‘Fakers’ by Rory Cormac review

In 1977 David Owen, then foreign secretary, closed the Information Research Department (IRD). He wanted, he said, to ‘end the grey area, which for far too long escaped proper scrutiny, falling neither in the open area of diplomacy nor in the closed area of spying’. The IRD had been founded in 1948, though it took up work that had been done during the Second World War by the Political Warfare Executive. Its aim was to spread information, or misinformation, that might be damaging to Britain’s enemies and to counter the attempts of those enemies to spread such information themselves. The IRD worked by trying to plant stories in newspapers and sometimes invented entire fictitious bodies through which false information might be conveyed. The IRD was a poor relation among the secret services. One suspects that its existence was tolerated mainly because it did not cost much money and did not do much harm. Oddly, one project promoted by those who worked for the IRD was to get someone to write a book on ‘black propaganda’. They justified these efforts on the grounds that they would expose Soviet duplicity, but one suspects that they just wanted their own world to be taken seriously. Now the IRD finally has its book. I am not sure, though, that Rory Cormac will induce anyone to take the IRD more seriously or that he takes it entirely seriously himself. He does not claim that his object of study had any great significance. His book is a succession of stories about operations that often descended into farce – especially when operations mounted by the IRD in different countries became tangled with each other. On one occasion, agents of the IRD heard that the Loyal African Brothers had denounced the CIA; they were disconcerted by this because the brotherhood in question was entirely fictitious and had, in fact, been dreamed up by themselves. On another occasion, the IRD sought to discredit President Sukarno of Indonesia by drawing attention to the fact that he was consorting with a ‘pretty young American girl’; in fact, Sukarno’s own intelligence services had concluded, correctly, that the girl was an American spy. Cormac captures the shabby absurdity of the world he describes. It was a world that would seem more familiar to readers of Len Deighton than those of Ian Fleming. The buildings from which the IRD operated were usually crumbling behind their grand facades. It always seems to be raining, and one can almost smell the damp raincoats and hear the drips from the leaking office roof. At one point, two detectives pursue their quarry across London on a ‘bright but showery spring day … squinting through the glare of fresh puddles’. The IRD was a smaller, more rackety organisation than the established intelligence services. Its employees had rarely been recruited over sherry in a university tutor’s study. Many had been journalists and knew something of the world that they were meant to be influencing. Most of all, the IRD hired accomplished liars. Such people are less common than is sometimes supposed. Deception requires a degree of empathy – its practitioners needed to put themselves into the heads of those whom they sought to deceive. They needed to pay attention to small details – an English speaker using a French typewriter is liable to make small mistakes that may reveal their identity. Not surprisingly, accomplished liars tended to lie to each other and the employees of the IRD seem, at least by the standards of middle-aged civil servants, to have been energetic adulterers. Are there any general conclusions to be drawn from the history of the IRD? It was not much involved in the battle against the Soviet Union. It was, after all, unlikely that the British would manage to plant stories in, say, Pravda and, in any case, what would have been the point of doing so? The brutalities of the Soviet regime were obvious, especially to those who were unlucky enough to live under it. No document damaged faith in the Soviet Union more than Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, which found its way into the public gaze even without help from Western intelligence agencies. The IRD mainly functioned in those places where carefully planted information might have most effect. This meant primarily Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It also worked in Northern Ireland during the early stages of the Troubles and occasionally got drawn into events in London, as when one of its members was required to give evidence during the trial of journalists who had published confidential documents about British arms sales to Biafra. It is hard to tell whether the IRD achieved anything. Black propaganda does not produce easily measurable results. Sometimes one suspects that the British establishment derived a strange frisson from the mere idea of deception. Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary from 1963 to 1973, was a solemn treasury mandarin who was fascinated by the margins of the intelligence world. Like a vicar who could not resist checking up on the progress of sin by having a quick glance at the News of the World, he read spy novels and once intervened personally when a single boy at Westminster School joined the International Marxist Group. Sometimes one feels that the dissemination of false information became a kind of work of art and that its practitioners came to value it – as people used to value making model buildings out of matchsticks – for its intricacy rather than because it served any purpose. My favourite of all the operations described in this book was carried out not by the British but by the North Koreans. At one point, they printed convincing copies of the London Times in which the cricket reports had been replaced by articles covering the 15th anniversary of the North Korean regime. The copies were then posted from Europe to random addresses in South Korea. No one seems to have asked whether South Koreans were interested in cricket. Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front LineRory CormacOxford University Press, 368pp, £25Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) Richard Vinen is Professor of History at King’s College London.