Artículo Foreign Policy, 04.02.2022 Calder Walton, académico del Harvard Kennedy School
Ukraine wouldn’t be the first place that Russia’s military started a war by faking an attack.
Last month, as tensions between Ukraine and Russia escalated, the US Department of Defense publicly warned that Russian agents were planning a false flag operation – a deception operation designed to give them an excuse to intervene in Ukraine. This was followed by an unusual public announcement from the UK Foreign Office alleging the Kremlin was plotting to install a compliant, pro-Russian leader in Ukraine. Then, this week, US intelligence officials released details of a Russian plot to fabricate a graphic video as a pretext for an attack on Ukraine. The video reportedly includes staged explosions, complete with dead bodies, actors and mourners, to justify Russian intervention.
Amid the sounds of swords and the fog of war, it is difficult for all observers, including governments, to understand what will happen next in Ukraine. Rumors circulate and tensions escalate day by day, even hour by hour.
However, recent claims by Western governments about Russian false flag operations and its intention to install a docile ruler in Ukraine are completely unsurprising from a historical perspective. Such moves were deliberate strategies on the part of the Kremlin during the Cold War, which the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin – an old cold warrior and former KGB officer – knows only too well. Understanding this story illuminates what we see unfolding right now.
Last month, as tensions between Ukraine and Russia escalated, the US Department of Defense publicly warned that Russian agents were planning a false flag operation – a deception operation designed to give them an excuse to intervene in Ukraine. This was followed by an unusual public announcement from the UK Foreign Office alleging the Kremlin was plotting to install a compliant, pro-Russian leader in Ukraine. Then, this week, US intelligence officials released details of a Russian plot to fabricate a graphic video as a pretext for an attack on Ukraine. The video reportedly includes staged explosions, complete with dead bodies, actors and mourners, to justify Russian intervention.
Amid the sounds of swords and the fog of war, it is difficult for all observers, including governments, to understand what will happen next in Ukraine. Rumors circulate and tensions escalate day by day, even hour by hour.
However, recent claims by Western governments about Russian false flag operations and its intention to install a docile ruler in Ukraine are completely unsurprising from a historical perspective. Such moves were deliberate strategies on the part of the Kremlin during the Cold War, which the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin – an old cold warrior and former KGB officer – knows only too well. Understanding this story illuminates what we see unfolding right now.
In 1968, the Kremlin used its intelligence service, the KGB, to create false flag incidents to justify Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia, where in January its new 46-year-old leader Alexander Dubcek was trying to open the country to civil society. democratic reform and create “socialism with a human face”. Spontaneous celebrations of popular support for the reforms came to a head during a May Day procession in Prague that year, where demonstrators carried signs reading “Long live the USSR, but at its expense”. In the Kremlin, Dubcek’s reforms seemed to threaten the fabric of the entire Soviet bloc. Previously highly classified KGB archives reveal that then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov used KGB ‘illegals’ under deep cover to fabricate incidents to justify dispatch of the Red Army, crush Dubcek’s reforms, and install a leader loyal to the Kremlin in Czechoslovakia.
As part of what was dubbed Operation Progress, revealed by documents smuggled from the KGB archives to the West, Andropov authorized the deployment of 20 KGB illegals. These were intelligence officers who were not under Soviet diplomatic (legal) cover but who operated without cover (therefore “illegal”), in the cold. Andropov’s deployment of these illegals in Czechoslovakia was more than anything that had been deployed in any Western country in such a short time. They posed as Western journalists, businessmen and students, in Czechoslovakia and neighboring countries. Their mission, controlled by the KGB’s Directorate S, its illegals department, was to spy on Westerners there and to undertake covert actions (“active measures”, in the vernacular of the Kremlin) to justify Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. They planted stories to smear Czech reformist politicians, tried to get journalists to publish provocative attacks on the Soviet Union, named those who should be deported to the Soviet Union, and fabricated evidence of a western plot to support the Czech reformists. In Moscow’s narrative, the pro-democracy reformers in Prague were aided by the CIA and the hidden hand of other Western intelligence services. They were trying to subvert the Soviet Union. Moscow therefore had to remain strong and consolidate its security in the face of Western interference. Sound familiar?
