We live in an age of subterfuge. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technolog y and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before th e 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully pla nning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic pro cess. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - m any of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign cr eeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany's best jazz magazine.