John A. Gentry

So Soviet intelligence took over after the Comintern was abolished in 1943 at pressure from the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United States and Great Britain.

They knew what the Comintern was all about, and they said, wait a minute, we're fighting this war with you,

not against you, stop trying to subvert us.

So Stalin said, oh yeah, okay, okay, we'll get rid of the common term.

But he gave the subversion mission to intelligence.

So it continued.

So the KGB formed, and the Committee for State Security formed in 1954, then took over that mission.

And in the late 1950s, the Communist Party Politburo gave the KGB an extra mission and emphasized more what they called active measures.

So active measures would be sometimes

physical actions, assassinations, kidnappings and so on, but mostly it was information operations, broadly defined.

They established in 1962 what was called Service A, which is part of the first chief directorate or the foreign intelligence operation, the KGB, roughly the CIA equivalent of the KGB.

And these people had a wide-ranging set of missions and did a wide-ranging set of things.

So they forged documents that would be given to Western newspapers.

They planted stories in newspapers in places like India, for example, hoping that they would get picked up by West European and the United States newspapers.

What kind of stories?

Stories, for example, like that the AIDS epidemic was a product of the United States Defense Department.

So it was one of their most effective active measures operations.

Why would we pick up what India— Because it's a good and interesting story.

But it was not a sure thing.

So the Soviets had other—