Legacy of British Cold War Propaganda

This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responssees set upp required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus They haunted an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival Did they change the course of the Cold War In this episode of The History Extra podcast, Rory Cormack introduces Spencer Mizen to the comically absurd and dangerously controversial tactics deployed by a group of misfits and Mavericks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the nineteen fifties and sixties Hi Rory, than you for joining us today. Your latest book is called Fakers top secret to of phhantoms and foragerers on the disinformation frontline So In the book, you tell the story of the information reesearch department, a top secret organization that ran hundredundreds of black propaganda campaigns against Britainons adversaries during the Cold War I wonder if you could start. introducing our listeners to the information research department. what was this shadowy entity that played such a significant role in Britain's prosecution of the Cld War And also, while you're doing that, I wonder if you could explain what we mean by the term Aanda. this is something I suspect that you many of our listeners won't be familiar with The Information Research Department was the shadowy unit inside Britain's foreign office, which was charged essentially with prosecuting the propaganda aspects of the Cold War. And they're shadowy because everything they did Every they wrote, every briefing they planted was anonymous or unattributable, which means that Her Majesty's government was nowhere near the final product At the height of the Cold War, this was a really, really big department, this unattributable propaganda department. numumbered around I don't know three hundred, three hundred and fifty people, it was a huge effort And within that, there was a much, much smaller team doing the much, much more sensitive and controversial aspects of what we call black propaganda. And this was when Not only was the material unattributable or anonymous This material that they specialized in was Forgeries and fakes So it goes beyond the kind of Gay, is it connected to the government? Is it not? We're not quite sure there's a bit of ambiguity, which governments want to hide behind sometimes for obvious reasons and it starts to actively forge enemy material or adversary material and it starts to create And it worked very, very closely with MI six. And this is a wonderful thing that I really enjoyed writing about the book was that MI six files are obviously all classified. and this was as close as we get to . operational detail, archival authority on some of these most controversial, most sensitive propaganda operations of the Cold War. Some of which are very sensitive, some of which are very serious, some of which Frankly, we're a bit bonkers And so when we use the term black propaganda, what exactly do we mean There's two different meanings. One meaning is that the British government's hand is completely deniable That's how some people understood it in the Cold War. So when there's a pamphlet, a newspaper article or whatever it may be, there is no suspicion at all that it can be traced back to the British hands. which various foreign secretaries and governments were quite like. because The message then becomes more credible When for example, you're trying to influence people in the Middle East who are coming out of imperial Britain, know at the height of the Cold War, they are not going to trust a document which says, the foreign Secretary of the UK says this when the UK has a reputation for being imperial. So there there's an incentive to make the message more credible by masking it. So the black propaganda side of things is when This is tootally deniable. There is another definition which other people use within the British government. The wonderful thing about studying British history is that the Brits don't write this stuff down. The Americans have all these definitions of hereere's a covert action. Here's this. The UK sort of makeup as you go along, which makes historians' job more difficult, but a lot more fun. So other people in the UK government said black propaganda is The forgeries and the fakes. So it's the actively going out and impersonating somebody else, which as you can imagine is much more politically controversial So to what extent whereere these people employing tactics that have being hed and fine tuned during the Second World Worders, Obviously you know a lot of misinformation, disinformation, spying espionage being carried out during the conflict with Germany, Italy and Japan Was the Information Research Dpartment basically building on what had happened there Yeah, it sort of was and a lot of the same people were actually involved And we historians know a fair amount of the kind of operations that the UK got up to in the Second World War, the political warfare executive was the slightly less famous sister organization of the Special Operations exxecutive and was doing some of these operations. Your listeners may be familiar with the name Sefton Delmer, who was the head honcho of British Black propaganda during the Second World War. Now after the war, he retires and goes off into and he becomes a journalist again. But there are other people who pick up the mantle. The political warfare executive is closed down because the government think this is There's no place for dirty tricks and lies when you're not a total war of an enemy. But some of these people who were working