Secret British ‘black propaganda’ campaign targeted cold war enemies
An
Israeli convoy passes Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai during the
six-day war, June 1967. The Information Research Department put out fake
Soviet comment on Egypt’s war effort. Photograph: Getty Images
Britain stirred up tensions, chaos and violence in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, according to declassified papers
The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa,
the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake
sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial
tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist
ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.
The
effort, run from the mid-1950s through to the late 70s by a unit in
London that was part of the Foreign Office, was focused on cold war
enemies such as the Soviet Union and China, leftwing liberation groups and leaders that the UK saw as threats to its interests
The
campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting
greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic,
documents encouraged hatred of Israel.
Recently declassified British government documents reveal hundreds of extensive and costly operations.
“These
releases are among the most important of the past two decades. It’s
very clear now that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than
historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and
offensive. Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely
exposing Soviet disinformation,” said Rory Cormac, an expert in the
history of subversion and intelligence who found the material when
researching his new book, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft, to be published next month.
The
Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second
world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on
Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda
operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.
Photograph: Express/Getty Images
The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965
that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of
thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be
written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British
propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the
biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
But
the thousands of declassified documents studied by Cormac give by far
the most extensive insight yet into the IRD’s disinformation operations.
“The
British were only one actor among many, and a fairly minor actor too,
compared with the quantity of material being produced and disseminated
by the bigger players,” said Cormac, professor of international
relations at Nottingham University.
“The UK did
not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they
definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message
across.”
The IRD employed 360 people at its
height in the mid-60s. However, its highly secretive Special Editorial
Unit, responsible for the black propaganda effort, was much smaller.
>From its base in a nondescript office in Westminster, the unit used a
variety of tactics to manipulate opinion.
One
was to produce “reports” sent to warn other governments, selected
journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.
The
reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned
from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared
to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were
in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up
in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of
Communist Front Organisations.
Another tactic
was to forge statements by official Soviet institutions and agencies.
Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from
Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat
in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at
Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied
to the country.
The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood,
a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across
the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967
war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the
Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more
than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic
superstitions”.
The IRD also created an
entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of
Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab
defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious
conservatives at the time.
“Why is the Arab
nation at this time afflicted by so much sorrow and disaster? Why were
the brave forces defeated in the jihad by the evil heathen Zionists?…
The answers are [easily] to be found … we are departing fast from the
right path, we are following the course chosen for us by the
communist-atheists for whom religion is a form of social disease,” it
read.
Such claims became increasingly
widespread in Egypt in the ensuing years, as a resurgence of religion
swept the key strategic state.
Nor was the IRD above encouraging opposition to Israel if it made its forgeries more convincing, Cormac told the Observer.
Yemeni fighters belonging to the British protectorate in the south of the country, in the early 1960s. Photograph: Getty Images
A
statement released by the IRD in February 1967 also purported to come
from the Muslim Brotherhood, and attacked Egypt for using chemical
weapons in its battle against a coalition of religious conservatives and
tribes in Yemen backed by Britain and Saudi Arabia.
The
IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing
that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the
imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to
be believers”.
“These Egyptian murderers have
gone too far in their hypocrisy unpunished, but they can no longer
pretend to be believers in God and in His Prophet and in His sacred
book,” a leaflet read, asking: “If the Egyptians have to go to war and
fight, why don’t they direct their armies against the Jews?”
Cormac
said that, as with much of the IRD’s output, the claims made were
factually accurate, but the tone and fake source were designed to
mislead. The leaflets about Yemen aimed to put pressure on the Egyptian
leadership to accept a ceasefire.
Other
material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to
Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more
supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between
the two communist powers.
One major initiative
focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony
that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an
attempt to maintain white minority rule.
The
IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its
leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the
economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we
can still save our country,” one said.
Attempts
to isolate African nationalists sometimes involved incitement of racial
tension. In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World
Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which
denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The
forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many
newspapers reacting intemperately.
Ian Smith, Rhodesia’s premier, centre, in 1965, another target of IRD’s activities. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
A
similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political
immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti,
blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on
the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent
more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.
Cormac said there is little doubt that senior British policymakers knew about the IRD’s work.
In 1964, the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, told the IRD to target Ghana
over fear that its mercurial president, Kwame Nkrumah, was tilting
towards Moscow. Months later, the new Labour foreign secretary, Patrick
Gordon Walker, encouraged the Foreign Office to maintain a “black
propaganda potential and from time to time produce black material”.
Walker was particularly interested in fomenting racial tensions between
Africans and the Chinese.
As with most such
efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge.
On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in
Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that
the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major
achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake
material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of
the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict.
Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.
Though
the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence
that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.
“The
[new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more
modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.
“Liz
Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence
sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper
hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used
far more devious means,” Cormac said.