Anti-Semitism, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced while repudiating an anti-Israel resolution adopted at the 1967 National Conference for New Politics, is “immoral.” Accordingly, the civil rights leader would surely have been dismayed at the prevalence of that age-old prejudice in the wake of the barbarous October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. Nor would he necessarily have accepted the cynical camouflaging of anti-Jewish prejudice as “anti-Zionism.” At an October 1967 dinner, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset’s later eyewitness account, King rebuked a student: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”
Moreover, Dr. King saw the fight against that age-old hatred as congruent with the civil rights struggle. In a June 1965 message, he wrote, “We deplore anti-Semitism as we deplore discrimination and segregation in Mississippi and Alabama." Given his awareness of Soviet intelligence attempts to discredit him by portraying him as an “Uncle Tom” secretly receiving U.S. government subsidies, King might also have recognized the pattern identified by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center: after October 7, the Kremlin fanned “the flames of antisemitism” while seeking to “discredit, divide, and weaken” its adversaries, particularly the United States.
It was not surprising that members of the so-called “Axis of Autocracies”—united by a common antipathy toward the United States—would mount influence operations aimed at exploiting that awful day. China, for its part, seeks to portray the United States as a violent, racist, politically riven, dysfunctional, declining power. As part of a state-linked operation, Chinese actors pretending to be Americans have leveraged divisive issues—including the Israel-Hamas war—to portray the United States as a country with weakleadership and a failing political system. This covert messaging campaign has been augmented by the distribution of more inflammatory material—including provocative memes and AI-generated images—on Western-facing Chinese diplomatic and state-affiliated accounts.
Iran has been much less subtle in its post-October 7 influence operations. Iranian actors have deployed fake personas, sock-puppet networks, hacked material, and cyber operations designed to support Hamas and discredit Israel. Neither the tone nor the aggressiveness of those actions is unexpected, given that Tehran’s ideological messaging—in accord with that of its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis—has long been premised on cries of “death” to the “Great” and “Little” Satans. Publicly available information does not establish that Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran created, directs, or controls the broader movement being advanced by an unholy coalition of the radical left and Islamists. Those governments have, however, identified and amplified real divisions in American society, often injecting poisonous content into them.
Of the latter-day Axis states, Russia has been especially forceful in its post-October 7 influence operations. After Hamas’s attack, Russian state media and Russia-linked covert networks rapidly exploited the war to promote anti-American themes and exacerbate tensions among the parties. Russian actors circulated manipulated videos and false stories, including fabricated claims that Ukraine had supplied Hamas with Western weapons. Some material was deliberately designed toresemble reporting from legitimate Western media. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), in 2024 the Russian government directed a “Doppelganger” influence operation that used fake personas, paid advertisements, fabricated media brands, and websites designed to impersonate legitimate U.S. news organizations; internal planning documents also contemplated AI-generated content. The operation’s goals included sowing division inside the United States, weakening support for U.S. foreign policy, and underminingAmerican relationships with allies, including Israel.
Russian intelligence services and Kremlin-directed influence organizations clearly regard anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and Israel-related polarization as exploitable American vulnerabilities and have demonstrated the capability and intent to amplify such divisions. Moscow has taken a pro-Palestinian position on the Israel-Hamas war while promoting conspiracy theories, ethnic tensions, and politically inflammatory narratives. Russian messaging fuels American domestic discord by hammering home claims—such as “Zionists control Washington”—that appeal to parts of the far left, far right, and isolationist middle. It also seeks to reinforce pernicious narratives that the United States causes instability; that its position on Israel exposes Western hypocrisy; that Ukraine and Israel receive Washington’s support while Americans suffer at home; and that the United States cannot be trusted asan honest broker in international affairs.
That the operational methodology Russia employs in pursuit of these goals reflects Moscow’s long-standing “active measures” (‘aktivnyye meropriyatiya’) doctrine—identifying divisions, entering debates through apparently legitimate accounts, intensifying antagonism, encouraging opposing groups to distrust one another, and thereby weakening social cohesion—is no accident. Like many Russian intelligence operations, Moscow’s current active-measures program has roots in the Soviet era. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the KGB’s Service A intensified an anti-Israel active-measures campaign that has echoes today. Cold War Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa later described part of that campaign as “Operation SIG,” intended to undermine support for Israel, damage U.S. influence in the Middle East, and widen the political divide between Washingtonand the Arab and Muslim worlds.
According to Pacepa, “SIG”—derived from the Russian phrase for “Zionist Governments” (‘sionistskoye gosudarstvo’)—was a clandestine propaganda and disinformation effort directed against Israel and its principal supporter, the United States. After Soviet-aligned Arab states were soundly defeated on the battlefield, Moscow sought to reframe the Middle East conflict, portraying Israel not simply as an Arab adversary but as an imperialist, colonialist, and racist extension of American power. Pacepa attributed to KGB chief Yuri V. Andropov the statement that the KGB “needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world.” The instruments available to Service A for clandestinely disseminating this theme included forged documents, front organizations, agents of influence, covert political support, and manipulation of foreign media. According to Pacepa’s account, those tools were used to place stories in sympathetic or controlled media, circulate inflammatory literature, exploit existing anti-Semitic material, provide covert assistance to organizations capable of repeating Soviet themes, and amplify them through Soviet-bloc and developing-world media.
