We've Been Here Before | A Century of Russian Disinformation and Espionage
Almost everyone has heard of both Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was actually named the House Committee on Un-American Activities. McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the use of the House Committee to engage in the repression and persecution of left wing associated individuals and alleged communists, as well as Soviet influence and espionage in the United States between the 1940s and the 1950s.
Less people have heard of its immediate predecessor, likely in part because its name doesn’t quite roll of the tongue: the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities.
The “Special Committee” was chaired by John William McCormack, a Democrat from Boston, and Samuel Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City. In 1930, Dickstein sponsored a bill that condemned religious persecution in the Soviet Union, and in 1932, Dickstein and Congressman Martin Dies Jr., cosponsored a bill to outlaw membership in the Communist Party of the United States.
A version of the same basic law would eventually pass by way of the Communist Control Act of 1954, which was signed into law by President Eisenhower in August 1954, outlawing the existence of and membership in the Communist Party of the United States, as well as support for the party, and support for "Communist-action" organizations.
In 1933, Dickstein called for a congressional investigation into Anarchism, after a failed attempt to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’d soon be on the Soviet payroll.
In 1934, his special committee was founded, and began investigating something called the Wall Street Putsch. Also called the Business Plot, it was an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the Roosevelt government and install Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, as dictator.
You can hear Butler for yourself in the video below, along with his admonition that, “no dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech and press.”
During the committee hearings, Butler testified that Gerald C. MacGuire, a bond salesman with Grayson M. P. Murphy & Co, tried to recruit him into their scheme, promising money and an army half a million strong to support the endeavor.
According to the New York Times archives, G.M.P. Murphy & Co was taken over by Swart, Duntze Co., Inc., an affiliate of Swart, Brent Co., Inc, in 1937. However, a company by that name still exists today, registered as the administrator of a private hedge fund with an office in New Haven, CT, based in Kansas. The manager is listed as Grayson M.P. Murphy, with total assets of $33,245,040 as of the SEC filing on Mar 31, 2023.
This must be a descendant of the original Grayson M.P. Murphy, who died of pneumonia in 1937, and was survived by a son, Grayson Murphy, Jr., who died of cancer in 1985, survived by a son, Grayson M.P. Murphy III, of New Haven, CT. The hedge fund could belong to him, though Grayson M.P. Murphy III died in January of 2024 at the age of 88, or it could belong to his son, Grayson Murphy (IV, I presume). I digress.
Smedley Butler, said his good reputation and popularity were vital to any hope of public support to the plot, and he had suspicions that he was seen as being easy to manipulate. The notoriously difficult General Douglas MacArthur was alleged to be the second choice if Butler declined a role in the coup.
Butler, who had a reputation as a critic of capitalism, said he was told he would have total power as the newly created "Secretary of General Affairs." The role of President, along with Roosevelt- if he survived - would retain a ceremonial role.
A journalist named John L. Spivak (who claimed he never actually joined the communist party despite writing for the American Communist Party’s magazine, New Masses) published several articles in which he reported portions of testimony that had been redacted from congressional reports as unsupported hearsay.
Spivak, with no evidence to support his claims, argued that the plot was part of a plan by J. P. Morgan and various “Jewish financiers,” to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship.
Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co. called it "perfect moonshine," while Gen. Douglas MacArthur referred to it as "the best laugh story of the year."
Every single person who was implicated by Butler denied their involvement in such a plot, although MacGuire was the only one identified by Butler who actually testified because, “[the] committee has had no evidence before it that would in the slightest degree warrant calling before it such men… The committee will not take cognizance of names brought into testimony which constitute mere hearsay."
The committee somewhat contradictingly claimed that it verified, “all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement about the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark.”
Clark was an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. The Committee allegedly destroyed all records of testimony about various monied interests, including Clark, Grayson Murphy, J. P. Morgan, the Du Ponts, Remington Arms, and others.
