Smears, Fakes & Phantoms: Cold War Britain's Secret Propaganda Department

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

In Cold War Britain, a secret propaganda department saw its list of targets and tactics widen. Personnel inside the Information Research Department went beyond forgeries, fakes, and plants, conducting bold impersonations to smear critics and stoke tensions among foes. The team of refugees, ex-journalists, and even daughters of aristocrats hashed together a slew of audacious operations across Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. They also had their own internal dramas. Author Rory Cormac poured through thousands of recently declassified files to uncover and chronicle their work in his book, Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Frontline. 

So, Rory, you are in Nottingham. Welcome to SpyCast.

Rory Cormac: Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here. 

Sasha Ingber: So when the Information Research Department started in 1948, what exactly was its remit? 

Rory Cormac: The remit was to deliver unattributable propaganda against the Soviets. The British were worried that they were ceding the space in information warfare, and the Soviets were launching an onslaught, and the British government were not in a particularly well-prepared position to defend and fight back.

And it's always that classic question of how do you get a message to a target audience in a credible manner when that target audience doesn't trust you, basically. And lots of parts of the world didn't trust the British government in 1948, believe it or not, and so they had to come up with more creative ways, shall we say, of getting messages across by creating fake groups and things like that.

Sasha Ingber: So speaking of trust and creativity, uh, can you speak for a moment about whether or not it played nice with MI6 before we get into some of the details? 

Rory Cormac: It played very nicely with MI6, and it almost had a revolving door, particularly some of the, the darker parts of the Information Research Department.

Much of the department, it wasn't very, very big, but it had a small unit within it, um, which went by various boring names to try to throw people off the scent. The Special Editorial Unit, for example, it was called at one point. And this team, they were- 

Sasha Ingber: So beautifully boring. 

Rory Cormac: I know. Well, even the, even the whole Information Research Department, that's, that's a boring name, hoping that nobody looks too closely.

And this special team- 

Sasha Ingber: And is that why Putin, you know, I think about Russia's, uh, Information Research Agency, which of course promoted or put together all kinds of influence campaigns. It's almost like it took a cue from this. 

Rory Cormac: Exactly. It's, it's the exact same principle. MI6 would provide the bits of intelligence that the propagandists would use.

So MI6 would have a source who might uncover a bit of friction or a, or a titbit that could be used, um, to expose some Soviet front organization or covert operation, and MI6 would pass it to the Information Research Department, who essentially would launder it through the international press or through, with MI6's permission, it should be said, um, or through these fake groups to get that piece of intelligence to the appropriate target audience.

Sasha Ingber: Now, you had found that one of the key personnel inside the Information Research Department was an Austrian refugee named Hans Welser, and he had actually been, uh, interned by MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence service. Tell us more about him. 

Rory Cormac: The people that staffed this unit were some of the most remarkable, colorful characters because it operated slightly outside of the regular foreign office structures and tight constraints of recruitment, so it could hire some more eccentric journalists and people of, of that sort and, um, Welser was one such person.

He was a refugee. He was a journalist refugee from Austria, from the Nazi state shortly before the war and when he married, he quickly married an, an English lady, and he was always very opportunistic. Clever man, opportunistic, and a bit of a social climber. The files show, for example, that his new in-laws were quite suspicious that maybe Welser hadn't married this wealthy, young English lady, uh, for reasons of love, uh, because he got his, his green card pretty much instantly afterwards and was allowed to stay.

Um, he then was interned at the start of the Second World War because he was, uh, an enemy alien, as in the, in the jargon of the time. Uh, locked up in a camp and inside that camp were a few Nazi sympathizers and so MI5 started to ask questions and once again, Welser the opportunist managed to, um, turn it to his advantage and prove his loyalty, prove, um, his, his abilities and soon afterwards he was out and he was working for British propaganda this time and he worked his way up gradually, uh, to become the foreign office's special operations advisor no less, and he was the central character.

He was in charge. He was the disinformation expert in the British government for the best part of two decades and he t- took it incredibly seriously as you can imagine. He quite, he liked to cultivate this image of himself as the propaganda hitman going around, uh, cultivating campaigns against the Queen's enemies wherever they may be found around the entire world and he, he relished this, this image.

