The British actor Tom Hardy has one of the best lines in the 2011 movie of John le Carré’s classic Cold War thriller “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” His character Ricky Tarr, an MI6 “scalphunter” sent to Istanbul to vet a potential defector, stumbles upon a Russian mole at the heart of British intelligence. The KGB is using the mole to feed the CIA fake intelligence from “Source Merlin” — supposedly an MI6 agent high up in the Kremlin — to destroy the Agency’s trust in the British. Ricky Tarr tells le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley that Merlin’s intelligence is in fact just “shit made in Moscow.”

This is not simply the stuff of Cold War spy fiction. The Russians have been adept at running what they call “active measures” (aktivnye meropriyatia) to confuse, deceive, and influence the West since the time of the Czars. Operations by the Russian Okhrana to discredit émigré opponents in London form the backdrop for Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent. When the Bolsheviks came to power, their own intelligence services continued the tradition, penetrating and manipulating Russian émigré organizations abroad. One such group, known as The Trust, was used in 1925 to entice Sydney Reilly, the so-called “Ace of Spies”, to Russia where he was interrogated and then murdered.