Thanks for joining in and all the great questions! I'm going to wrap this up now but I may respond to a few good questions over the next few days. Good luck everyone with your Thanksgiving and holiday conversations this year... should be a doozy but a chance for us all to connect with loved ones on what matters most.

Let me leave you with a few links for further reading:

Christopher Andrew's "Sword and the Shield" - using historical KGB documents

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

Using humor to disarm disinformation:

https://youtu.be/uuKipN1aFd0

State Dept disinformation reports: 1994 baby parts

http://pascalfroissart.online.fr/3-cache/1994-leventhal.pdf

1987 AIDS report

https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/1987/soviet-influence-activities-1987.pdf

Learn to identify the 4D's of Russian propaganda: Dismiss, Distract, Distort, and Dismay

https://www.stopfake.org/en/anatomy-of-an-info-war-how-russia-s-propaganda-machine-works-and-how-to-counter-it

Active measures and disinformation is like "water falling on a stone" it's not any one crazy story, it's the accumulation that makes the hole.

https://youtu.be/ALfDhs-_ce4?t=20m50s

​

Go read the book The Sword and the Shield. It's part of the Mitrokhin Archive - the largest dump about the KGB in history. It's fascinating and scary.

You'll change your mind about how he isn't a genius.

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006

A couple of books I've read recently about the intelligence side of things. Not sure about how their conventional forces compare to ours.

>As a result, "the security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels."

False.

I'm assuming that Chomsky hasn't been to Afghanistan. I have, multiple times. The peak of violence was in 2007. And the Afghan people agree. (PDF link, page 24)

>The people of Afghanistan, teetering on the edge of starvation in September 2001, were deprived of much of the food and medical assistance from international aid that was keeping them alive because Coalition airstrikes destroyed infrastructure and made travel unsafe for aid trucks.

False.

There are fewer babies dying now, more hospitals than since before the invasion, and the average life expectancy has risen by almost 20 years.

>Chomsky laments that the US government largely dismissed these human-rights problems in its quest to "secure our interests."

False.

Hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people have been sent to Afghanistan to rebuild the medical, telecommunications, energy, and civil infrastructures of Afghanistan. The US didn't destroy it, decades of war with the Soviet Union and its subsequent neglect by the Taliban did. The reason you didn't see "Shock n'Awe 2001!™" with the US invasion was because there was hardly any infrastructure left to destroy.

>Chomsky was one of the few people in the United States at that time to publicly talk about how deeply the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in arming and training the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

False.

This is, and was, common knowledge. It was widely reported in the press in the 80s.

And before anyone goes on about how the CIA created Bin Laden, let me just put out that both "The Black Book of Communism" (Courtois, ed, 1997) and "The Sword and the Shield" (Mitrokhin, 1992) note that most of the ideological underpinnings of the modern-day jihad were put into place by the Soviet Union's attempts to eradicate Islam through violence, and that any US aid (none of which went to Bin Laden) was merely a confidence-boosting side show to the main conflict.

Not to mention the fact that in addition to the US, almost all of Europe, Saudi Arabia, and China, also gave aid to the Afghan Mujahideen.

>For example, the United States recently risked a major international conflict with a nuclear-armed nation, Pakistan, by assassinating an influential figure in one of its major cities.

If you think we are not already engaged in an international conflict with parts of the Pakistan government, I have a bridge to sell you.

But I suppose I'm just pissing into the wind.

This is the glorious Chomsky, after all. He is trapped so many decades back in political reality that he is probably still writing checks to the Sandinista National Liberation Front .

He wrote a book about his archive material, too. The Sword and the Shield by Christoper Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. Been sitting on my bookshelf but I haven't gotten around to reading it.

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

https://www.amazon.com/World-Was-Going-Our-Way/dp/0465003133

Read these. I'm fascinated with Russian political history, especially in regards to the KGB, and these books are the best of the best when you want to learn more. They get into the deep specifics on why things are done the way they are done. Since Putin was the head of the KGB, you really get an idea on why and how he does specific things.

It's amazing. I'm very interested in Cold War espionage history and recently read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive/dp/0465003125

Basically, the writers take the most outrageous and intriguing stories and background details from that book and put them into the show. I love it.

> Joseph McCarthy when, at least in retrospect, that guy was clearly insane.

Except that he was right about the government being infiltrated by Communists. Read The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB and about the Venona Papers. The Hollywood Ten were Communists, and the Soviet Union was trying to take over the world.

KGB secret archives are filled with information about what MPs in various European countries were on the payroll or agents of influence. Allende was on their payroll too.

This is discussed briefly in the book The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. I'm only about halfway through the book, but I've already run into some interesting stuff on shortwave radio propaganda as well.

e: According to this book, they didn't trust Eskimos and Aleuts to be reliable stay-behind agents because they were perceived as being anti-establishment drunkards (paraphrased).

We were so thoroughly penetration that the Soviet Union obtained the complete plans for the American atom bomb- from two seperate sources.

An excellent book detailing Soviet penetration, ad KGB operations throughout the Soviet era, is The Sword and the Shield, based on the Vasily Mitrokhin archive.

http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/

https://www.amazon.co.jp/World-Was-Going-Our-Way/dp/0465003133

変な本がCIA内部では重要扱いされてるみたいな展開を期待したけど普通の本だった

I also heartily recommend The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

https://www.amazon.ca/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

buy or check out this book from your library (if your library isn't cucked to blacklist it). has all the dirty laundry on the infiltration by the KGB of our government!

and for a simple synopsis related to communist china and how truman's state dept fucked over china (he really did fuck them over), read this article:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4691-china-betrayed-into-communism

(fantastic article and one of the only truth you'll find on the internet regarding truman and our state dept getting infiltrated by maoist sympathizers...fucking GENERAL GEORGE MARSHALL who worked for the truman administration called mao and his commies 'so-called communists' and a 'true peasant revolt'...i mean what the fuck????)