In the 1990’s, declassified documents from a Soviet era signals intelligence project revealed that in mid 1930s, Dickstein began receiving payments from Russian intelligence, and stopped receiving payments from Russian intelligence in February 1940.
Dickstein - who helped to promote Butler’s ideas - was being was paid the equivalent to about $28,000 in 2024 dollars (about $1,250 a month in the 1930s) by the Soviet NKVD for a variety of espionage services.
He retired from Congress in 1945, served as a New York Supreme Court Justice until 1948, and died in early 1954. A 1939 NKVD report said that Dickstein provided the Soviets with, "materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc."
Dickstein also reportedly ran a lucrative side business in illegal visas for Soviet operatives. Kurt Stone wrote that Dickstein "was, for many years, a 'devoted and reliable' Soviet agent whom his handlers nicknamed Crook."
The “not officially a communist” journalist, Spivak, - like Dickstein - was described as an “agent” in intercepted cables from the NKVD. The Soviets wrote that they especially appreciated information he obtained from sources inside of United States Congressional committees, which included details about the German government's financing and sponsorship of Nazi activity in the United States, as well as documents related to munitions and chemical weapons research.
Contemporary newspapers like the New York Times, in their November 1934 Op Ed, widely reported the plot as something like a hoax, with the Times actually calling it "a gigantic hoax." Historian and Pulitzer winner Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was documented calling it a “cocktail putsch” in 1958.
Schlesinger, Jr., for his part, acknowledged that the plot existed in some sense, but considered it to have never left the fanciful imaginations who first discussed it. The New York Times also had coverage upholding the claims made by Butler.
In 1935, Smedley Butler adapted War Is a Racket into a book from a speech he delivered in a nationwide tour after his retirement from the US Marine Corps in October 1931. He was quite a popular speaker after his retirement, taking paid gigs at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups.
In War is a Racket, Butler proposes limiting the military strictly to “self defense”, and alleges imperialist, capitalist motivations for the wars in which he served, essentially accusing the arms industry of getting rich on blood money in the support of other industries. It is a short five chapters.
War is a racket
Who makes the profits?
Who pays the bills?
How to smash this racket!
To hell with war!
The reason that the Soviets stopped paying Dickstein is that the NKVD was unhappy with his performance after he lost control of the committee, and unsuccessfully attempted to expedite the deportation of a Soviet defector, Walter Krivitsky, while Congressman Dies, who took control of the Committee, used his power to keep Krivitsky in the United States.
Krivitsky testified in front of the Dies Committee in October 1939, before sailing for London under the name "Walter Thomas" in January 1940 to be interrogated by British counterintelligence at MI5, for which it is believed he was assassinated. On February 10, 1941, at 9:30 a.m., Krivitsky was found dead in his room at the Bellevue Hotel (now the Kimpton George Hotel) in Washington DC, three different suicide notes by his bed, and a .38 caliber revolver in his right hand.
He died from a single shot to the right temple, and it is a matter of debate whether or not he killed himself. What is not up for debate is that Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD, learned about his meeting with MI5 and ordered his assassination.
Congressman Martin Dies Jr, a democrat from Texas, along with Dickstein, created the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. Nicknamed the Dies Committee, Dies served as its first chairman for seven years from 1938 to 1944. Unlike Dickstein, who was more concerned with fascists, Dies' committee mainly targeted communists and their sympathizers.
Dickstein was not discovered to be a Soviet agent until deep into the 1990s as a result of journalist research into the Venona project materials. The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program that was started during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service, and later absorbed by the NSA.
It ran in secret for 37 years from 1943 until 1980, decrypting communications intercepted from various intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union (the NKVD/KGB and the GRU). This program started when the Soviet Union was still an ally of the United States. It expanded during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union became an enemy, and decrypted thousands of messages.
The Soviet version of the GRU was dissolved in May of 1992 when the Russian GRU took over its activities. The KGB was dissolved in December of 1991, eventually splitting in two, and becoming the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) respectively.
