by Sharon Rondeau
(Mar. 8, 2021) — In previous articles in this series, we spoke with author Jeff (JR) Nyquist about his insights into the world of communist strategy, past and present, and its goal of conquering capitalism and instilling authoritarian regimes around the globe.
A longtime student of history and Soviet military strategy, Nyquist has written three books and published columns at The Epoch Times, Financial Sense and other publications over many years. In an article published Saturday on his blog, Nyquist contended that the West remains unprepared to face the real threat which communist super-powers present to free societies. “The communists in Russia and China are part of a global network of political crime and subversion,” he wrote. “Whatever their internal squabbles in the past, they are working together, even now, for socialism on every continent. They are coordinating their policies in Africa, Latin America and inside the United States.”
In Part 3, Nyquist told The Post & Email:
The Cold War never ended; it’s about communism vs. capitalism; it’s about atheism vs. Christianity; and of course it’s complicated…There are lots of different groups that disagree on the left, just as there are lots of groups on the right which disagree. But they have one thing we don’t have: they have that Marxist-Leninist core that is able to actually run strategy over decades and slowly grind it down. And that’s what you’re seeing. That’s why you see the country is moving toward communism.
Part 1 of our interview focused on how Nyquist developed an interest in world history, politics, and Soviet military strategy; his pursuit of more knowledge with the goal of teaching at the college level, and a communist recruitment effort in graduate school which he spurned but stated was responsible for ending his aspirations of a position in higher education. He is now warning, based on current events and his considerable reading of Soviet literature and strategy, that communism’s arrival in the West is closer than most are aware.
From his reading of “defector literature,” Nyquist said, he learned from firsthand accounts how communist regimes plan to disrupt free countries, create political upheaval, and change elected governments to totalitarian regimes. At this point in time, Nyquist said, “Western civilization is throwing itself under a train” by embracing socialism, which leads to communism and the annihilation of opposing viewpoints and, based on historical precedents such as the Bolshevik Revolution and Josef Stalin’s brutal dictatorship, tremendous loss of life.
Soviet defectors’ written predictions, Nyquist observed, have largely been realized, as illustrated by the division of Yugoslavia “along ethnic lines,” a foretelling made in Jan Sejna‘s 1985 book, “We Will Bury You.” Similarly, that which President George W. Bush termed the “War on Terror” in 2001 was described by Soviet defector Viktor Suvorov in his 1988 work, “Spetsnaz,” as a “grey terror” in which, in Nyquist’s words, “the West would be attacked by terrorist forces that had no apparent connection to Russia or the Soviet Union but would be controlled through intermediaries and mercenaries.”
In Part 2, Nyquist recounted how strong and vibrant civilizations have been destroyed by believers in a “new religion,” as in the case of Christianity toppling paganism in the Roman Empire in the latter part of the 4th century. Nyquist then drew a parallel between the Empire’s fall to today’s attempted dismantling of America’s Judeo-Christian foundation by those advancing the “new religion” of socialism.
Communist regimes promote “evil” and psychologically-unsound individuals to achieve their goal of complete control over nations, Nyquist said, who first exploit well-meaning but gullible people’s desire to form an earthly “utopia” but later prove themselves “ruthless,” “vicious” and “corrupt” to achieve their ends.
One of the communists’ main strategies is the dissemination of false narratives, Nyquist explained, in order to divert attention from the truth. In an email Nyquist sent us prior to our interview, he referenced Natalie Grant’s posthumous new book, “Disinformation: Soviet Political Warfare 1917-1992,” in which Grant wrote (p. 20), “…to this day Soviet military authorities recommend deception of the enemy by concealing existing objects and by creating simulated objects in order to divert the enemy’s attention.”
“This was the core concept behind many communist bloc disinformation operations,” Nyquist wrote. “It is an effective technique because you create diversionary narratives which effectively conceal true narratives. Few would guess that odd claims made by shadowy figures could serve as camouflage – but they do. All that is required is publicity. It is only through careful fact-checking and strategic inference that an operational pattern of disinformation/camouflage reveals itself over time. One example of this might well be as follows: The communists needed Biden in the White House and they could not allow Trump another four years; thus, it is widely suspected there was election fraud. Of course, the real mechanisms of fraud craves camouflage. What better camouflage than to propagate false election fraud narratives to distract from what actually happened? Imagine, as well, how investigative resources might then be diverted toward narratives that would ultimately prove discreditable.
