Useful Idiots and Fellow Travelers

Disinformation's Helpmates

After the Cold War ended, Sergey Kondrashev, who once headed KGB’s Service A (now SVR Directorate MS), which planned and coordinated Soviet covert influence operations in foreign countries, explained to retired CIA counter-intelligence expert Tennent “Pete” Bagley how the Soviets spread their themes.  According to Bagley, Kondrashev said:

Service A had no officers of its own stationed abroad, but each of the FCD’s [First Chief Directorate of KGB, i.e., foreign intelligence] geographic departments and each important residency made one or two officers responsible for developing relationships with local people who were willing to accept and propagate ideas or plant articles and other items of information.  Each department and residentura kept Service A informed of such “assets” (as the locals were known) at its disposal.

Kondrashev stressed that these assets abroad were often mere sympathizers and not necessarily recruited agents.  In fact, Service A tried to avoid using agents to plant articles for fear of exposing their pro-Soviet leanings.  (Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief, pp. 173-174)

Referring to someone as a “Russian agent” may be one of the most overused and inaccurately used epithets.  Actual Russian agents of influence are likely to pursue their influence operations very quietly and out of sight, where they can be most effective and damaging.  As Kondrashev told Bagley, Soviet—and now likely Russian—intelligence assets abroad for planting stories are more often “sympathizers.”

In addition to sympathizers, there are two other broad categories of people involved in spreading themes useful to the Russians, who typically operate independently and without any discernable instruction from the Russian government.  In the Cold War, there were known as “useful idiots” and “fellow travelers” and these categories are still valuable today in examining how Russian themes, or themes helpful to the Russians that originate elsewhere, are spread.

Useful Idiots

A “useful idiot” has been defined as “a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda,” according to the Word Histories website.  It provides, as an example, a 1948 news service item that reported, “Italian Interior Minister Mario Scelba … called Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni, who is co-operating with the Communists, the ‘No. 1 useful idiot assisting Communist aspirations to control Italy.’”

One very well documented example of how a useful idiot can spread Soviet disinformation far beyond what the Soviets and their sympathizers could directly accomplish is the case of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy beginning in 1967.  Garrison fell prey to Soviet disinformation about the assassination, wrote about an imagined conspiracy in his book On the Trail of the Assassins, which became the inspiration for the 1991 movie JFK by Oliver Stone, which then spread the disinformation much wider and in a much more convincing way than the Soviets ever could have done on their own.

Journalist and author Max Holland did an excellent, very thorough job of researching how Garrison spread lies about the Kennedy assassination, largely on his own but spurred by a very timely piece of Soviet disinformation.  Holland wrote a number of articles on this subject.  I will reference his article, “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination: The Power of Disinformation,” which appeared in 2001 in the periodical Studies in Intelligence, which is the professional journal of the U.S. intelligence community.  Holland’s article won a prize from the journal, the first author outside the government to do so.  The article drew extensively on declassified CIA records.

In February 1967, Garrison started an investigation of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.  The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in New Orleans for five months prior to the assassination.

Holland wrote that on March 1, 1967, “Garrison ostentatiously arrested an urbane local businessman named Clay Shaw and charged him with masterminding a plot that culminated in President Kennedy’s death.”  Holland noted that three days later, on March 4, the Italian newspaper Paese Sera, which was owned by the Italian Communist Party, “published a ‘scoop’” claiming that “the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), a trade-promotion group headquartered in Rome from 1958 to 1962 [with which Shaw had worked] … had been ‘a creature of the CIA.’”

Holland wrote that the next day,

l’Unità, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, published a front-page story headlined, “Shaw…was a Rome agent of the C.I.A.” Moscow’s Pravda picked up the story on 7 March, publishing it under the simple headline, “Clay Shaw of the CIA.”