Putin worked as a secret foreign intelligence officer for 16 years after he joined the KGB in 1975, retiring in December of 1991 during the coup against Gorbachev. He trained at the 401st KGB School in Okhta, Leningrad, and at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before resigning in 1991 to begin his political career in the fallout of the collapse of the USSR.
Putin has continuously held the position of either president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012. He is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin.
In the year 2000, the FBI uncovered multiple cells of Russian spies operating within the United States, and began what would become a ten year counterintelligence investigation called Operation Ghost Stories.
In 2010, as a result of that investigation, 10 Russian agents were arrested as members of what was called the Illegals Program by the Department of Justice. An eleventh person was arrested in Cyprus but vanished after being released on bail; a twelfth person, a Russian national who worked for Microsoft, was also deported. Moscow court documents later revealed another two Russian agents, who Russia alleges were known to the FBI, managed to flee without being arrested.
Posing as ordinary American citizens, the sleeper agents who were arrested were accused of, "carrying out long-term, 'deep-cover' assignments in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation."
“The Russian government spent significant funds and many years training and deploying these operatives,” said one FBI counterintelligence agent who worked on the case. “No government does that without expecting a return on its investment.”
They collected information to send back to Russia, and they were also actively engaged in what is known in the spy business as “spotting and assessing,” identifying vulnerable individuals to target. The FBI believes they were seeking to co-opt students and others in academia who might one day hold positions of power and influence.
In the 1930’s, Soviet intelligence ran a similar operation at Cambridge University, called the Cambridge Five, in which they successfully recruited students who would later rise to power in the British government and become Soviet operatives during World War II and into the 1950s, including known spy Kim Philby, among others.
“We believe the SVR illegals may well have hoped to do the same thing here,” said one counterintelligence agent.
Alan Kohler, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, told ABC News that, "Operation Ghost Stories was probably the largest FBI counterintelligence investigation in history."
FBI agents recorded several instances where the Russians passed large amounts of cash in public places, including one instance where $60,000 was buried at a highway rest stop. One of the spies uncovered in this investigation was the notorious Anna Chapman, who reportedly proposed marriage to Edward Snowden on orders from the Kremlin.
One couple named in court documents were journalist Vicky Peláez and Mikhail Vasenkov, aka Juan Lazaro, in Yonkers, New York. Court filings claim that these couples were arranged in Russia to, "co-habit in the country to which they are assigned," even starting families to help maintain their cover stories.
Peláez was a leftist journalist who wrote for El Diario Nueva York, the largest, oldest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the United States.
In espionage incidents since Operation Ghost Stories, Maria Butina was convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent in 2018 after attempting to to infiltrate groups including the National Rifle Association of America as part of an effort to promote Russian interests in the 2016 United States presidential election. The Senate Intelligence Committee later said that she also tried to persuade the Trump campaign to establish a secret back channel communication with Russia.
In March 2018, the Trump administration expelled over 50 alleged Russian spies from the United States following the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. The White House also ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle; intelligence suggests that the consulate was a key base of operations for Russian intelligence operations being conducted in America.
The botched assassination attempt was allegedly organised by a secret group within the Russian GRU, Unit 29155, a special forces outfit responsible for carrying out foreign assassinations and other activities aimed at destabilizing western countries under the command of Major General Andrei V. Averyanov.
Unit 29155 has also been linked to the attempted assassination of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in April 2015, a destabilisation campaign in Moldova in 2016, a failed pro-Serbian coup plot in Montenegro in 2016, which included an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister, and the assassination of former GRU Colonel Sergei Skripal in March 2018.
In 2020, a CIA assessment reported low to moderate confidence in intelligence uncovered during interrogations of Afghani militants that Unit 29155 operated a Russian bounty program offering cash rewards to Taliban-linked militants who killed coalition soldiers in Afghanistan.
