A more insidious disinformation tactic could not be devised. A famous ‘disinformation’ campaign was waged against the British East India Company’s army in mid-19th Century India. It led to the Sepoy Rebellion and cost thousands of lives.
The dangers of a rumor
The Company’s Muslim and Hindu sepoys, or soldiers, received new cartridges for their Enfield rifles. To load the cartridge, a soldier had to bite off the paper which held the charge. Someone started a rumor that these charges were encased in pork lard and beef tallow. To taste the former was forbidden to Muslims, the latter to Hindus. They revolted. Even more astounding, when the British ceased using the greased cartridges, the soldiers saw it as ‘proof’ of the religious violation being perpetrated on them.
Disinformation is employed to manipulate others. Employing half-truths, or unconfirmable statements, released from non-traceable sources, lies are spread. These lies are planted with the intent of confusing an opponent.
Cleared personnel are subject to such manipulation. In the past, they might receive false information at a chance meeting at a bar, during a trip to a famous museum, or even through the mail. Adversaries hope to spread their own message through unsuspecting, but credible targets. In recent years favored outlets were friendly, although relatively unknown newspapers. Now a little heard of media sources online will do the trick. If a cleared company representative ‘heard’ that a new process was developed by another country, we could waste millions building defenses against something that might not even exist. Nowadays, it is far, far easier to contact people through social media, the better to ‘drop’ these false stories. QAnon, a now famous conspiracy theory site, even calls its announcements ‘Drops’.
The influence of disinformation
Soviet dictators came up with the word appropriate for their duplicity. ‘Disinformation’ is a method where false, or half true, information is fed to media outlets to cause confusion among adversaries. One favorite ploy used was to ‘discover’ Nazi personnel documents sunk in Austrian lakes, then reveal ‘shocking proof’ that post-war Western democratic leaders were really former Nazis. This way, elections in the West were influenced either in favor of those leaning toward Soviet policy, or anti-Soviet politicians might lose their credibility. How did this work?
Austria was occupied by the four Allied powers at the end of the Second World War. Austrian and southern German lakes were known as dumping places for Nazi documents at the end of the war, because this is where the last remnants of the Hitler government fled. A major discovery of vast amounts of counterfeit money was one such legitimate discovery.
Soviet access to Nazi documents through conquest or simple forgery exploited this fact. Using the true story of discovered counterfeit money, the Soviet plotters could then ‘reveal’ their own discovery. There, among the mostly valid documents, they ‘found’ documentary proof showing Western politicians to be Nazis who tried to hide their past. The lie was concealed in the truth.
There is some truth in disinformation
Another disinformation scheme from 1943 lasted until the mid-1990s. This was the great Soviet lie of the Katyn Forest massacres. Thousands of Polish officer prisoners of war were murdered by the Soviets after they invaded Poland from the east after Hitler struck from the west. The Soviet mass burial grounds for these murdered Polish officers were later overrun by the Nazis when they invaded Russia. Hitler’s propaganda machine worked overtime when the Polish bodies were disinterred. The goal was to drive a split between Soviet and Western allies. This time, what the Nazi propaganda machine said was true. The Poles were murdered by the NKVD, the previous name for the KGB. Soviet disinformation swung into gear. The Soviets claimed the whole Nazi discovery was a fraud. Due to the exigencies of the war, no one ever sought further clarity. This lie lasted throughout the Cold War. In the mid-1990s, the post-Soviet Russian government admitted the whole story was a lie, that they had indeed murdered these Polish officers.
The KGB learned that lies can succeed. They planted them during the Korean War, claiming Americans were dropping biological weapons against the North Korean invaders. They spread a story through friendly South Asian newspapers that AIDS was a CIA invention that got away from them. KGB manipulators spread lies that the CIA spread cocaine in black communities in America. Today doctored photos of American soldiers supposedly laughing at a child run over by a tank during NATO maneuvers spread over the internet. Whole teams of Russian agents discerned divisive issues that would pit Americans against one another over race, politics, and health during our elections.
It doesn’t just affect the military
We need to be aware that our corporate well-being can suffer from disinformation. It is not only because truth should win, but that lies generally have a short, but very effective shelf life. When the West brought out the ‘neutron bomb’ which we said would not damage as much property as previous high explosives, our adversaries leaped all over it. They called it the ‘perfect capitalist weapon’ which only killed people, but would not destroy buildings and property! Some lies appear shortly before they can affect, say, an election or major corporate decision. Too briefly to be checked out for veracity, but not for impact on influencing decision makers, these lies are almost naked exploitation. Well done disinformation plays on partial truths, but distorts the real intent of the message.
Watch your message. If you are involved in any aspect of your classified program, see how it ‘reads’ in the press. If I want the US out of a country, I might not claim they are hateful warmongers. Most people know that’s not true. But I might claim they exploit our workers on their bases, cheat them of their earned money, and even show pictures of Americans ‘identified’ as criminals. All of these hair-raising claims have been used against military and private industries by our adversaries. It took too long to identify these claims as false, and thus the lie expanded. The cleared personnel responsible for the defense of our efforts weren’t ready for such a possibility. Some didn’t even know it existed since no one monitored the local news outlets. This disinformation was only revealed when huge demonstrations took place outside American installations, with duped people demanding the expulsion of these ‘thieves’. What if we’d been alerted to these claims going through the media beforehand? What should have happened? Media should have been monitored for how they were reporting on us. Actions could then be taken well beforehand by credible representatives to defuse these false claims. We could have opened up what could be shown, met with those with legitimate concerns, or shown the truth behind false claims. Here we have the FBI in the U.S., and overseas we have our military and State Department representatives to help us. Use them.