within that world Stay on and gradually get built back up again as the Cold War intensifies. And really this super secret unit There's only about twenty odd people They were the legacy of PWE. they were the successor of the political warfare deepartment and we werere carrying on a lot of those methods, tactics and tricks So can you introduce us to a couple of these people? Because an entire cast ofort fascinating characters that pop up in the book Yeah, I wonder if we could talk about a couple of them. Can we start with Hans Vel sir. How did an Austrian refugee in one time MII suspect end ups working at such a high level within this organisation. Chom intellects and and a bit of ruthlessness, I reckon. I kind of fell in love with some of these these characters. They're quite morally ambiguous and I like that in a book personally. and Hans Velser was a journalist He was a refugee from Nazi Austria and he arrived in the UK He was quickly under suspicion. from MI five because of certain people that he was mixing with. he was interned He married a slightly wealthy English lady who was very young who loved him dearly by all accounts, but some of her Some of her relatives were a little bit suspicious and thought that maybe old Hans was was using her for a for citizenship and a way in. And he gradually, I obviously don't know the truth of that, but seeing some of the documents where her aunts were writing to MI five and the police and saying, you have you checked out this strange Austrian who's just suddenly arrived on our shores and got married very quickly and is now looking for government jobs. He uses that and he uses an MI five investigation into somebody he happens to know to ingratiate himself with the propagandists. and he's very, very talented. He's also very charming. and works he gradually works his way up. He takes British citizenship ends up divorcing the first wife, marrying another remarkable woman. by the name ofdelaide, who was MI six and had an important role in the Special Operations executive during the Second World War. So all of a sudden This outsider is at the heart of the British propaganda establishment. And then we've got Velzer second in command, John Rayner. He's been described as an eccentric, hard drinking, high flying journalist turned propagandist. He a pretty interesting character. What qualities did he bring to the information reesearch department He brought a bit of flare I think So he's got a great backstory as well and he's a fascinating character. He was on the Dale Express, I think it was, a picture desk in the nineteen thirties onene of the youngest editors of Fleet Street helped to revolutionize the design of the front page, bold colors, all this kind of thing increases circulation. And then he joined the war efforts, ended up in Italy, I think it was, doing the same sort of thing He then goes to Singapore. He was running propaganda operations in Singapore at the end of the Second World War. And byy this time he's on, I think his third wife, notorious womoman eyes lots of affairs. His first wife actually hired a private investigator because she was convinced that he was cheating on her. The private investigator reported back and said, I don't think you need to worry. He was wrong. She did need to worry Is that I don't think he need to worry he's more likely to drink himself to death than to have an affair because he spent all his time in Fleet Street boozers. But then he goes quiet and I cannot find what he did for about five years when he finished as regional chief of propaganda d the very early Cold War. And then he goes quiet. Some people say he was set up a farm in Australia I honest to God can't track him down. But then he reappears. He pops back up in the Information Research department, older than Velsa. The pair of them have a slightly strange relationship. They don't get on all that well, but they are an odd double act who orchestrate this massive campaign over about fifteen years So you describe the members of the information research department is a collection of mavericks and misfits, oddballs and irregulars. I mean do you get the impression that youre out to be sort of quote unquote different, slightly eccentric and unconventional to excel in this job compompared to the regular foreign office, you certainly did. So we have the stereotype of the those days fairly or unfairly, the stereotype of the public school educated, Oxbridge diplomat type And then suddenly across the street in the attic, in fact of an out house in the foreign office, you have muchuch more creative, independent minded, free thinking, journalists, literary women women had a really important role here. And I think one of the reasons why this group collected slightly more eclectic mix of characters, shall we say, is because it was funded differently from the foreign offffice and was slightly different from the foreign office, which meant that It wasn't subject to the same recruitment constraints They were slightly more free and easy in who they let in. So If a woman for whatever reasoning sexist old reasons around marriage bs or whatever they might be feels their root from the foreign office is there might end up being a home in the Information Research deepartment. So it was slightly more fluid, which allowed a wider mix of independent voices. M to the irritation, it should be said of the foreign office, these regular diplomats who then get quite frustrated that these eccentrics in the attic are building their own empire and doing their own little thing takes us through many of the IRD's sort most fascinating