# Ideological Subversion: the Return of a Cold War Word, Between Real Threat and Fantasy

A 1984 video, millions of views, a word we thought had been consigned to the Cold War museum: “ideological subversion” is back in our news feeds. It designates both very real operations, documented by state services and researchers, and a convenient fantasy for accusing any opponent. This series of fifty posts aims to hold both ends: to take the threat seriously without giving in to paranoia.

By Paul-Michel Manandise · 16 October 2026 · CEAS Editorial Cell

Translated from the French. Original published on CEAS: https://www.ceas.info/publication/subversion-ideologique-retour-mot-guerre-froide

# Key findings

• Excerpts from the interview with Yuri Bezmenov (1984) circulate massively on social media and serve opposing purposes, from the New York Times series on the roots of “fake news” to narratives presenting Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates as an authoritarian power grab.
• The confusion between propaganda, disinformation, influence, hybrid warfare and subversion benefits above all those who manipulate.
• The 2018 CAPS/IRSEM report adopts the notion of “information manipulation”, defined as “the intentional and massive dissemination of false or biased news for hostile political purposes”.
• Subversion is the most all-encompassing notion, and therefore the easiest to misuse.
• Decree no. 2021-922 creating Viginum targets behaviours (foreign origin, artificial or automated dissemination, manifest falsehood, harm to the fundamental interests of the Nation), not opinions.
• Foreign manipulation operations are documented, from the Soviet campaign attributing the origin of AIDS to the Pentagon to the Russian RRN campaign targeting France.
• Paranoia is the mirror-image trap of naivety: it denies the genuine causes of discontent and can feed a “liberticidal temptation” among those in government.

# A video that will not die

In 1984, in front of the camera of the American essayist G. Edward Griffin, Yuri Bezmenov, a former journalist of the Soviet Novosti agency who defected to the West in 1970, explains that espionage is only a small part of the KGB’s work. According to him, “only about 15% of time, money and manpower” is spent on intelligence as such; “the other 85%” goes to “a slow process” that he calls “ideological subversion”, “active measures” or “psychological warfare” (author’s translation from the interview transcript, rendered here into English).

The aim, he says, is to “change the perception of reality” of a population to such an extent that, despite an abundance of information, nobody is any longer “able to come to sensible conclusions” in defence of their own interests. He then lays out his famous four-stage model: demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis, normalisation.

The aim, he says, is to “change the perception of reality” of a population to such an extent that, despite an abundance of information, nobody is any longer “able to come to sensible conclusions” in defence of their own interests.

Forty years later, these excerpts circulate on a loop on YouTube, TikTok and X. As the journalist Jorge Barrera recounted in a long CBC News investigation in 2022, they were used in a trailer for the video game Call of Duty in 2020, used by the New York Times in a series on the roots of “fake news”, and then recycled to present Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates as signs of an authoritarian power grab. The same document thus serves opposing purposes. That is the first reason to look at it closely.

# A thicket of words

The second reason has to do with vocabulary. People speak interchangeably of propaganda, disinformation, fake news, hybrid warfare, influence or subversion. These words do not mean the same thing, and confusing them benefits above all those who manipulate.

The report Information Manipulation, published in 2018 by the French foreign ministry’s Policy Planning Staff (CAPS) and the Institute for Strategic Research at the École militaire (IRSEM), immediately points out this “obvious terminological confusion”. It notes that it is thanks to this confusion that some people can compare RT with the BBC or France 24, or minimise the problem by explaining that “everything is propaganda”. The authors therefore set aside several notions considered too vague or too militarised (“information warfare”, “hybrid warfare”) and adopt that of information manipulation, defined as “the intentional and massive dissemination of false or biased news for hostile political purposes”.

For the rest of this series, let us distinguish:

• influence and public diplomacy, which all states practise openly and which are not a problem in themselves;
• propaganda, an organised attempt to shape opinions and behaviour, which may rely on accurate facts;
• disinformation, the deliberate dissemination of false or misleading information, usually while concealing its source;
• active measures, a Soviet term for a set of covert influence operations, from disinformation to the funding of front organisations;
• and finally subversion, the broadest and vaguest term: the idea that an adversary seeks to weaken a society from within, by undermining its trust in its institutions and exploiting its divisions.

It is precisely because subversion is the most all-encompassing notion that it is the easiest to misuse. In a post published in the Club de Mediapart on 19 March 2026, “The dawn of the invisible war”, I recalled its etymology: the Latin subvertere, “to overturn from below”. The word says exactly what it designates: not a frontal assault, but a work of undermining that exploits a society’s weaknesses from within.

# What French law retains

France has chosen a narrow, operational definition. Decree no. 2021-922 of 13 July 2021, which created the Service for Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference (Viginum), attached to the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN), targets operations that meet several conditions at once: they involve, “directly or indirectly, a foreign state or a foreign non-state entity”; they aim at the “artificial or automated, massive and deliberate dissemination” of online content; they concern “manifestly inaccurate or misleading allegations or imputations of fact”; and they are “likely to harm the fundamental interests of the Nation”.

This grid has one virtue: it targets not opinions, even radical ones, but behaviours (foreign origin, artificial coordination, manifest falsehood). A French activist who violently criticises the government does not fall within this framework. A network of fake accounts run from abroad that imitates the Le Monde website to spread fake articles does. The same decree also establishes an ethics and scientific committee to monitor the service’s activity, a sign that the legislator was aware of the risk of abuse.

