argues has actually declined. It may be nothing more than a game that someone is playing, something that got out of hand, or, as the ex-Q-believer in the eighth episode of The Rabbit Hole suggests, a group of people out to exploit the followers and make money in the process. Whatever it is, it seems to take the idea of eroding civil society, present in so many active measures, to its logical extreme. Whether as has been suggested lately, it will evolve into a religion, remains to be seen, but for now, it has the hallmarks of something the KGB could only have dreamed of.
We are not good in dealing with disinformation, we never were. Recognition and exposure are useful, but are not enough. QAnon may appear to be the most dangerous example today but that may change. Both disinformation and the belief systems that enable it are mutable and constantly in flux. The lie is always with us.
