◆ SpookStack

12 THE TECHNIQUES OF SOVIET PROPAGANPA = SE Tes tence i etek Zs lig Koumintang newspaper, in Nanking, was directed bya very pretty 7 and extremely inte Pent young woman, K P’eng who won the oo '= heart of the editor. Kung P’eng is today head of the Department of “7% Information of Peiping’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. cos - , of many tender Such is the situation; in many periodi ies; af OT TE many levels. oe ee i* Tis confession of Aleksandr Keznacheyev ‘ penatrates atill further ~~? into the dark abyes of press infiltration. Kaznacheyey was young ae attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Rangoon, capital of Burma,-who -=s= chose liberty in 1959. Ass typical professional product of Communist “-4 conspiratonal training, he had attended the specialized schools of = Moscow for 10 years. There the atudents performed practical work =» in falsification of documents and distortion of facts; learned how.to - 4- implant and maneuver clandestine factions in the organizations of ~~ the free world, and how to corrupt men. niece they studied paychol- ~~ ogy, languages, the art of poisonous sophisms, photo , printing, bridge, sports, the use of a silenced pistol, and guernile: warfare. As good student, Kaznacheyev received on graduation = diplomatic post in the city of a thousand pagodas. - oe Lyn His work consisted of processing articles received on microfilm from Moscow, drafted in their entirety by Russian propaganda agencies. — - Picking them up in the Embassy cellar, he translated them inte -~ | Burmese or English, embellished with local color, and placed them in the large Rangoon newspapers, Newspaper of the People, New Light and the English-language Mandalay Ludu, over the signatures of underground Burmese on the newspaper staffs, thanks to the appa- ratus. Once published, Kaznacheyev forwarded clippings to Tass News Agency, which made a great deal of noise about them, stressing the point that they were genuine products of Burmese political opinion. In addition to staging these illusory theatrics, Kaznacheyey was also responsible for numbers of forgeries, among which was a letter attributed to Admiral Frost, U.S. Navy, promising American support to an anti-Communist leader of the Sumatran insurrection against President Sukarno; a falsification calculated to identify Indonesian anti-Communists as creatures of Washington. The affair had serious repercussions, and the Admiral’s denials did little to dissipate the resulting suspicions. Forgery was suspected only by a few propaganda specialists at the time. Three years later it was co od by the testimony of its author, Kaznacheyev. a (b) News agencies wee News agencies receive very special attention in efforts at infiltration. Foreign correspondents are especially susceptible to this technique since, being isolated from their national environment they naturally seek association with diplomats, of whom a third are from Communist countries and another third from the “neutralists,” where fallacious Soviet propaganda has wrought havoc. Also signifi ificant is an ex- posure to temptation that offers to provide compensation for the vag- abond existence which is the lot of many correspondents. The better to poison he agencies, Moscow has infested the cafes and bars frequented by their correspondents. The famous German Communist Willy Miinzenberg, one of the geniuses of political 4 See ‘Soviet Intelligence in Asia: Conditions in the Soviet Union,” testimony befure the Senste Internal Security Bubsominitios, 1050.