The content and placement of this warfare is hard to pin down. For example, both the CIA and the KGB worked in and around “the peace movement” in the U.S. and Europe. Their work often differed in outcome but employed the same fundamental tactic: to instigate and support movements and protests that manifest the legitimacy of one ideology (or the illegitimacy of the other). During the 1950s and 1960s the CIA was one of the main financial supports for the National Student Association, one of the largest student organizations in the U.S., with representatives on campuses across the country. The National Student Association organized protests for free speech, desegregation, anti-war, anti-colonialism, and feminism. The goal of CIA involvement was to demonstrate that the U.S. was an open society by promoting the visibility of dissent, which made America different from the Soviet Union. In “the free world,” students were able to speak their mind and protests were able to change public sentiment and even law. The CIA also used this operation to keep tabs on all the student radicals and maintain the protest movements within certain “safe limits.”[33]
The KGB by contrast was involved in orchestrating international scientific cooperation in the West for anti-nuclear proliferation protests. They leaked documents from the Pentagon to drive fear of U.S. belligerence within European nations, pushing them toward peace. They released the names and addresses of hundreds of CIA agents in a book published in English called Who’s Who in CIA. The response to this by the CIA was to publish a similar book simply called KGB.[34] More broadly, the Soviet Union promoted ideological war through cultural diplomacy involving events of high culture, including ballet, classical music, literature, science, and other aspects of Russian culture. The aim of this propaganda was to show that the U.S. was immature, capitalistic, and superficial, and therefore unable to hold a true vision for the future of the human race.[35]