The prime minister of Czechia, announced in 2021 that Unit 29155 was behind the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition warehouse explosions. Czech police seek information from the public on two suspects: Alexander Mishkin (aka Alexander Petrov), Anatoliy Chepiga (aka Ruslan Boshirov), the same men identified in the Skripal poisoning case.
In another incident tied to Unit 29155, in 2016 about two dozen American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, heard piercing sounds of metallic hissing before they began experiencing nausea, vertigo, headaches, and other cognitive ailments in what has come to be called Havana Syndrome. Others have since reported the same, but no one has been able to figure out what could be making them sick. Theories included the use of sonic weapons launched by foreign actors like Russia.
The CIA dismissed that idea, saying most cases of "Havana Syndrome" actually stem from pre-existing medical conditions. In March 2023, a collection of American intelligence agencies released a joint unclassified report on Havana Syndrome that suggested, "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and was "very unlikely."
A 2024 review published in the International Journal of Social Psychology suggested that Havana syndrome was a health scare fuelled by "moral panic", and that Havana syndrome just "a socially constructed catch-all category for an array of pre-existing health conditions, responses to environmental factors, and stress reactions that were lumped under a single label."
In April 2024, 60 Minutes, Der Spiegel and The Insider substantiated allegations that Unit 29155 was connected to "Havana syndrome," where United States intelligence agents, military members, defense industry employees, and their family members have experienced symptoms in the range from pain and ringing in the ears to cognitive dysfunction.
Among the core findings of the yearlong collaboration of Roman Dobrokhotov, Christo Grozev and Michael Weiss were that senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to the development of non-lethal acoustic weapons; and that members of the unit have been geolocated to places around the world just before or at the time of reported incidents.
"[Averyanov’s] qualification is preparing special operations abroad. He is the ‘hit and kill guy’ you call when you need this kind of service," Heinemann-Gruder, who studies private paramilitary groups at the University of Bonn, told France24 in 2023.
Averyanov is considered to be an important part of the reorganisation of Russian operations in the fallout from the Wagner Company debacle that led to death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed when his private jet mysteriously crashed into a field northwest of Moscow in August of 2023. Putin later claimed that hand grenade fragments were found in the bodies of people who died in the crash. Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin and most of the rest of the group's leadership died in the incident alongside him.
All Russian military leaders Prigozhin tried to oust remain in power, and Wagner Company has been absorbed into Russia's national guard, known as Rosgvardia, and rebranded as the Africa Corps, or the Russian "Expeditionary Corps," under the control of… Major General Andrei V. Averyanov.
Russia has denied all of these accusations. They have likewise denied allegations of astroturfing, either via Spesnatz GRU or the Internet Research Agency once controlled by Wagner Company boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, and alleged to have been transferred into the control of the GRU following his death.
The earliest allegations about Russian "web brigades" appear in an April 2003 Vestnik Online article "The Virtual Eye of Big Brother," by French journalist Anna Polyanskaya (former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova), Andrey Krivov and Ivan Lomako.
The authors claim that up to 1998, of the contributions to forums on Runet, Russian internet sites in the .ru domain, about 70% of Russian Internet posters were generally liberal views. This shifts after the new millenium, amid a flurry of "antidemocratic" posting activity, and up to 80% of posters suddenly begin to reflect totalitarian values. They attribute this change to teams of Russian commenters organized by the Russian state security service.
In January 2012, a hacktivist group claiming to be the Russian arm of 4Chan linked Anonymous, published a collection of emails that supposedly came from accounts controlled by former and present leaders of the pro-Putin youth organization Nashi (including a number of government officials).
The e-mails suggested that members of these "brigades" were paid the Ruble equivalent of about $3 USD, with potential bonuses depending on whether the comment received replies. Some were paid as much as the Ruble equivalent of about $21,000 USD for leaving hundreds of comments on press articles on the internet, and were presented with additional gifts.
Those who had been behind the 1934 coup against FDR went on to suffer a defeat in the 1934 congressional and 1936 presidential elections. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party won an overwhelming victory in 1936; their third party, calling itself the Union Party, ran on a program of economic nationalism.
