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PM-Soviet Disinformation, Bjt,0893
Soviets Depict U.S. News in Harsh Light
An AP News Analysis
By BRYAN BRUMLEY
Associated Press Writer
    WASHINGTON (AP) - The Soviet media may be singing a different tune
on internal matters, but they are still playing harsh melodies about
America including what U.S. officials call ''disinformation.''
    The intent is to tarnish the U.S. image abroad, according to Soviet
defectors once involved in the campaign. American officials have
mounted an international campaign of their own to rebut the charges.
    Among recent Soviet media reports, all denied by U.S. officials,
were that:
    -The Defense Department developed the AIDS virus.
    -The CIA was behind the suicide of 914 Americans at Jonestown.
    -The Pentagon ousted President Nixon.
    -The assassins of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ''received
their ideological inspiration from the CIA.''
    -Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith's letters and visits to Soviet
leaders led U.S. intelligence agencies to murder her.
    Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of allowing more internal
criticism in official Soviet media ''seems to be having no effect on
Soviet international behavior,'' said Richard Perle, formerly deputy
defense secretary and now a fellow at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute.
    Soviet defector Ilya Dzirkvelov testified at a trial in London this
year that the Soviet Commmunist Party Central Committee decided in
1959-60 ''to increase our ideological influence in the West.'' He
said that involved ''active measures'' - planting fabricated or
distorted stories in foreign media.
    Herb Romerstein, a U.S. Information Agency specialist on such Soviet
activity, said, ''We have not noticed any reduction in the amount or
the intensity of Soviet disinformation'' since Gorbachev rose to
power in March 1985.
    Once the reports appear in the foreign press, they are picked up by
the state-run Soviet media, and fed abroad again by official radio
stations and news agencies, according to U.S. officials and defectors
such as Dzirkvelov Stanislav Levchenko, who worked for the KGB
disinformation campaign.
    ''The covert propaganda belongs to the KGB,'' Dzirkvelov testified.
''The KGB or the Soviet embassy's aide have to collect the real facts
that happened, and after that we can manipulate these facts ... to
compromise somebody or some measures by foreign governments.''
    The Central Committee secretariat sets the goals of disinformation,
and leaves the means to the KGB, according to Dzirkvelov and
Levchenko.
    The USIA, said Romerstein, coordinates efforts by U.S. diplomats
abroad to monitor Soviet disinformation, and to counter it through
statements either to foreign journalists abroad or by government
spokesmen in Washington.
    Among the most spectacular Soviet fabrications was the accusation
that U.S. Army scientists developed the virus responsible for AIDS,
the acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
    ''Quite simply, these charges are untrue,'' said Pentagon spokesman
Fred Hoffman. ''Yet the story keeps going. It is obviously a
systematic campaign.''
    The story first appeared in the weekly ''Literaturnaya Gazeta'' in
October 1985 and was promptly denied by the State Department. But
since then, it has appeared in the news media of more than 60
countries, in more than 30 languages.
    The topic disrupted a meeting last spring between USIA director
Charles Wick and Valentin Falin, the head of Novosti, the
semi-official Soviet news agency that U.S. officials say is often
used as a vehicle for disinformation.
    Wick stomped out of the meeting after Falin insisted that the AIDS
story was true, and that the United States had also developed
''various exotic weapons, including so-called ethnic ones,''
according to an account published in the weekly ''Moscow News,''
which is published by Novosti.
    The alleged ''ethnic'' diseases supposedly afflict Arabs in
Israeli-held lands and blacks in South Africa, but do not harm Jews
or whites living there. Romserstein and other American spokesmen
dismiss the charges as ridiculous.
    Meanwhile, Moscow News is at the cutting edge of ''glasnost,''
Gorbachev's policy of allowing the media to carry sharper criticism
of corrupt and inefficient officials inside the Soviet Union and to
report more on social ills such as drunkeness and prostitution.
    Moscow News on March 1 reviewed a Soviet book called ''Death of
Jonestown - Crime of the CIA,'' blaming the agency for the suicide of
914 American members of a religious cult in Guyana in 1978.
    Reviewing another book on March 7, Moscow News said President Nixon
was forced to resign in 1974 because of a CIA and Pentagon
''behind-the-scenes struggle against the policy of relaxation of
international tensions.''
    The article, titled ''Brass Hats Against the President,'' flies in
the face of congressional and judicial investigation results by
alleging that ''the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the
Watergate offices was a deliberately crude job by CIA operatives who
wanted to leave traces'' and thus sabotage Nixon's policy of detente
with the Soviet Union.
    The article failed to note that detente continued under Nixon's
successors, Presidents Ford and Carter, until the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan in 1979.
    The editor of Moscow News, Yegor Yakovlev, interviewed by The
Associated Press during a visit to Washington, defended the articles
as reviews of legitimate books.
    U.S. officials view such anti-American propaganda as the price
reformist editors such as Yakovlev pay to print articles that test
the limits of glasnost on domestic issues.
    ---
    EDITOR'S NOTE: Bryan Brumley was an Associated Press correspondent
in Moscow 1981-82.
    
 
AP-NY-08-17-87 0155EDT
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