John A. Gentry

things that they would do.

So they would write stories and feed them to sympathetic journalists who would then publish them verbatim.

What they also did was publish, in essence, notes.

This is the message we want to get across, point A, point B, and so on.

And I then give it to you.

So I'm a KGB agent, you're my asset.

I give it to you and then you write up my message in your style.

So it doesn't look like a KGB product anymore, but you're passing on the message.

So again, a wide variety of approaches that were used to provide a consistent general message, but one that would not be obvious.

So what they did was develop techniques that were designed specifically

to be long-term in goal, long-term in duration, that would be subtle, that would be complementary, and would be hard to both identify and combat.

So it was a very effective program.

And they actually came up with a name for it back in the 1950s.

They call it reflexive control.

So you're trying to get... So I'm trying to get you to do what I want

but you need to not know that you have been influenced by me."

So that has worked very well for the Soviets, and the KGB officers who defected, who were involved in active measures campaigns, have said repeatedly, it really was very easy to fool Westerners, to fool Americans.

These were gullible people, and they particularly were

were fond of targeting political liberals, not hard conservatives and not hard leftists.

And again, to go back to Willy Munzenberg's Innocence Clubs, they wanted to create a lot of allies as part of the effort to subvert the country as a whole.