I'm intrigued by the last bit, and I have a hunch where you may be going with it. I think that the Soviet infiltration of Western academic institutions might be a nice example of building exploitable blind spots in your enemy's collective world view.

Mike

Your the third commentator to wonder about a Soviet 5GW… [1,2, look for "willi"]. I'm skeptical, but I've wondered before if early Christianity was a hybrid 4GW/5GW, so maybe…

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/12/21/open-thread-ii.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/07/20/open-source-conspiracy.html

I'd have to look for the link, but I saw an interview with an old KGB guy talking about how they worked to get American universities populated with professors who taught things like the fact that all ideologies are valid and equal, that America was the great satan and that due to Colonialism we deserve all the ire of the third world.

And so we have a very large portion of the population, many of them now in positions of power, that don't believe we have a moral right to fight the WOT or pretty much whatever war might come our way. The Soviets may not have won the Cold War, but they won a significant campaign that made us much weaker for the next (current) conflict. If it hadn't, we wouldn't need the SysAdmin Industrial Complex you're proposing.

Mike

Try Ladislav Bittman's 'Deception Game', 'KGB and Soviet Disinformation' and 'The New Image Makers'.

Also look for Anatoliy Golitsyn 'New Lies for Old' (then of course make yourself familiar with the Nosenko-Golitsyn debacle, which you may already be aware of).

Richard Schultz 'Dezinformatsia' is also good.

Surkov is considered the chief ideologist of Putin's cabinet and the deceased journalist Anna Politkovskaya described him as the “acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia”. He also influenced the creation of the Nashi youth movement which has been used against the Ukraine and most recently Estonia.

Most interesting is a number of other things, like that he gave a speech entitled 'How Russia should fight international conspiracies'. He also did three years of theater direction at the Moscow institute of culture (which would fit in with theater aspect of 5GW). Funnily enough he also has a large collection of puppets (according to wikipedia, but doesn't cite the source).

So he's an interesting chap. A puppeteer propagandist if you will.

Whoops. That should be used against Estonia, but founded because of the events within Ukraine, which they think might happen within Russia (that is, mass youth protest backed by the west to overthrow a decision).