Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference (Strategic Perspectives, no. 11)

Abstract

This study explains how one part-time interagency committee established in the 1980s to counter Soviet disinformation effectively accomplished its mission. Interagency committees are commonly criticized as ineffective, but the Active Measures Working Group is a notable exception. The group successfully established and executed U.S. policy on responding to Soviet disinformation. It exposed some Soviet covert operations and raised the political cost of others by sensitizing foreign and domestic audiences to how they were being duped. The group s work encouraged allies and made the Soviet Union pay a price for disinformation that reverberated all the way to the top of the Soviet political apparatus. It became the U.S. Government s body of expertise on disinformation and was highly regarded in both Congress and the executive branch.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA577586

Entities

People

  • Christopher Jon Lamb
  • Fletcher Schoen

Organizations

  • National Defense University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Congress
  • Department Of State
  • Disinformation Operations
  • Information Operations
  • Interagency Coordination
  • Intergovernmental Organizations
  • International Law
  • International Organizations
  • International Relations
  • Law
  • National Politics
  • National Security
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Political Systems
  • Sociopolitics
  • Treaties

Readers

  • East Asian Political and Security Studies within the Soviet Union
  • Economics
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.