The Great War of Words

By Evan Thomas.

In the Soviet Union, where ideas, like almost everything else, are controlled by the state, the word is propaganda. In the U.S., Government officials prefer to talk of "public diplomacy," a term less offensive to free-speech sensibilities. But however they describe it, both superpowers are engaged in an all-out war of words and images aimed at winning hearts and minds around the globe.

Propaganda--the methodical spreading of information to influence public | opinion--can take many forms, from a government-approved interview in Pravda to a carefully couched answer at a Washington press conference, from a story planted in a foreign newspaper to a State Department white paper. The line between manipulating mass opinion and enunciating policy, between p.r. posturing and legitimate diplomacy, can be shadowy indeed. Most official declarations, be they from the Kremlin or the White House, have a mixed purpose.

Whether subtle or blatant, the role of propaganda is becoming increasingly critical. Television images, bounced off satellites to the remotest corners of the world, have made the cliche of the global village a reality. The polarization of nations along East-West lines has intensified the ratings war. Totalitarian states, by virtue of their complete control over the media, are relentless producers of propaganda. Democracies are sometimes gullible consumers. Complex issues can be twisted and made dangerously simple by clever opinion shapers, and if the masses can be moved, their elected leaders must follow. Nuclear weapons have raised the stakes. As real war becomes increasingly costly and nuclear war barely thinkable, East and West must duel with words. "Ideas are weapons," declared V.I. Lenin more than half a century ago. U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Z. Wick says today, "The only war the U.S. has fought in the past four years has been the propaganda war."

At the summit this November, the battle will peak. Says a top White House aide: "It may be that the summit will be 'won' or 'lost' on the p.r. front." Already, U.S. and Soviet advance teams have scouted Geneva for the best camera angles.

In the past, Kremlin propaganda has often sounded to the rest of the world, and even to Soviet citizens, like, well, propaganda. The Soviets were once clumsy and loutish as salesmen. When Nikita Khrushchev wanted to make a point at the United Nations in 1960, he took off his shoe and waved it. Mikhail Gorbachev, by contrast, is a walking advertisement for a different Soviet way of doing things. He is a smooth performer in public and a skillful articulator of the Kremlin line. Like the new man in charge, Soviet propaganda has become subtler and more adroit. A recent example: the slick 56- page pamphlet "Star Wars: Delusions and Dangers" that appeared last month throughout Washington and European capitals, translated into English, French, Spanish and German. Western correspondents are now invited to question urbane Soviet spokesmen at on-the-record press conferences. At a briefing at the Soviet embassy in Bonn last month, the Soviets served trays of caviar canapes along with the rhetoric.

The new Kremlin pitchmen have caught the U.S. off guard. "Their tone in public is more sophisticated," admits National Security Council Spokesman Edward Djerejian. "Quite frankly, they're aping us." Administration officials defensively insist that Gorbachev, for all his outward reasonableness, is merely playing a propaganda game. But as one top White House aide concedes, "Gorbachev comes off as very straightforward. He looks like he is willing to discuss issues frankly. He gives the impression that he can be dealt with."

The U.S. has responded with a global p.r. offensive of its own. Determined to cast off gloomy post-Viet Nam introspection, the Reagan Administration has been trying hard to sell America, especially to the Third World and disaffected European youth.

The U.S. is still heavily outgunned by the Kremlin's vast worldwide propaganda network. The CIA estimates that the Soviet budget for international propaganda is more than $3 billion a year, roughly four times what the U.S. spends. Radio Moscow consumes most of the budget, broadcasting an astonishing 2,167 hours a week in 81 languages to 100 countries.

A variety of Soviet propaganda ploys are dressed up as diplomacy. The "peace offensive" is an old standby. Ever since the early days of the cold war, the Soviets have periodically called on the West to freeze weapons, halt nuclear testing or renounce first strikes. In the view of U.S. officials, these campaigns are invariably timed and framed to make them unacceptable to Washington, usually because they would lock the U.S. into a position of military inferiority. But they can effectively cast the U.S. as warmongers to the audiences targeted by the Soviets.

"There are already so many weapons in Europe, particularly in West Germany, that any steps toward arms reduction look good in the view of the man in the street," says Peter Danylow of the German Foreign Policy Association in Bonn. The U.S. has made matters worse by rejecting Gorbachev's peace gambits with a notable lack of finesse. Editorialized a liberal German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung: "In the duel of public diplomacy which goes with arms control like wurst on bread, Gorbachev has won a clear point."

Another Kremlin staple is the international publicity stunt. Last month a Soviet official arrived in Manila to award Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos the Russian Jubilee Medal for his "deeds of valor and heroism against the forces of fascism and militarism." Marcos, acutely aware that the American Congress had just voted to reduce military assistance to his regime, promptly delivered a speech critical of the U.S.

But such heavy-handed tactics can backfire. To encourage West German opposition to the deployment of Euromissiles by the U.S. two years ago, Moscow warmly welcomed Chancellor Helmut Kohl's political opponent, Social Democrat Hans-Jochen Vogel. To many West Germans it appeared that the Soviets were meddling in their elections. Kohl was returned to office, and the Euromissiles were deployed.

That setback helped persuade the Politburo to modulate and refine Soviet propaganda tactics. "They decided to call off organized peace marches," notes Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, a former member of the National Security Council staff. "There is a departure from the cruder public maneuvers."

