From Revolution to Provocation

Chapter 7 examines the CIA espionage and psychological-warfare operations against the USSR that involved the most important and most controversial Russian exile organization, the People’s Labor Alliance. Operations to infiltrate agents directly into the USSR by plane ended in fiasco due to Soviet counterintelligence, which thwarted the NTS operations and pursued measures to penetrate and subvert the émigré organization from within. In response, the CIA turned to a strategy of utilizing the NTS as an instrument of psychological warfare, spreading disinformation about the exiles in order to incite the Soviet state into costly countermeasures. Such an effort to manipulate the fiction of émigré political influence demonstrated the increasingly complex and marginal-gains nature of Cold War competition between intelligence agencies.