Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast Summary

Episode Title: Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War
Release Date: June 11, 2026
Host/Interviewer: Spencer Mizzen
Guest: Professor Rory Cormac, University of Nottingham
Focus: The Information Research Department (IRD), Britain’s secret organization for black propaganda during the early Cold War

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the secretive world of British disinformation campaigns during the Cold War, as uncovered in Rory Cormac’s new book, Fakers: A Top Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line. Cormac discusses Britain's Information Research Department (IRD), the colorful and controversial figures who ran its operations, and the outlandish, ethically murky black propaganda campaigns they orchestrated in pursuit of strategic advantage. The conversation pulls back the curtain on both the comic absurdity and the darker consequences of these secret operations, bringing historical clarity and insight to a topic with enduring modern relevance.

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The IRD: Purpose and Tactics

[03:32]

• The IRD was a shadowy organization within the UK Foreign Office, tasked with the propaganda aspects of the Cold War, always operating anonymously or with full deniability.
• At its peak, about 300-350 people worked for IRD. Within this, a much smaller, elite team specialized in "black propaganda"—not just unattributable content, but forgeries and fakes designed to mislead adversaries.
• Close cooperation with MI6 provided access to operational detail rarely seen in British intelligence histories.
• Quote:

  "Everything they did, everything they wrote, every briefing they planted was anonymous or unattributable ... Her Majesty’s Government was nowhere near the final product." —Rory Cormac [03:36]

Defining Black Propaganda
[05:26]

• Two main definitions:
  1. Completely deniable material—no connection can be traced back to the British government, making it more credible to target audiences.
  2. Active forgeries and impersonation—content fabricated to appear as if coming from enemy sources or fictional groups, making it politically explosive.
• Quote:

  "It starts to actively forge enemy material or adversary material and it starts to create fake groups." —Rory Cormac [04:22]

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The Legacy of WWII ‘Dirty Tricks’

[07:16]

• The IRD inherited personnel and methods from WWII’s Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and Special Operations Executive (SOE).
• Many WWII propagandists stayed on, evolving the craft as the Cold War escalated.
• Quote:

  "They were the legacy of PWE … carrying on a lot of those methods, tactics and tricks." —Rory Cormac [08:17]

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Maverick Personalities Behind the Scenes

Hans Welser:
[08:49]

• Austrian refugee and former MI5 suspect, who rose through charm, intellect, and ruthlessness.
• Used personal connections—and even suspicion from authorities—to leverage his way into the heart of the IRD.
• Married an Englishwoman (gaining citizenship), later divorcing to marry Adelaide, a notable MI6 agent and SOE operative.
• Quote:

  "All of a sudden, this outsider is at the heart of the British propaganda establishment." —Rory Cormac [10:18]

John Rayner:
[10:31]

• Eccentric, hard-drinking ex-Daily Express journalist; helped revolutionize newspaper design.
• Channeled flair and experience from WWII propaganda efforts in Italy and Singapore.
• Despite fraught relationship with Welser, formed an effective (if odd) double-act orchestrating major IRD operations for 15 years.
• Known for heavy drinking and personal chaos; his wife once hired a P.I. suspecting infidelity.
• Quote:

  "[Rayner and Welser] are an odd double act who orchestrate this massive campaign over about 15 years." —Rory Cormac [12:14]

The Culture of the IRD:
[12:41]

• Described as mavericks, misfits, eccentrics—diametrically opposed to the typical, public school-educated Foreign Office diplomat.
• More gender-diverse and creatively inclined, with rules and recruitment less rigid than the main Foreign Office.
• Quote:

  "They were slightly more free and easy in who they let in. So … there might end up being a home in the Information Research Department." —Rory Cormac [13:32]

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The Operations: From Absurd to Sinister

Indonesia ‘Voice from the Well’ Operation:
[16:57]

• 1960s campaign to destabilize Indonesian leader Sukarno by exploiting local superstitions.
• IRD created eerie ‘ghost’ recordings, simulating murdered generals calling for revenge:

  “‘Sibandrio, Sibandrio, we will come and get you. We will never forget what you did here. You are a dead man… When Allah brings my broken body together, he will crush yours in hell.’” [18:27]

• UK ambassador (self-styled James Bond) planted tapes around Jakarta hotels for journalists to find.
• Effectiveness hard to prove—IRD could only claim a cumulative impact, especially after Sukarno’s eventual downfall.
• Quote:

  "The ambassador 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..." —Rory Cormac [19:14]

Bulgarian Hippies Plot:
[21:01]

• 1968, world youth festival in Sofia: IRD tried to discredit Soviet "front" organizations by sowing chaos.
• Two middle-aged men, including very straight-laced Welser, pretended to be 'hippies' and designed posters urging:

  “‘Hippies of the world, drop in on Sofia. It's the land without fuzz. Come and enjoy the cannabis culture of the East. The land where boys and girls get together...’” [21:37]

• Sought to disrupt festival by appealing to Western youth culture, much to the horror of Communist authorities.
• Bulgarian files later confirmed festival disruption and authorities’ irritation over hippie attendees, though attribution remains murky.

