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The 26th of March 1960. The Pushkin Theatre in Moscow is full. On the stage two men sit either side of a chess board. Mikhail Bottvinik, a bespectacled symbol of Soviet solidity, plays the white pieces. Opposite him sits the 23 year old Mikhail Tal. An intense Latvian with piercing black eyes. The audience sitting in the theatre seats fixates on a large demonstration board set to one side of the stage on which it can follow the game move by move. Bottvinik moves his Queenside rook back to its original square. Tal responds by moving his knight to the F4 square. There is an audible gasp from the audience. The knight can be taken by a pawn. It is too obvious to be a mistake. It must be a sacrifice. But for what. There is a babble of conversation as the experts in the audience discuss the move and try to work out what happens next. Bottivinik complains to the match referee that he cannot concentrate. After several efforts fail to quiet the audience, the match is moved into a back room. Tal is disappointed. He thrives on the reaction from the audience.
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“The point is that Tal himself didn´t know what happened next. He had some idea that he would get attacking advantage from giving up his knight. But he hadn´t calculated all the permutations. He wanted to creat chaos, create as complicated a position as possible on the board, confident that he could navigate it better than his opponent. And he was right. He won the game and the match. And that was the lesson we learnt in the 90s.”
Two men are sitting at a table outside a café near the Cascade in Yerevan. They are speaking in Russian, but that is nothing unusual following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yerevan is full of Russians either avoiding military service or avoiding western sanctions. The older of the two men is sitting with his back to the Cascade. Solidly built, in his early seventies and with his head shaven, he is smoking American cigarettes. The man facing him is younger, in his late twenties, blonde hair curling over his collar.
The older man continues: “Only powerful countries can be strategic. In the Cold War we tried to compete strategically with the US. But the US was militarily and economically more powerful than us. In a strategic contest we were doomed to failure. The weaker competitor must focus on tactics, create ever more complicated situations confident in its ability to better navigate them. Vladimir Vladimirovich understood that. When he took over from the old drunk Yolkin he first offered the West collaboration. But when they made clear they were intent on expanding NATO right up to the outskirts of Moscow he focused on tactics. Create chaos and uncertainty and watch the so-called democratic countries stumble in their efforts to understand what is going on. The objective situation, what we used to obsess about in Soviet days, doesn´t matter. Tal didn't really know what he was doing. Analysis afterwards often found his sacrifices unsound. But his opponents couldn´t find the right moves over the board.”
“So what about Ukraine? Was invading Ukraine tactical?” The younger man interrupted.
The older man drew on his cigarette. “Well no. The trouble is that every now and then the tacticians start believing their own propaganda. They decide that they can be strategic. Tal lost against Bottvinik the next year, and Vladimir Vladimirovich invaded Ukraine. But now we´re back to creating chaos. The army will keep doing what Russian armies do in Ukraine. We´ll encourage the Iranians to keep their proxies stirring up the Middle East and we´ll keep dripping poison in Chinese ears about NATO´s plans to undermine Beijing in Asia. And we´ll look to you and your guys to cause chaos in the information sphere.”
The younger man sipped his coffee and then smiled. “No problem. It's funny, you know, how innocent the West can be. A decade ago, their diplomats and academics were enthusing about social media platforms and how they could be used to spread democracy. Their foreign ministries put social media at the centre of their public diplomacy. All those ambassadors on Facebook! The Swedish foreign ministry even set quotas for the number of social media posts their embassies had to make every week. The Arab Spring was down to Facebook, although it didn't take you guys long to take advantage of the chaos that caused.”
The older man nodded in acknowledgement of the compliment. The younger man continued: “It took them a long time to realise that the real value of social media is in disinformation operations. Social media platforms, the great invention of the Americans, are their enemy, not their friend. Now they are enthusing over generative AI. They are overawed by the power of ChatGPT. But again they´ve been slow to realise the real value of this kind of AI. They invent these tools which they don´t know how to use, and we turn them against them.”
“I´m too old to understand all these technologies” said the older man. “I´m from the generation which planted stories in Indian newspapers accusing the CIA of inventing AIDS as a biological weapon.” He smiled at the memory. “It worked though. How does AI make our active measures more effective?”
“True enough” replied the younger man. “That AIDS operation was still being taught as a case study when I passed through Gridnevka. Look, the first advantage of AI is that we can generate disinformation and fake news at scale.Back in the past we had to rely on human bots generating disinformation and placing it in social media. You remember how that fat pig Prigozhin set up the Internet Research Agency employing hundreds of youngsters to generate disinformation to place in social media?”
The older man nodded.
“Well we don't need that any more. Generative AI like Chat GPT can churn out as much fake news as we want. You just put in the prompt and out comes the content. And we don't have to care about accuracy because that´s not the point.”
“Anything that means we don't have to rely on amateurs like Prigozhin is to be welcomed” growled the older man under his breath as he lit another cigarette.
“Yeah, but it gets better than that. GANS technologies pair two neural networks together. One produces content and the other criticises it. And they do at speeds you can't conceive of.”
“So what?”
“It means we can generate deep fake video and audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original quickly and at scale. The best thing is that when we put this stuff on western social media platforms, the underlying algorithms will transfer them instantly to people who want to believe they are true. We can overwhelm efforts to distinguish between real and fake videos and audio. And it´s not just political chaos we can cause. Videos or audio of “comments” by senior executives admitting they have falsified their companies figures or questioning the viability of other companies or banks can generate more chaos in the financial markets. We don't even need to mount specific operations against specific targets. We just flood the western information sphere with so much fake news and so many deep fakes that even their governments won´t know what is true and what is not.”
“Good. As you see, tactics not strategy. Tal not Bottvinik.”
The younger man looked around, as if conscious for the first time that they were in a public space. At this time of the morning the bars and cafés at the foot of the Cascade were not busy. They would come to life come night time. Now there were just a few people enjoying a morning coffee, and none showed any interest in the two Russians. Even so he lowered his voice when he spoke again.
“I see that Vozhd has hired that nutter Karaganov to write a report on ways of deterring the West. Wasn't he the one who recommended a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Europe?”
“Yes.”
“Dear God. Do you think the Vozhd would ever use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?”
“My young friend, firstly you are forgetting your own trade.” The older man smiled and dragged again on his cigarette. “Create chaos and uncertainty confident you can navigate it better. Every time Vladimir Vladimirovich mentions nuclear weapons the west ties itself up in its fears and doubts. So-called strategy experts opine in the mainstream media. Governments condemn decisions that are not yet taken. Western publics fear escalation to a nuclear holocaust and support for Ukraine weakens. Your job is to play on this.”
“Yes of course.”
“But there is a broader point. We don't distinguish between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons but between strategic and tactical weapons. You have to calculate the escalation ladder. The West has forgotten Herman Kahn. He worked it out. Imagine if we used a tactical nuclear weapon against the Ukrainian military inside Ukraine. How would the West respond? They would hardly give the Ukrainians tactical nuclear weapons to use against us. But would they use their own tactical nuclear weapons directly against our forces? That would drag them into the open war with us they are desperate to avoid. Would it unify the West against us, or cause splits among the Europeans terrified of escalation and the most likely to suffer from nuclear exchanges? If the Ukrainians looked like winning and a united West threatened the Rodina, what calculation would Vladimir Vladmirovich make sat in the Kremlin bunker? How would the rest of the world react, not the West but those still trading with us? What would China's reaction be? China cannot allow us to be defeated, but what lengths would Beijing allow to prevent that? But the best way is to keep the calculation unnecessary. Do your job well, sow chaos in the West´s information sphere, and we, at least, can sleep safer in our beds.”
The older man turned to order the bill.