This, we might imagine, is the Age of the Fake. AI videos; TikTok fascists; the Joycean mind-fragments of a US president for whom truth itself is an ever shifting quantum concept. Surely no other generation has had to navigate such a disorientating landscape of deceit.
Or perhaps they have. Our old friends the Russians gave the world The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century – a lethal, widely circulated (and still circulating) hoax outlining the world-dominating plots of Jewish people. Meanwhile, a still unidentified forger composed the Zinoviev Letter, which was published by the Daily Mail a few days before the 1924 general election. Purportedly from Grigory Zinoviev of the Soviet Comintern, it outlined a rosy future of uncompromising Leninism across England with the re-election of Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald lost.
If espionage has a certain seedy allure, IRD work was resolutely low-budget and cheerfully grubby
Now Rory Cormac lifts the lid – releasing some very pungent aromas – on a previously unexplored Department of Deliberate Untruths. This was the exquisitely blandly named ‘Information Research Department’, set up in 1948 under Clement Attlee’s government to counter Soviet propaganda in a fast-freezing cold war. A secretive sub-section of the Foreign Office, it was in the business of fakes: leaflets, pamphlets and any printed matter that might help foster confusion, dissent and anger anywhere that communism threatened to take hold.
This applied further than Europe. Presidents of newly independent African republics were portrayed as being Chinese communist stooges. Authoritarian leaders were denounced as Soviet marionettes. The IRD also infiltrated Soviet-backed international festivals and youth groups. The idea was that factions would be turned against factions by crudely produced fake pamphlets ascribing various ideological outrages to rivals. If espionage had a certain seedy allure and glamour, this kind of work was resolutely low-budget and cheerfully grubby. Yet in its own way it was madly skilled. Operatives had to ventriloquise different languages, dialects and the phraseology of different generations. The department’s remit stretched across Britain’s fast dissolving empire as well as flashpoints, such as Egypt.
Apart from devising their own wheezes to make unhelpful regimes look bad, the IRD also had to counter the blizzard of leaflets being issued by enemies. There was some amazingly abstruse detective work: analysis of typewriter keystrokes and staples could determine whether the source of the enemy propaganda was Moscow or Beijing. Cormac’s work in unearthing top secret documents is colourful, at times suggestive of Graham Greene’s darker entertainments. Yet this was no game. Words and slogans – if taken up by rebels in troubled lands – could have a devastating impact.
An early star of the department was Hans Welser, a Vienna-born journalist who had performed propaganda miracles with the Political Warfare Executive in the second world war. Working alongside him was his wife Adelaide, another wartime propaganda whizz, who shuttled expertly between the IRD, conferences with MI6 and meetings in Fleet Street bars. Also key was John Rayner, a former Daily Express features editor and formidable eccentric. He was dazzlingly good at producing forged leaflets and listed among his talents farming and Elizabethan calligraphy. Notable women included the former Bletchley codebreaker Elizabeth Wyndham, who had been variously posted to Khartoum and Leopoldville, and who, upon being kidnapped by guerilla fighters, intimidated them into letting her go.
A prime example of the department’s shadowy efforts was played out in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. President Sukarno, having gained his nation’s independence from the Dutch, was both beloved and tyrannical. He – and communism – posed a threat to neighbouring Malaysia, where Britain still had vested interests. The IRD set to work with a variety of attacks – on the president’s adultery, on his toadying to communists, on his being a bad Muslim. A storm was indeed gathering and an attempted coup resulted in the decapitations of local dissidents, whose heads were lobbed daily over the wall of the British consulate.
Cormac’s flavourful account is also a portrait of Britain in sharp post-imperial decline: dusty offices and cynicism. In the early 1970s, the department faced a grim challenge in Northern Ireland as the flames of the Troubles rose – the propaganda efforts of Soviet-backed agents boosting the Provisional IRA. As energetic as the department was, its enemies were indefatigable, seeking to poison Britain both domestically and internationally.
By 1977, this rackety outfit was felt to have run its course and was wound down by the foreign secretary David Owen. But, given that faking these days seems to be a freelance affair, with Iran, Hezbollah, Russia and China commissioning social media figures to flood the internet with destabilising rubbish, it’s possible to feel a pang of rueful nostalgia for a team who in the 1960s tried subverting a Soviet-bloc hippy pop festival with the slogan: ‘Come to Bulgaria – the land free of the Fuzz!’
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