Ladislav Bittman (1931-2018) was a Czechoslovak intelligence officer who served as deputy chief of the StB’s disinformation department, Department 8, created in 1964 under KGB guidance. He defected to the West in 1968 after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and settled in the United States, where he later taught journalism at Boston University under the name Lawrence Martin. His books The Deception Game (1972) and The KGB and Soviet Disinformation (1985) were among the first insider accounts of how Soviet bloc services planned and executed active measures, including the forgery and staged discovery of documents in Operation Neptune, covered on the child page.
Sources
- Bittman, Ladislav. The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare. Syracuse University Research Corporation, 1972.
- Bittman, Ladislav. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View. Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1985.
- Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.