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This is a truly amazing summary of disinformation (especially early Soviet, US vs Soviet during the Cold War, and post-cold war Russian operations). Pretty amazing overview of everything. I was already very familiar with all the post-cold-war stuff, but learned an a lot about the earlier periods from this book.

I think there are really four core lessons here: 1) Intelligence agencies use disinformation extensively, and it wasn't solely the Russians -- the US was great at this in the 1950s too! 2) Wittingly and unwittingly, press and activists really are the critical enablers of this 3) A lot of the disinformation (and other intelligence ops) have been for really dubious value -- i.e. spending massive amounts of money and time to do something like "reduce the prestige of an adversary" -- perhaps the hardest part of this whole thing is measuring success, and in particular, having the right metrics in the first place 4) Technology, and especially social media, makes active measures "more active and less measured".

(I personally wasn't a huge fan of the postmodernism argument toward the very end, but the rest of the book was great.) ( )