A former employee of some serious US think-tanks and state bureaucracy, Mark Hackard, sent me an article on a very important topic and I gladly reproduce it here. You can read original at Mark's Blog. As well as get acquainted with Mark's background too. I do not like espionage, albeit professionally when you serve in military you deal both with intelligence and counter-intelligence matters directly. Obviously not on the level of what amounts to a highest level of state espionage, but close enough to know sometimes high level people--comes with the territory. So, here is Mark's excellent insight.
Over the past several years, the testimony of a previously
obscure Soviet defector has grown ever more potent as America unravels
into chaos. Should we trust him?
The late Yuri Bezmenov
(1939-1993), styled a man who turned his back on the KGB and a “fighter
against totalitarianism,” has gained exalted status among independent
media commentators and has even found currency in the mainstream.
Bezmenov, the son of a Red Army officer and trained in oriental
languages, was a journalist for the Soviet news agency Novosti
and scored a posting to India in the late 1960s. In 1970 he vanished
from the USSR embassy colony disguised as a hippy and made his way to
the West, where he would rail against the Soviet system, writing
pamphlets like Love Letter to America; No Novosti is Good News; World Thought Police; and Black is Beautiful, Communism is Not.
As a Soviet defector, Bezmenov was readily available to denounce Moscow
and the communist menace in Western media outlets. His shining moment,
now filtered through a multitude of memes and short clips on social
networks, was a 1984 interview with author G. Edward Griffin.
Bezmenov sold himself to his audience as a former KGB operative and
proclaimed that the Soviet Union was applying a Marxist strategy of
subversion to undermine the United States from within. It consisted of four stages:
Demoralization
Destabilization
Crisis
Normalization
Bezmenov’s analysis and prognostications have since been seized upon
by columnists and media personalities as proof of everything from a
cultural Marxist drive to take over America to a specifically Russian
plot with the same objective. He stars in a trailer for the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War as a Cassandra warning of communist subversion. He has also featured in no less than the New York Times’ clumsy “Operation Infektion,” a 2018 video series informing us that Russian intelligence “hacked” the 2016 US presidential elections through disinformation operations.
Few, however, have called into question Bezmenov’s story and his
claims, most tellingly his supposed status within the KGB’s First Chief
Directorate (Foreign Intelligence). This biographical detail is what
made his story sensational, as the defection of a mere Soviet journalist
would hardly arouse much interest in the reading public. Yet that’s the
hard truth – Bezmenov never served in the KGB.
Yuri Bezmenov was never a KGB staff officer for the First Chief
Directorate or any other unit of the Soviet intelligence service. Nor
did he ever see the inside of School 101, where future intelligence officers trained, Lubyanka, or the KGB residency in India. Bezmenov was a low-ranking newsman for Novosti
who wrote propaganda, and after he switched sides, he plied the same
trade on behalf of the Western powers. The KGB may indeed have used him
as an informant – to keep an eye on contacts of interest – and for
participation in occasional “active measures,” disseminating Soviet
narratives and piecemeal disinformation to foreign media. Bezmenov’s
position would have allowed for such possibilities. While a certain
number of KGB officers would have worked undercover as journalists at
Novosti (not the inflated 75% Bezmenov gives), Bezmenov wasn’t one of them.[i]
Bezmenov was also never a wizard of Soviet psychological warfare – he had no entry to the KGB First Chief Directorate’s Service A
or the Communist Party’s Central Committee that oversaw its activities.
Nor did Bezmenov, self-identified expert on active measures, ever
mention Service A’s chief Maj. Gen. Ivan Agayants, or his successor Lt. Gen. Sergei Kondrashev.
He demonstrates zero understanding of the strategic purpose of real
active measures as practiced by the KGB. His supposed training in
tabletop wargames and interrogation would have been part of cursory
reserve officer mobilization courses mandatory for Soviet university
students throughout the Cold War, not a special program that made
Bezmenov a hardened expert in subversion. Indeed, the four-step process
of subversion he claimed as a covert Soviet strategy could be gleaned by
anyone well-versed in Sun Tzu and practical psychology. Further,
Bezmenov provides no evidence of Soviet infiltration of American culture
and institutions to advance a complex, globe-spanning campaign to
implode the United States, only coarse ideological invective.
What Bezmenov embodies in Cold War espionage history, in exaggerated
fashion, is the tendency of defectors to inflate their self-worth
through ever-wilder claims. Anatoly Golitsyn, an actual KGB officer who crossed the Iron Curtain a decade before Bezmenov, forged a similar path with tales of a “Monster Plot,” including a false Sino-Soviet split, to deceive America and leave her ripe for conquest. Golitsyn enjoyed the patronage of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, and his theories were popular among suspicious cold warriors throughout the West.
Today Bezmenov is clearly useful to US media and political elites,
and so his assertions of Soviet subversion are dusted off and given a
new lease on life. It’s much easier to ascribe the failure and
dysfunction of an entire political system to “Kremlin meddling,”
or an even older KGB plan just now being realized, than to shine light
on the predations of an oligarchic superclass that has misruled America
into civilizational breakdown. Anti-communism is a sure hit with the
right, and liberals are programmed into a newfound hatred of Russia;
each side is manipulated via dialectics in order to further obfuscate
the truth and obscure any viable resolution to real cultural, political
and economic challenges.
There very well may be a resurrected Bolshevist spirit of
subversion present in the current disorder, a phenomenon that infused
the Frankfurt School’s transvaluation of all values in the West. In our
twenty-first century that spirit animates neither communism, an
ideological corpse long-buried, nor the SVR, modern Russia’s
intelligence service. Rather, the ruling class itself, with its panoply
of media organs, multinationals, academia and government agencies, seems
possessed by a force spiraling towards destruction.
In the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, players, briefed by prophet Bezmenov on the Soviet threat to America, are able to choose three options for their character’s gender: male, female, and non-binary. Just who is subverting whom?
I believe this piece to be of an ultimate import because as I state for years, decades really, what America "knows" about USSR/Russia is primarily trash or what I call a "solzhenitsified" version of it, concocted primarily through Russian (Jewish) dissident circles who always had their own agenda and scores to settle and knew WHAT the other side wanted to hear from them. They created such a grotesque caricature of USSR and, recently, of Russia that I can only repeat Mark's closing question: who was subverting whom? Isn't it a valid question to ponder when contemplating today the fact that Russia, whose economy "was left in tatters", seems to be doing just fine and, in fact, somehow is not torn apart by political, ethnic, economic or cultural strife. Remember, to succeed one needs to be extremely well situationally aware, Sun Tzu anyone? I don't think US political top was aware of anything outside, as well as inside, US borders for a very long time. Mark's article is exactly about it. But then again, the reality is a difficult thing to face.
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