Press: Crackdown on Disinformation

France prosecutes two journalists for "bad acquaintances"

"The Plan we devised three years ago was to develop our capacity to influence public opinion in the West, through disinformation fed to governments and opinion formers and, above all, through media operations."

The half-crazed Soviet spy master who spells out his Plan is pure fiction, the creation of Journalists Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss in their new novel The Spike. The plan itself, according to U.S. intelligence experts, is all too factual. "Disinformation" refers mostly to covert falsification tactics used by the Soviet Union to further its propaganda aims. Examples of disinformation—a forged U.S. Army field manual, bogus vice-presidential statements critical of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—occasionally surface in the Western press.

Soviet experts in the West have known of the KGB'S disinformation activities for years; dealing with them is quite another matter. For the first time, French authorities have begun to crack down on the practice. In the past 15 months, two writers have been arrested and charged with using secret foreign contacts to jeopardize national security. Other French journalists are wondering whether the campaign against disinformation is beginning to restrict the free flow of information.

The first case involves Pierre Charles Pathé, 70, the son of pioneer French Film Producer Charles Pathé. An avowed admirer of the U.S.S.R., Pathé was arrested in 1979 after leaving a long trail of liaisons with Soviet diplomats and intelligence agents. He was accused of accepting money for disseminating Soviet disinformation through numerous writings dating back to 1959.

After his arrest, Pathé helped police fill in the missing KGB names and dates in the 15 years' worth of notebooks taken from his Paris apartment. He assisted in pinpointing some 50,000 francs in his bank account as Soviet payments. The money, he said, represented author's fees for Soviet rights to his book and many articles. His regular intelligence contacts, he claimed, were simply journalistic sources for gathering information—not spreading disinformation.

Pathé was tried last May, but for the most part his writing was not examined in court. Compared with the normal stream of invective and accusations running through France's hyperactive partisan press, Pathé's personal editorializing seemed tame indeed. As one French intelligence officer acknowledges, "If the court had only ruled on what Pathé wrote, he would not have been condemned."