advocates, such as the Heritage Foundation, argued that support for anti-Communists would topple Communist régimes without retaliatory consequences to the United States and help win the global Cold War. Afghanistan and Al Qaeda Examples of blowback include the CIA's financing and support for Afghan insurgents to fight an anti-Communist proxy guerilla war against the USSR in Afghanistan; some of the beneficiaries of this CIA support may have joined al-Qaeda's terrorist campaign against the United States. Syria and ISIS During the Syrian Civil War, United States and Saudi Arabia supported and aided anti-Assad armed groups. Some of those groups later shifted loyalty to ISIS. Yevno Azef and Russian Imperial secret police Russian socialist revolutionary Yevno Azef, as a paid police informant, provided the Russian secret-police Okhrana with information to allow them to arrest an influential member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. After the arrest, Azef assumed the vacant position and organized assassinations, including those of the director of Imperial Russia's police and later Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve (1904) and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Tsar's uncle (1905). By 1908, Azef was playing the double role of a revolutionary assassin and police spy who received 1000 rubles a month from the authorities. Soviet disinformation blowback Soviet intelligence, as part of active measures, frequently spread disinformation to distort their adversaries' decision-making. However, sometimes this information filtered back through the KGB's own contacts, leading to distorted reports. Lawrence Bittman also addressed Soviet intelligence blowback in The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, stating that "There are, of course, instances in which the operator is partially or completely exposed and subjected to countermeasures taken by the government of the target country." See also Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden Boomerang effect (psychology) French Connection Guatemalan Civil War Office of Public Diplomacy Plausible deniability Reagan Doctrine Unintended consequences People Chalmers Johnson João Goulart Mohammad Mosaddeq Qasem Soleimani References Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson, Intelligence operations Revenge