“Since false diversionary narratives are the backbone of our enemy’s disinformation campaigns, every false narrative of strategic importance must be suspected. To show how this kind of strategy has been used in the past, let me offer a few well-documented examples that may surprise you: (1) The widely believed JFK assassination conspiracy theories, which point to everyone except the Soviets and the Cubans, have successfully persuaded a vast number of Americans to blame anti-communist groups and organizations for the assassination; (2) conspiracy theories having to do with secret UFO disclosures which demonize the Western security establishment also fall into this category (please see Howard Blum’s revelatory book, Out There linked below); (3) the 9/11 Truther movement, which has direct Russian involvement and demonizes American leaders as the authors of the 9/11 attacks; and (4) anti-Semitism, especially in the context of Soviet control (through agents of influence) of the Nazi diaspora after World War II.
“A much larger list of diversionary disinformation operations could be made. Operations of this kind have successfully diverted the attention of millions of people who, by turns, have become obsessed with narratives that lead them away from the real threat; namely, Moscow, Beijing and international communism. What I’m saying may confuse some of your readers, so a brief explanation should suffice. The Russians have been so successful at this kind of operation that they attempted to ‘change’ their political system, with some loss to themselves on account of missteps. Nonetheless they kept the core of the Soviet system intact and are determined to push communism in Latin America and in the United States. Of special interest, they have rebuilt their military power, gained technology from the West, and have placed their agents in key leadership positions inside Western governments (Germany, the United States, France, Britain, etc.). If we examine all the false narratives put forward about Russia and Putin, we begin to peel back a mask which hides the same old Soviet face.
“As you can see, Americans have become very disoriented because of Russia’s successful strategic disinformation. In fact, hardly anyone understands the communist role in the present crisis. Since last May, of course, the communists have somewhat tipped their hand by boldly operating through front groups like BLM and Antifa – looting and burning, rioting and disrupting. Everything is a bit more out in the open now. But even so, look at the most attention-grabbing narratives of recent weeks. All mention of communism as a coherent movement supported by Russia and China has been buried under a mountain of falsehood. The QAnon nonsense has been particularly exasperating. By diverting public attention to false narratives, the communist strategists make sure that the public never finds its way to the truth of anything; never sees the left’s consolidation of power over key institutions. False narratives assure that the public always looks toward ‘other’ threats (i.e., the CIA, the KKK, evil Corporations, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, the Jews, the Masons, the Illuminati, etc.). Once the public mind is obsessed with varying casts of villains, nobody ever notices the villains in Beijing and Moscow, Havana and Pyongyang.”
Continuing our interview, Nyquist said:
Let’s talk about narratives for a second. The Russians have something they call “maskerovka,” which is a combination of camouflage and psychological warfare. One of the concepts in the quote of Natalie Grant is that you can create false objects to divert the attention of the enemy away from real objects, which in itself is a way of camouflaging to divert attention. You have the example in World War II we are familiar with in which they created a “W” Army in England that they put Patton in command of that was supposed to cross the channel at Calais and convince the German generals that the invasion was coming to Calais when it was really coming to Normandy. They placed cardboard tanks that aerial reconnaissance would spot. This was the diversionary tactic.
Think of it now as a metaphor. In information warfare, you’re not dealing with physical objects such as tanks or armies. You’re actually dealing with a narrative. Let’s say Narrative “A” represents the truth and Narratives B-F represent false narratives. As you and I know, there’s always going to be somebody who has the wrong idea and come up with a false narrative. Natalie Grant goes into this in great detail in the book. I got a review copy and wrote a short blurb for it. A retired DIA general I know, John Dziak, wrote the Introduction to the book and recruited me to do that, but I was very pleased to see her manuscript finally see print. She passed away some time ago but there’s valuable knowledge there which is really something we’ve lost, as she has a deeper understanding of this. She describes actual operations which she was familiar with that the Soviets conducted in the ’20s and ’30s. They would actually sent someone out to create a false narrative, which sounds very similar to things we’re seeing today in which they tell people something they want to hear which affirms for them the truth of something they suspected. It’s something that’s ostensibly against the communists, but later it turns out to be untrue. Along with the narrative, it discredits the truth of how bad the communists are, and it discredits the anti-communists who promoted it, who fell for it.