Morally Questionable Campaigns:
[23:47]

• IRD’s work to suppress African independence movements and involvement in the Yemen Civil War.
• Example: Faked Muslim Brotherhood pamphlet accusing Egypt’s Nasser of dropping chemical weapons on Muslims, laced with anti-Semitism to make it credible.
• Internal justifications preferred "spreading truth" via a "fake source" rather than outright lies.
• Quote:

  "They said we didn't lie … We had to use a fake source in order to make it credible to the target population." —Rory Cormac [26:17]

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The Archives: Revelations and Bureaucratic Comedy

[27:10]

• Around 8,000 IRD files released into UK National Archives since 2020.
• Files include forgeries, operational discussions, transcripts, and bureaucratic absurdities (e.g., setting up a makeshift bar with filing cabinets).
• Some documents shock even Cormac, including explicit details on media manipulation and journalist complicity.
• Quote:

  "If they were alive today, I think they'd be staggered." —Rory Cormac [29:39]

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International Context and Britain's Place in the ‘Disinfo’ Stakes

[30:27]

• UK considered itself a black propaganda expert, even offering guidance to the CIA, which had more resources but less ‘finesse.’
• Around 400-450 British operations identified vs. thousands by the USSR and USA.
• Many nations in the Global South ran their own active campaigns and counter-campaigns.
• The British style was "bespoke" and "careful with truth," often using lies to spread actual facts, in contrast to the Soviet "industrial factory" approach.

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Legacy and Lessons (or Lack Thereof)

[32:48]

• IRD shut down in 1977, but the core (Special Producer Unit) continued secretly until at least the mid-1980s, when available records end.
• Cormac argues that despite today’s concern over Russian and other disinformation, Britain debates strategy "with no reference to its own past expertise or mistakes."
• Quote:

  "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. And I think that's a shame." —Rory Cormac [33:48]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Le Carré meets Monty Python." — Cover tagline on Fakers [16:58], reflecting the absurd-comic yet dark aspects of the story.
• "They just used lies to spread truth, if that makes sense." — Rory Cormac [32:23]
• "We're used to cabinet-level things... but then we don't see how it plays out on the ground. And this is what I personally loved..." — Rory Cormac [28:23], on the archive’s unprecedented operational detail.

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Key Timestamps

• [03:32] – What was the IRD?; definitions and tactics
• [07:16] – IRD’s wartime origins and connection to WWII black propaganda
• [08:49] – Profile: Hans Welser
• [10:31] – Profile: John Rayner
• [12:41] – The IRD’s maverick culture
• [16:57] – Case study: ‘Voice from the Well’ Indonesian ghosts plot
• [21:01] – Case study: Bulgarian hippies and festival disruption
• [23:47] – Ethics and controversial operations (African and Arab world examples)
• [27:10] – The opening of IRD’s archives and what they reveal
• [30:27] – Britain’s role compared to other Cold War disinformation powers
• [32:48] – The IRD’s legacy and what modern policymakers can learn

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Conclusion

This episode offers an engaging, sometimes startling look at Britain's intricate and morally ambiguous engagement with black propaganda during the Cold War. Rory Cormac brings to life the outlandish plots, eccentric personalities, and deep ethical questions, grounded in newly declassified archival material. The discussion connects both the craftsmanship and the peril inherent to covert information warfare, highlighting lessons for today’s disinformation landscape—and what happens when history is forgotten.

Transcript

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[Narrator / Podcast Host]

They haunted an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Misen 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 1950s and 60s.

[Interviewer / Host]

Hi, Rory. Thank you for joining us today. Your latest book is called Fakers, a top secret tale of phantoms and forgeries on the disinformation front line. So in the book you tell the story of the Information Research Department, a top secret organization that ran hundreds of black propaganda campaigns against Britain's adversaries during the Cold War. I wonder if you could start by 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 Cold War? And also while you're doing that, I wonder if you could explain what we mean by the term black propaganda is this is something I suspect that many of our listeners won't be familiar with.

[Rory Cormac]

The Information Research Department was the shadowy unit inside Britain's Foreign Office, which was charged essentially with prosecuting the propaganda aspects of, of the Cold War. And they're shadowy because everything they did, everything 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 was numbered around, I don't know, 300, 350 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 gray. 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 fake groups. And it worked very, very closely with MI6. And this is a wonderful thing that I really enjoyed writing about the book was that MI6 files are obviously all classified. And this was as close as we get to proper operational detail archival authority on some of these most controversial, most sensitive propaganda operations of the Cold War, some of which were very sensitive, some of which are very serious, some of which, frankly, were a bit bonkers.

[Interviewer / Host]

And so when we use the term black propaganda, what exactly do we mean?

[Rory Cormac]

There's two different meanings. One meaning is that the British government's hand is completely deniable. And 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 hand which various foreign secretaries and governments would 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 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 imperialist. So there's an incentive to make the message more credible by masking it. So the black propaganda side of things is when this is totally 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 here's a covert action, here's this, the UK sort of make it up as you go along, which makes historians job more difficult but a lot more fun. So other people in 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.

[Interviewer / Host]

So to what extent were these people employing tactics that had been honed and fine tuned during the Second World War? There was obviously, you know, a lot of misinformation, disinformation, spying, espionage being carried out during the conflict with Germany, Italy and Japan. I mean, was the Information Research Department basically building on what had happened there?

[Rory Cormac]

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 in the Second World War. The Political Warfare Executive was the slightly less famous sister organization of the Special Operations Executive and was doing some of these operations. Your listeners may be familiar with the name Sefton Delma, 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 at total war with an enemy. But some of these people who are 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 20 odd people. They were the legacy of PWE. They were the successor of the Political Warfare Department and were carrying on a lot of those methods, tactics and tricks.

[Interviewer / Host]

So can you introduce us to a couple of these people? Because there's an entire cast of fascinating characters that pop up in the book and yeah, I wonder if we could talk about a couple of them. Can we start with Hans? Well, sir, how did an Austrian refugee in one time MI5 suspect, end up sort of working at such a high level within this organization?

[Rory Cormac]

Charm, intellect and a bit of ruthlessness? I reckon I kind of fell in love with some of these characters. They're quite morally ambiguous and I like that in a book personally. And Hans Meltzer was a journalist. He was a refugee from Nazi Austria and he arrived in the UK, he was quickly under suspicion from MI5 because of certain people that he was mixing with. He was interned. But he married a slightly wealthy English lady who was very young, who loved him dearly by all accounts. But some of her relatives were a little bit suspicious and thought that maybe old Hans was using her for a, for citizenship and a way in. And he gradually. I know I obviously don't know the truth of that, but seeing some of the documents where her aunts were writing to MI5 and the police and saying, 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 MI5 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 he gradually works his way up. He takes British citizenship, ends up divorcing the first wife, marrying another remarkable woman by the name of Adelaide, who was MI6 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.

[Interviewer / Host]

And then we've got Welser's second in command, John Rayner. He's been described as an eccentric, hard drinking, high flying journalist turned propagandist. He sounds a pretty interesting character. What qualities did he bring to the Information Research Department?

[Rory Cormac]

He brought a bit of flair, I think. So he's got a great backstory as well and is a fascinating character. He was on the Daily Express, I think it was Picture desk. In the 1930s, one of the youngest editors of Fleet street helped to revolutionize the design of the front page. Bold colors, all this kind of thing, increase his circulation. And then he joined the war effort, 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 by this time he's on, I think, his third wife. Notorious, womanised, 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. He said, I don't think you need to worry. He's more likely to drink himself to death than to have an affair. Cause 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 Propaganda in the very, 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 Velser, the pair of them have a slightly strange relationship. They don't get on all that well, but. But they are an odd double act who orchestrate this massive campaign over about 15 years.

[Interviewer / Host]

So you describe the members of the Information Research Department as a collection of mavericks and misfits, oddballs and irregulars. Do you get the impression that you have to be sort of quote unquote, different, slightly eccentric and unconventional to excel

[Rory Cormac]

in this job compared 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 outhouse, in the Foreign Office you have much more creative, independent minded, free thinking journalists, literary types, women. Women had a really important role here. And I think one of the reasons why, why this group collected slightly more eclectic mix of characters, shall we say, is because it was funded differently from the Foreign Office 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 bounds or whatever they might be, feels their route from the Foreign Office is blocked, there might end up being a home in the Information Research Department. So it was slightly more fluid, which allowed a wider mix of independent voices, much 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, building their own empire and doing their own little thing,

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[Interviewer / Host]

takes us through many of the IRD's or most fascinating and consequential operations and plots. I wonder if you could talk us through two or three of them. You mentioned earlier that you know, some were quite frankly bonkers or comically absurd. So what 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?

