Covert Influence–Russian Operations Changed America (Part 2)

Covert Influence Not Propaganda

In covert influence, the payload is subtle. When done correctly, it is hard to identify the payload as anything but the creator’s point of view. The payload is disguised as critical thinking, cultural criticism, or intellectual theorizing. Covert influence is not propaganda. A propaganda message might be: “Imperialist America murders babies in Iraq!” A covert influence payload might be a movie that sensationalizes an incident on the battlefield, with an unspoken theme of American military complicity in war crimes. This insidious form of espionage is more difficult to identify than propaganda.

Willi Munzenberg: Master of Influence Operations

The early USSR’s intelligence services perfected covert influence. Their desired goal: destroy the will of the capitalist enemy to resist “inevitable” communist domination.

Working under the Communist International (ComIntern), Willi Munzenberg, directed global covert influence operations, likely at Lenin’s direction. A ComIntern press agent, publisher, movie maker, and middleman, German communist and long-time friend of Lenin, Willi was the mastermind behind Soviet intelligence’s covert influence operations.

Munzenberg’s covert influence message was attractive to American intellectuals. The objective of the operations was to bring America down, sooner rather than later, so that communism could replace America’s free enterprise and individualism with a dictatorship of Elites, and collectivism. Until his neck was broken by a rope in a French forest as Paris was captured from the Nazis in WWII, Munzenberg honed his message to a fine point. His operational genius provided a message that seduced the intellectuals, without leaving any trace of Soviet involvement.

Willing Accomplices

Munzenberg perfected the “Popular Front” operational concept. He and his agents set up multiple organizations with high-minded names and reasons for existence–for example the International Congress Against Fascism and War, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. These fronts gave intellectuals and artists a higher calling–while serving as cover to insert covert influence payloads into the targeted cultures. The perceived moral superiority of the Soviet’s covert influence messages provided members a chance to show “you were a decent human being,” in fact, a better human being. Munzenberg despised these members, and called them “Innocents.”

I call these Americans “Willing Accomplices.” They were witting, and unwitting, agents of influence They were Willing to imbibe the superior attitude conferred by the high-minded ideals of the fronts. And they were Accomplices to the communists’ goal of destroying their country.

Targets: American Media, Academia/Education, and Hollywood

Munzenberg and his men, and later the KGB’s ops officers in the US, targeted the most efficient conduits to influence American culture. The press, education and academia, and Hollywood were the fertile recruiting grounds of Munzenberg’s influence operations.

The payload was a simple formulation. Stephen Koch, for his book on Munzenberg, “Double Lives,” interviewed Willi’s wife, Babette Gross, who survived the war to live into her 90s. Ms. Gross told Koch that Willi had carefully crafted the “payload” for his covert influence operations:

Reduced to its essence the message was: “You claim to be an independent-minded idealist. You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break. You believe in open-mindedness. You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country. You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman. You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding. You hate fascism. You think the capitalist system is corrupt.”

This subtly anti-American message created a mindset. The mindset created a superiority complex among those who adopted it. They were smarter, better, more feeling, more caring, more humane, more human, overall better people than the unwashed masses. As Stephen Koch explained, “The purpose … [was] to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment.”

The attitude of wise superiority to the American masses, disdain for the racist, sexist, homophobic, foreigner-hating, dead-white-male-worshipping ignoramuses spread quickly throughout the three domains of cultural transmission. First academia rejected traditional America, her people, her founders, and her foundations. The press was next, closely followed by Hollywood.

The most stunning aspect of Munzenberg’s message was its ability to self-propagate. Like a fertile flower, once planted and growing, it spread its seeds far and wide, with no need for a gardener to nurture it. The payload, so powerful and seductive, once planted in the American intelligentsia, grew and metastisized, like a political cancer, until it burst forth in full flower as Political Correctness (PC) in the 1980s.

Munzenberg’s skillful covert influence operations, aiming to destroy American Exceptionalism, are still bearing fruit today. Willi’s influence operations outlived every one of the ComIntern officers that recruited the Willing Accomplices, the American agents who carried the influence messages into the heart of our culture. The effects of Willi’s operations outlived even the USSR, and even communism as a practical political platform.