To counteract Soviet propaganda at the beginning of the Cold War, the Foreign Office set up a clandestine organisation named the Information Research Department (IRD). It owed much to the campaign of psychological warfare waged against the Nazis which was led by the piratical journalist Sefton Delmer, nicknamed Seldom Defter. He had attempted to beat Goebbels at his own game and to undermine German morale by means of subversive radio broadcasts purporting to come from within the Third Reich. The IRD developed further techniques of black propaganda, forging documents, inventing fictitious political groups to sow discord and mistrust, carrying out assorted dirty tricks and disseminating fake news on an enormous scale. At its peak during the 1960s, the IRD had a budget of £1 million and employed over two hundred people. Yet only in the last few years has significant light been shed on its activities, thanks to the opening of nearly eight thousand hitherto classified official files. Rory Cormac’s book is the product of prodigious labour in the archives, although his writing does not always do justice to his research.

As the British Empire dissolved and both Russia and China tried to fill the power vacuum, the IRD made corresponding efforts to prevent the spread of communism in newly independent countries. The struggle to win hearts and minds was particularly fierce in Africa, where it took many forms. The Kremlin’s forgery factories issued documents which supposedly revealed that Portugal and the United States were plotting to overthrow Julius Nyerere’s non-aligned government in Tanzania. The Russians also sent letters full of anti-black abuse, apparently emanating from the Deep South of the United States, to African diplomats at the United Nations, who predictably responded by lambasting US racism. In its turn, the IRD used racial tensions to its advantage. It exploited a crackdown by Bulgarian police on students from Ghana and Kenya who were protesting about discriminatory treatment during their visiting programme. Posing as the communist-sponsored World Federation of Democratic Youth, the IRD defended Sofia’s police force and denounced the African students as primitive people who had only just ‘emerged from the jungle darkness of want’. 

The IRD’s most elaborate deception was achieved by the Loyal African Brothers, a phantom body conjured up to impersonate African nationalists hostile to communist neocolonialism. The Brothers issued a stream of leaflets designed to expose Russian and Chinese incursions, to smear left-wing politicians (sometimes with salacious gossip) and to push