The Union Party was an offshoot of the National Union for Social Justice, a political movement formed in 1934 by Charles Coughlin that heavily criticized communism, capitalism, and the Roosevelt administration, while also calling for the nationalization of multiple industries.
“Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest based in Royal Oak, Michigan, who attracted a huge radio audience with his weekly preaching against the KKK. Coughlin had initially supported the New Deal, but in 1936, denounced the New Deal government as an instrument of “international communism” and “international Jewish bankers.”
A strong supporter of fascism, Coughlin increased his rabid anti-Communism and anti-Semitism on the air, which led to campaigns to boycott his program. In November 1938, when the Hitler regime launched a national campaign of violence and terror against Germany’s remaining Jewish community (the burning of synagogues, the beatings, arrests, murder, imprisonment of Jewish people), which the Nazis themselves called Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass,” Coughlin made a speech on the radio justifying it, blaming “the Jews” for supposedly bringing it on themselves.
His anti-Semitism eventually led to his removal from commercial radio. Coughlin also ran a newsletter in the 1930s in which he printed anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda which he titled Social Justice. After Coughlin called for a "crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the Red Revolution," the newsletter, which had a circulation in the thousands, helped bootstrap a group called the Christian Front, an anti-Semitic, anti-communist (they made no distinction between "communists" and Jews) fascist group active in the United States from 1938 to 1945.
In language from Social Justice that echoes the language of Social Justice Activists today, Coughlin argued that violent revolt was a justifiable response to tyranny. Christian Front members committed many beatings and stabbings.
For months in 1939, Jews were harassed and attacked on the streets of New York City by thugs generally associated with the Christian Front, which was explicit in its support of Adolf Hitler, and participated in the notorious February 20, 1939, Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden organized by the German American Bund.
The Christian Front sold copies of Social Justice, organized boycotts of Jewish owned businesses, and held rallies in which speakers denounced Jews as international bankers, war mongers, and communists, and mocked President Roosevelt as Rosenfelt.
There are no known direct links between Coughlin or the Christian Front and the Soviets; however, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies up until 1941. In fact, parts of Poland that were annexed by the Soviet Union following the 1939 invasion of Poland by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are today part of the Ukraine.
The Okhrana Foreign Agency, a spiritual predecessor of the GRU and KGB, was notorious for agent provocateurs. Many historians, such as Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhine, believe that Matvei Golovinski, a writer and Okhrana agent, fabricated the first edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903, which has been endorsed by many prominent Islamists of our own time, including Hamas and other Palestinian leadership, as well as the Russian aligned Iranian government.
The obvious parallels between Dickstein, Coughlin, and his Social Justice movement on the one hand and modern “Social Justice” groups that range from DSA to Black Hammer to the Proud Boys on the other are not evidence of anything, but they are curious.
Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov was a Soviet journalist for the Novosti Press Agency, which he called an arm of the KGB, editing and planting propaganda materials in foreign media. Yuri Bezmenov estimated that over half of Novosti’s employees were KGB officers.
Bezmenov defected to Canada in the 1970s and later moved to the United States. In this excerpt from a 1985 interview, he discusses the “ideological subversion” that the KGB uses to demoralize other countries, describing a process of disinformation, fake news, and other active measures that the KGB uses to destabilize target countries. In his words, which you can hear for yourself below -
What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, their country…
- Yuri Bezmenov
Excellent warning by Yuri Bezmenov for the American Patriot to fight & educate citizens against socialism & communism as well as forcing government to stop funding communist governments. Appreciated his explanation of steps leading to a nation’s downfall starting with demoralization, destabilization, crisis and then normalization. Sadly many people are stuck one of these stages & lack the motivation, recognition or vision to stop the “business as usual” mentality & jump ship to survive. The previous info on infiltration of spy's within the UK & US was also interesting. Great research!