Holland also noted that Richard Helms, who became head of the CIA in 1966, testified before Congress in 1961 that Paese Sera had been instrumental in circulating Soviet disinformation.  In his testimony, Helms said:

In recent days we have seen an excellent example of how the Communists use the false news story. In late April rumors began to circulate in Europe, rumors charging that the Algerian-based generals who had plotted the overthrow of President De Gaulle had enjoyed support from NATO, the Pentagon, or the CIA. Although this fable could have been started by supporters of General Challe [one of the coup plotters], it bears all the earmarks of having been invented within the [Soviet] bloc. 

In Western Europe this lie was first printed was first printed on the 23^rd of April by a Rome daily called Il Paese.

Senator Keating asked: “Is Il Paese a communist newspaper?

Helms responded:

It is not a communist paper as such.  We believe it to be a crypto-Communist paper, but it is not like L’Unita, the large Communist daily in Rome. It purports to be an independent newspaper but obviously it serves Communist ends. 

… We found it interesting that Il Paese was the starting point for a lie that the Soviets spread around the world. The paper and its evening edition, Paese Sera, belong to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda. These newspapers consistently release and replay anti-American, anti-Western, pro-Soviet stories, distorted or wholly false. Mario Malonni, director both Il Paese and Paese Sera, has been a member of the World Peace Council since 1958. The World Peace Council is a bloc-directed Communist front.

Former Service A head Sergey Kondrashev confirmed what Helms had said about Paese Sera; he told Pete Bagley that it was one of the publications the Soviets used to plant false stories in foreign media.  Bagley wrote:

Sergey Kondrashev stressed how many different channels he used to pump out disinformation.

The most obvious route toward the broad Western public was, of course, newspapers and magazines—planting articles in cooperative papers (of the many, Kondrashev remembered Paese Sera in Italy, Blitz in New Delhi, and Die Furche in Vienna) ….  (Spymaster, p. 175)

The Falsity of Soviet Claims

The claims about Shaw being a member of the CIA apparently had no truth to them.  As Holland notes, Shaw, a distinguished World War II veteran, had voluntarily spoken to what was then called the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA.  A 1974 article in Parade magazine explained how this organization operated, which Holland quoted in his online publication, Washington Decoded:

The CIA Domestic Contact Service is an information gathering operation.  American businessmen, returning to the U.S. from foreign trips, are asked to pass on useful information gleaned in their overseas visits or tours of duty. “There is no payment of money,” Richard Helms, former CIA director, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 7, 1973. “There is no effort to twist anyone’s arm. We simply are giving them an opportunity, as patriotic Americans, to say what they know ….”

Holland notes that Shaw’s relationship with the Domestic Contact Service “ended after 1956” for reasons that are not clear.  Holland concluded:

He had never received any remuneration and probably considered the reporting a civic duty that was no longer urgent once the hostility between the two superpowers became frozen in place and a new world war no longer appeared imminent.

Holland said that the accusations that Rome’s Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) was connected with the CIA were also not true.  He noted that:

the CIA’s CI [Counterintelligence] staff … ran file traces on CMC and PERMINDEX, its Swiss-based parent corporation. The results were uniformly negative. Neither company was a proprietary or front, nor had either been used to channel funds to anti-Communists as alleged.

Holland added that, “[t]hough not the official organ, Paese Sera was a proprietary company of the Gruppo Editoriale PCI [Communist Party of Italy], and thus owned by the Italian Communist Party.”

Garrison’s Gullibility and Delusions

The false claims of CIA involvement the Soviets planted in Paese Sera greatly influenced Garrison, Holland shows in his article.  Garrison apparently did not realize the article contained Soviet disinformation.  Holland wrote:

Garrison seemed intoxicated by the world’s attention and was acting like a carnival barker rather than a DA [district attorney] investigating a grave matter.

Garrison had been convinced by the Paese Sera article that Shaw was linked to the CIA; that association, in turn, implicated the CIA in a cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.

[Soviet] Dezinformatsiya thus exerted a profound influence on the prosecution of Clay Shaw.