I mean, in some ways he was, uh, he was faking it and fitting in in his own, in his own way because he, I mean he's an outsider. He took British citizenship. Colleagues would note how he would deliberately dress in a very stereotypically British manner and he would deliberately try to use British phrases and take on British, uh, opinions, but he never could quite shake that Germanic accent.

But he was, he was in charge. He was the number one and a very, very influential character 

Sasha Ingber: And so he came quite a long way from being detained by MI5 to now working inside the government as this go-to man for forgeries, for fakes, and you also told me that he and his boss essentially swapped wives inside this office.

Can we just take a quick detour because this is such a strange detail about this man? 

Rory Cormac: We can. It's an, it's an interesting one, isn't it? And again, it goes to the, I dunno, is it opportunism? Is it moral ambiguity? I dunno. There's something about his, something about his character. He worked very closely with his wartime boss, a man called Leslie Sheridan, and his wife.

Leslie Sheridan's wife was a woman called Adelaide who worked for MI6 and worked very closely during the war with, with Welser. And Welser and his wife were good friends. They were a foursome that would go on holiday, uh, together right into the, into the Cold War. One year, one summer, they came back from one of their holidays, uh, with a black eye and different wives.

And that, and that was that. It was all very strange. 

Sasha Ingber: I, I, like, did they go to Vegas or something? That is, I mean, how? 

Rory Cormac: And the fu- the funny thing is you then look at the, the marriage register, and they, they married each other's wives in the same district. And you, you, you look at the document, and there's one person's name, and literally two, three months later, there's the other person's name.

It was that quick. Uh, it was all very surprising. But then Welser and his new wife, his boss's ex-wife, became a power couple because she was in charge of running all the fake news agencies, and they became this power couple at the heart of British propaganda. And the poor ex-boss, uh, they were no longer friends, and he sadly died not long afterwards.

Sasha Ingber: Wow, so some, some real drama inside this office. Now, as you talk about Welser and his wife are now running journalists like they're spies 

Rory Cormac: I, I like this because it shows the overlaps in tradecraft a little bit between spies, journalists, propagandists. And Welser had a star agent. You know, he wasn't technically a spy, although he worked very closely with MI6, and he had a star agent, and this was a man called László, László Taubinger, who was a journalist.

He was a Hungarian refugee working out of- 

Sasha Ingber: I was gonna make a Casablanca joke, 'cause it sounds like we're talking about Victor Laszlo- ... but I digress. 

Rory Cormac: And, um, the- he was working in Vienna as a correspondent for various central newspapers, and what Welser would do would feed him bits of MI6 intelligence when it, it was gossip often.

It was a bit of intelligence that there was a fight between two different national delegations in a hotel at a Soviet front, uh, organization conference, and, and Taubinger would, would run it under his own name in a particular G- German newspaper or a Swiss newspaper, and then it was, in today's parlance, go viral.

But the problem was Taubinger was quite a eccentric personality himself. He was a great journalist, but he was constantly worried. He was miserable. He was ill. And so Welser had to, had to run him like an intelligence officer. He had to fly out to Vienna. He had to meet him, wine him, dine him, pick him up off the floor.

And at one point, Taubinger was going blind, and you can imagine the panic in the heart of the British propaganda team when their star agent was losing his eyesight. So they flew him over under a code name to give him eye surgery in a very fancy British hospital, and Welser picking up the tab personally.

Um, so he spends, you know, a good 15, 20 years cultivating and running this, this star agent, who ended up having some quite big scoops and, uh, exposing a fair bit of Soviet front organization activity across Central and Western Europe 

Sasha Ingber: So this actually did make a fighting difference in the disinformation battle against the Soviets?

Rory Cormac: It did. I mean, I can give you a couple of examples. Uh, there was a, a, a Soviet-sponsored conference, and the Cubans weren't going to come, and it was all a bit- there was a bit of tension with inside the communist camp. And it was László  Taubinger, no less, who exposed the fact that the Cubans weren't going to come.

