Lessons from the Cold War’s disinformation front

Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line, Rory Cormac, Oxford University Press, £25

As a former official historian at Britain’s Foreign Office, I rejoice that Rory Cormac, in his new book Fakers, has made such productive use of the records of the Information Research Department (IRD), long withheld from public inspection but many now in the National Archives (TNA). Although the first IRD files reached TNA in 1995, material on the Special Editorial Unit – responsible for what was called rather euphemistically ‘novel and unconventional forms of counter-subversive activity’ – was long seen as too sensitive for release. Having spent a long time in my career working on how to release intelligence-related material without compromising information that needs to be kept secret, it is satisfying now to see the results of those efforts put to such good use.

Not only does Cormac understand the value of this material in its wider historical context, he also knows how to tell a terrific story about a world where, as Peter Pomerantsev says in his blurb, ‘Monty Python meets Le Carré’. Some of the stories in Fakers do indeed contain elements of farce and espionage, from an attempt to lure hippies into Bulgaria to the undermining of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana; some, like inventing a ghost in a well in Indonesia to voice criticism of President Sukarno, are scarcely credible. Yet the book also contains important insights into the use of information as an instrument of policy, whether the material is genuine or confected, disseminated for offensive or defensive purposes. Those insights were of critical importance during IRD’s existence between 1948 and 1977, and remain relevant almost 80 years later.

The idea of a British government information campaign to combat communist propaganda, led by the Foreign Office, was not new – indeed, somewhat crude and uncoordinated efforts had been under way since the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917. But it took on a new urgency in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as the Soviet Union, now one of the victorious Great Powers and one with regional military dominance, extended tight political and economic control over eastern Europe. Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin resisted the idea at first, considering that ‘putting over of positive results of British attitude’ would be a ‘better corrective’ than a denunciation of communism. Also, many in the Labour Party, not to mention the wider British public, were sympathetic to the Russians who had sacrificed so much in the cause of Allied victory. By the end of 1947, however, after a series of bruising encounters with Soviet negotiators on postwar international arrangements, Bevin accepted the need for active defence against communist propaganda. The Cabinet agreed proposals he set out in a memorandum of 4 January 1948, drawing on suggestions by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), for the setting up of a ‘small section in the Foreign Office to provide material for our anti-Communist publicity’. Information Research Department was born. Though its fortunes fluctuated with changes of government and organisational upheaval, it remained in existence until shut down by Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

IRD’s work has been written up in a number of studies, but its activities after 1961 when the department became, in Cormac’s words, ‘bigger, bolder and more global’, are less well-known, especially those of the Special Editorial Unit that are the focus of Fakers. IRD pursued elaborate – at times over-elaborate – strategies for anti-communist campaigns, extending across the globe. It created companies to publish on the open market books that embodied the anti-communist message; it invented organisations – such as the ‘Loyal African Brothers’ – to disseminate propaganda (with help from MI6) and promote tensions between rival groups, spread rumours and undermine individuals or governments known to be (or suspected of being) controlled or influenced by Moscow. IRD was particularly active in Africa, where Soviet (and Chinese) influence was spreading, but also in Indonesia, central Europe and later in Ulster (though efforts to counter the IRA’s far superior propaganda activities made work in that province a poisoned chalice): ‘The method was the same each time: sanitize intelligence and launder it through a fake channel to expose and discredit these organizations as tools of Moscow.’ All this makes Fakers an interesting read. But two points emerge that have important contemporary relevance. Some might take the view, on the basis of the more bizarre schemes described in the book, that IRD’s work represented rather amateurish efforts by a group of people whose talents were rooted in wartime propaganda, and who had not yet adjusted to Britain’s diminished status in the post-1945 world. That assessment misses the point. IRD’s role – its mission statement, in management-speak – was to implement a serious Cold War policy objective. And while it encountered a good deal of bureaucratic obstruction, for example from the Commonwealth Relations Office, it received a good deal of political support during years when Soviet disinformation campaigns, influence operations, sabotage and espionage were being pursued aggressively and on a global scale.

When the British government expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers in September 1971 (still the largest single expulsion by a government acting alone), one reason for action was the detail provided by defector Oleg Lyalin of prospective KGB operations both in Britain and overseas. Some of these were as bizarre as any planned by IRD. More important, however, as Cormac points out, were Lyalin’s insights into just how broadly the Soviets interpreted ‘disinformation’: in their view it included deception, false propaganda and ‘ideological sabotage’ designed to ‘spread confusion, denigrate morale and weaken alliances’. They were also prepared to reinforce the message by military means if necessary, propaganda and kinetic action regarded in Russian eyes – then and now – as different points on the same scale of warfare. The threat was, therefore, a serious one. Today there is an equally serious threat from both Russia and China, even if the ideological imperative has mutated and disinformation is disseminated instantaneously through sophisticated technological means.

The other important lesson from Fakers concerns the difference between incidence and impact. Over IRD’s lifetime, successive senior officials asked – particularly when seeking cost savings – whether IRD’s efforts achieved anything. All too often, the assessment of campaigns was ‘No reactions so far noted’. John Rayner, one of IRD’s most creative propagandists, insisted that ‘absence of evidence was not evidence of absence’. Lack of reaction did not mean a campaign was ineffective: reactions might be delayed or emerge more subtly; achieving publication was a result of sorts. Nigel Clive, the former MI6 officer who became head of IRD in 1967, was, as Rory Cormac puts it, underwhelmed by this argument: his pressure for evidence of tangible results would produce even wilder schemes. But the difficulty of measuring the impact of disinformation, in all its forms, is perennial. The use of social media to spread disinformation during election campaigns (including the 2016 US presidential election) demonstrates this. It may be possible to prove that disinformation is being spread in order to influence an outcome; in some cases, it may be possible to identify the people, or the state responsible. That is incidence: we know it happened. Impact is much harder to measure.

All kinds of factors affect the outcome of elections, making it almost impossible to prove that a disinformation campaign on social media, for example, played a significant role in the outcome. The difficulty of measuring impact is even more acute when disinformation is aimed at undermining public confidence more generally, sowing distrust in politics, politicians or public health campaigns; or encouraging the belief that a certain section of a community is responsible for deteriorating security or a tragic event. We know it is happening and often we know who is responsible, but proving its effect is – despite the tendency for media amplification – much harder. That does not mean we should not work hard to detect and call out those responsible. IRD’s weapons were (largely) paper and ink, but they were still fighting a war. So are we, in defence of our values, our science, our way of life: even when the evidence is absent, it does not mean it does not exist. Fakers is an instructive, as well as an entertaining book.