He continued:

Garrison now unleashed a barrage of sensational accusations. In no particular order, Garrison alleged that Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Oswald had been under the control of the CIA; the CIA had whitewashed the real assassins; the CIA had lied to the Warren Commission [which investigated the assassination] and concealed evidence with the FBI’s connivance— no, the CIA had lied to the FBI too!

Holland noted:

an Agency [CIA] internal memo dated 6 June observed that Garrison had “attacked CIA more vehemently, viciously and mendaciously than has any other American official or private citizen whose comments have come to our attention. In fact, he [has] outstripped the foreign Communist press, which is now quoting him delightedly.” Left-leaning and Communist organs presented Garrison’s allegations as affirmation of America’s deeply confused and corrupt political system. The KGB delighted in such Garrison quotes as one saying that the CIA was “infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo [had been] in Nazi Germany.”

It got worse.  Holland wrote:

In February 1968, [Garrison] unveiled what would be his final and enduring explanation during a Dutch television show hosted by a left-wing, anti-American journalist named Willem Oltmans. According to Garrison, it was no longer the case that the CIA was an unwitting accomplice to the murder and then an accessory after the fact. No, the truth had turned out to be much worse. Garrison now averred that the Agency had consciously plotted the assassination, executing the plan in concert with the “military-industrial complex.” Both had a vested interest in the continuation of the Cold War and the escalation of the hot war in Vietnam. President Kennedy [supposedly] wanted to end both conflicts; that was why he had to be assassinated.

Holland says that within the CIA, the senior counter-intelligence officer assigned to watch the case, Ray Rocca, “observed in a March 1968 memo, ‘Garrison has now reached the ultimate point in the logic of his public statements…. This is by and large the Moscow line.’”

Clay Shaw’s trial in early 1969 led to a rapid acquittal.  Holland noted, “the jurors … rendered a unanimous verdict of ‘not guilty’ after deliberating 54 minutes.”

However, Holland observed:

An abject failure in courts of law, Garrison’s probe achieved a latent triumph in the court of public opinion. The DA’s message became part and parcel of what has been called “the enduring power of the 1960s in the national imagination.”

… The alleged link between Shaw and the CIA became a staple of conspiracy books published in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.

Once again, it got worse. Holland noted:

Garrison tried to implement the advice rendered by [a friend] in 1971: write a “muckraking book” that would bring the Shaw-CIA connection front and center.… Fifteen major publishers rejected the manuscript. Finally, the memoir found a home at a small New York-based press, which printed On the Trail of the Assassins in 1988.

None of this seemed to matter … until the publisher of Garrison’s memoir thrust a copy into the hands of filmmaker Oliver Stone during an international film festival in Cuba. That chance encounter eventually led to the endorsement of Paese Sera’s disinformation by a major Hollywood film, JFK. ... In the movie, Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner) confronts Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones) with an Italian newspaper article exposing Shaw’s role as a CIA operative. The confrontation, of course, never occurred in real life; yet the scene captures a hidden historical truth. The epicenter of Garrison’s prosecution, and the wellspring for his ultimate theory of the assassination, was the DA’s belief in a fantasy published by a Communist-owned Italian newspaper.”

In all likelihood, Paese Sera did not publish the article on its own initiative.  As Kondrashev told Bagley, the KGB disinformation service used Paese Sera and other newspapers to covertly spread disinformation and the Soviets had been trying to falsely blame the CIA for the Kennedy assassination since soon after it occurred. 

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former acting head of Romania’s foreign intelligence agency, who defected to the United States in 1978, explained that Soviet KGB professionals recognized that the ripple effects of their disinformation could far exceed their initial efforts.  He wrote:

As that very clever master of deception [KGB head from 1967 to 1982] Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will—all by itself—generate a horde of unwitting but passionate advocates.

