Planting in fertile soil
Disinformation as practiced by the Soviet and now Russian security services works best when the lie it peddles contains an element of verisimilitude or the germ of verifiable fact, however cleverly cocooned in falsehoods. William Blake put the matter better than Yuri Andropov ever could have when he wrote, "A Truth that's told with bad intent/ Beats all the Lies you can invent."
Outlandish conspiracy theories -- the CIA created AIDS to destroy inner-city black communities and also assassinated JFK -- may become fringe urban myths or Oliver Stone biopics. Smarter efforts to undermine the West are rooted in smarter understandings of the West and its social and political pressure points. It is always easier to co-opt than to create anew. And because lingering or resurgent neo-Nazism was a problem in West Germany in 1959, even if not to the extent exaggerated by Agayants, the swastika graffiti operation succeeded in two ways.
First, it undermined and subverted an enemy nation, as intended. Second, it "helped East Germany legitimize itself as a peace loving, antifascist state," as Anton Shekhovtsov, a Vienna-based scholar of European fascism, argues in his timely and exhaustively researched new book, "Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir."
As with many KGB operations, this one had the added virtue of Freudian projection: accusing the West of that which the East was guilty. The East German regime, Shekhovtsov reminds us, was not above rehabilitating and suborning former agents of Hitler to agitate on behalf of their new socialist fatherland. The Communist-controlled and perfectly misnamed National-Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD), for example, "helped form, during the 1950s, 'numerous pressure groups, newspapers, and "study circles" for former officers' through its West German contacts among former Nazis and Wehrmacht officers," he writes. "For (these) purposes, the NDPD received 700,000 East German Marks a month from a Soviet bank."