Defying Conventions

On August 20, 1978, in East Jerusalem, a K.G.B. agent slipped a document into an American diplomat’s empty parked car. The paper contained false claims about Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser and an irritant to the Soviet Union. Operation MUREN failed to discredit Brzezinski, yet the Soviets persisted with “active measures” to influence American politics until the Cold War’s end, according to archives smuggled out by Vasili Mitrokhin, a K.G.B. defector. During the nineteen-seventies, Soviet spies dug for dirt on Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat who twice ran for President. (They didn’t find anything.) For a 1984 operation to thwart Ronald Reagan’s reëlection, the K.G.B. warned its residencies worldwide, “Reagan Means War!”

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