A 1980s interagency committee that counteracted Soviet disinformation effectively – and convinced senior Soviet leaders of the impossibility of changing US policy via such means – is the subject of a new study by Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb of the Institute for National Strategic Studies: Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference, recently published by National Defense University Press.
The study shows how the Active Measures Working Group “pursued a sustained campaign to expose Soviet disinformation” and “negated much of the effort mounted by the large Soviet bureaucracy that produced the multibillion-dollar Soviet disinformation effort.” Major contributions to the success of this committee were made by a number of IWP professors and former professors then working in the US government – including Kenneth deGraffenreid, John Dziak, Walter Jajko, John Lenczowski, and Herbert Romerstein – as explained in the work.