Uh, he was the one who broke the story based entirely on a bit of intelligence that MI6 had, had gleaned. Uh, and that, that story was picked up all, all over the world. And Taubinger was very pleased, but he was also then absolutely terrified because the Soviets started to ask questions about his sources.

And Taubinger was worried that the Soviets might think his sources were people back in Hungary, um, who would then be put at risk. And he was writing to Welser and saying, um, "I can't tell them my real source because my real source is MI6, and the Soviets are starting to ask questions about my relatives back in Hungary. What do I do? Help." And Welser had to try and navigate some of those, uh, moral and operational difficulties. 

Sasha Ingber: So in a way, these journalists had to protect their own sources and methods just like a real intel officer. Now, another important person in this office was a former journalist by the name of John Rayner.

Who was he? 

Rory Cormac: Rayner was another fabulously interesting and eccentric character. You're right, he was a former journalist, a, a prodigy. He was credited with turning around the fortunes of one of Britain's biggest tabloid newspapers. He was then snapped up by wartime propaganda organizations, and he was in charge of spreading rumors behind enemy lines during the Second World War.

He was, um, an eccentric character, a womanizer, a hard drinker. He was on, I think by the time we meet him in the 1960s, on his third wife. Um, great company, slightly disreputable company, I think. Uh, and the state was always slightly worried that he might be a bit loose-lipped, especially after a few glasses or bottles of, uh, of wine.

But he was, he was Welser's number two. He was in charge of the creative output and actually on the more operational side of things. If Welser was the strategic boss, Rayner was number two and was, um, running a lot of these operations. 

Sasha Ingber: I'm curious to know what their dynamic was like because there are certain ways that they seem to have commonalities, but then there are also some real character differences.

Rory Cormac: Yeah, they were both outsiders trying to fit into the British establishment and neither entirely trusted by the regular diplomats in the foreign office. But I think it was quite a tense relationship because, uh, Rainer was 10 years older than Welser. Rainer was a l- lighthearted, joking, hard-drinking womanizer who loved rude wordplay, who loved double entendre.

He, his office wall was plastered with, uh, newspaper clippings that he thought, and headlines that he thought were a little bit rude, um, that made him chuckle like a schoolboy. And also Rainer, being older than Ra- than Welser, um, had a much more prominent wartime position. He was quite senior in World War II, whereas Welser was, was quite junior, and suddenly you've got this role reversal.

Welser's in charge, and Welser is much stricter, a bit more austere, doesn't suffer fools gladly, and I think there is a little bit of tension, uh, between the two of them. They're an odd double act at the heart of the British secret state. 

Sasha Ingber: And you also found, speaking of Rainer being a womanizer, that it contributed to this sort of incestuous, promiscuous office environment because he ended up having an affair with a forger?

Rory Cormac: He did. A woman, a very talented woman by the name of, uh, Helen Dunlop, who started off, I think, in a secretarial role and worked her way up. But at some point they started an affair. They ended up getting married. She was 20 years younger than him, I think. Um, they ended up getting, getting married 20 odd years later, and yeah, she was...

She became one of the, the operational team as far as we can tell, and was involved in at least, at least one forgery. So yeah, it was a, it was a strange place with w- wife swaps and affairs and slightly promiscuous and certainly not aligned to the stereotypical image we might have of the British Foreign Office of the 1960s.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. It's funny, you know, when I worked in counter disinformation at the US State Department, I'm just gonna state for the record- ... our office was nothing like that. We did not have that much fun. We did not have any of the juicy gossip. But women also worked there. Can you tell us about who they were? 

Rory Cormac: They did, because the, the Foreign Office, the regular Foreign Office had, uh, frankly sexist recruitment practices, um, barring a lot of women from, from serving and particularly from progressing.

But this unit was separate, and so they were able to be much more flexible in their recruitment practices and, and, and take on a range of women from, uh, very smart daughters of aristocrats, all the way through to scruffy recent graduates and, and linguists and specialist writers. There were, there were some very interesting and, and talented characters who became quite, quite senior.

