When Meta disclosed in a recent threat report that covert networks from Russia and Iran were leveraging generative artificial intelligence models to flood online platforms with synthetic political commentary — a pattern consistent with OpenAI’s own findings on foreign influence operations — the reaction in Western capitals was alarm. To those of us who spent years inside Soviet-legacy national security structures analyzing aktivnye meropriyatiya — active measures — the reaction was recognition.

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During the Cold War, a Soviet active measure was a labor-intensive operational enterprise. Subverting a political process, inserting a forged document into a European newspaper, or funding a local proxy movement required covert officer networks, diplomatic pouch runs, and years of patient staging. The objective was rarely to convert the target population to Soviet ideology. It was to exhaust the target’s societal trust, degrade confidence in democratic institutions, and widen existing internal fault lines.

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Operation Denver is the textbook case. In 1983, the KGB planted an anonymous letter in an Indian newspaper with long-standing Soviet ties, claiming the Pentagon had engineered AIDS as a biological weapon. Working through its East German counterpart, the KGB then brought in a scientist to dress the claim in academic language, routed it through Soviet wire services, and waited. By the late 1980s, the fabrication had reached American television screens, and it took Moscow’s own intelligence chief admitting the operation in 1992 to put it to rest. That was the cost of a single successful active measure: a front newspaper, a recruited scientist, and the better part of a decade.

Today, Russia’s security services no longer need undercover officers, covert funding channels, or recruited foreign journalists. Commercial........

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