[Rory Cormac]

This is the thing that Was a challenge writing it, but a really enjoyable challenge is how it flips between really serious, where the stakes are incredibly high. You know, we're talking about interferences in civil wars, nuclear proliferation. And then the idea doing these bonkers operations, you've got this darkness and light all the time. In fact, one of the kind endorsements I had on this on the front cover said, le Carre meets Monty Python. And there is a sense of that. So it's quite. I try and check myself because I go into a ho ho ho story and then you remember the dark undercurrents. But with that caveat in mind, I'll go into a ho ho ho story. And one of my favorite ones was in Indonesia, actually, where, for context, the Indonesian leader was a guy called Sukarno. The UK doesn't like him, let's put it very simplistically. There's been a attempted coup against him. It's failed. And the Information Research Department are trying to. 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. It's called the voice from the well. During this failed coup plot, some generals were murdered and their bodies were thrown down a well. And the IRD's idea was to create tapes, 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, Subandrio. And it says in fade in echoey voice. It literally says, echoey voice. Sibandrio, Sabandrio, we will come and get you. We will never forget what you did here. You are a dead man. One of the quotes is, when Allah brings my broken body back together, Sbandrio, he will crush yours in the bits of hell. It's dark, outrageous, ridiculous. The idea. The guy that was promoting it was talking about Hamlet's ghost. He's a 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 Sir Bandrio's foreign minister, to discredit him and to try to help bring him down? And they ended up doing this. And the ambassador 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.

[Interviewer / Host]

Is there any evidence that that actually worked, that plot?

[Rory Cormac]

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. And this ended up being the IRD's downfall, to be honest, because as Britain, let's face it, gets poorer in the 1970s and they want more value for money and. And the Foreign Office bean counters are asking for prove it works. Where are your metrics? Show me your spreadsheets. And the IRD are 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 Sukarno. And eventually Sukarno is, as your listeners will know, overthrown. He's removed by the person the IRD wanted. So the IRD can try and point to a cumulative impact of their work. And for obvious reasons, they did try to claim success. But of course there were a whole load of other factors, internal factors. The Americans were also active, the Chinese were active, the Australians were active. So it's quite, very difficult to prove that this one thing led to something else.

[Interviewer / Host]

Can you give us another example of a plot that really sticks in your mind from your research into the book?

[Rory Cormac]

The hippies, the Bulgarian hippies. This is a slightly lighter one. 1968, the Soviets are hosting a world Youth festival in Sofia. It's one of those classic Soviet front organizations that they pretend is independent young people coming together to celebrate peace, when actually it's covertly sponsored and facilitated by the Soviets. And the IRD wanted. Velser and Rainer 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 Beatles at the most prominent. And you've got two middle aged men, one of whom, Velse is very, very straight laced, and they pretend to be a hippie group and they design a poster of Flower Power and they try to, try 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 Velser and Rainer, but might not want to associate themselves with hippie festivals. So they created this idea that there 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 actually disrupt. And the fun thing was it did disrupt and the Bulgarian straight laced security authorities hated all of the hippies. And it was wonderful references in the files to these long haired oafs playing their drums and how they ended up pulling out chords to shut the electric guitars up. Proving that it was the Hans and John, the Velser and Rain 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 Valser and Raynor would have liked to have claimed a small hand in that.

[Interviewer / Host]

No, it's important to emphasize, isn't it, and you have touched upon this already, that some of these operations were pretty controversial. And some of the campaigns the IRD perpetrated, such as, for example, you know, attempting to suppress independence campaigns in Africa, were like pretty morally, you could say, morally questionable. Did your research reveal much soul searching among the operatives themselves at the time?

[Rory Cormac]

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. There's about 8,000 files spelling it all out, which as a historian of intelligence and secrecy, I am not used to. So I think if this soul searching had existed, I think I would have seen it. They constantly justified 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-1960s. The President of Egypt, Nasser, who we know was a hate figure of the British at this time. Nasser got involved in the Yemen civil war and we know that he dropped chemical weapons on villages. The British wanted that to be known. However, they didn't feel able to say it publicly because Nasser would just accuse 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 to Muslims, to Arabs, in a credible manner? And their response was to forge a document by the Muslim Brotherhood which went something like this. Muslims of the world, you should know, Nasser, the president of Egypt, has just killed fellow Muslims. How dare he? He is a terrible Muslim, and so on and so forth. The problem, one of the problems was that IRD thought to make it credible as the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, to 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 know, I can, you can imagine you, you think, wow, that's, 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 are doing that kind of thing anyway. So we're not really adding anything now. Your listeners can disagree with that as much as they like. It's 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.

[Interviewer / Host]

Now, you mentioned just earlier, the 8,000 once top secret files that the IRD or operatives working for the IRD left. When did they first reach the public domain and what form did they take?

[Rory Cormac]

They got dumped, really in just before COVID they started coming out and I, I don't know why. They are the IRD's operational files, and shortly before COVID they started coming out. And then suddenly around 2020, 2021, there are these huge dumps in the archive of thousands. And the form they take is conversations, minutes between the people, which is why in the book I'm able to have dialogue in places which I really, really enjoyed writing. Emotions, feelings, all this kind of thing. This isn't high level. The Prime 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. Things like one of the files that I found which made me smile was when IRD moved into their new headquarters. They set about trying to create a makeshift bar in the restaurant and they used filing cabinets. And then you had senior propagandists sitting behind the bar trying to serve people. And whatever the Whitehall Department of Public Bureaucracy and works is like someone of yes, Minister, come in and tell them off and say, you can't put up a bar, you haven't got a bar license. And you get that kind of back and forth. So all of that kind of colour 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 color, you get the personality and you get the operational detail and the debates. It was just great fun.

[Interviewer / Host]

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 a public domain, I reckon.

[Rory Cormac]

So I think they'd be gobsmacked, because some of it is. And even I was gobsmacked. There are a few in there. There were a few I was looking at thinking, really, when 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 1960s and was running all sorts of things that Velser and Rainer and their friends were planting through their pliant journalists, including some quite derogatory comments about lazy journalists who just take whatever we give them. So that kind of thing. I was really quite shocked that it would be released. And if they were alive today, I think they'd be staggered. Yeah.

[Interviewer / Host]

Now, Britain can't have been the only nation in the Cold War prosecuting black propaganda campaigns. Where do we rank in the world table of black propaganda? Were we a world leader or were other countries running rings around us?

[Rory Cormac]

We thought we were. One of the nice finds was about 1960 from the CIA is obviously getting bigger and more confident and taking on a more global role. But the Brits were adamant that they had 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 at the time there was something in that. So what the UK did was a widespread campaign, much more widespread than I realized. I think I found 400, 450 separate operations, which is big and quite cleverly targeted. However, the CIA were doing thousands and thousands and thousands and the Russians, the Soviets were doing thousands and thousands of thousands. So I don't want to create a false equivalence that the Brits were doing as much as the Soviets or the Americans and even smaller powers. One of the findings from the book is that places in the global south and sub Saharan 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 Kenyan National Archives and 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 a much less industrial scale than the Soviets. I guess we like to think of ourselves or the Brits like to think of themselves as kind of a more bespoke service with proper expertise and craft, unlike the more mass produced Soviet factories.

[Interviewer / Host]

So the IRD was wound down in the 1970s, but that can't have been the end of black propaganda campaigns. What do you see as being this department's greatest legacy?

[Rory Cormac]

Historians assume that when the IRD got closed down in 1977, that was it, that was the end of things and it was all cancelled. One of the things that found was that the IRD was shut down. But this very, very small unit that I was the focus of the book by this time, it's called the Special Producer Unit that carried on, that carried on completely unaffected from everything else. And unfortunately that's where the files go dry in the mid-1980s. So we don't know what. What happened is much, much smaller. I think as the decade progressed, the number of forgeries dwindles. But I think the greatest legacy is that. Well, it's a tricky one because the government seems to have forgotten this kind of thing and we often to 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? These are, I assume I'm not privy to them, but I assume these are 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. And I think that's a shame. Wherever you stand on the appropriateness of covert operations in contemporary warfare, we should know our history and we should know that the UK did use to do this. So if one thing comes out the book, maybe teaching the Foreign Office some of their own history might be a nice outcome.

[Narrator / Podcast Host]

That was Rory Cormack speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Rory is a professor of international relations, specialising 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 Frontline.

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