andort consequential operations and plots. I wonder if you could talk us through two or three of them. you mentioned earlier that know somehere quite frankly bonkers are comically absurd. So I wonder if you could introduce us maybe to one you describe as comically absurd, but also one that could be looked back on as being genuinely successful This is the thing that was a challenge writing it, but a really enjoyable challenge is the how it flips between really serious, where this is the stakes are incredibly high. you know, we're talking about interferences in civil wars, nuclear proliferation And then the I idea doing these these bonkers operations, youve got this darkness and light all the time. In fact, one of the kind endorsements I had on this on the front cover said Leare meets Monty Python. And there is a sense of that. it's I try and check myself because I go into a ho ho ho story. I mean you remember the dark undercurrents. But with that caveat in mind, I'll go into a ho ho ho story. One of my favorite ones was in Indonesia actually, where for context, the Indonesian leader was a guy called Skano. the UK doesn't like him Let's put it very simplistically. There's been an attempted coup against him, it's failed, and the Information Research Department are trying to get rid of him and to get rid of his foreign minister, a guy called Sabandriano And the plan is this. They create Ghosts the voice from the well. We during this failed couplot some generals were murdered. and their bodies were thrown down a well And the IRD's idea was to create tape recordings of the voices of the ghosts of the dead generals And I've got the scripts of these recordings and it starts like this Sabandrio and it says a fade in echoy voice. It literally says echoy voice. Sabandrio, Savandrio,, we will come and get you. We will never forget what you did here. You're a dead man. onene of the crites. When Allah brings my broken body back together, Sabandrio He will crush yours in his bits of hell. It's Dark outrageous, ridiculous. the idea the guy that was promoting it was talking about Hamlet's ghost, He's big Shakespearean reader. Can we create Hamlet's ghost? Can we play on Indonesian superstitions and create the ghost of these murdered generals to expose the role of Savandrio's foreign minister, to discredit him and to try to help bring him down And they ended up doing this And the ammbassador to Indonesia fancied himself as a bit of a James Bond type And he was dropping recordings in plant pots around different hotels in Jakarta for journalists to pick up and play and try and get it out there. So that's one particularly strange example Is there any evidence that that actually workt that plot? Yes and no So one of the key findings from the book is that it's incredibly difficult. to prove demonstrably with metrics that one particular operation led to a particular outcome This ended up being the IRD's downfall, to be honest, because as Britain Let's face it gets poorer in the nineteen seventies and they want more value for money. And the foreign office bean counters are asking for prove it works, wear your metrics, showh me your spreadsheets. I the I ideD outrage. They're saying, how dare you? This is an art. We can't prove it on a spreadsheet. And this is a nice example So that Indonesian operation was one of a wide range of IRD operations trying to discredit Scano And eventually, Sakane is you know, as your listeners will know, overthrown is removed by the person the IRD wanted. So the IRD can try and point to a cumulative impact of their work. for obvious reasons they did try to claim success. But of course there are a whole load of other factors, internal factors, the Americans are also active, the Chinese were active, the Australians are active. so it's qu very difficult prove that this one thing Led something else Can you give us another example of a plot that really sticks in your mind from your research into the book The hippies The Bulgarian hippies. this is slight a slightly lighter one. nineteen sixty eight The Soviets are hosting a World Youth Festival in Sfhia. It is one of those classic Soviet front of organizations that they pretend is independent young people coming together to celebrate peace when actually it's covertly sponsored and facilitated by the Soviets. The IRD wanted Vela and Ryna wanted to expose the Soviet hand behind this They came up again, came with quite a few different operations to do this. The one that sticks in my mind was the hippies. This was the height of flower power and beetles at there, know, most prominence And here you go You've got two Middle aged man onene of whom Velsa is very, very straight laced and they pretend to be A hipp group And they design a poster of a flower power And they tri to tried to write the language of the cool youth And it says something like Hippies of the world drop in on Sophia It's the land without fuzz Come and enjoy the cannabis culture of the East the land where boys and girls get together and it goes on like this and I can just I could picture them writing it and giggling to each other as they're writing it And the aim of it was partly to disrupt the festival, was to encourage people to go to the festival knowing that communist authorities did not want any hippies there. in any way, shape or form, but it was also to try to discredit the festival in the eyes of delegates from parts of the global South, who also might not according to Velsa and Reyna might not want to associate themselves with hippie festivals. So they created this idea that they were going to be a lot of