Cold war mind games | HistoryExtra
""'Neither side twigged that the other side was different from the way they thought about things. And, and there's a very famous example, in 1946, of an American diplomat called George Kennan, who was in Moscow, had spent the war there. And he wrote a document that came to be known as the long telegram. And he essentially in that tried to trace the development of Soviet thinking, at the end of the Second World War, from his experience, firsthand experience. He was a career diplomat, he'd had extensive knowledge of the Soviet Union, spoke Russian. He empathized with the Russian people, but Kennan harbored no illusions about the Soviet leadership, he knew that they were slippery customers, he knew that they’d take whatever they could get in diplomatic exchanges and give nothing in return. And he went to great lengths to try and inform his bosses at the State Department of the misgivings that he had in that sort of brief honeymoon period at the end of the Second World War. But Washington steadfastly refused to take any notice of what Kennan was saying, they just didn't want to rock the boat.
So by 1946, Kennan was in complete despair. And he put down his thoughts in a very long telegram to Washington, he said later, I had to tell them, that this was the same group of people, Stalin and his colleagues, who tried to make a deal with Hitler at our expense, and had not changed their views about the West. So Kennan understood a lot about the Soviet leadership and about the psychology that drove Stalin. He understood that Stalin was bent on expanding Soviet power, but he had a more nuanced understanding of the way that the leadership was thinking. So he wrote in his telegram, that in the minds of the Russian people themselves, there was little appetite for international aggression. And he said that the Russian people, by and large, are friendly to the outside world. They're eager for experience of it. They're eager above all, to live in peace, and enjoy the fruits of their own labor. So the result according to Kennan, again, this is very hard for Washington to take on board, was that the Soviet leadership was actually obliged to convince the Soviet people to fear a menacing Western enemy.
And Kennan was on to their tricks. He knew that they were using psychological warfare to manipulate people's minds. So fake news. It was already on the agenda in 1946. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth, Kennan wrote, indeed, their disbelief in its existence leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. So, in effect, Kennan was warning that the Kremlin was trying to cloud Western judgment and that Washington, Washington shouldn't step into the trap.
A version, sort of mirror image of that by written by a Soviet diplomat in Washington at the time, a fellow called Nikolai Novikov. And he was asked by the Kremlin to provide kind of a version of how the American mind works. And you know, you can really read what he wrote. And you can see he's doing his best to try and comprehend the psyche of the of the opponents, of the enemy as it would become. But you can see that he fell into every trap of preconceived thinking, of confirmation bias. You can see that he was constrained very much by the need to conform to Marxist principles, first of all. Namely, that the conflict between capitalist states was inevitable, that the downfall of capitalism was only a matter of time. And you can see Novikov kind of consciously trying to fit the evidence to demonstrate that this view was correct. So he's at pains, for instance, to prove that Washington and London were at loggerheads, and that they'd soon be in open and possibly armed conflict, and that capitalism was doomed to collapse.
And that's actually true of quite a lot of Soviet analysis of that period. And you can see with the benefit of hindsight, that the intelligence, including a lot of stuff that had been gathered by KGB operatives, at considerable risk to themselves, had to be tailored by the analysts to support the views, and often the very self deluding views held by the Kremlin. And you can see, at home in the Soviet Union, the same thing was happening with domestic propaganda, because the received opinion was that Soviet socialism, by definition could not be wrong. So any failings in industry or agriculture and food supply, couldn't be the result of problems with the Soviet system, they had to be the result of foreign plots or sabotage. So this sort of phantom enemy was routinely blamed. And the upshot of that was that real problems were actually not dealt with. Or they were discussed endlessly in a sort of fruitless search for an ideologically correct solution.
And the Soviets, you know, just like the Americans projecting their own views on the west. And it was easier for them, because there was no independent media in the Soviet Union. So the leadership could essentially tell the Soviet people, whatever it wanted to tell them, but also in the sort of mirror, sort of shadow dance that's going on, they kind of convinced themselves that because the media are not independent in the Soviet Union, then it must be the same in the West. So Novikov, in his telegram writes that, you know, obviously, all the American media are working under the instruction of the government. And he's, American newspapers are being told what to write by the government in Washington. And he wrote clearly, because that was happening in the in the Soviet Union. So he writes, you know, the American media are being instructed to create an atmosphere of war and psychosis among the masses, preparing them for conflict with the Soviet Union. And he wrote that because that was what the Soviet media were doing themselves...
Governments in east and west kind of prioritize token efforts so that people felt that they did have some control over events. For instance, our grandparents’ and parents’ generation was told to sort of build fallout shelters in the backyard of the house, and the authorities knew this would be completely useless. But nonetheless, it served a sort of psychological purpose because it made people feel they had some sort of agency and the American psychologist Irving Janis, who later would became very famous for the concept of groupthink, advised the American authorities that they could deploy emotional training techniques that would build up a tolerance for insecurity… by encouraging people to build their shelters, you can sort of lessen resentment towards the central government's lack of action. And you could also imbue the individual with a sort of sense of control over his or her chances of survival.
And the most sort of striking example of this is the duck and cover program, where duck and cover was where American schoolchildren from quite a young age were taught that if the alarm goes and there's going to be nuclear attack, what you need to do is duck and cover, duck under your school desk, cover your eyes and your ears, and that somehow will protect you. No adult clearly had any belief that that was going to save these children. But, but again, it gave them a sort of sense of agency, a sense of doing something. But for many of that generation who went through the duck and cover exercises, it left a lifelong impact. It left that sort of paradigm of existential anxiety really that, that continues, even today. I'll just read one piece of testimony very striking one from a woman called Amy Morris-Young...
The theories came out that the AIDS had been manufactured as part of a biological defense program at Fort Detrick in Maryland, that it was being deployed by the CIA against innocent victims in Africa in the third world where, you know, the sort of battle for ideological dominance was going on… so many new newspapers is reported that AIDS had originated in the the labs of the CIA, that it kind of became accepted. And so the point I want to make though is that the effect of disinformation, what we would today call fake news, creates that climate of, sort of pervasive uncertainty in which no one seems to know what can be trusted and what can't be. The aim of Soviet disinformation was clearly to undermine the confidence of people in the West, in the open nature of their so called free society, and in the probity of the men who ran it. And Moscow was very good at sort of seeking out the potential sort of weak points in the nation's psyche, and applying pressure to them. And the impact of fake news is absolutely profound, because the mind creates sort of mental maps and it finds a way to redraw them, to draw in these, these so called facts. And once they're in there, they're very hard to get out.
So for instance, as late as 1992, the then Director of Foreign Intelligence for Russia, no longer the Soviet Union, Yevgeni Primakov, publicly declared, admitted that Operation Infection was a deception that had been cooked up by the KGB, that there was no truth at all, to the rumors that it was a CIA plot. But even then, vast numbers of people refused to change their views. They continued to believe that the US had deliberately manufactured AIDS’"
Evidently the Soviets thought that they were trying True Socialism, since it couldn't be wrong
Obviously Primakov was a CIA agent and all the people who just hate the US and will believe anything negative about it are right