Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of "Socialism in One Country". In the early 1980s, Hall and the CPUSA criticized the Solidarity movement in Poland. In 1992, the Moscow daily "Izvestia" claimed that the CPUSA had received over $40 million in payments from the Soviet Union, contradicting Hall's long-standing claims of financial independence. The former KGB General Oleg Kalugin declared in his memoir that the KGB had Hall and the American Communist Party "under total control" and that he was known to be siphoning off "Moscow money" to set up his own horse-breeding farm. The writer and J. Edgar Hoover biographer Curt Gentry has noted that a similar story about Hall was planted in the media through the FBI's secret COINTELPRO campaign of disruption and disinformation against radical opposition groups.