The_Info_Web/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/INTELLIGENCE/Disinformation.md

created	updated	title	tags	description	category	summary
2025-07-22	2026-10-08	Disinformation	concept intelligence propaganda	Disinformation is false information deliberately and often covertly spread in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.	Intelligence Concept	Disinformation is false information deliberately and often covertly spread in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.

Disinformation is false information deliberately and often covertly spread in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth. In accounts of Cold War Parapsychology research it figures in the origins of the Soviet Union research program.¹

The French accounts of 1959 and 1960 describing telepathy tests between a shore laboratory and the USS Nautilus (The Nautilus (Telepathy Project)) were cited by Leonid Vasiliev in 1960, in a lecture at Leningrad and, according to I. V. Tsykunov, in a report to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, when he argued for renewed Soviet psi research.²³ The U.S. Navy denied the reports, and the submarine's first captain, William R. Anderson, said in 1963 that the Nautilus was in dock on the date given.⁴ Martin Ebon recorded that some Americans entertained the hypothesis that the story was a "Soviet plant," a piece of "disinformation" launched in France to provide a reason for a start-up of Soviet psychic studies, and that Gerard Messadie told him in 1980 that the whole thing was probably a hoax and that Jacques Bergier, who had ties to French intelligence, was his source.⁵ Jim Schnabel wrote that the story may have been Bergier's private fraud or a disinformation ploy designed to stir up valuable data about American psi research or to encourage Russia to undertake wasteful psi research.⁶ A 1975 Defense Intelligence Agency study described the Nautilus "experiments" as "probably mythical," while saying the claims had "one tangible consequence" for Soviet research.⁷

Footnotes

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1. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers. Dell, 1997. ↩︎

2. Anfilov, Gleb. "Is Telepathy Possible?" The Soviet Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (June 1961), pp. 3-7, translated from Znanie-Sila, 1960, no. 12. https://archive.org/details/sim_russian-social-science-review_1961-06_2_6 ↩︎

3. Tsykunov, I. V. "От фантазии к реальности: как история «Наутилуса» открыла гонку сверхъестественных вооружений между СССР и США" [From fantasy to reality: how the story of the Nautilus opened the race for supernatural weapons between the USSR and the USA]. Aliter, no. 20 (2023), pp. 34-55. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/ot-fantazii-k-realnosti-kak-istoriya-nautilusa-otkryla-gonku-sverhestestvennyh-vooruzheniy-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎

4. Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation, "Nautilus Hoax Exposed," vol. 10, no. 6, November-December 1963, citing This Week, September 8, 1963. NSA-RDP96X00790R000100040002-2, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/nsa-rdp96x00790r000100040002-2. ↩︎

5. Ebon, Martin. Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? McGraw-Hill, 1983, chapter 3, pp. 28-31. ↩︎

6. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. Dell, 1997, pp. 90-93. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎

7. Maire, Louis F., III, and J. D. LaMothe. Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, DST-1810S-387-75, September 1975, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500420001-2, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500420001-2. ↩︎