Active measures (Russian: aktivnye meropriyatiya) is the Soviet intelligence community's term for a broad set of influence activities aimed at weakening adversaries and advancing state interests without resorting to open military force. The concept was institutionalized in the KGB, most famously in its First Chief Directorate's Service A, which coordinated disinformation, forgery, front organizations, and propaganda from the 1950s through the Cold War. The term has been retained in scholarly and policy usage to describe successor practices by Russian services such as the SVR, FSB, and GRU.
Typical instruments include:
- Disinformation: planting fabricated or distorted stories in foreign media to be picked up by mainstream outlets.
- Forgeries: producing fake official documents to embarrass adversary governments.
- Front groups: financing or steering ostensibly independent peace, solidarity, or cultural organizations.
- Agents of influence: cultivating journalists, academics, or politicians who advance favorable narratives.
- Kompromat: collecting and selectively releasing compromising material.
Well-documented Cold War cases include Operation INFEKTION (also called Operation Denver), a KGB campaign begun in the early 1980s that promoted the false claim that HIV/AIDS was a US biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick. The story was first seeded in the Indian newspaper Patriot in 1983 and amplified through East German and Soviet outlets before being publicly retracted by Soviet officials in the late 1980s.
In contemporary usage, the term is frequently applied to Russian interference activities catalogued in the US Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 on the 2016 US presidential election and in the Mueller Report (2019), which documented social-media operations by the Internet Research Agency and GRU cyber intrusions. Analysts debate how cleanly the Cold War framework maps onto digital-era influence, but the underlying logic—combining truthful, distorted, and fabricated material across multiple channels—remains central.
Example
In 1983 the KGB launched Operation INFEKTION, planting a story in the Indian newspaper Patriot alleging that the US military had engineered HIV at Fort Detrick.
Frequently asked questions
Propaganda is typically overt messaging by an identified state. Active measures combine overt propaganda with covert tools—forgeries, front groups, agents of influence, and cyber operations—often designed to appear to originate from non-state or adversary sources.
Keep learning