Accession Number:

ADA577586

Title:

Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference (Strategic Perspectives, no. 11)

Descriptive Note:

Corporate Author:

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIV FORT MCNAIR DC INST FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES

Personal Author(s):

• Schoen, Fletcher
• Lamb, Christopher J.

Report Date:

2012-06-01

Pagination or Media Count:

169.0

Abstract:

This study explains how one part-time interagency committee established in the 1980s to counter Soviet disinformation effectively accomplished its mission. Interagency committees are commonly criticized as ineffective, but the Active Measures Working Group is a notable exception. The group successfully established and executed U.S. policy on responding to Soviet disinformation. It exposed some Soviet covert operations and raised the political cost of others by sensitizing foreign and domestic audiences to how they were being duped. The group s work encouraged allies and made the Soviet Union pay a price for disinformation that reverberated all the way to the top of the Soviet political apparatus. It became the U.S. Government s body of expertise on disinformation and was highly regarded in both Congress and the executive branch.

Descriptors:

• *POLITICAL SCIENCE
• COVERT OPERATIONS
• DECEPTION
• STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS

Subject Categories:

• Government and Political Science

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE