Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Cold War Disinformation Front Line (456)

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1:23I delve into the fascinating world of Cold War propaganda with historian Rory Cormack, author of a new book, Fakers, a top-secret tale of phantoms and forgeries on the disinformation front line. The episode uncovers the clandestine operations carried out by the Information Research Bureau, the IRD, a little-known unit of the British Foreign Office that specialised in covert propaganda during the Cold War. Rory shares insights from the recent declassification of 8 ,000 files which revealed the astonishing operational details of the IRD from bizarre forgeries to the creation of phantom organisations.

2:01The episode highlights the absurdity and complexity of Cold War espionage. As Rory explains, the IRD was not just about planting stories in the press, they were deeply involved in black operations, often working closely with MI6 to achieve their goals. The episode also explores the colourful characters that populated the IRD, including journalists, refugees and writers who brought their unique backgrounds to the table. Rory's anecdotes about their lives and social dynamics within the department add a rich layer of narrative to the historical context. I'm delighted to welcome Rory Cormack to our Cold War conversation.

2:41Rory Cormac:the government released about 8 000 files out of nowhere and i could not believe it to be honest as someone who specializes in cold war history secret cold war history i'm aware of stuff that gets released that gets kept back and some of it you understand why it gets kept back but even i was staggered when the government suddenly declassified 8 000 odd files about six years ago with some of the most outrageous operational detail where, you know, they're naming people, they're naming agents, they're naming intricate operations. And that was my way into it, really. The book is about a unit in the Foreign Office called the Information Research Department, which some listeners may be familiar with.

3:31Rory Cormac:It's the successor, really, to Sefton Delmo and the political warfare executive their job or one of their jobs was to keep the nucleus of the political warfare executive alive so that britain didn't lose some of those skills should the cold war turn hot but their main job was to engage in unattributable propaganda throughout the cold war and i was familiar with them they worked out the foreign office they have linked to mi6 there are various books about them their files started coming out in the 1990s but But what I didn't realize was how many covert propaganda operations they were doing, how many of the Sefton-Delma type things they were up to.

4:14Rory Cormac:Because the standard Cold War narrative, historical narrative about the Information Research Department is that they were doing those kind of grey operations where they're briefing journalists, planting the old bit in the press, that kind of thing, which is all very interesting. but then suddenly we had this dump of files and that's why I wrote the book I wasn't I never intended on writing it but I saw these files I saw some the leads some of the stories some the characters and I just thought this needs to be written and it wrote itself to be honest absolutely absolutely because something called the information research department is a lovely typical innocuous name was it obviously on the books or how was it funded was it kept in the shadows it was called the information research department as you say deliberately as a typically bland british name which allowed it to be listed in the foreign office directories and internal british government directories and that sort of thing but it had a cover and people wanted to look really boring so i seem to know i really asked that but i don't know what it did and if they did the cover was it was engaging in research to help inform foreign policy making it was funded out of the secret vote so it was funded from the intelligence budget essentially because they didn't want people asking too many questions because ultimately it was a shady shadowy arm of the foreign office and then within the information research department there was a smaller unit which is what i'm particularly interested in which did the black stuff so it's almost like levels of secrecy and shadowiness and to go back to your point about banal names the unit that i'm interested in we did the fakes and the forgeries which is the subject of the book and with particularly close ties with mi6 was quite it kept changing its name every couple of years and i'm sure it's to throw people off the scent so it went from the special editorial unit which sounds a bit dull later on it became a special producer unit which sounds a bit dull there was a brief period in the mid-1960s when they got a bit cavalier and they called themselves the special operations section i didn't last too long because that must have raised the eyebrow but yeah there's lots of them trying to manage having a fakes and forgeries department as part of the foreign office which doesn't really sit well with british ideals of what diplomats shouldn't be doing.

6:42And there must have been some conflict between them and MI6, or did they play together well?

6:49Rory Cormac:The funny thing is, the conflict was between them and the Foreign Office, even though they're technically part of the Foreign Office, because you have the propagandists, many of whom were working very closely with MI6. And it was MI6 who were the technical specialists at MI6, were the ones doing the forgeries, actually physically doing the forgeries. And it was a technical specialist in MI6 that were collecting signatures and letterheads and that kind of intelligence gathering, which is necessary for a good forgery. So the men and women in IRD, in this particular black wing of IRD, were working very closely with MI6.

7:26Rory Cormac:Now the friction came with the Foreign Office, even though they're supposed to be part of the same happy family because the diplomats did not trust and did not like what they were up to for a few reasons one they thought it was dangerous a bit reckless it could backfire you end up framing people there was one case where the ird wanted to make it look like czechoslovakian students were doing something at the height of the czechoslovakian prague spring and the foreign office. This is far too dangerous. So you have that bit of tension. You have the diplomats that didn't trust some of the more kind of secrety stuff going on.

8:06Rory Cormac:And it didn't help that the IRD was physically separate from the foreign office. They were hanging out in an annex, really, which I quite like the visual image of it. You've got the grand foreign office. We can picture it by Horse Guards Parade on Whitehall. And then if you go across Horse Guards Parade, there's a quite grand buildings now they've been run down in the 1960s and the ird were in there and my team in the ird the black propaganda guys and women were in the attic of a rundown building across the road with a casino below at one point doing all these fakes and forgeries and you can just imagine the foreign office getting getting wound up by what they saw as these shady empire builders hanging out in their attic doing crazy stuff absolutely because i think that there's at least a couple of occasions where the British embassy abroad in various countries comes across one of these forgeries and is reporting it back not knowing that it's the IRD Black Ops team that produced it.

9:04Rory Cormac:I love that and it must they take it as a win because it showed the IRD Black Ops team that their material must have been pretty convincing and there were other occasions where The IRD Black Ops team lost track of what was theirs and what wasn't theirs, because when they're impersonating so many of these different groups, and as your listeners know, Cold War's full of lots and lots of resistance groups, liberation groups, all with different acronyms, lots of different interchangeable names, different parts of the world. and the IRD was creating some of these pretending to be some of these but then sometimes there will be a genuine one which had some strange name like the organization for the liberation of occupied Spanish territories in the northern Sahara or something like that and I remember seeing the notes getting between the propagandists in London saying we've just seen this leaflet come from that group is it one of ours oh I'm not sure it sounds like it could be one of ours and you get this weird breakdown of reality and fiction.

10:09Rory Cormac:Once you start these things, it's quite hard to keep track, I think, of what's real and what's not. I think it's described by one of your reviewers as quite Monty Python-esque, some of these stories. And surely the Soviets are doing the same thing, but on a larger scale. So there is a battle going on here between Britain, the CIA mainly and the Eastern Bloc. Yeah that's a really important point. The book ultimately is about what the Brits were up to but clearly they don't exist in isolation and so a lot of what we try to chart in the book is this battle is how it operates alongside and against the other propagandists.

10:54Rory Cormac:Now it's important not to create false equivalents here and you're entirely right, the Soviets were doing it and the Americans were doing it at a much greater scale, different laws of engagement, different risk thresholds and all that kind of thing. The Brits saw themselves, righty or wrongly, as a more bespoke service, a more boutique service, much more talented. And they compared themselves in that sense to not just the Soviets, but also to the Americans who also operate on a more industrial level. And the Brits thought, look, We can't, and we don't necessarily want to, out-compete the Soviets in propaganda.

11:29Rory Cormac:The Chinese as well became increasingly vigorous in this. But what the Brits thought they could do was use their knowledge, skills, contacts, experience, global outposts to operate on a smaller footprint but make a bigger impact. And that was their approach. and even approached the Americans in the 1960s, and as the CIA is getting bigger and more powerful, and said, we, the Brits, we should take the lead in all black propaganda operations because we've got the skills. And that's how they saw it. And the other thing to add to that is it wasn't just the British and the Americans and the Saviors, the usual suspects.

12:13Rory Cormac:One of the key things that struck me was just how many other regional powers and players were doing this in the Cold War. How the Egyptians, the Kenyans, the Indonesians, again, I don't want to create a false equivalent, but all of these countries had agency and propaganda of their own. There was a lovely moment I found where a research assistant of mine was going through the Kenyan National Archives and seeing things through British eyes. I was expecting the Kenyans to be worrying about British propaganda because I knew from our files that the Brits were targeting kenya and the kenyans were actually more worried about somalian propaganda from across the border their black propaganda operations which i would never have contemplated tanzania as well was up to all sorts of things i think one of the things that comes out of the book is just what a swirling mess of propaganda the cold war was and how many different players there were and how places like sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, they were not battlegrounds where the superpowers were playing against each other to win over the Kenyans or whoever else.

13:28Rory Cormac:They have their own agency and they were doing their own stuff and they were running operations back up against the Brits and elsewhere, which creates a much more dynamic, vigorous history, I think. It's hard to tell, and it's hard to get into a nice, neat narrative, but then that is history isn't it and particularly cold war history particularly labyrinthine i would say who did they recruit to work on this i'm presuming over a lot of journalists or people with a journalist background in there but who were they using to produce this stuff they were using you're right journalists they were using writers they were using lots of refugees who had either fled Nazi Germany and had experience in World War II propaganda, or who'd fled the Soviets, had a high proportion of women writers because the IRD was outside of the main foreign office proper.

14:28Rory Cormac:And some of the constraints, the old-fashioned sexist constraints, which prevented women from joining and progressing, didn't apply so rigidly to the information research department. So there were a lot of women writing as well. And so, which was when they were wealthy graduate types, men and women, who wanted to do this kind of thing. There were also much more scruffy, more casual student types. There were sons and daughters of aristocrats, and there were refugees from Eastern Europe. And they all blended together in this team of black writers. that the head of it was a man called Hans Velser, who was himself an immigrant.

15:12Rory Cormac:He fled the Nazis before World War II and settled in the UK. And he was a journalist by training. He was one of those very enigmatic characters who, there were lots of rumours going out about him in the files around whether he married his first wife for a green card, whatever the British equivalent is, in the start of World War II. He was under surveillance by MI5 at one point at the start of World War II, but he was a very clever man. He gradually worked his way up from refugee and MI5 suspects to special operations advisor for the foreign office, I think his title was towards the end. Absolutely fascinating man.

15:51Rory Cormac:And his number two was a guy called John Rayner, who was a journalist. He was one of the youngest Fleet Street top guys in the 1930s. His claim to fame was redesigning the front page of the Daily Express, I think, to make it bolder and more colourful. He was credited with a rapid increase in circulation. But he ended up working again for the physical warfare executive. And then there was this weird five-year period where he vanished. and to this day don't know what he did some people say he ends up being a farmer in australia but he so he was a he was another kind of a colorful character let's say he was a hard-drinking womanizing writer who loved double entendres and wordplay and by the time he started at ird i think he'd on his third wife and it's just it's just this kind of this wonderful array of colorful characters who wouldn't have got a job anywhere else in the foreign office but because of the The nature of the IRD, what they were doing in the looser recruitment structures, it brought together this fabulous, fabulous range of people.

17:01One of the things that I enjoyed about the book is that you do highlight persons who would probably not get featured in an intelligence history. You said women, you said refugees, but you were also talking about the social history year and with some of these characters they are colourful probably the wrong phrase for it but they certainly have interesting private lives certainly old hans wessler and his co-worker leslie sheridan have quite an interesting story don't they they do leslie sheridan was a

17:40Rory Cormac:propagandist in the succumbent war and then was one of the founding fathers of the information research department a very important figure in british propaganda sheridan and his wife adelaide i think it was they who recruited velsa into wartime propaganda and they became very good friends socially with velsa and his wife and became a foursome and they would go on holiday together and whatnot. And then suddenly, in the early 1960s, they went away on one of their holidays and they came back and Leslie Sheridan and Hans Velser had swapped wives and they got divorced. So apparently came back with a black eye as well to add to the mystery of what happened on that trip.

18:30Rory Cormac:And what's really striking is when you look at the marriage registers, you can see that they then marry each other's wives within three four months of each other on the same marriage register you can all you can see is a historical visual document a fabulous artifact of social history you can see this bizarre this bizarre wife swap and rayner had a colorful private life of his own he as i say he was on his third wife i think and then ended up having an affair with one of the one of the writers in his team and they they married later when he was i think he was 20 years older than her so there is a fair bit of social history a lot of it comes back to the just wonderful richness of the archival files and these are the people that you don't normally write about in intelligence history books because they're not in the files i'm lucky enough to have written a couple of books in the past myself and they're all about prime ministers and kings and queens and foreign secretaries and cabinet secretaries and the heads of the intelligence services and the men and women on the grounds because of the nature of the archival record which is my kind of brand of historian is archival specialist you don't get to know about these people and then suddenly these files are so deep and rich you get to learn their story you get the quips in the margins with the handwriting back and forth And I was able to, for the first time in my life as a historian, write dialogue in a book because they're actually having conversations and their personalities shine through.

20:07I'll just give you one final example on the social history side, which was there was a file about the IRD's new offices, which sounds quite dry.

20:18Rory Cormac:They moved from the attic that I mentioned earlier to a modern new block by the river. um and the ird were desperate to install a bar in in on the floor i've looking at attempts and the bean counters in the white hall ministry of works whatever they're called said you can't you can't do that you haven't got approval to do that and so we have this wonderful tale through the archives of the black propagandists of the ird creating a makeshift bar out of filing with files and bits of wood or whatever and then serving up their drink and then getting told off for spending more time working out how they can have their whiskey when they wouldn't have a license or whatever and it's that kind of just going back to the monty python point the farce taking place and the social history taking place against the really high stakes and serious backdrop of cold war and propaganda and some sensitive operations.

21:18Rory Cormac:Meanwhile, the same people are messing around trying to organize dances and getting upset because they haven't sold enough tickets for the New Year's dance. And I just, I love that contrast. And I was able to try and bring that out for the first time as a historian because I've never had the opportunity before. Yeah, yeah. It sounds sensational, the detail that you've got in there. Starting or growing your own business can be intimidating and lonely at times. Your to-do list may feel endless with new tasks, and lists can easily begin to overrun your life. So finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything as a built-in business partner can be a game changer.

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22:32And if people haven't heard about your brand, you can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you, with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash realm. Go to shopify.com slash realm. That's shopify.com slash realm. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can.

23:25So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. As a monthly or annual supporter, you'll be able to listen ad free. you'll become one of our community get the sought after cold war conversations drinks coaster as a thank you and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve cold war history just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more what i'd like to do now is actually have a look at some of the operations that they were involved in and i guess Certainly in the mid-50s, one of the characters that's really proving a headache for the British is Nasser, the leader in Egypt, which leads to the Suez crisis.

24:19But can you talk about some of the black operations that they were attempting against him?

24:24Rory Cormac:He was certainly one of the main targets of all this. And we know that the IRD, this team, the IRD, was engaged in Suez. unfortunately on Suez in particular but we've been talking about how great the files are everything from the 1950s I believe were destroyed so we that's why the book starts in 1960 because that's when the record starts but of course NASA remains very much a target after Suez and the Brits really go for him when it comes to the Yemen civil war your listeners may well be familiar with the case where Nasser and Egypt intervene on the side of the Yemeni Republicans in a civil war and the Brits and the Saudis and others support the Royalists and what the UK wanted to do was try to expose what Nasser was up to try to expose Nasser's involvement which was supposed to be secret try to give him a bloody nose try to get him to withdraw and try to just make generally make his life more difficult.

25:27Rory Cormac:And they did this through a whole range of different operations, some farcical, some very serious and controversial. On the farcical end, they created a load of different Monty Python-esque Arab resistance groups, all criticizing NASA. The brave heroes of the Egyptian revolution group would come out and say, NASA's betrayed us, both through X, Y, and Z. They'd plant it in the press and try and circulate it. On the other end the spectrum. Probably the most controversial operation that I've come across was in 1967, when, again, the Yemen Civil War, NASA used chemical weapons. This happened. This wasn't a British lie.

26:11Rory Cormac:Chemical weapons were used in various villages as part of the Yemen Civil War. And the UK wanted the world to know that NASA had just used chemical weapons. It's obviously a heinous thing to do. It's a war crime. And then the Brits wanted to expose it. They were slightly hamstrung against doing it overtly, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Americans were saying, please don't make too much of this because we don't want propaganda accusing us of false equivalents, given that the Americans were using chemicals in Vietnam at around the same time. So they didn't want that challenging hypocrisy.

26:48Rory Cormac:The Brits, they'd been burned by NASA quite a few times, where every time they exposed him, NASA was very clever and was able to twist everything back and use it as a propaganda attack on the British. So they were a little bit hesitant. And then there's all the usual stuff about evidence thresholds and all that kind of thing and the technicalities. So for various reasons, and perhaps most importantly, the British knew that if they came out and said NASA has used chemical weapons, the target audience, in short, Muslims across the Middle East, are not going to believe britain because britain is was the the imperial masters who were not trusted by by the locals so they said let's do a black propaganda operation how are we going to get this message out in a credible manner we're not lying but we need to get in a credible manner so what they decided to do was forge a document, a pamphlet, by the Muslim Brotherhood exposing NASA's use of chemical weapons so that the target audience knew it.

