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Title: Youri Bezmenov - Communist Psywar (Part 1) View count: 1045 Rating: 5.0 (17 ratings) Description: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol5no3/html/v05i3a04p_0001.htm Psywar as Covert Operation In the cold war, the United States and her allies find themselves mostly on the defensive, which means, among other things, that their antagonists have the first choice of weapons, battlefields, and timetables. The Communists have chosen primarily political weapons -- agitation and propaganda, mass organizations, subversion. Although they do not eschew the use of more orthodox means in the international arena -- armed forces, economic warfare, diplomacy -- these are subordinated to the political bias of the controlling Communist Party. The cold war is therefore being fought mainly with the weapons of psychological warfare, taken in its broadest meaning to denote the whole range of manifestations from propaganda and various kinds of national penetration to the political-psychological effects of the respective antagonists' achievement in orthodox activities -- military power, economic strength, social stability, national morale, and so forth. There are other reasons for this hegemony of the psychological, too, among them the reluctance of governments to risk nuclear war in pursuit of their national objectives, the extraordinary new efficiency, range, and speed of mass communications, and the rapid rise of literacy rates in all parts of the world. On the Communist side, these weapons are wielded mainly by ostensibly non-government agencies, the Communist parties and their innumerable fronts and auxiliary organizations. This setup enables a Communist government to disclaim formally the responsibility for whatever these groups may be doing in another country. It also provides a huge, specialized apparatus devoted largely to the conduct of the cold war, endowed with enormous manpower reserves -- the 85 Communist parties alone have more than 30 million card-carrying members, of whom several hundred thousand are full-time activists -- and backed by the massive financial and technical resources of twelve totalitarian dictatorships. The mass organizations of the non-Communist world -- political parties, labor unions, veterans' associations, and the like -- though capable of playing a significant role in the cold war, are by themselves no match for the world-wide Communist machine. Most of them exist for some strictly limited purpose such as getting their representatives elected to parliament or obtaining better working conditions for their members; they cannot compete with a movement whose central and pervasive purpose is to bring all mankind under the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus decisively to change the course of history. In countries where the Communist movement is comparatively weak, political groups, however anti-Communist in their basic attitudes, naturally spend a far greater amount of their energies in competing with each other than in fighting the cold war. But even in countries like Italy, France, India, or Japan, where the Communists are strong and well organized, the spontaneous anti-Communist efforts of political parties and other mass organizations are inadequate, being limited to opposing the local Communists at the polls and in shop steward elections and similar contests, without mounting any effective counteroffensive against world Communism beyond their borders. These private efforts can make a successful contribution in the cold war only if they are all coordinated, supported, and supplemented by government action. But since the psywar weapon chosen by the Communists involves activities which, when not entirely clandestine, must have their government sponsorship disguised, the regular agencies of a democratic government in peace time (and the cold war, for all that its outcome will be of more decisive significance for mankind than that of a good many shooting wars in earlier phases of history, is technically considered a state of peace) would find it difficult to meet the Communist drive on the scale and with the militancy required. The conduct of the West's psywar effort is therefore inextricably bound up with the intelligence function. This phase of national defense has to be carried out by clandestine means not attributable to the sponsoring government. It has to depend on intelligence techniques such as cover, foreign agents, the penetration of hostile organizations, and third-country operations, as well as utilize information obtained by clandestine collection. Organizationally, however, responsibility for psywar may be assigned in any of three ways--to the same organization and the same personnel that collect intelligence; to the same organization which collects intelligence but to separate units and different personnel; or to an independent organization, connected only through liaison arrangements with the collecting service. Tags: yuri, bezmenov, russia, soviet, union, ron, paul, bailout, paulson, plumber, joe, mccain, obama, nader, psywar, communism, capitalism, Author: rickrocker |