For example, one woman was called Anne Elwell, and she rose to become head of the Information Research Department's Middle Eastern section. And she was a, a formidable, clever, talented, warm, uh, woman who could speak at least three, four different languages. She was an opera lover. She had trained as a book binder.

She had trained as an actress. She had worked during the war on, um, script writing and propaganda films. So she was well able to move into this, into this world of propaganda, and her job involved in part suggesting different, different covert operations, different black propaganda operations to Welsa and to Rayner. 

Sasha Ingber: Let's talk about some of their operations now.

You found one from 1966 in Indonesia, and I think the right word to describe this is macabre. Can you talk about this operation? 

Rory Cormac: They were trying to target President Sukarno, whom neither the Brits nor the Americans, uh, had much time for because they were concerned that he was getting too close to the communists.

And in 1966, there was an attempted coup against him, and as part of the coup, uh, the plotters, uh, killed a few Indonesian generals, and they threw their, their bodies down a well. And this then led to a, a crackdown against, against communists. And Britain thought, it was the British ambassador actually, thought, "How can we encourage the crackdown against communists and put more pressure on Sukarno and make his position gradually less tenable?"

And the idea, as you say, was a particularly macabre one, where they thought, "Let's pretend to be the ghosts of the dead generals down in the well." And so- They, they c- wrote this script, uh, saying, "We, we are the dead generals. We will rise up. We will get our vengeance on the coup plotters. We will get our vengeance on, um, on the, the guilty men, and, and our, from..."

And it's, it's all very, it's very dramatic. 

Sasha Ingber: And I feel like very 1960s in a way. Nobody's like, "Hey, maybe, maybe this isn't the best course of action here." 

Rory Cormac: No, to start with, they were, they were quite, they were quite keen, and they thought, "Well, how can we get an echo chamber?" Eventually, though, the British propagandist in London started to think, "Hang on a minute, maybe trying to impersonate the ghosts of dead generals might be a bit much and might be a bit blasphemous and might backfire." But by this point, the ambassador in Jakarta in Indonesia, who was really keen, he fancied himself as a little James Bond, um, was getting a bit carried away. He'd already got the recordings, and he'd already personally dropped them in plant pots in various hotel lobbies around Jakarta to be picked up by local broadcasting stations.

So by the time London tried to call it off, it was, it was too late. And as far as I can tell, some of those recordings did end up being played on black radio stations by Malaysia, um, to target, to target Sukarno. Um, so once you start something in this world, it can be quite hard to, uh, to, to contain it and to stop it.

Sasha Ingber There's a good crack pot joke in there somewhere. We're still in the 1960s, and now you've also stumbled upon files that show that hippies were weaponized in Bulgaria. Break this down for us. 

Rory Cormac: You'll like this. So pic- picture the scene, 1968, and it's the height of hippie mania, Beatles mania, all that kind of thing.

And the propagandists had a standing order to try to expose the, the World Youth Festival, which was a m- massive international gathering of, of young people from around the world, uh, as being covertly sponsored and organized by the Soviets. And the creative thinkers, I think it was John Rayner, thought to himself, "Right, what, how can I discredit this, this festival? How can I expose it? How can I make life difficult for the organizers?" 

And then he looks around him, saw Beatle mania, and thought, "What, what don't communists like? Uh, hippies. Communists don't like free love, sex, drugs, rock 'n' rolls, and hippies. So let's, uh, make life difficult for them." And the operation, uh, which genuinely happened, involved the propagandists creating a fake group of hippies and writing, uh, promotional materials, uh, to encourage hippies from around the world to descend on mass into Sofia to make life difficult for the communists.

And the text was just ridiculous. It said things like, um, "Come to Bulgaria, the land without fuzz. Come closer to the contemplative cannabis culture of the East. Bulgaria, the land where boys and girls get together." And you can almost hear them sniggering and the wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And they posted this.

