I’ve seen that interview, but I’m surprised anyone watching it following the fall of the Berlin Wall and Glasnost would find it remotely credible. Soviet attempts to turn Americans and Western Europeans into Marxist-Leninnists who supported Communism were abject failures. The “brainwashing” went overwhelmingly in the other direction: citizens of Communist countries ended up wanting, by and large, to adopt the Western capitalist way of life.
That’s not to say that the KGB didn’t have some degree of influence on certain movements. But the overall picture that Bezmenov paints is laughably false with hindsight. The interview is from 1984, and I’m sure many in the KGB at that time really believed that their cunning plan to brainwash the West was working.
Western countries were full of communists before the liberal-tankie split. After ww2 the communists almost won the elections in Italy. It wasn't until the communists started pasting protesters with tanks that it became no longer socially acceptable to be a communist.
After the failure of world revolution only the subversion program remained. This was widely successful and is still ongoing.
A bunch of Americans went to join the communist experiment in the 20s and 30s. They saw what a disaster it was but the newspapers covered it up. The NYT famously declared that there was no famine in ukraine while millions starved. Of course the journalists were friends with Stalin.
That’s not to say that the KGB didn’t have some degree of influence on certain movements. But the overall picture that Bezmenov paints is laughably false with hindsight. The interview is from 1984, and I’m sure many in the KGB at that time really believed that their cunning plan to brainwash the West was working.