The Dulles Plan – a possible KGB provocation of the USSR

· Documents, Kazakhstan, KGB, Russia, USA, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine

Internet publication. „We will throw everything we have – all our gold, all our material might and resources – into brainwashing and fooling people. The human brain, people’s consciousness, is capable of change. Having sown chaos in Russia, we will imperceptibly substitute their values with false ones… We will find like-minded people, our helpers and allies, right inside Russia. Episode by episode, a grandiose tragedy will be played out – the demise of the most recalcitrant nation on earth, the final extinguishing of its self-awareness. From literature and art we… will gradually eradicate their social essence, we will break artists of the habit, we will knock out of them the desire to depict, to explore… those processes that take place deep within the masses. Literature, theater, cinema – everything will depict and glorify the basest human emotions. We will support and elevate in every way those so‑called artists who will sow and drum into the consciousness the cult of sex, violence, sadism, betrayal – in short, every kind of immorality. In governing the state we will create chaos and confusion. We will imperceptibly yet actively and constantly encourage the tyranny of officials, bribe‑takers, unscrupulousness. Honesty and decency will be ridiculed and will become needed by no one, they will turn into a relic of the past. Boohorishness and insolence, lies and deceit, drunkenness and drug addiction, animal fear… and national enmity, above all enmity and hatred toward the Russian people – all of this we will skillfully and imperceptibly cultivate. Only a few, very few will guess or understand what is happening. But such people we will place in a helpless position, turn them into a laughingstock, find a way to slander them and declare them the dregs of society… We will loosen generations this way, one after another… We will fight for people from their childhood, their youthful years, we will always place the main stake on the youth, we will corrupt, deprave, and debauch them. We will turn them into cosmopolitans.”

This question unexpectedly puzzled the history section. The quotation attributed to CIA director Allen Dulles has been wandering from one publication to another for many years, and its meaning was quite consistent with the U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet, contrary to expectations, the journalistic investigation – in the course of which we met with more than one veteran of our own special services – did not yield a definitive result, although it did shed more light on the personality of Allen Dulles himself, who played an important role in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the 1930s‑1950s. However, let us proceed in order…

A statement very similar in substance to the “Dulles quotation” first appeared in the USSR in… fiction. In 1965, the Kiev publishing house “Radyansky pysmennyk” brought out Yuri Dold‑Mikhailik’s novel And One in the Field Is a Warrior. In its second part, “In the Captivity of the Black Knights,” an American general named Dumbright, inspecting an intelligence school, delivers words that can be seen as a free rendering of Dulles’s directives for waging an ideological war against the USSR. Later, something similar is uttered by another literary character – one of the negative heroes in Anatoly Ivanov’s novel The Eternal Call. Whether the writer had read the work of his Ukrainian colleague or was familiar with some document from the KGB archives about CIA plans is unknown. But chance coincidences occur extremely rarely in our life, so most likely the quotation attributed to Allen Dulles was introduced into writers’ and journalists’ currency back in Brezhnev’s time by someone from the special services. Creative people willingly used it, because it matched their convictions and generally corresponded to the strategy of “psychological warfare” of that period.

At the turn of the 1980s‑1990s, the “Dulles statement,” with explicit attribution to the CIA director, appears in the socio‑political articles of opponents of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. At that time, the title of a document dated December 1945 is mentioned for the first time: “Reflections on the Implementation of the American Post‑War Doctrine against the USSR.” But what this is – an article, a chapter from a book, a memo, or an oral address – is never specified.

For the sake of objectivity, it must be acknowledged that from a linguistic point of view the authenticity of the quoted statement raises some doubts. The quotation sounds very emotional, but it is uncharacteristic of English‑language rhetoric – “native” English speakers would form phrases somewhat differently. References to translation style or the differences between the Russian and English language systems do not help – it is all far too “literary.” So if these are indeed Dulles’s thoughts, we are dealing not with a translation of a written text, but with a free retelling by someone who heard an oral speech. That is entirely possible: veterans of the special services allow that the USSR’s KGB may have obtained an account of a speech Dulles delivered at some closed meeting. The source of information could have been a Soviet illegal intelligence officer or a defector from one of the American intelligence agencies, whose name cannot be disclosed. And if we recall the famous story of the “bug” – the listening device implanted in a wooden eagle that stood for quite a long time in the office of the American ambassador in Moscow – other ways of obtaining information can also be imagined…

Be that as it may, the Soviet “propaganda machine” needed a wake‑up call for broad sections of the public. Let us recall that in the early 1960s the Soviet Union began speaking of ideological sabotage against the USSR, and documentary confirmation was required of what was then customarily called the “insidious designs of imperialism.” It is possible that an excerpt from an intelligence report was lightly edited, given “emotional coloring” by mentioning the planned “tragedy, grandiose in scale, of the demise of the most recalcitrant nation on earth,” etc., and then, through the channels of the relevant KGB divisions, fed into the milieu of Soviet writers and journalists…

Semion Borzenko, editor-in-chief of Com-Piter, investigates the origin of the so-called Dulles Plan in the patriotic press. The very writing style of this “document” immediately gives pause: it is far too Russified, too familiar to the 1990s rather than the 1940s (the “plan” is deceitfully dated to that era)—words like “cosmopolitanism”, “drug addiction”, and other turns of phrase highly characteristic precisely of the patriotic press of the early nineties. This supposedly American “plan” reeks a mile off of chauvinistic humanitarianism and “soil-bound” ideology, which in the 1980s fed directly into the perestroika processes so destructive for the USSR. There was even a newspaper called Russians Against the USSR. Naturally, the first category placed in the letter is “the Russian people,” described as the most rebellious. It is hard to believe that this is a document from American intelligence services, rather than a sermon from yet another obscurantist “soil-scientist.” And indeed, the author of the counterfeit “document” is a church hierarch.

Of course, there is no English original of the “Dulles Plan”—it was written by Russians for Russians, for the most impressionable and reckless. There is not even a hint of translation, not a trace of the lexicon of American McCarthyites. Moreover, in an overtly anti-Soviet hand, a patriot of “Russia without Bolsheviks” has struck Lenin’s personality from the “plan,” even though he was mentioned in the original source. All so that the patriotic flock might more easily digest the “evil strategy of the Yanks,” aimed not at undermining the base, but at undermining morality… It is evident that the “plan” was written by an idealist-metaphysician, alien to Marxism—a subject with which even Dulles was far better acquainted than the patriots of the 1990s. Yet for reckless patriots, what is always needed is a simple image of the enemy and an explanation for the country’s problems, for the disastrous state into which it fell AND THROUGH THEIR OWN PERSONAL fault—by the simplest means: a conspiracy of “the damned Yankees.” This “plan” serves exactly that need of the dark flock.

One of those reckless patriots who frequently quotes the “Dulles Plan” is the famous Pskov party poet and culturologist, now almost an ideologue of Zyuganovism, V. S. Nikitin—the pioneer who discovered in the programmatic documents of the CPRF such claptrap as “the Russian spirit” and other nonsense that has penetrated the holy of holies: the Party’s Programme for the communists’ coming to power. Semion Borzenko debunks all the myths connected with the “Dulles Plan,” tracing its direct source, which turns out to be Soviet fiction…

Watch to the end; it is very interesting and very important—and do not, like the Central Control and Auditing Commission of the CPRF, allow such major theoretical errors in the future. The “Dulles Plan” never existed. This “document” was written by a St Petersburg priest who is very popular among Zyuganovites and among still more “right-wing” soil-enthusiasts.

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