Russia has a 100+ year history of successfully interfering with other countries.

This is a must read for anybody interested in Russian government subversion.
https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483754893&sr=1-1&keywords=mitrokhin+archive

Russia nerd here. I don't have anything in my library that contains a history of espionage in the broad sense, but "The Sword and the Shield" is probably the most thorough examination of the KGB, which is pretty interesting. It's actually a compilation of smuggled KGB documents.

You can read more about the Mitrokhin files (concerning Israel) in this story: http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-13181,00.html

Or in the books written by Prof. Christopher Andrew in cooperation with Mitrokhin himsef: https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476826988&sr=1-1&keywords=the+sword+and+the+shield+the+mitrokhin+archive
Or: https://www.amazon.com/Mitrokhin-Archive-II-KGB-World/dp/0713993596

> Y'know I used to think the whole Red Scare was an overreaction

When the Mitrokhin Archive came to light, it showed that some of the most insane sounding Red Scare conspiracy theories were actually true. The Sword and the Shield breaks it down into digestible form.

The first problem you're going to run into is that no one (with good reason) wants to tell you what "works" because as soon as that becomes public knowledge, people will craft means and methods against it. There's absolutely no value to disclosing what works aside from for public relations. So understand that.

Books like this and this are great for grasping a bit of knowledge and getting a storyline, but don't share much about the nitty gritty. I've read them both, and though I have no experience in operations in the 40s-70s, I do with what Bamford speaks of and there's quite a bit of fearmongering there. Either way, it's helpful to find the perspective of what's trying to be done. These aren't people trying to trample your friends, it's people trying to find a balance between freedom and security.

A book like this is basically just a nice story. It's a few biopics in one and the writer clearly likes the people he's writing about, so he's extremely pretty sympathetic to them. Still good for motivations and perspective, though.

These two are extremely useful because they get into that nitty-gritty that I spoke of earlier.

But as I said, it basically comes down to the balance between freedom and security. If you- like a crazy amount of redditors and young people seem to be- are way way way more interested than freedom than you are security, you're never going to like what people in the IC do. And that's your preoperative, but it seems that many people that of that cloth usually live within a secure environment and just don't really worry about. It's easy to not give a shit about heavy jackets when you live in West Maui. Moreover, the craze that I've seen in reddit is just...amazing? So many people with so little experience of education in these things that insist they know just so much. These same people will flip shit if you wander into their area of expertise acting like you know what's up when you clearly don't but...if someone's talking about CIA/NSA/FBI/etc or even just international politics in general? Suddenly they're the expert. It's weird.

This is why I chuckle when people think the redacted portions of the 9/11 Commission Report somehow point to an inside job, letting it happen, or a vast Saudi conspiracy. The redacted portions were redacted because of classification, and things are classified to protect means and methods, 99% of the time. Sometimes technology is classified, but it's rare and I don't know much about that anyway.

This article was published after he released his book, Programmed to Kill. It contains new information.

The primary sources referenced are the Mitrokhin archives and former Russian President Yeltin's own memoirs.

Some of the Mitrokhin archives are open to the public, and a book about them was written by the only historian allowed to see them. The book is The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.

There have been several books written on the Mitrokhin archives, but the archives have never been completely publicly revealed.

However, take a look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive#Disinformation_campaign_against_the_United_States

The first two claims (the KGB's promotion of false JFK assassination theories, using writer Mark Lane and a creating a forged letter from Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, attempting to incriminate Hunt in JFK assassination) reference this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Mitrokhin-Archive-Kgb-Europe-West/dp/0140284877

They reference pages 296-298.

Google Books has a generous free preview and I just tracked down the portions which discuss KGB disinformation about JFK:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=tiNqCAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PT391#v=onepage&q&f=false

Unfortunately, some of the pages about this are omitted, but start from that page and read the next six or so pages.

By the way, the above book is one of 5 or so written jointly by the original leaker of the Mitrokhin archives and Christopher Andrew, the only historian allowed to see the archives. Thus, the above book is basically a primary source.

i asked my superhacker friend and he told me he had to hack "the inthenet" using "gogole" or something to get you this info fresh off the presses, so use this wisely

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2019/05/the-soviet-roots-of-anti-zionist-anti-semitism/

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/140328/timmerman-disinformation

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4886594,00.html

do you really think people have bookmark libraries and scans of books to pamper fools for free?

for the third time:

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

has a whole chapter detailing how ruskis were flooding arab populations with endless prints of protocols for decades, on top of all the other shit i listed above and many more

you want the unabridged 2-tome version

I would just like to point out, in 1991 the KGB archives from 1918 to 1980s were smuggled to the west. Apart from the areas that were obliterated to erase the feuding during the Stalin purges and potentially embarrassing information collected on the leadership that took over after Stalin (and tragically Stalin's obliteration of his Okrana record) it is a pretty complete record of KGB activity in other countries. The KGB was extremely interventionist beyond the wildest dreams of the CIA into other nations affairs during the early 1950s. So the CIA was paranoid, but it was paranoid because there really were extreme interventions by the USSR going on behind the scene in many places. If you ever get the chance there are several books that have summarized the contents of the archive. The breadth of KGB operations was staggering even in the UK and US.


This is the book written by the KGB defectors on the contents of the archive

There was a good reason for this. The so-called antiwar movement was infiltrated and funded by Soviet intelligence.


Confirmed by Mitrokin after he defected to the West.

EDIT: http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463946856&sr=8-1&keywords=mitrokhin+archive