Elon Musk

[Thumpalumpacus]

Talking about Russians spreading their propaganda on the American people, is something that has been going on for decades.

In 1994 the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin disclosed in his memoirs that a day after the assassination of JFK, a letter was sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny. It recommended the publication in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries” of disinformation that would expose “the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals” and pin it on someone else.

Two months after the death of Kennedy, the British magazine Labour Monthly published an article describing Oswald as a fall guy and, without supplying any evidence, pinned the assassination on “far right” elements in the USA. The magazine’s editor was Rajani Palme Dutt, the privately educated one-time General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an unrepentant Stalinist. The Labour Monthly piece did its work and soon everyone was cooking up Kennedy conspiracy theories and whispering them in bars across the Western Hemisphere. Dutt was very far from being the only useful idiot in the game, and over the next  two years the Soviet Disinformation Unit would propagate many lies about the assassination, including a carefully planted piece in the Paese Sera, an Italian newspaper that would eventually lead to the arrest of Clay Shaw.

The bestselling book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy, published in 1964, also played a part. The author Joachim Joesten claimed that Kennedy had been against the escalation in Vietnam and that the CIA had been essentially a rogue outfit. As the Washington Post revealed in 2003, it was not until “the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published in 1999” that Joesten’s publisher had received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.

So the existing and understandable climate of paranoia in the wake of the assassination got fuelled by Soviet disinformation that led millions to believe that the murder of JFK was a massive conspiracy.

Or take AIDS misinformation - Operation Denver

In 1983 they pulled off another extraordinary disinformation coup when an anonymous letter by a “well-known American scientist” was printed in an Indian newspaper called The Patriot, claiming that the AIDS virus had been manufactured in a US military lab and then leaked out. It was so effective that many people still believe it today.

Absolutely. Historically, the Soviet government maintained an Agitprop department from the very beginnings of that nation. At its dissolution, no subsequent Russian intelligence agency would see fit to disband such an effective program.