The Soviet KGB's Propaganda, Forgeries, and Terrorism in America

The old KGB building in Moscow

After the fall of communism in the former USSR, a KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the British with documentation he had secretly copied from the KGB foreign intelligence archives.

The Mitrokhin archive revealed that the Soviet KGB had used "active measures" to incite racial tensions in America in order discredit our justice system at home and abroad.

One of Mitrokhin's books, The Sword and Shield, co-authored with the former head of the Cambridge History Department Dr. Christopher Andrew, reveals:

[T]he Centre implemented a series of active measures designed to weaken the internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international reputation by inciting race hatred. In 1971 Andropov personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League, headed by Meir Kahane, calling for a campaign against the "black mongrels" who, it was claimed, were attacking Jews and looting Jewish shops. Thirty pamphlets were mailed to a series of militant black groups in the hope of producing "mass disorders in New York." At the same time forged letters were sent to sixty black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by the League against blacks and calling for vengeance against Kahane and his chief lieutenants...

On at least one occasion, the Centre ordered the use of explosives to exacerbate racial tensions in New York. On July 25, 1971 the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to proceed with operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive package in "the Negro section of New York." Kireyev's preferred target was "one of the Negro colleges." After the explosion the residency was ordered to make anonymous telephone calls to two or three black organizations, claiming that the explosion was the work of the Jewish Defense League. (88)

...Before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, for example, Line PR officers in the Washington residency mailed bogus communications from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. (89) Among the racial taunts devised by Service A for inclusion in the mailings was the following:

THE OLYMPICS--FOR THE WHITES ONLY!

African monkeys!
A grand reception awaits you in Los Angeles!
We are preparing for the Olympic games by shooting at black moving targets. In Los Angeles our own Olympic flames are ready to incinerate you. The highest award for a true American patriot would be the lynching of an African monkey.
Blacks, Welcome to the Olympic games in Los Angeles!
We'll give you a reception you'll never forget! [Sword and Shield. 238-9; See also here for another recounting of this story and similar incidents.]

Mitrokhin also explains that Mark Lane, the lawyer for the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Jonestown People's Temple, had a relationship with KGB agents who posed as journalists.

I have already written a series of articles about Mark Lane on this blog, but you can use the search feature to read more about him.

Amazingly, after Mark Lane emerged unscathed from the mass murders at Jonestown, he wrote a book claiming that the CIA was behind the mass-poisoning of 900 people with cyanide!

Mitrokhin notes that the KGB sponsors of a propaganda magazine called The Covert Action Information Bulletin were on the lookout for atrocities like Jonestown to blame on the CIA, but The Sword and Shield doesn't mention that Mark Lane was their lawyer.

An example of KGB-sponsored propaganda in the Covert Action Information Bulletin is when the discredited University of Colorado ex-professor Ward Churchill, a historical fabricator who posed as an Indian, claimed in the Summer 1985 issue of the C.A.I.B. that the FBI had backed death squads that murdered 342 Indians.

Ward Churchill would later fabricate his now discredited claims that the U.S. Army deliberately infected the Mandan Indians with smallpox in order to exterminate them.