hippies there. and then One of the wonderful things that we did was we then looked at the Bulgarian files on the other side to see if we could match them up to see if there was any recognition of flower power and if it did'd actually disrupt. And the fun thing was It did disrupt and the Bulgarian straight lace security authorities hated all of the hippies. And there was wonderful references in the files to these long haired oaths playing their drums and how they ended up pulling out chords so you just shut the electric guitars up proving that it was the Towns and John the Velcer and Rin operation, which led to that is more difficult, but it was certainly onto something and it was all part of this wider disruption. The festival was disrupted. It was quite chaotic. and I think Vela and Rainna would have liked to claim A small hand in that No, is it important to emphasize, isn't it? And you have touched upon this already that some of these operations were pretty Controversial and summer pain it. IRD perpetrated, such as for example attempting to suppress independence campaigns in Africa where pretty morally you could say morally questionable Did your research reveal much soul searching among the operatives themselves at the time? Honestly, no And I think it would have been there if it existed because one of the most wonderful thing about this whole project that I've loved is the depth and the richness of the archival material It's about eight thousand files spelling it all out, which As a historian of intelligence and secrecy, I am not used to. So I think if they if thisstal searching had existed, I think I would have seen it They constantly justify themselves, even on the most morally problematic operations I'll give you an example The one which I think is the most morally problematic was In the Yemen Civil War in the mid nineteen sixties, the president of Egypt, NASA We know was a hate figure of the British at this time NASA got involved in the Yemen Civil War, and we know that he dropped chemical weapons on villagers The British wanted that to be known However feel able to say it publicly because NASA would just accusing Brits of propaganda and lying and many people in Yemen were quite happy to believe the Brits were lying because of imperial reasons. So They thought, how can we get this message out there? T Muslims, two Arabs in a credible manner And their response was to forge a doocuments by the Muslim Brotherhood which went something like this. Muslims of the world, you should know NASA, the president of Egypt, has just killed fellow Muslims out d there he is a terrible Muslim and so on and so forth problem, one of the problems was that IRD thought to make it Credible. as the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, too make this forgery credible. They had to lace it with anti Semitic and anti Israeli. commentary because that is what the Muslim Brotherhood at the time would have done So there's a line and I paraphrase which says something like NASA should have dropped the bombs on the Jews instead. And when I read that in the archives, you you can imagine you think, wow, that's problematic, to say the least So to answer your question about what they thought about that how they've squared that circle And I'm not defending this. They said We didn't lie Their justification was NASA did do this We were spreading the truth. We had to use a fake source in order to make it credible to the target population And therefore, we just had to lace in some other stuff to make it credible, otherwise it wouldn't have worked. And the Muslim Brotherhood of doing that kind of thing anyway, so we're not really adding anything. Now your listeners can Disagree with that as much as I like. It is an incredibly controversial stance, I'm not defending it, but that was their rationale. As long as they weren't lying They thought it was okay. Now you mentioned just earlier the eight thousand once secret files that the IRD or Operatives working for the IRD left When did they first reach the public domain? What form did they take They got It's really in before COVID, they started coming out. and I don't know why. They are the IRD's operational files And shortly before COVID they started coming out, and then suddenly around twenty twenty twenty one are these huge dumps in the archive of thousands And the form they take is conversations, minutes between between the people, which is like why in the book'm to I'm able to have dialogue in places which I really, really enjoyed writing. emmotions, feelings, all this kind of thing. this isn't high level The prrime Minister says this, This is how it works out on the ground. So you have lots of operational narrative you have the actual Drafts of the forgeries and the fakes that they created, you have their rationale behind creating these different fakes You have the disagreements, the tension between the propagandists and the foreign office proper. You have even Bureaucratic absurdities, thingsings li one of the files that I found which was m made me smile was when IRD moved into their new headquarters and they set about trying to create a makeshift bar in the restaurant and they they use filing cabinets and then hey, you had senior propagandist sitting behind the bar trying to trying to serve people. And the whatever the White haall Department of public bureaucracy and works, it's like some of a yes minister come in and tell them off and say, you can't put a bar, you haven't got a bar license. and you get you you get that kind of back and forth. So all of that kind of color is also in it. And for