That’s one form of it: a false narrative as a kind of trap that is discrediting to the true narrative directly because it’s related to the true narrative, closely enough related that they can be confused with it, and then of course it discourages and demoralizes people.
An example would be Operation Wind, which Edward Jay Epstein wrote about in a book called “Deception.” It was after World War II, and there was a Polish Home Army which was destroyed largely by the Nazis during the uprising in Warsaw in 1944. After the destruction of the German army on the Eastern Front, they were expecting the Soviet army to arrive. In expectation of the Soviet army breaking through the center of the front to arrive in Warsaw, they rose up against the Nazis. They wanted to have a Polish national armed presence when the Soviets arrived. Well, the Soviets, of course, didn’t arrive; they decided to stop their advance, and there’s even a theory that Hitler and Stalin engaged in some kind of secret back-channel deal and the Nazis were allowed to go in and wipe out the Polish Home Army and the Soviets just sat and watched and let them do it. The Soviets regarded the Polish Home Army as an enemy just as the Nazis did, because after all, the Soviets and the Nazis had together destroyed Poland as a nation, and the Russians didn’t want Polish nationalists to exist.
After World War II, the Soviets took the remnants of the Home Army and recreated it, only it was under their control. Then they made contact with MI6 and the CIA and said, “Look, these people want to liberate Poland. Send them gold; send them weapons; send them money.” They even asked at one point for them to send an American general to command them. Fortunately, we never did that. The communists controlled the whole thing; it was a narrative about the Polish people rising up to free Poland, but the narrative was completely false. The Bolsheviks would even assassinate communist officials, blow up trains and bridges; they did all kinds of things that were inconceivable to us but made it absolutely believed by MI6 and the Americans. Then finally, when they had gotten enough gold and enough weapons and lured genuine Polish patriots into this fake Polish Home Army, they just arrested everybody, kept the gold and the weapons and made a “ha-ha” broadcast in which they said they had done the whole thing.
It was horribly demoralizing to both MI6 and the CIA and to Polish nationalists everywhere, conducted very similarly to basis of Operation Trust in the 1920s. It went on for many more years. It was 1921 to 1927. The Trust was a fake, pro-czarist, anti-communist organization that was built up by Soviet intelligence and captured actual monarchists. There were actual monarchist organizations that the Soviets had captured during the civil war, and they just turned it around and used it as their own. They actually were able to penetrate the White Diaspora; every single intelligence service in Europe believed it; even the Americans believed it, though we didn’t have a regular intelligence service at the time; we had our military intelligence people. Everybody was fooled; in fact, they smuggled out documents. All the leaders in Europe were reading Bolshevik correspondence — what Lenin was saying, what Stalin was saying — and they were giving them, a lot of the time, genuine documents that they didn’t think would do them too much harm. They smuggled people out of the Soviet Union. Instead of a ha-ha broadcast, one of the leaders of the Trust defected to Finland and under interrogation admitted that the whole thing was a fraud from beginning to end.
The effective of this was electrifying. All the agents they had in Russia were Trust agents: the British agents, the French, the German, the Swedish, the Italian, the Spanish; they were all double agents feeding them false information for years. It destroyed their intelligence apparatuses in Russia; it demoralized them; it discredited the most experienced intelligence professionals. Literally, all the Western services had to start all over again and basically they couldn’t, and they were blind as to what was going on in the Soviet Union. Of course, it discouraged anyone from ever trying again. The Whites (White Russians) who wanted to overthrow the Russian government were always thinking they would come back to power, and this gave them false hope. “Trust the plan” was part of the Trust. “Trust the plan because we have control in Moscow; we even have control over the Cheka.* We have a large degree of control in the Army and even in the Bolshevik halls of power; our agents are in the ascendancy.”
Of course, it was all untrue. Forevermore after that, nobody wanted to hear about overthrowing the Russian government; it was poison, it was toxic to talk about it because all their dreams had ended in such profound humiliation.
*Nyquist explained that “The Cheka was the original name of the Soviet secret police. It was later changed to GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB, FSB/SVR, and back again to MVD today, or simply ss State Security.“