Operation SIG sought to establish several mutually reinforcing propositions: that Israel was an illegitimate imperialist, colonialist state; that Zionism was inherently racist; that Israel and the United States constituted a single strategic enemy; and that the Palestinian struggle formed part of a worldwide “national liberation” movement. Indeed, according to KGB foreign-intelligence archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, “Zionism was second only to the United States (‘the Main Adversary’) as a target for KGB active measures.” As with other active measures, success could come from polarization, repetition, and erosion of confidence in an adversary’s motives, thereby improving Moscow’s geopolitical standing and influence. This constituted less a single disinformation story than a sustained campaign that developed and clandestinely circulated a narrative, placing it through ostensibly independent sources, encouraging sympathetic organizations to repeat it, and relying on repetition to confer apparent legitimacy. The objective was not necessarily to persuade audiences to accept every assertion. Rather, it was to establish a narrative that undermined the American position in the Middle East by portraying Washington as incapable of acting independently of Israel.
There is a striking thematic resemblance between several narratives promulgated by Operation SIG and rhetoric now used by some far-left, revolutionary socialist, anti-Zionist (a euphemism for raw anti-Semitism), and Islamist activists in the United States. The resemblance is reflected in a number of fallacious, often contradictory propositions: Zionism equals racism; Israel is a settler-colonial state; Zionism is tied to fascism; Israel is an instrument of American imperialism; “Zionists” control U.S. policymaking; Israel is an imperialist outpost; the United States and Israel constitute a single oppressive system; and violent Palestinian or Iranian-aligned “resistance” is part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle. This does not mean that Moscow controls today’s American protest movement.
What is, however, demonstrably true is that the recycling of an ideological vocabulary—albeit with the mendacious substitution of the label word “Zionist” for “Jew”—that Soviet active measures spent decades promoting internationally lives on in that movement and the language it employs. Operation SIG is illustrative of a fundamental principle of Soviet disinformation that continues in Russian operations today: Do not manufacture a grievance when an authentic grievance can be weaponized. The most effective active measure rarely invents an issue from nothing. It identifies a genuine conflict or prejudice and then manipulates, radicalizes, and internationalizes it.
Apart from the deliberate perversion of the historical significance of the Holocaust with the antithetical assertion that Israel’s justifiable response against those who conceived, directed, and participated in the heinous October 7 attack constitutes genocide, the chief difference between what the KGB did in SIG and what Russian intelligence is doing today is the speed with which disinformation and propaganda can now be created and disseminated. Whereas the KGB of the 1970s needed agents of influence, front organizations, controlled newspapers, forgeries, clandestine payments, friendly Communist parties, and sympathetic journalists willing to place stories that could take months to prepare and be circulated widely enough to have an impact, its Russian successors can utilize social media, fake Americans, AI-generated photographs, deep-fakes, bot networks, controlled influencers, and algorithmic amplification to spread disinformation themes at scale in a matter of hours.
In so doing, Russian intelligence systematically takes the most incendiary versions of American political arguments and makes them appear more popular, more widespread, and more authentic than they really are. The originating intelligence service no longer needs to control the narrative. Once an ideological concept becomes embedded in political culture, an active measures operation can become self-sustaining as genuine activists reproduce it voluntarily.
Building on Operation SIG, our adversaries are turning our democratic system inside out by using against us the freedom of speech we value and that is anathema to them. To those who argue today—as they did in his day—that the enlightened and anti-racist could not succumb to anti-Jewish prejudice, George Orwell had a rejoinder. “People of left opinions,” he wrote in 1945, “are not immune to it.” Revolutionary Marxists, progressive anti-colonial activists, Palestinian nationalists, and some imported Islamist or Iranian-aligned activists are converging around a common concept: “Anti-imperialism.” Organizations whose underlying ideologies would otherwise appear incompatible are united by hatred for the U.S., its democratic ideals, and its history. They also share a very thinly veiled anti-Semitic worldview and a common desire to destroy Western civilization.
In his landmark 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King reminded us that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Although those words addressed the evil of segregation, King later explicitly invoked the Holocaust in the same letter. Explaining the distinction between law and justice, he observed that Nazi persecution was carried out under German law, whereas resistance to it was illegal. He then declared, “Had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.”
King’s words provide an appropriate warning for our own time. The lesson of Operation SIG is not that Moscow created anti-Semitism or the political divisions concerning Israel, but that an adversary can identify such divisions, sharpen them, legitimize their most poisonous expressions, and ultimately induce others to propagate them voluntarily. What once required the KGB years of painstaking active measures can now be accomplished—and amplified globally—in hours. In such a milieu, Orwellian inversions of the truth can be made to appear more plausible for the very simple reason that they are delivered to target audiences before any countervailing argument can be mustered.
The danger, therefore, lies not simply in Russian, Chinese, or Iranian disinformation, but in our willingness to become its unwitting agents of influence. A democratic society cannot defeat foreign propaganda by abandoning the freedoms that distinguish it from its adversaries. It can, however, recognize when old prejudices have been repackaged in fashionable political language and refuse to lend them legitimacy. King understood that anti-Semitism was not made less immoral by the ideology in which it was cloaked. Nearly sixty years later, that remains a lesson worth remembering.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.
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