In July, Soviet illegals deployed in Czechoslovakia reportedly uncovered a caché of vintage World War II weapons, which were conveniently in packages labeled “Made in USA”. Soviet state media quickly published the story as evidence of a counter-revolutionary plot by the West inside Moscow’s sphere of influence. Further details of the KGB’s active measures plot in Czechoslovakia were revealed to me by a former Czech intelligence officer, Ladislav “Larry” Bittman, who specialized in active measures. I interviewed Bittman shortly before his death in 2018, as part of a book I’m finishing on the century-long intelligence war between Russia and the West. Bittman played a key role in liaising between the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and the KGB in the run-up to the Prague Spring. He explained to me that the KGB had concocted a plan to assassinate the Soviet wives of Czech citizens and then blame their murders on Western counter-revolutionaries. This was going to be the pretext to intervene. The plan was never implemented, but it reveals the chilling lengths hardliners in Moscow like Andropov were willing to go to to justify intervention in a Soviet state.
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin used supposed evidence of agents and saboteurs (actually the work of the KGB) as an excuse to intervene in Czechoslovakia. The Kremlin also conveniently released a copy of an alleged secret US plan, which it conveniently obtained, to overthrow the Czech government. In August 1968, the Soviet Red Army and its reliable Warsaw Pact allies duly went to Prague to restore Soviet orthodoxy, the largest armed action in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubcek was forced to resign and transported to Moscow. (Out of office, he suspected, not implausibly, that the serious health problems he suffered were the result of his attempted poisoning by the KGB.) Brezhnev installed a neo-Stalinist quisling regime in Czechoslovakia, led by Gustav Husak, who then normalized relations with Moscow, which in practice meant conforming submission. The Soviet leader then established a grand Soviet strategy, the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, granting him the right to intervene in countries where “socialism” (i.e. Soviet orthodox rule) was threatened. KGB Chairman Andropov considered the crushing of the Prague Spring a stunning success for Soviet intelligence. Deceit and military force prevailed, lessons he would not forget during his long reign as head of the KGB and when, 14 years later, he himself became the Soviet leader – the first chairman of the KGB to do so.
In reality, there was no CIA conspiracy behind the Prague Spring reforms. British records reveal that his spy chiefs had so little reliable intelligence that when Soviet forces entered Prague they were taken completely by surprise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Andropov also appears to have provided the Politburo with biased intelligence, relying on reliable US KGB reports that the CIA had no plot for Czechoslovakia. Bittman told me that his StB colleagues who tried to question Moscow’s claims were silenced and threatened with violence. For Bittman, and many others, the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring was a disappointing experience. Soon after, he defected to the West, becoming a valuable source of intelligence for the CIA on Soviet active measures.
Soviet active measures in Prague in 1968 were not one-off. Each of the major Soviet armed interventions aimed at bringing so-called fraternal assistance to capricious countries – Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 – was accompanied by Soviet deception operations, including under false banner. In fact, the KGB’s predecessor, the Cheka, established shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, used deception operations to help the Bolsheviks “pacify” Ukraine in the following years. Imposing Soviet rule in Ukraine – described in diminutive in Moscow as the Ukraine – through fear and violence was an essential part of the creation of the Soviet Union a century ago, in 1922.
In the days and weeks to come, we should watch for incidents that would justify Putin’s intervention in Ukraine. In many ways, Putin’s grand strategy is to recreate the Soviet Union, to make Russia even greater. As a former KGB officer, he knows Soviet intelligence history firsthand. He studied at the KGB’s elite Andropov Institute in the Moscow Region, where recruits were trained in active measures and other trades. Putin’s mentor was Andropov, whose strategy was to combine military might with deception. Today, in Putin’s Kremlin, former KGB types and those from post-Soviet intelligence and the Russian military are the “power men” (siloviki) exerting a disproportionate influence. Putin’s recent actions suggest he is creating a modern Brezhnev Doctrine, giving him the right to intervene to impose other autocrats in Russia’s near abroad. It intervened in Kazakhstan and has a docile leader in Belarus. Ukraine would be the next logical step.
At the same time, Putin’s Russia is not simply the Soviet Union Part II. His regime is first and foremost a kleptocratic mafia state, merging old revanchist traditions with new authoritarian Russian nationalists. The more that can be done to expose this horrible reality, the better it will be for Russians, Ukrainians and the world.
