Active Measures Against The "Main Adversary"
A few claims of active measures against the United States were described in the Mitrokhin Archive:
- Promotion of false John F. Kennedy assassination theories, using writer Mark Lane.
- Discrediting of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), using historian Philip Agee (codenamed PONT).
- Exposing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover as a homosexual.
- Attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing publications portraying him as an "Uncle Tom" who was secretly receiving government subsidies.
- Stirring up racial tensions in the United States by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, placing an explosive package in "the Negro section of New York" (operation PANDORA), and spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination had been planned by the US government.
- Starting rumors that fluoridated drinking water was in fact a plot by the US government to effect population control.
- Starting rumors that the moon landing was a hoax and the money ostensibly used by NASA was in actuality used by the CIA.
- Fabrication of the story that the HIV virus was manufactured by US scientists at Fort Detrick; the story was planted by Soviet KGB officers in the Pro-Soviet Indian newspaper "The Patriot" in 1983. The claims were subsequently spread by the Soviet press in a process that was well documented by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency. The Soviet's AIDS fabrication was officially disavowed in the fall 1987.
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Famous quotes containing the words active, measures, main and/or adversary:
“Few, if any, creatures are equally active all night.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.”
—Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)