Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

Thomas Rid

Profile Books, Apr 23, 2020 - History - 415 pages

We live in an age of subterfuge. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new.

In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany's best jazz magazine.

Contents

• The: x
• The Fifth Estate: xxxiv
• Escalate: xxxvii
• Field Manual 3031B 17 Service: xli
• The Neutron Bomb: lxxv
• Peacewar 20 Nuclear Freeze: lxxx
• Nuclear Winter: xcii
• AIDS Made in the: xciv
• The Philosophy of AM: xcviii
• Hack: xcviii
• Digital Measures: xcviii
• First Digital Leaks: xcviii
• Anonymous: xcviii
• Sofacy: 2020
• Leak 28 Election Leaks: 2022
• Guccifer: 2023
• Trolled: 2025
• The Shadow Brokers: 2027

About the author

Thomas Rid is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author most recently of the acclaimed Rise of the Machines (2016), a history of cybernetics. He testified on disinformation in front of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
• Author: Thomas Rid
• Publisher: Profile Books, 2020
• ISBN: 1782834605, 9781782834601
• Length: 415 pages
• Subjects: History / Military / General; History / Military / Strategy; History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General; Political Science / Intelligence & Espionage