This was the case with the very well-timed Soviet disinformation placement in Paese Sera in 1967, published three days after Garrison had indicted businessman Claw Shaw.  When it and similar articles came to Garrison’s attention, they appear to have shaped his thinking enormously.  As a result, 24 years later, the false claim of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination became the centerpiece of Stone’s film JFK, which was released in 1991.  At that time, my daughter was a visiting summer student in Australia.  She told me the film was shown in a history class she attended, as if it portrayed actual events.  As Andropov knew, “if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will—all by itself—generate a horde of unwitting but passionate advocates,” often described as “useful idiots.”

Fellow Travelers

Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky “coined the term poputchik ('one who travels the same path') and later it was popularized by Leon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government,” according to Wikipedia.

Encyclopedia Brittanica notes:

Outside the Soviet Union the term fellow traveler was widely used in the Cold War era of the 1950s, especially in the United States, as a political label to refer to any person who, while not thought to be an actual “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party, was in sympathy with its aims and supported its doctrines.

In the post-communist Russian era, the term can be applied more flexibly, to describe those who share some or many Russian geopolitical goals—in particular, a wish to damage the United States, and are active in pursuing this goal.

Party for Socialism and Liberation

One such entity is a small U.S. communist party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which has been very active in organizing “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in many American cities following HAMAS’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on southern Israel.

The PSL was founded in 2004, after a split within the Workers World Party (WWP).

The Workers World Party was “created by the KGB community” according to Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, former acting head of Romania’s foreign intelligence service.  In his 2013 book Disinformation, Pacepa wrote:

The WWP was created by the KGB community in 1957 ….  It was run by a Soviet-style secretariat whose members were secretly indoctrinated and trained by the KGB, which also financed its day-to-day operation.  In 1959, the WWP got its own newspaper, Workers World, which was edited by the KGB’s disinformation department and was, for a while, printed in Romania ….  To camouflage Moscow’s hand and to give the paper a broader appeal, the early issues showed both Lenin and Trotsky holding up a banner saying, “Colored and White Unite and Fight for a WORKERS WORLD.”  (Disinformation, p. 294)

Pacepa continued:

Over the years, the WWP created several front organizations along Soviet lines ….  Most recently the WWP spawned a front called ANSWER, standing for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.  …  Formed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, ANSWER has since helped organize many of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the United States ….  It is supported by numerous foreign Marxist bodies (the Lebanese Communist party, the New Communist Party of the Netherlands, the Partido Comunista de la Argentina) and by other anti-American organizations ….  (Disinformation, p. 295)

My boss at the U.S. Information Agency, Herb Romerstein, who was an expert on American communism, told me that the WWP was a “microscopic” U.S. communist party that was especially skilled at getting permits for marches and demonstrations.  This made them very useful when protest was in the air.

ANSWER was formed three days after September 11 attacks.  Pacepa noted:

ANSWER was the main organizer of the large anti-American demonstrations that took place in the United States on April 12-13, 2003 [shortly after coalition forces captured Baghdad].  Its website contained numerous ready-to-use anti-American flyers (among them “Surround the White House” and “Vote to Impeach Bush”) that could be downloaded, printed, and posted.  ANSWER also provided dozens of buses to transport the “spontaneous” demonstrations from more than one hundred American cities around the United States to Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where the main anti-American demonstrations were scheduled. (Disinformation, p. 295)

After the 2004 split in the WWP, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) maintained control over ANSWER.

One of the leaders of PSL and ANSWER is Brian Becker.  He also wrote one of the first articles for Russia state-owned Russia Today (later RT) in December 2005 and later co-hosted the “Loud and Clear” radio program on Russia’s state-run Sputnik’s radio program in the United States. 

The PSL calls for a “revolutionary overturn” to get rid of capitalism and establish socialism.  In August 2014, Becker and another PSL leader sent the “most heartfelt comradely greetings” to “Dearest comrade Fidel” Castro of Cuba, saying, “We are among the millions on every continent who have been greatly inspired by your unflinching revolutionary leadership for almost seven decades. … We follow your example as we struggle in the United States.”

In February 2000, PSL and ANSWER leader Brian Becker visited North Korea to present a birthday gift to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.  Later in the year, he said, “We know that the biggest single contribution that we can we make to the final transition to socialism everywhere is to build a truly revolutionary party that can lead the struggle to overthrow imperialism at its center.”

