You for being with us this morning. With us here at the United States institute of peace. We are committed to trying to today, a Panel Discussion hosted by the washington post. Include barton gelman. That collected metadata on americans phone records. Tonight at 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. For over 35 years, cspan brings Public Affairs of ants washington directly to you about putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, briefings and conferences. Offering complete gavel to gavel coverage of the u. S. House, all as a Public Service of private industry. We are cspan, rated by the cable industry 35 years ago and brought to you as a Public Service by your local cable or semiprovider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. On monday, the heritage held a hold it conference on russian politics and influence. Panelists talked about the effectiveness of government backed media broadcasts like voice of america. This is just under two hours. Welcome. We would ask everyone here if you will check that cell phones have been turned off. It would be appreciated as we prepare to begin. Our internet viewers are always welcome to send questions or comments, simply emailing us. Hosting our discussion today is a senior fellow for public a douglas and Sarah Allison center for foreign and National Security policy. She is a media fellow at the hoover institution, she also serves on the board of visitors at the institute of political journalism and the center for free inquiry at Hanover College in indiana. Please join me in welcoming hello dale. As a look at a highly eastern situation in ukraine and president ial elections coming up in may, these efforts by russia, i think we can all say can be trusted to intensify. The russian actions against crimea and Eastern Ukraine have awakened the world to val to Vladimir Putins efforts to recreate past russian influence. Every onee is using of the means at his disposal, going beyond military power. For new sources of being blocked, prorussian ngos are being established throughout the former republics and russian ethnic minorities and neighboring states are bombarded with russian language media from moscow. The on that, in crimea and Eastern Ukraine, Russian Special units are igniting separatist interest. Meanwhile, from the american if, we they should say it all, have secretary of state john kerry and Vice President joe biden spearheading u. S. Support for ukraine. Terriblynt find that confidence inspiring, then i am with you. We have today with those three truly eminent experts on russia and the soviet union. Keen observers of russian behavior, past and present. Our first speaker will be john. Ynch how ski from 199119 93, he served in the state department in the eau of European Affairs 19811983. And from 198387, he was direct to your of european and soviet affairs at the National Security council. In that capacity he served as the principal soviet Affairs Advisor to president reagan. With manyn associated academic and research institutions, but he is certainly best known as the ofnder of the Institute World politics on 16th street, and Eminent School of foreign , the graduate school which is spearheaded many of the efforts on strategic communication, Public Diplomacy and studies of foreign propaganda. We are absolutely thrilled youre here with us today. Much, it is aery i have great admiration for them and maybe we have too of a society of mutual admiration here. Has asked me if i would give a little bit of a background on russian propaganda and also soviet propaganda and how some of the themes and ways and means of this propaganda related to what is going on today. Tradition,long obviously, and the 20th century, that the soviets perfected to a science. Spectrum ofentire activities that went from ordinary conventional public cultural diplomacy, sports diplomacy, and other things like that, that were designed for purposes of , tohological disarmament ordinary information policy ,hich was heavily manipulated andng the truth with lies using the truth as it serves their purposes and twisting it in classic rock again to stick classic in propagandistic fashion. It refers to disinformation, forgeries and covert political influence operations. All sorts ofd things such as provocations, front organizations, agents of influence that were placed in foreign newspapers, in foreign parliaments and in foreign governments. Givene a number of that the kgb may have been split up into a couple of different organizations but never really reformed, given that the kgb was heavily involved in these types ofactive measures operations, there is a tremendous institutional memory within russia today about how this was done during soviet days. Unfortunately we have stopped tracking these kinds of things in the u. S. Government. In the 80s, when i was serving there, we had a soviet active notures working group which only our intelligence community, but also our Diplomatic Community collected information about soviet disinformation themes and how they were related oath to covert influence operations and to ordinary propaganda. Upstudied what we had picked. We declassified information which we had analyzed. We disseminated it to other government agencies, to editorial boards, to foreign governments, in order to sensitize people of what the soviets were doing. I simply ask, how do you know realityperceiving correctly if you dont know how your perceptions can be managed by any number of actors, friends or foes. This is an essential subject for the study of International Relations, and i