27:52Rory Cormac:And because it was from the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the foreign office, they assumed that the target audience would believe it in a way they wouldn't if it was from the foreign office. And they were very happy with this. There were no lies in that document. NASA did use the chemical weapons. Unfortunately, to make it credible, they argued, they had to write in the style of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was at the time very aggressive. It was also, at the time, very anti-Semitic, to be credible. And so you have this scenario where these propagandists sitting in Whitehall are writing things like, Nasser has betrayed islam he's a bad muslim he's not a true believer and then it goes on to say something like and i paraphrase something like these bombs should have been used against israel instead and i remember sitting in the archives reading that thinking oh my you have these moments where you just see something goodness me that's quite striking their argument and i'm not defending them for a second it but their argument was that they didn't lie this was happening anyway and that's i did do this and they just had to make it credible and i didn't ever once see any discussion in the archives about the morality of it or the dangers or repercussions it was very matter of fact they just thought that they had to use that language in order to be in order to be credible and the bottom line is it wasn't a lie um so that's i think quite a striking and controversial visual example i'm not offending it to give you an insight into their mindset and what they're up to but the aim of it was to undermine nasa and he was the target of many of their operations and this sort of trying to hide the british hand in it is a constant challenge for the ird and as you say it's trying to get the phraseology right because you can't just transpose an english interpretation and just have it as a straight translation it needs to be in the colloquial and the slang way that the target audience speak and i think as you alluded to there one of the things i i found really interesting is these phantom organizations that the ird are producing which have no supporters whatsoever but give the impression there's this army of people there and the one that features quite strongly is the loyal African brothers.

30:23Rory Cormac:Yeah and they are a African resistance movement supposedly from some part of Francophone Africa and the aim of them is to expose what they call neo-imperialism and colonialism in the African continent being perpetrated by the Soviets and the increase in the Chinese. The aim is to basically launder intelligence. So if MR6 or GCHQ found out that a particular a Kenyan official, let's say, was quite close to the Chinese or taking some money from the Chinese. Now, the UK government couldn't say that because it's based on classified material. So they tend to use these fans from groups to launder the material with MI6's approval, GCHQ's approval, into a way that was usable and did decent damage.

31:22Rory Cormac:There were target politicians that they saw as being in the pockets of the Chinese and the Russians. They would target officials working for international organizations in Africa and regional bodies who they thought were on the take. The challenge, as you mentioned, was to do it in a convincing manner. And where this was, I think, quite different from the Second World War is the increasingly global nature of what's going on. Whereas in, we've talked about Sefton Delmo and the PWE earlier, a lot of that was for obvious reasons targeting the germans and so a lot of their writers were germans or dan war himself he lived in germany for a long time was fluent in german had affection for the german people and so you can have that expertise now suddenly you have a small number of people because it's not world war ii anymore but a much wider battlefield where one minute you're trying to to be muslim brotherhood and arab revolutionaries the next minute it's on it is almost literally the same people are pretending to be francophone african resistance fighters desperately trying to learn the colloquialisms desperately trying to read the local newspapers so they can write in that manner but i think which undermined impact for sure but it did they did get away with it there weren't many accusations that the brits were behind the loyal African brothers.

32:43Rory Cormac:At one point, there was a nice story, a bit of a farce, where the Americans and the Soviets started cooperating with the Lord African brothers, assuming they were real, and started doing their own Lord African brothers, forging them, and slagging off the Brits, which actually weirdly helped the British because it made increased liability, wouldn't it? If suddenly the Lord African brothers are writing pamphlets saying that the British are being imperialistic that's going to throw people off the scent that the brits are actually behind it and so reyner co-opted that in his next round and as you can see it's this wonderful interplay between the different propagandists their different forgeries almost talking to each other through these different forgeries but yeah the law african brothers were one of the the main conduits of british propaganda throughout the 1960s and only got ditched when they thought that old-fashioned anti-imperialism and nationalism was getting a bit old-fashioned in the end of 1960s and it was all about new left and that kind of thing so they ditched them and upgraded them for a younger newer more trendy model you've got leaders like nasa who are trying to be independent of the soviets and the british this is a period of decolonialization where previously british run territories are becoming independent.

34:08And Malaysia is one of those. And Sukarno, who is the leader of Indonesia, starts a war because he feels that it should be part of Indonesia there. And I think with Sukarno, this isn't one way traffic. He has his own black ops unit. So as you say, it's not just the british it's not just the soviets it's not just the us these independent nations are

34:35Rory Cormac:operating their own black ops then they were and i mean that confrontation between indonesia and malaysia the malaysians were at it as well they had black radio stations and then the australians were doing stuff so you have this this again this mess of of operations and rumors and propaganda all competing against each other but that was my favorite example of british propaganda against the Indonesians was an operation called The Voice from the Well. So to give a bit of context to the story, Sukane, as you say, was in charge and was waging an undeclared war against Malaysia, which dragged the British in.