me as a historian, that is such a treat because we're used to cabinet level things, the Prime Minister wants to do this, but then we don't see how it plays out on the ground. And this is what I personally loved about writing this is you get that colour, you get the personality and you get the operational detail and the debates. It was just great fun And I guess what gives these records a slightly different flavor is that Many of the people who left those records didn't dream that they'd ever sort of reach the public domain I reckon so, I think they'd be gobbersmacked because some of it is and even I was gobbersmacked. I was there are a few in there. There were a few I was looking at thinking Really where it starts naming journalists, for example, who were being used by the IRD as conduits for their material Naming the newspapers, the IRD were planting documents in The Sunday Telegraph, for example, was a favorite of the IRD throughout the nineteen sixties and was running all sorts of things that Velsa and Ryna and their friends were planting through their client journalists, including some quite derogatory comments about lazy journalists who just H whatever, whatever we give them That kind of thing, was I was really quite shocked that it it would be released. and if they were alive today, I think maybe staggered yeah Britain Canada been the only nation in the Cold War prosecuting black propaganda campaigns Where did we rank on the world table of black propaganda? Were we a world leader or were other countries running rings aroundanked us We thought we were. One of the nice finds was about nineteen and sixty and the CIA is obviously getting bigger and more confident and taking on a more global role Brits were Adam and B. They the expertise in this and offered to take the lead in black propaganda from the CIA and the general assumption Rightly or wrongly was the Americans had the money and had the infrastructure, but the UK had the expertise. And I think I think at the time there was there was something in that. So What the UK did was a widespread campaign, much more widespread than I realized. we I think I found four hundred, four hundred and fifty separate operations, which is big. cleverly targeted However The CIA were doing thousandousands and thousands and thousands. The Russians, the Soviets are doing thousands and thousands and thousands. So I don't want to create a false equivalence that we the Brits were doing as much as the Soviets or or the Americans and even smaller powers, one of one of the findings from the book is that places in the global South and Subhaharan Africa weren't passive battlegrounds of superpower confrontation They were doing their own stuff as well. That was a nice thing we found in the Kenyan National Archives where I was looking at the impact of UK propaganda go to the Kanya National Archives We found that the Kenyans were more worried about black propaganda coming from Somalia rather than the Brits. So lots of countries are engaged in this with much different levels of Risk threshold. tolerance of spreading lies. and to be fair to the Brits, they didn't spread very many lies at all. They just used lies to spread truth, if that makes sense And it was on much less industrial scale than the Soviets. I guess we like to think of ourselves or the Britits like to think themselves as kind of a more bespoke service with proper expertise and craft unlike the more mass produced Soviet factories So the RRD was wound down in the nineteen seventies. But that kind have been the end of sort of black the campaigns. what you see as being this department's greatest legacy? Historians assume That when the IID got closed down in nineteen seventy seven, that was it That was the end of things and was it was all cancellled One of the things that found was that The IRD was shut down But this very, very small unit that I've the focus of the book, by this time it's called the spepecial prodroucer unit That carried on That carried on completely Unaffected from everything else And unfortunately, that's where the files go dry in the mid nineteen eighties. so we don't know what what happened is much is much, much smaller as I think as the decade progressed, the number of forgeries dwindles. But I think The Greatest leegacy that But it's a tricky one because The government seems to have forgotten this kind of thing And we often bring it to the present day. We often hear debates about the information war and disinformation and what role should the UK be playing and was there a danger of ceding the battleground to Russia and allowing Russia to exploit the vacuum?ing these are I assume, I'm not privy to them, but I assume these's live debates within government And I think one of the Legacies of the IRD is the lack of legacy is the fact that If people are discussing what Britain should be doing now, they're doing it without any historical knowledge of what worked and what didn't work. I think that's a shame. Wherever you stand on appropriateness of covert operations in contemporary warfare We should know our history and we should know The UK did used to do this. So if one thing comes out the book, maybe teaching the foreign offffice some of their own history might be a nice outcome That was Rory Corormack speaking to Spencerisen Rory is a professor of International Rations specializing in secret intelligence and covert action at the University of Nottingham. His new book, which shares plenty more stories about black propaganda in the Cold War, is Fakers, a top secret tale of Phantoms and forgeries in the disinformation frrontline