think it is a sign of huge, both professional and academic, malpractice but this is a subject that is good so systematically ignored, except in a few corridors around the country like ours at iw p that study these things. I wanted briefly to review a couple of the classic methods of soviet propaganda and disinformation, which have been carried on by the russians in the modern era. We in the United States, not having collected information on this, nor having said this in a systematic nor having studied this in a systematic fashion, are blissfully unaware. There are examples of neighboring countries, not least of which are ukraine, where people were living there are very familiar with soviet active measures and now russian active measures, and who were in the of and who actually exposes things, charge the russians are doing these things. This was long before these recent events. Ukrainianaring accusations against russia concerning active measures back latee early, mid and 1990s. One of the most essential elements of russian strategy and soviet strategy is to define the terms of debate. Any good debater knows that he who defines the terms of debate is halfway towards winning. The soviets did this and also set of classic fashions. They were for peace, we were for. They were for disarmament, we were for arms race. They were for security, we were aggressors who were creating etc. Theyretc. , doing the same thing today by identifying the Ukrainian Government as fascists and nazis , of course blackening the image of their opponents is standard operating procedure. Theyre saying that this is betweenly a battle them, the good guys, the answer fascists inhe nazi kiev. In the crimean referendum, there were signs saying, basically asing this conflict out russia versus the nazis. Effort part of his involves distracting people posit attention from the issue distracting peoples attention from the issue at hand. One of the ways that russian propaganda has been doing this, especially insofar as United States has been involved, has been to accuse us of illegally invading iraq, of attempting to coopt all sorts of people around the world who question the legality and the prudence of. Ur invasion of iraq in any event, there are other kinds of games like that, but suffice it to say that this is one of the major elements. Accuser adversaries of doing exactly what they do, namely covert action. They are accusing us of it, theyre accusing kiev of covert it is in the east when precisely their own provocateurs had been involved in infiltrating the country and engaging in these types of riling up demonstrations, staged protests. The semantics are another key technique in all of this. One of thesay that elements in this, and there are many different dimensions. You may have seen some recent reports about the use of which theyre claiming to be russian territory. Then, there are certain other themes. One of them is that moscow is paranoid. His is a classic soviet strategic deception theme. It is designed to get everybody in the west to believe that we cannot we have to handle moscow with kid gloves, we cannot provoke them too much, we cannot resist what theyre doing or else it will provoke them and make things worse. Then, there is the effort to try to coopt sympathizers among the enemy. What is remarkable is the degree utinsch pollutants p moral values and antilgbt campaign has managed to attract socialof socially conservatives, not only in the United States but particularly there is soea and much more about these themes that can be said. I am sure my colleagues will say will address a number of them. I would like to deal very briefly with what United States should do. As i mentioned before, i think it is essential that we as a government and and academic institutions, think tanks, do more analysis of this field. That thelly delighted Heritage Foundation has seen fit to have this forum, to cast some light on this issue. This is a classic issue that shouldnt just be reserved for crisis moments. It is something that goes on all the time in so many of the different conflicts around the world, whether it is the middle east or radical islamism or china. These are fertile fields for analysis. The next thing i think the United States has to do is have a voice of truth. Of our shut down so many Public Diplomacy capabilities in this country. We shut down the United StatesInformation Agency in what i call a bipartisan fit of absence of mind in 1999. I think it was all supposed to be very efficient and we were going to we folded a shadow of usias former capacity where ignored. S it is not something that is your ticket to being a secretary of state. We have a diplomatic culture in and not a serious soft power culture. I would say that the u. S. Army has a greater sensitivity to soft power than the department of state does. Mindserstands hearts and operations, having recognized the vital necessity of these sorts of things on the battlefronts, and iraq and afghanistan. It understands cultural diplomacy and understand it to be a more a strategic instrument of American Power. Ishave a huge part of this our International Broadcast. Radio, television and obviously internet are the only unfiltered information that we can get into the minds of millions and millions of people around the world. All other information that we transmit is filtered by the governments that control the trulyas does russia extraordinary extent that it has started to do. We have shut down the voice of america, russian and ukrainian broadcasts over short wave. We barely had an imprint, an am. Tation i