Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War
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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 Mizzen to the comically absurd and dangerously controversial tactics deployed by a group of misfits and mavereks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the 1950s and 60s. 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 sort of 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.
As this is a something I suspect that many of our listeners won't be familiar with. The Information Research Department was the shadowy unit inside Britain's Foreign Office, which was charged essentially with prosecuting the propaganda aspects 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.
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