In 2024, PSL and ANSWER were very active in early stages of “pro-Palestinian” protests.  On March 30, ANSWER helped organize protests in 36 American cities.

An April 24, 2024 tweet illustrated the synergy that can exist when fellow traveling organizations like PSL supply placards for demonstrations attended by people who could be described as “useful idiots,” including this one at New York University (NYU):

Interviewer: What would you say is the main goal with tonight’s protest?

Protestor 1: I think that the main goal is to show our support for Palestine and demanding that NYU stop … I honestly don’t know all of what NYU is doing.

Interviewer: Is there something that NYU is doing?

Protestor 1: I really don’t know.  I’m pretty sure they’re …  (turning to protestor 2 and asking): Do you know what NYU is doing? 

Protestor 2:  About what?

Protestor 1:  About Israel.  Why are we protesting here?

Protestor 2:  I wish I was more educated.

During this exchange, protestor 1 is standing in front of a sign with the logo of the Party for Socialism and Liberation on it, although its message is not visible in the camera frame.

Ignorance about the Middle East among young protesters is quite common.  Ron Hassner, an enterprising political science professor at University of California, Berkeley wrote that he

hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant [“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”], some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%) [for a combined total of 86% support].

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel).

Political Protest as Mating Display

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has advanced an interesting theory about why so many politically uninformed but seemingly fervently committed young people attend protests, in a chapter on “Political Peacocks” in his 2019 book Virtue Signaling.  Miller says seemingly selfless political stances among young people can be a form of mating display.  He writes about an earlier series of protests:

Suddenly, in the spring of 1985 in New York, hundreds of Columbia University students took over the campus administration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa. As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I was puzzled by the spontaneity, ardor, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country six thousand miles away?

… Although the protests achieved their political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin…. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years.

The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock’s tail or the nightingale’s song, seems dangerous. It risks trivializing all of political discourse….

Yet, Miller found there is evidence for this hypothesis.  He continues:

In unpublished studies I ran at Stanford University with Felicia Pratto, we found that university students tend to treat each other’s political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is simply read off as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality who will excel at protecting and provisioning his or her mate. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality who will excel at child care and relationship-building.

Miller concludes:

because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests.

This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before. The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one’s heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid.  (Virtue Signaling, pp. 17-28; see also “Extract from Geoffrey Miller’s essay ‘Political Peacocks’”

The Importance of Making Careful Distinctions

The Soviet KGB was and the Russian SVR foreign intelligence agency likely is adept at using sympathizers and “useful idiots” to accomplish its purposes and, in all likelihood, welcomes the independent efforts of “fellow travelers” whose goals align closely with Russian interests.  In dissecting these complex and often interwoven phenomena, one needs to make careful distinctions, to the greatest degree one can, about people’s motives and their degree of independence.  One should, at all costs, avoid lumping people with disparate motives and differing agendas into a oversimplified “Russian ecosystem,” as some have unwisely done.  Conflating Russian state-controlled fronts with independent radical actors who embrace Russian propaganda or disinformation, to a greater or lesser degree, for their own purposes, is a cardinal conceptual failing that tends to undermine the credibility of those who embrace such overly simplistic notions.

In one particularly egregious example, a young, foolish “hard charger” in one place I worked came up with the very bad idea of referring to someone as “an agent of Russian influence.”  I unequivocally said, “no.”  Resorting to such verbal sleight of hand would have relied on the calculation that some people would not be able to make the distinction between the real term, a “Russian agent of influence,” who are almost always impossible to detect, and the phony term, used to describe a person who was much more likely a sympathizer, “useful idiot” or “fellow traveler.”  Deliberate verbal trickery has no place in the task of countering and exposing disinformation and foreign influence operations, which must be based on thorough research and the ability to make careful, clear, scrupulous, fair distinctions, both in analysis and in communicating one’s findings.