Once shy of Western reporters, Soviet officials at various levels have become more open and accessible. The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vladimir Lomeiko, has instituted regular on-the-record press briefings that now attract more newsmen in Moscow than the off-the-record backgrounders at the U.S. embassy.

Traditionally, the Soviets have employed a kind of Orwellian Newspeak in their pronouncements. Western leaders were invariably "certain imperialist circles," their followers "faithful lackeys." But the current Kremlin spokesmen slip easily into Western argot and affect a more relaxed, laid-back style. Ebullient Eduard Shevardnadze, the new Foreign Minister who replaced Andrei Gromyko (known as Grim Grom by Western newsmen), disarmed U.S. officials during a technical discussion of arms control at Helsinki last month with a rare display of Soviet humility. "Well, of course, I'm not a real expert!" he reportedly exclaimed and then turned to informally solicit the views of his delegation. Says Greg Guroff, a USIA Soviet expert: "He represents a whole new generation of Soviet leaders whose hallmark is that they have more self-confidence, less bombast."

Kremlin watchers caution, however, that underneath their new veneer, most Soviet bureaucrats are the same old dogmatic apparatchiks. Propaganda within the U.S.S.R. is just as shrill and paranoid as ever. Reagan is sometimes & likened to Hitler by news organs. One wall poster currently displayed in Moscow shows a grim image of a U.S. monster threatening to rain down bombs from outer space. Overseas, disinformation remains a favorite tactic; the Kremlin rarely overlooks an opportunity to plant a false rumor. While grieving last week over the death of Samantha Smith, the American girl who visited the U.S.S.R. on a peace mission at the invitation of Yuri Andropov in 1983, the Soviet media hinted that her plane crashed as a result of foul play. No lie is too big: the news agency TASS blithely reported last October that the Pentagon was poisoning the Amazon River. The Soviets still regularly use forgeries to discredit the U.S. Last July the Soviet press published a letter to Chile's President Augusto Pinochet, purportedly from a U.S. Army general, welcoming Chilean troops to fight in El Salvador.

To fight back, the Reagan Administration has upped the budget for USIA by 85%, to $795 million in 1985, and launched a six-year $1.3 billion modernization program for the VOA, four of whose transmitters were so old that they had been used by the Nazis in World War II. USIA Director Wick has made combatting Soviet propaganda a personal crusade. On occasion, he has gone overboard. Shortly after taking over the information agency in 1981, he produced a worldwide television extravaganza called Let Poland Be Poland, which featured Frank Sinatra crooning Ever Homeward in pidgin Polish. The show drew howls of ridicule. But Wick has scored some coups. It was the USIA that put together the tape recording, played with such damning effect at the United Nations, of the voice of a Soviet fighter pilot as he coolly shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983 ("The target is destroyed").

Wick has made clever use of satellite television. The USIA's new Worldnet linkup can put U.S. officials on the nightly news all over the globe. When the Soviets pulled out of the 1984 Olympics, nearly 60 million viewers in Africa and Europe watched Olympics Czar Peter Ueberroth and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley rebut Soviet complaints about inadequate security and alleged racism. Last April Worldnet began beaming a global two-hour morning news-and- entertainment show, complete with a perky anchor, called America Today. The USIA is now considering equipping Afghan "freedom fighters" with minicams to film action footage of Soviet aggression.

Wick is particularly eager to reach West European youth, whom he regards as ) dangerously "neutralist," in part because they lack a memory of the U.S. Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. Frets Wick: "They don't have the indissoluble link with their blood brothers fighting totalitarianism."

Wick's critics are fearful that he risks turning the supposedly objective VOA into a mouthpiece of right-wing jingoism. Counters USIA Counselor Stan Burnett: "We are advocates. We are supposed to create a public climate for U.S. policy." Wick regrets that he cannot do more. "In an open society like ours, we can't tell the press what to cover. We can't focus on a subject like the Soviets do and just keep hammering away at it."

The U.S. does have one weapon the Soviets cannot begin to compete with: its mass culture, so pervasive that Moscow teenagers pay black-market prices for blue jeans and television viewers the world over are addicted to Dallas and Dynasty. Radio Marti, the Reaganauts' new propaganda tool aimed at Castro's Cuba, is a huge success, not for its anti-Communist editorials but for its pop music and steamy soap opera Esmeralda.

Radio Moscow's 37,500-kW transmitters can reach billions of radios, but that hardly guarantees everyone will listen. In pro-Soviet North Yemen, for instance, only 14% of listeners tune in Radio Moscow, compared with 47% for the BBC and 26% for the Voice of America. Furthermore, to be heard is not necessarily to be believed. Soviet propaganda is greeted around the world with large doses of skepticism, even in the U.S.S.R. Soviet visitors to the U.S. sometimes express shock to see people out of work. Having read so much about rampant U.S. unemployment in the Soviet press, they assumed the opposite--that there was very little.

Absolute control over the means of production gives the Soviets a great advantage in the propaganda war. The Kremlin can shape, time and fine-tune a message with precise calibration. The U.S., by contrast, is often a cacophony of voices, all shouting and disagreeing at once. But in the struggle for world opinion, it is that very diversity of viewpoint and freedom of dissent that gives the U.S. its most valuable asset: credibility.

With reporting by John Kohan/Bonn and Alessandra Stanley/Washington