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Article: Disinformation
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, andSecurity
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Disinformation
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MARTIN J. MANNING
Disinformation is mostly commonly described as false information created by governments in wartime for military purposes and by totalitarian governments for political
purposes in peacetime. Rumors, lies, and other forms of disinformation were made public by the Soviet Union to discredit the United States, the latter being the context in which the word is generally applied. The KGB coined the Russian word
dezinformatsiya
; it came into the English language as disinformation. The technique of disinformation goes back at least to 1918 with the end of World War I. Disinformation as a KGB weapon began in 1923 when I. S. Inshlikht, deputy ...