dont know why the bbq was unable to renew the a. M. Station that we had in moscow, but a subcontractor of the pbg fails to renew the contract, and then president putin shut the thing down. I do know where the responsibility lies. In any event, the pbg, the broadcasting board of governors, which runs the voa, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, radio free asia and others, is a dysfunctional agency, which has unpaid,of bipartisan, volunteer commissioners who, only parttime, and who edges and who exercise executive authority. And the secretary of state is a member of this , but is effectively in absentia. That thet is bureaucracy there is effectively unaccountable. This is a board that does not report to anybody when it comes to being consistent with, in the case of the voice of america, voa broadcasts have to be consistent with the Foreign Policy of the United States. The surrogate radios, the freedom radios that serve a separate mission from the voice of america, like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, act as a surrogate to mastech free press for countries denied free media. These are entirely separate missions. They are worthy, both of them, of being pursued. They are extremely cheap. The pbg tried to shut down all broadcast to china in mandarin and in cantonese on the grounds that short wave is an obsolete legacy technology. 290 then, did beijing by shortwave transmitters in the last couple of years . Because shortwave is beijings favorite and most effective method of communicating with its own people. Shortwave gets to the audience. You can listen to radio anonymously. These Radio Broadcasts and tv broadcasts have been incrementally junked g, as if everybody is going to be on the internet and as if there arent million of Internet Police in a place like , as of internet sites can be blocked or the entire web cant be shut down. In any event, we have to start getting serious about getting alternative an alternative , ane out there in the world entire overhaul of strategic medications. My solution for this is to make the voa and the freedom radios, the surrogate radios and television stations have their own independent directors that report ultimately to the white house, to the White House Security council. There are different ways of structuring this. Reasonable people can disagree, but they have to be accountable. I also believe that we should set up a new u. S. Public where we folded in all of the Public Diplomacy functions of the u. S. Government entered one big empire so that they would ultimately be taken seriously in this agency. I believe that 50 of all ambassadorships should come out of that agency, and then people would start taking Public Diplomacy seriously. Thank you. You for that intervention on behalf of u. S. Public diplomacy. I know there are lots of talks about Reform Efforts in this field and maybe one of these next few days or months we will have another meeting. Now let me introduce our next who at theul goebel, moment is a guest lecturer at the institute on world politics. That is not by any means his only reason for being here. Is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in eurasia. He has served as the director and dean in various capacities at the buzzer by john at the the azerbaijant university. Prior to joining the faculty in he workedas with various parts of the u. S. Government. The Central Intelligence agency, the state department, as well as voice of america root, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. He has frequently worked in ethnic and religious issues, and has been an advisor to the latvia, andestonia, lithuania, during the drive for independence from the soviet union. He is extremely wellqualified to give us that point of view. Paul, over to you. Hela has asked me to speak about the fraught relationship between moscow and ethnic russians outside of the Russian Federation. I would do that, but i cannot resist adding to johns very insightful comments that those of you who are going to become interested in the issue of countering what the russians are doing in the propaganda and disinformation wars, nature of americas leading specialist on disinformation in the past and whose works continue to be important. She said three things which are relevant to our discussion today. The first is that the worst problem in International Relations is that everyone tries to project and others what they are themselves. It is not only a problem with the russians do it, it is everyones doing and we tend not to see it will we do it ourselves. Where this was summarized by natalie years ago was, the u. S. Census soviet Union Diplomats and they treat them like spies. Wed the soviet union sent diplomats and they choose like spies. They send a spies and we treat them like diplomats. The second thing is that the problem is far worse than many people think. Most of the statements that Vladimir Putin and his friends make today are outright lies. To counter. Rly easy it is a much more serious threat in the case of misinformation. As natalie wrote some years ago, this information is mostly true is mostlyrmation true. You put in one or two falsehoods and that has enormous consequences. It requires enormous resources to find out very is easy to deal with blatant lies, but do not think that the blatant lies of the only challenge out there. Grant road, natalie dealing with the question of disinformation and efforts to influence, one has to realize that this is a longterm problem that you cannot dip in and dip out the United States is increasingly shortterm in its a