In 2008, thousands of secret KGB documents were declassified in Ukraine. The files detailed horrific crimes against humanity by the Soviet Union in the 1930s during the mass famine.

But they also revealed evidence of how Russian intelligence agencies falsified reports and fabricated witness statements against Ukrainian liberation insurgents. In essence, they accused the Ukrainian nationalists of crimes that they demonstrably never committed.

One of these fake crimes was the murder of vast numbers of Jews. The dossier disclosed in devastating detail how the KGB falsified testimony.

This discovery was so significant that Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, then head of the Ukrainian security service, flew to Tel Aviv and delivered the files to his counterpart in Mossad and the Israel minister of Public Security.

ukraine refugees

Two Jews crossing into eastern Poland, a day after Russia launched an attack on Ukraine (Photo by WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

The archive confirmed how Russian intelligence operatives have used antisemitism as a political weapon for the past 100 years. In 1900, the Tsarist intelligence service concocted and peddled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Protocols, the most notorious antisemitic tract of modern times, was fabricated and later published by the Russian newspaper Znamya. In 1921, The Times exposed the text as a forgery but as late as 1958 this fraud was being circulated by Soviet psychological warfare agencies, specialising in antisemitism.

During the Cold War the notion of a “Jewish conspiracy” was ruthlessly used by the KGB to smear Western politicians.

During the 1976 US presidential campaign, the Kremlin was confronted by one of its most hostile critics, the Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

The KGB considered the Senator an enemy and head of the “Jewish lobby”, which was campaigning for unrestricted emigration by Soviet Jews to Israel. He also supported anti-Soviet dissidents and increased defence spending and so needed to be discredited.

For the Senator, the Soviet Union was an evil empire. “The basic aim of the Kremlin remains unchanged — a Moscow-dominated world”, he said.

“Let us pay the devil his due. The overlords of the communist men are not stupid. They are skilful practitioners of the art of conquest.

They have read their Machiavelli, their Clausewitz, just as they read their Mein Kampf. The Soviets have profited from the mistakes of aggressors in ages past. Unlike Hitler, they might wait for years, or even decades to achieve their ends.”

Jackson insisted that relations could improve only if Moscow allowed Russian Jews to emigrate if they wished. The Kremlin refused and Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin reported that Jackson “kept escalating his demands” in order to win the backing of “the Jewish lobby” in his bid to win the Democratic nomination.

It was time for the KGB to act. Its New York resident, Boris Solomatin, reported: “Jackson’s strong point is the fact he has never been involved in any sort of political or personal scandal. In the post-Watergate period, the personal integrity of a presidential candidate has had exceptionally great significance.

It is necessary to find some stains on the Senator’s biography and use them to carry out an active measure which will compromise him.”

KGB officers desperately tried to find kompromat on the Senator. The only lead was his sexuality.

Jackson had married at the age of 49 and his KGB file records his colleagues were “amazed” as they considered him a “confirmed bachelor”. But the KGB agents could not find any evidence that he was gay apart from the fact the Senator once shared an apartment with a male childhood friend — hardly evidence.

The boring truth was that Senator Jackson married late in life and was not homosexual. But the KGB was unperturbed. In May 1976 they simply fabricated a document to “expose” him as gay.

Codenamed POROK (meaning “vice” in Russian), the KGB forged an FBI memo, dated June 20, 1940 in which FBI director J Edgar Hoover reported that Jackson was homosexual. Photocopies of the forgery were then sent to the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters.

At the time it was controversial to be gay in conservative politics and so the clear intention was to destroy his chances of becoming the candidate.

Senator Jackson did not stand for the presidency again and died in 1983. His former foreign policy adviser Richard Perle recalled the smear and told me: “I don’t think it had any real political impact.” Journalists ignored the fake documents when they landed on their desks. But the episode revealed just how far the KGB was prepared to go.

Even before Carter moved into the White House, the KGB was focusing on what kompromat could be obtained on powerful administration officials. They targeted Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor known for his visceral anti-Sovietism.

On January 3, 1977, two weeks before the Presidential inauguration, Andropov approved an operation to collect “compromising information” on Brzezinski as a means of putting pressure on him and influencing his decision-making.

KGB agents were tasked to find any negative information against him. Was Brzezinski concealing his Jewish origins? Was he having an adulterous relationship with the Hollywood actress Candice Bergen?

And was there any compromising material about his relations with his staff? By 1978, the KGB was struggling. And so it resorted to fabricating documents that Brzezinski was secretly antisemitic, as this would damage his standing in the White House.

In August 1978, the KGB drafted a report by an Israeli Zionist organisation that alleged the National Security Advisor was “a secret antisemite”.

The document concluded there was compromising information on his personal life that would seriously discredit him. In fact, the KGB had nothing on the parsimonious, intellectual former Harvard professor. But this “intelligence report” was inserted through the window of a car parked by an American diplomat in Jerusalem.

A week later two anonymous leaflets about Brzezinski were distributed throughout New York City. On the surface, the leaflets were written and circulated by the US Jewish Defence League.

One contained a photograph of the National Security Advisor and underneath stated in large headlines: “Brzezinski is antisemite, has been bought out by Arabs and trades in Jews… There is no place for the Polish-born antisemite Brzezinski in this country.”

The second leaflet also contained the emblem of the Jewish Defence League. Headlined “To All Jewish and Zionist Organisations”, it posed several questions, notably “Can the antisemite Brzezinski be non-partisan in mapping out US foreign policy?”. It then provides the answer: “No.”

Underneath, the leaflet states, “We urge you not to accept the antisemite Brzezinski as a representative of the American people who are true friends of democrats the world over, including Israel.”

New York Jews were shocked to receive this leaflet and copies were sent to the White House. On August 31, 1978, the National Security Council asked Rabbi Israel Miller, head of the Jewish Defence League, if these documents were authentic.

Within hours a horrified Miller disavowed them as fraudulent. In fact, they were a crude KGB forgery. Buried in the Congress archives, a note attached to the file states: “Another phoney KGB document.”

The covert war against the National Security Advisor did not succeed but that was not always the KGB’s intention with fake documents.

The secret agenda was to spread false smears like a virus to discredit Brzezinski, regardless of whether it was effective.

For the rest of the Cold War antisemitism was always on the agenda, according to former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, who was based in the US during the 1980s.

He said: “Attempting to show that America was inhospitable, we wrote antisemitic letters to American Jewish leaders. My fellow KGB officers paid American agents to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. Our New York station even hired people to desecrate Jewish cemeteries.

“I beamed back reports of these misdeeds to Moscow who no doubt was thankful they had been born in a socialist paradise and not in a hotbed of racial tension.”

Disinformation and forgery deployed by the KGB during the Cold War have not vanished in the mists of time. These covert operations are very much in use in Putin’s war in Ukraine. Today the ghosts and shadows of the KGB haunt the west and their role in implementing Russia’s illegal wars remains as insidious and influential as ever.

Mark Hollingsworth is the author of ‘Agents of Influence — How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies’, published this week by Oneworld