John A. Gentry

Well, it appears that they're working together on some.

My interpretation here is that Russia's got its own agenda.

China clearly has an agenda too.

I think with respect to Ukraine, for example, and Russian information operations we'll talk about, they're operating pretty much on their own.

Not that I see.

Not that I see.

They both are using techniques that the Soviets developed, but they've got their own agendas and their techniques are different in some respects.

So what you're trying to do with information operations, propaganda actually is only one element of that.

So propaganda would be something that would be fairly obvious in media, brochures, things of that sort.

But there's a wide range of other things, forgeries, for example, social media doings,

So I prefer to talk about influence operations or information operations.

The history of this as it pertains to the United States.

So if we're thinking about different countries, this would be somewhat different.

But as we were talking earlier, the Soviet Union over a century ago in the early 1920s set up information operations that were designed to subvert and ultimately destroy their capitalist opponents.

And so their intelligence services, their foreign ministry, even their national leaders were integrated in these campaigns.

One of the foremost of these operators early on was a young German communist by the name of Willy Munzenberg.

who organized printing presses, publishing houses that would publish material that was consistent with Soviet interests.

He also organized groups of various sorts.

He divided them into

into groups that would be roughly homogenous.