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How 'disinformation' works;NEWLN:The Reagan-Gorbachev Summit: Soviet 'reverse P.R.'

By JIM ANDERSON

WASHINGTON -- The man who once was the deputy commander of Czechoslovokia's disinformation operation, Ladislav Bittman, defines his former profession as 'public relations in reverse, trying to damage the image of your enemy.'

Bittman, now a professor of journalism at Boston University, predicts that a failure -- particularly a lack of specific progress on arms control -- at the Geneva summit will be followed by a massive disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union.

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The key to such disinformation, he said, is to adapt the line to existing prejudices but, he added, 'Journalists can be bought, corrupted and recruited, just as diplomats and government officials.'

'If I were still in the business, I would carefully analyze the American and European press, particularly any comments about President Reagan's unwillingness to cooperate (at the summit), or about splits within the administration.

'I would compose a series of phony messages, including some verifiable, true information, and add a few dramatic statements 'proving' that the U.S. president came to the summit with a plan that it should not succeed.

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'I would start it in the European press, using two or three journalists with respected names, who would write stories that would fit their previous bias. The journalists would do some of their own research and background and so they would able to say, quite properly, that they did their own reporting. It would be written in their own style.'

He insisted, 'I am not trying to create a wave of paranoia, but Soviet disinformation is a brutal misuse of press freedom. The only medication is to be forewarned and to use good journalistic practices, such as double-checking with the alleged sources of the information.'

He predicted that the disinformation campaign would concentrate on European and Third World publications, since most American journalists are trained to do the kind of checking that would uncover forgeries or obvious plants.

The technique is used hand-in-hand with propaganda, which directly promotes the role and image of the Soviet Union.

The classic, simplest form of disinformation, as Bittman outlines it in a new book, 'The KGB and Soviet Disinformation,' is the forged document. But, in an interview with United Press International, he said the real world is more subtle and complex than that.

Disinformation, as he practiced it in Czechoslovokia and as it continues to be practiced, has two aims: to confuse the decsion-making elite (including the other side's intelligence agencies) and to influence public opinion. For example, in 1965, some 70,000 ethnic Germans applied for exit visas to leave Czechoslovakia and to go to West Germany.

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Bittman said his service recruited several hundred of them as intelligence agents in the west -- 'They knew that it was the only way to get out.'

The Czechs knew that many of the Czech-Germans would inform the West Germans they had been recruited, and scores of them did so as soon as they arrived. As a result, he said, the West German intelligence service believed it 'was obviously facing the greatest espionage assault in its history. The West German intelligence spent four totally unproductive years, investigating the Czech-German emigres.'

A variation on that, Bittman said, was the Cuban Mariel episode, in 1980, when 125,000 Cubans flooded the United States, some of them mental patients and hardened criminals expelled by the Cuban government.

U.S. intellligence was saturated trying to sort the spies, psychotics and criminals from the mass of ordinary Cubans, and many still slipped through the preliminary nets.

'It not only tied up U.S. intelligence,' Bittman said, 'it alienated U.S. public opinion aganst the Cuban refugee community' which, until then, had a hard-working, honest and anti-communist image. 'Now many communities are reluctant to accept Cuban refugees,' ---

Soviet disinformation, Bittman said, is a large bureaucratic operation and, thus like all products of bureacracy, it is predictable.

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'The technique begins by carefully analyzing the western press, seeing what they are interested in, and what sort of theories and speculations are being published.'

This is how it was done, apparently, in the wake of the Soviet shooting down of the KAL plane in September, 1983. One planted version of the events, supporting the Soviet contention that the Korean plane plane was part of a complex intelligence operation, also fit the general lines of speculation in some western magazines and newspapers.

The story was slipped to a respected British magazine, The Defence Attache, which printed an expose of the U.S. intelligence operation. The magazine later discovered it had been hoaxed, retracted the story and apologized for it.

Another version along the same lines was printed this year in The Nation magazine and, despite convincing evidence from the State Department that the chronology and some key factors were flat wrong, was picked up by New York Times columnist Tom Wicker.

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