ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

DisinformationAssassinationDepartment of State, United StatesSecurity Clearance InvestigationsTerrorism, Intelligence Based Threat and Risk AssessmentsTerrorist Organization List, United StatesDirected Energy Weapons.SEE Defense Initiative and National Missile Defense.Dirty Bombs.SEE Russian Nuclear Materials, Security Issues.Dirty TricksDirty tricks are clandestine activities carried out by acovert-action group to discredit, destabilize, or eliminatean opposing regime, one of its agencies or departments,or an individual. A type of covert operation, dirty tricksinclude everything from the spreading of false rumors tosabotage, overthrow, and assassination.American dirty tricks. The history of dirty tricks practiced bythe United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is along one. Among the most significant examples in thisextensive catalogue are the many attempts to undermineor neutralize Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. These rangedfrom large-scale conspiracies such as assassination plansand the Bay of Pigs invasion to bizarre brainstorms at thefringes of practicability. An example of the latter was a plotto introduce a substance that would cause Castro’s famousbeard to fall off, thus presumably eliminating hismachismo and thus his credibility with the Cuban people.Castro was far from the only foreign leader targetedby CIA dirty tricks. Another example was Chilean presidentSalvador Allende, who steered his nation towardMarxism in the early 1970s. The CIA bribed members ofthe Chilean Congress, and employed a number of meansto foment unrest in Chile. Evidence gathered by the ChurchCommittee of the U.S. Senate indicates that the CIA mayhave been behind the truckers’ strike of 1972–73 thathelped spawn the coup in which Allende lost his life andGeneral Augusto Pinochet took power.United States is hardly the only nation that has employeddirty tricks in its covert operations. Another example is theSoviet Union, whose KGB operatives were past masters atsuch tactics ranging from disinformation to assassination.The Soviets, of course, had the advantage—at least, incountries where their system gained control—of beingable to suppress all undesirable information. Yet, evenbefore the fall of the Soviet empire, extensive informationon Soviet activities was available.To cite one example among many of those noted byBritish journalist Chapman Pincher in The Secret Offensive(1985) the Soviets sought to strike back at Egyptianpresident Anwar Sadat for his increasingly pro-Americanacts by printing leaflets attacking him as a U.S. puppet.These tracts, which the CIA traced to the Soviets, butwhich were purportedly issued by Muslim fundamentalists,helped fan the flames of the Muslim Brotherhood,which had Sadat assassinated in 1981. The KGB alsoprovided the Weathermen, a U.S. radical group in the1960s, with money and other forms of assistance throughCuban intermediaries, and Soviet support for terroristgroups attempting to destabilize western Europe duringthe 1970s and 1980s is well-documented.❚ FURTHER READING:BOOKS:Bennett, Richard M. Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spiesand Secrets. London: Virgin Books, 2002.Carney, John T., and Benjamin F. Schemmer. No Room forError: The Covert Operations of America’s Special TacticsUnits from Iran to Afghanistan. New York: Ballantine,2002.Pincher, Chapman. The Secret Offensive. New York: St.Martin’s, 1985.Richelson, Jeffrey T. The U.S. Intelligence Community,third edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.SEE ALSOBlack OpsChurch CommitteeCIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency)Iran-Contra AffairKGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, USSR Committeeof State Security)❚ MARTIN J. MANNINGDisinformationSoviet dirty tricks. Though CIA dirty tricks, such as thosethat were revealed in the course of the Iran-Contra hearingsin the late 1980s, are legendary for their cunning, theEncyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and SecurityDisinformation is mostly commonly described as falseinformation created by governments in wartime for militarypurposes and by totalitarian governments for political331