A century of disinformation, traced as a craft with its own tradecraft, failure modes and professional standards.
The best material is the Cold War work. Operation INFEKTION, the KGB campaign to seed the idea that AIDS was engineered at Fort Detrick, is the case study that explains the whole discipline. It worked because it took years, used real journalists, and attached the lie to a genuine grievance.
The lesson underneath is that effective disinformation is mostly true. Pure fabrication is brittle. What survives contact with scrutiny is a real document, a real resentment, and one altered detail.
The book is dense and the structure is chronological to a fault, but it is the most serious thing I have read on the subject.
Read January 2023.