Um, MI5 was horrified. MI5 wrote, "Ugh," in big letters- ... on top, on top of it. Um, but they posted it. So 700 odd people, uh, including journalists, students unions, all, all sorts of people, in the hope that they would encourage people to, to dissent. And even if it wouldn't encourage people to arrive in Sofia, um, they hoped it would make the Bulgarian authorities worried enough that hippies might turn up to just add that extra bit of disruption, that extra bit of paranoia and, and throw them off course.

Which it did. Um, the Bulgarian authorities, uh, were terrified of The Beatles turning up, were terrified of hippies arriving, and as part of their counter preparations, deported, um, every sex worker they could find from Sofia to a resort in the, in the Black Sea, I think. 

Sasha Ingber Yeah. I'm picturing the bell-bottoms, the flower crowns, the chaos of it all.

Rory Cormac: Well, they were. W- Welser referred to them as, as long-haired oafs. He said, "If we can, if we can send the long-haired oafs and their lovers, um, it can't do any harm," or, or, or something like that. And the Bulgarian descriptions of these hippies, uh, was even more, uh, de- derogatory with their drums and their, uh, guitars.

They were, they were not fans, shall we say, of, of counterculture, believe it or not. 

Sasha Ingber: Wow. So flower power used in a very different context. These are such bizarre operations and, and some of them are a little bit less funny than others. There was a controversial effort that you came across around the same time in the '60s, and, uh, this was something that was meant to, um, interfere in Yemen's civil war.

Rory Cormac: What they were trying to expose was President Nasser, the leader of Egypt, had used, and he had, it was true, had used chemical weapons against one of the sides the, in the, in the Yemeni civil war. And the British wanted the, the Arab world, the Muslim world to, to know this. But they also knew that if they came out openly and said it, much of the Arab world who they wanted to convince would not believe them.

They thought, "Well, how can we make it credible?" And they decided to do a forgery. They forged a, a leaflet in the name of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamists, uh, to say, "Nasser has done this. Um, he is a, he's a bad Muslim. Um, he has killed lots and lots of innocent, uh, Muslim men, women, and children.”

However- To make it credible, every single Muslim Brotherhood pamphlet or document at the time, uh, was laced with vile and violent antisemitism. And so they use phrases, um, such as, you know, "Nas is a bad Muslim. These weapons should have been used against Israel instead," for example. They thought the Muslim Brotherhood are saying these things anyway, so we're just, we're just trying to be as authentic as possible.

Um, but clearly it, it raises a whole load of, uh, ethical issues. Essentially they're inciting, uh, antisemitism and violence, which I think is pretty problematic, uh, for many reasons. 

Sasha Ingber: Right. 

When we come back, a traitor on the inside and what became of the department.

When we talk about Bulgaria, Yemen, Indonesia, we're not talking about Russia, which is specifically where this essentially is emanating from. Why is it that this team was not targeting the centerpiece of the Soviet Union? 

Rory Cormac: I think it, it was a hard target. I think it was probably a bit too difficult. I think there was too much censorship.

Britain didn't have the great sources on the ground inside the Soviet Union, and the Soviet, the KGB was rounding up journalists, was rounding up all sorts of collaborators, and it was just, it was too difficult to get those, to get those sources, and perhaps too risky and too, uh, provocative as well. Maybe they were worried that if they got found out, it might be a bit, they might cross a line, a bit too escalatory.

Um, so what they did was then instead they focused their energies on, on the global south, on the battle for post-imperial influence where they had better sources, they had better channels, um, and they were trying to, uh, expose Soviets and indeed Chinese, in their words, neo-imperial encroachments into parts of, say, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

And I think it was just, it was just a bit easier doing it down there than, than targeting Moscow directly. 

Sasha Ingber: Having existed for decades, did the Information Research Department, did their operations ever get exposed? 

Rory Cormac: They did. A couple of times they did. Um, but the wonderful thing was that they were able to exploit it.

Oppor- they were so opportunistic, they were so creative, and each time someone tried to expose, they would use it in their own, uh, to, to, to their own advantage. I can give a, give a couple of quick examples. One of them, there was a, a fake group called the Freedom for Africa Movement, and the, the propagandists used this, it was a British fake group, to expose any African politician who was getting a little bit too close to the communists.

