Manipulation

Probing Soviet influence

Disinformation is the term that intelligence analysts give to falsehoods a country disseminates by duping foreign news media. Such campaigns usually depend on a legitimate journalist's unwitting participation. Thus it is often all but impossible, even long after the fact, for a news organization to detect that it has been the victim of disinformation. One classic instance that took months to expose: the rash of stories planted among Western journal ists that the late Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was a fan of jazz and Western fiction and a closet liberal.

The inability of a news organ to be sure that it has not been used was cited last week by the West German newsweekly Der Spiegel. The publication withdrew, for a no-cash settlement, a libel suit that it had brought in Britain against the defunct newsweekly Now. The London-based magazine had reprinted in 1981, a few months before it folded, a speech by its owner, Sir James Goldsmith, in which he accused the left-leaning Spiegel of having been manipulated by the KGB while researching a series of 1962 articles that challenged the integrity of Franz Josef Strauss, then West Germany's Defense Minister. In last week's exchange of statements in court, reprinted in full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Goldsmith emphasized that he had not meant to imply that Spiegel had knowingly cooperated with the KGB. Spiegel's British attorney, John Wilmers, conceded, "Although they themselves are not conscious of having been used, my clients are conscious of the dangers to press freedom posed by Soviet covert propaganda." Both sides described the outcome as a moral victory.

Goldsmith, who owns the French weekly L 'Express and an American supermarket empire, has crusaded for years urging Western journalists to study disinformation techniques. To prepare a defense for the Spiegel trial, he solicited testimony from students of Soviet actions in West Germany, Britain and the U.S., including a Czech defector, General Jan Sejna, whose public remarks were the basis for the assertions about Strauss and Spiegel. Among other potential witnesses: a Soviet bloc defector who was involved in efforts to defame Strauss, and George town University Professor Roy Godson, author of a recent book on Soviet disinformation. Goldsmith said last week that he will publish a book, to be written by British journalists, based on the evidence he accumulated. Says he: "Prime responsibility for stopping Soviet abuse of our freedom of the press lies with the media themselves."

Goldsmith, a failed aspirant to Parliament, is written off by some intelligence experts as a Conservative ideologue. Yet Western reporters have repeatedly experienced disinformation from the Soviet bloc, from attempts to discredit Polish Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa to contentions that the Korean Air Lines jet shot down by the Soviets was on a CIA mission. The issues in the Spiegel case probably are, as its editors said last week, beyond conventional proof. But the broader problem Goldsmith raised is one that knowing journalists cannot easily dismiss.