WP Book Review of Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

David Ignatius has a review up of a new book on Russian Active Measures. An excerpt:

When Russian intelligence officers plotted their campaign to destabilize American politics in 2016, they had nearly a century of experience in covert manipulation to draw upon. The Internet had given the Russians new tools for this mischief. But their secret weapon was us — an open, divided, angry America.

That’s the lesson of Thomas Rid’s superb new book, “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.” The manipulators were opportunists: They poked at the holes and fissures in our political life and helped turn our simmering rage into a boil. But we did most of the work for them, as we amplified Moscow’s leaks and lies in the aftermath of its 2016 covert action and agitated ourselves into a state of near-hysteria. Russia set loose a virus, but we journalists and citizens, ever more obsessed with Russian “meddling,” were the mules who carried it.

Read the whole thing here.