# Two symmetrical traps

The first trap is naivety. Manipulation operations from abroad are not the invention of a few experts in search of funding. The Cold War archives, which we will explore, document very real Soviet campaigns, such as the one that attributed the origin of AIDS to the Pentagon in the 1980s. Since 2023, Viginum has published detailed reports on Russian operations targeting France, including the RRN campaign, which usurped the visual identity of French daily newspapers. For a reader who knows Ukraine from the inside, these mechanisms are anything but abstract: they have accompanied the war since 2014.

The second trap is paranoia. Seeing Moscow’s hand behind every social grievance, every student movement or every protest vote amounts to denying that citizens have reasons of their own to be discontented. The CAPS/IRSEM report warns of an “indirect effect” of manipulation: generating a “liberticidal temptation” among those in government, that is, pushing them to take measures contrary to their own democratic values, which deepens divisions further still. The historian and Russia specialist Mark Galeotti makes a similar point: it has become very easy to see the Kremlin’s hand behind every setback, which credits Vladimir Putin with more influence than he really has. And Galeotti adds that this may be “the greatest active measure of all”.

# What this series proposes

This series will proceed in eight stages: the Bezmenov model and its author; the Soviet archives; Putin’s Russia; Ukraine as the first front; France and Europe as targets, based on Viginum reports and the work of EU DisinfoLab and EUvsDisinfo; criticisms of the concept and its conspiracist uses; the major theories of propaganda, from Bernays to Ellul; and finally, the tools of democratic resilience.

This series also extends the posts I have published in the Club de Mediapart since autumn 2025 under the title “The invisible war”. In them I argued for what I called a “Counter-Art of War”: training citizens, from school onwards, in “information hygiene”; not merely refuting propaganda but “mapping” its funding networks, troll farms and local relays in order to expose them to justice and to public opinion; and responding to manipulation “not with the sterile brutality of censorship” but with the clarity of facts. This requirement also applies to ourselves: it obliges us to subject our own models, including mine, to the same criticism as those of others.

Our method will be simple: distinguish what is proven, what is plausible and what is merely asserted. Cite sources, all of them verifiable. Point out limitations, including those of the services that fight disinformation. For a democracy that defends itself against manipulation by manipulating in turn would already have lost.

# Limitations & uncertainties

Bezmenov’s model (the 15% / 85% split, four stages) rests on the testimony of a defector; this post presents it without assessing it, its critical examination being planned for later in the series.
The Bezmenov quotation is the author’s translation, based on the interview transcript.
This opening post sets out a framework and announces further developments; it does not analyse the campaigns cited (INFEKTION, RRN) in detail.
Viginum’s French definition is deliberately narrow and does not cover the whole range of influence phenomena.
The reports of the services fighting disinformation have their own limitations, which the series undertakes to point out.

# Methodological note

Analysis based exclusively on open, verifiable sources: transcript of the 1984 interview, a journalistic investigation (CBC News, 2022), the CAPS/IRSEM report (2018), decree no. 2021-922 published on Légifrance, the Viginum technical report on RRN (2023), and work by Mark Galeotti (Marshall Center, 2019) and Thomas Boghardt (Studies in Intelligence, 2009). The Bezmenov quotation was translated by the author from the interview transcript. The method distinguishes what is proven, what is plausible and what is merely asserted, and subjects the author’s own models to the same criticism as those of others. First post in a series devoted to ideological subversion.

# Sources & references

1. Yuri Bezmenov – G. Edward Griffin, interview (1984), transcript: https://www.fisheaters.com/srpdf/bezmenovinterview.pdf
2. Jorge Barrera, “Chaos agent”, CBC News, 05.02.2022: https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/yuri-bezmenov-soviet-defector-canada
3. J.-B. Jeangène Vilmer, A. Escorcia, M. Guillaume, J. Herrera, Les manipulations de l’information : un défi pour nos démocraties, CAPS/IRSEM, 2018: https://www.irsem.fr/storage/file_manager_files/2025/03/les-manipulations-de-l-information.pdf
4. Décret n° 2021-922 du 13 juillet 2021 (Viginum), Légifrance: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000043788361
5. Viginum, RRN : une campagne numérique de manipulation de l’information complexe et persistante, 19.06.2023: https://www.sgdsn.gouv.fr/files/files/Publications/20230619_NP_VIGINUM_RAPPORT-CAMPAGNE-RRN_VF.pdf
6. Mark Galeotti, “Active Measures: Russia’s Covert Geopolitical Operations”, Marshall Center Security Insight, no. 31, 06.2019: https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/active-measures-russias-covert-geopolitical-operations-0
7. Thomas Boghardt, “Operation INFEKTION”, Studies in Intelligence, 53/4, 2009: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/1-Operation_INFEKTION_Soviet_Bloc_AIDS_Disinformation_Campaign.pdf
8. Paul-Michel Manandise, « 1. L’aube de la guerre invisible », Club de Mediapart, 19.03.2026: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/1759733/blog/190326/1l-aube-de-la-guerre-invisible-par-le-colonel-paul-michel-manandise

Paul-Michel Manandise – CEAS, Centre Européen d’Analyse Stratégique – ceas.info

Original article: https://www.ceas.info/publication/subversion-ideologique-retour-mot-guerre-froide