In my honest opinion the Bezmenov is a typical case of a defector with limited importance trying to compensate for his essentially marginal position by making the boldest possible claims.

Although in the video shown here, Bezmenov is factually largely correct about "active measures", his claims about stages of subverting America and Americans having been brainwashed already into Marxist-Leninist values pretty much betrays what we are dealing with here: an activist with a political agenda and a political message.

His background was that of a RIA Novosti reporter, and while half of Novosti's reporters were KGB officers, mr. Bezmenov was not one of them. As such, his access to any kind of detailed strategies or KGB playbooks would be none, and at best he was to report regularly to the KGB on people he had spoken to or things he had seen or heard. The KGB seldomly let Russians travel abroad without giving them any kind of intelligence assignment.

As far as the concept of active measures goes, it is strongly tied to the person of Ivan Agayants, a KGB officer of Armenian descent who was stationed in Paris in the 1940's. Although forgery and disinformation was a tradition going back to Tsarist times, Agayants utilized and perfected it like no one before him.

He taught his methods at the KGB school in the 1950's, but was eventually asked to centralize the KGB's active measures in a single department, "Section D", from Dezinformatsiya. Agayants hand-picked his team, many of whom had served as KGB officers under journalistic cover, since that was what they would be doing at Section D as well: produce newspaper articles and foreign government documents, except fake ones. Agayants also travelled extensively across Eastern Europe to help set up similar units there. In 1966 it was renamed Service A (from "Aktivka").

Active Measures grew more prominent within the KGB during the 1950's and 60's as a result of Moscow's policy of Peaceful Coexistence and Detente, which ultimately rejected Stalin's idea of unavoidable military confrontation, and instead believed in the political and ideological victory of Communism. Hence political warfare took a central role in Soviet foreign policy. Active measures could be employed at home and abroad, against anyone or anything, for many different reasons, and in many different ways. It was therefore not a rigidly defined method or strategy, as Bezmenov here claims, but simply a tool in the arsenal of KGB residencies. Most of the time, it amounted to little more than pranks and disseminating anonymously written letters or articles full of profanity. The Czechoslovak intelligence service for instance ended up doing prank calls to the office of Radio Free Europe in West-Germany.

Although the East German disinformation section was probably the most sophisticated - being able to imitate West-German documents and vernacular of course better than anyone else - its intelligence chief Markus Wolf believed it was of little importance within the bigger Cold War. At best, KGB and other Warsaw Pact intelligence officers viewed active measures as adding a tiny yet constant drop of distrust in Western society. There was no grand strategy however of actually brainwashing Western audiences to overthrow their governments.

By the 1980's, as the Cold War intensified, the Kremlin was confronted by an uprising in Poland, and international outcry over its war in Afghanistan, Yuri Andropov circulated a directive to all KGB stations abroad to step up their active measures and that every intelligence officer was to be involved in active measures. The Kremlin surely wanted and hoped this could weaken the wave of anti-Soviet public sentiment in the West, but by that few KGB officers really believed it could be that effective.

In the US however, around 1983-1988, active measures became something of a national hype. The CIA warned in the media for KGB disinformation, and recent defections cooperated in the publication of the first books on KGB active measures, and some defectors such as the Czech Ladislav Bittman testified before Congress about active measures.

The Bezmenov interview should be seen in the context of that active measures hype. It wasn't even new - already in 1960 the CIA warned of this KGB method - but for some reason people seem to forget quickly about it, until after a few decades they suddenly realize it again. Bezmenov however seeks to scare people, while the reality about which some defectors testified before Congress was a lot more sober and less Dr. No sounding.

To conclude, a 1970's KGB handbook defined active measures as follows:

"Agent-operational measures aimed at exerting useful influence on aspects of the political life of a target country which are of interest, its foreign policy, the solution of international problems, misleading the adversary, undermining and weakening his positions, the disruption of his hostile plans, and the achievement of other aims."

This beautiful Chekist poetry came down to performing any kind of trick to discredit opponents, sow confusion, or support claims made by Soviet propaganda or advance opinions in Western media and politics advantageous to the Soviet Union.