And one, one day, the, the Soviets, um, they forged their own version of a Freedom for Africa Movement pamphlet. Um, they maybe got wind that it might have been British or maybe American they might have wrongly thought, and they forged their own version, uh, where in the same language, same, same papers, same everything else, uh, exposed CIA bribery of African politicians.

And 

Sasha Ingber: the- So this was just a free-for-all vehicle at this point. 

Rory Cormac: Yeah. And then the British are reading it thinking, "Hang on a minute, I don't recognize this. This group is fake." "And we create them." And, uh, so what the British did, uh, instead of, uh, you know, warning the Americans or thinking, "Oh, the Soviets are onto us," they built on it.

They, for the next one, they said, "Yes, in our last episode, we did expose the CIA. This proves that we are not a Western organization, and we are a holistic group of concerned Africans." And they tried to use it to their advantage to create this extra level of authenticity and, and credibility. And it happened time and time again.

Each, each time there was a risk of exposure because propaganda, you know, it takes on a life of its own, um, and it's very difficult to, to control. And so if you're creative- You can try to, um, exploit it and leverage the twists and turns to, to one's own advantage, and the IRD, uh, continually tried to do that to the best of their ability.

Sasha Ingber: I feel like we've come up with many good ideas for some twisted dark comedy. And now in the early days of the IRD, there was a man who had worked there. He was a British producer. He was a British diplomat and spy, and I'm talking about Guy Burgess, who was part of the Cambridge Five, who was sharing intelligence with the Soviets.

When he worked inside the IRD, how much was he sharing? Did he do any damage to this organization? 

Rory Cormac: Burgess must have passed on a lot of tidbits, a lot of gossip, a lot of tradecraft. We've, he must have told the Soviets about the existence of the Information Research Department, although maybe, I mean, he was a bit of a drunk, so maybe he got confused and there was a lot of gobbledygook.

The Soviet files suggest that they didn't really know the institutional makeup of it particularly all that effectively. But what Burgess must also have passed on was some of the methods and tradecraft that the British were, were doing. For example, Bur- Burgess would have told them that MI6 was circulating documents in the name of different fake groups.

He would have told them that Britain was recruiting journalists and laundering intelligence through different journalists, that Britain had, uh, covertly controlled news agents, for example. Now, this would have become out of date fairly quickly, and I don't think Burgess knew any of the names of these fake groups.

But the principles, the, the, the methods and the tactics, and the fact that the British were operating increasingly in the, in the Global South and stepping up the fight against the Soviets there, that all remained true. And, um, it's very likely that Burgess would have tipped off the Soviets about all of that type of thing.

Sasha Ingber: By the time that Burgess flees to Moscow, the IRD is still in existence. Are they having to do any damage control? Is their credibility now being questioned? 

Rory Cormac: They were surprisingly blasé about it. They, occasionally it would come up. Occasionally someone would ask if the name of a particular fake group dated back to Burgess's time, and if it did, they would think, "Well, may- maybe we shouldn't use this because the Soviets might well know."

But Welser, and I don't know if this was opportunism or naivety or just being a bit, a bit blasé, um, on at least one occasion he, he lied slightly to his bosses and said that these, these groups didn't go back that far and therefore the Soviets, uh, would never know about it and so they could carry on regardless.

They didn't take it too seriously, I think because they knew that these, the Soviets would a- assume these methods and techniques anyway. And I also think because, um, in the world of propaganda, if the Soviets tried to expose something, Britain could expose something back or exploit it or leverage it for advantage and, um, the game continued.

Sasha Ingber: So how successful or effective were they ultimately, and how did that affect their resources, their funding to continue these forgeries, these fakes, these operations?

Rory Cormac: This was the million-dollar question, and it was ultimately the downfall of the team. And we know it's one of those timeless challenges, prove the effect of a particular propaganda operation. It's incredibly difficult to demonstrate that it was this operation, particularly when it taps into existing actors, movements, ideas.

How do you isolate the one operation? And what, what the Brits tried to do was they, they counted. They counted how many newspaper articles their operation led to, and they'd say to their bosses, um, "Look, this one forgery has generated coverage in five newspapers in four different countries," say. And for a while, that was, that was okay.

But as the British state declined and as the Foreign Office were feeling the, the, the pinch in their wallets, and managerial culture increased in the world of metrics and spreadsheets, it wasn't enough anymore, and the bosses came back and said, "Look, that, that, that proves nothing. It doesn't matter how many newspaper articles you got. Show us that those newspaper articles led to behavioral change. Prove to us that your operation ended the career of these politicians." 

And the, the British propagandists would say, "Okay, well, we targeted this politician, and this politician is no longer in power. Therefore, we think that, that, that was down to us. That's a win." 

The Foreign Office would come back and say, "Well, uh, prove it. How do you know?" And they, they could never quite answer it. And so the Foreign Office then cut their resources because they couldn't prove it, which then as an institution leads to a, a death spiral, and, um, gradually they struggled, uh, more and more and more, and these operations dwindled by the, by the late 1970s 

Sasha Ingber: Right.

You found that the office shut down in 1977, but some of that work continued into the '80s through what was called a Special Producer Unit. Why did this work ultimately carry on? 

Rory Cormac: Yeah, another lovely boring name. So- It's 

Sasha Ingber: like a nod to the Broadway show, The Producers- ... somehow, but... 

Rory Cormac: I, I like, I quite like that.

But what we found was that the Special Producer Unit, as it was now called, escaped almost unscathed, and it continued. Whether ministers knew about this, I'm less sure, and I think there's, there are a couple of bits of evidence that they were hiding their existence slightly. When, when, when one of the ministers came to do an inspection, it was a, a hide under the tables type, uh, type game.

Um- I- But-

Sasha Ingber: Given what we've already talked about, I very much believe this to be the case. 

Rory Cormac: Um, but the re- the reason they, they kept going was, uh, one, they needed to maintain that, that nucleus of skills and expertise, because once you lose this type of experience, it's very, very difficult to bring it back again, and they worried that if there was going to be a, another hot war or World War III, they needed to have something that they could expand quickly rather than trying to start from scratch.

So that, that was one reason. And a second reason it stayed was, um, they, it, they did still think occasionally it, it could be useful. So even into the, the early 1980s, they were still creating the odd, the odd fake group to keep the, keep the skills and the spirit alive 

Sasha Ingber: Mm-hmm. So a lot of this had to do with the fear of losing the institutional knowledge of how to do this work.

Rory Cormac: Yeah, because these people trace their, their skills back to the Second World War. And when they retired in the mid-1970s, um, this was a massive loss of experience and, and changing of the guard, um, which is ultimately, ultimately irreplaceable. And we don't know what happened, um, from the mid-1980s onwards.

The files go cold, and, uh, who knows what happened to that small little nucleus of specialists that counted as information. 

Sasha Ingber: You just have to look under a few more desks, Rory. But speaking of files, before we sat down together, you had shared with me that you were utterly gobsmacked to get this content, to be able to get access to these documents, and to see so much that was completely un-redacted.

Rory Cormac: It was crazy. I was stunned. I sat there looking at names, looking at methods, looking at agents, um, literally listing the, the fake news agencies, naming the British associate editors of different British newspapers who were conduits of covert material. I 

Sasha Ingber: mean- And some of these people are, I imagine, still alive.

I mean, right? 

Rory Cormac: Yeah, one or, one or two. Um, and the other reason I was really, really shocked was how much personal detail and, and colorful detail, um, and operational detail. You know, most intelligence history books when we're using files, we don't have MI5 writing, "Ugh" on top of a, on top of a document. We don't have this back and forth between, um, between the people writing this, writing this stuff.

That's why it was a, a real pleasure to, to write up the lives and the operations and the, the planning in such a colorful manner. Um, it was, it was great. It was great fun. 

Sasha Ingber: Rory, thank you so much for talking about this really bizarre little nook inside the Foreign Office, taking us through all of it.

Rory Cormac: Thanks so much. Been great fun. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.