Report: UK ran secret ‘black propaganda’ campaign to sow division between Soviet Russia, Muslim allies

Newly declassified documents have revealed that the British government had for a long time run a secret propaganda campaign to sow division between Soviet Russia and its Muslim allies by using fake news reports and promoting anti-Moscow sentiment.

The documents, reported by The Guardian, highlighted a “black propaganda” campaign from the mid-1950s to late 1970s that mostly targeted African countries, the Middle East and parts of Asia with false news items that were ultimately intended to spread radical ideas about Soviet Russia.

The campaign, led by the UK’s Information Research Department (IRD), was established after World War II as a response to alleged Soviet propaganda targeting Britain and was coordinated with the CIA’s war propaganda operations.

The propaganda campaign was aimed at destabilizing the United Kingdom’s enemies during the Cold War by inciting violence, supporting racial tensions and encouraging hatred toward Israel.

The British daily said the extensive campaign attempted to turn Muslims against Moscow and occasionally used anti-Israel propaganda in order to appear authentic.

“These releases are among the most important of the past two decades,” Rory Cormac, an expert in the history of subversion and intelligence who stumbled upon the declassified documents when researching material for a book, told The Guardian.

“It’s very clear now that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and offensive. Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely exposing Soviet disinformation.”

He added, “The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across."

Cormac said a central tactic employed by the IRD was the forging of statements that appeared to be written by Soviet agencies at the time, including Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency.

The report said the IRD forged 11 such statements between 1965-1972, including one that followed the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab countries, primarily comprising Jordan, Syria and Egypt, during which the occupying regime invaded and captured the West Bank, al-Quds, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

In an attempt to sow division between Moscow and its Arab allies in the Middle East, the British organization created literature purporting to come from Muslim organizations that blamed Soviet Russia for the Israeli occupation.

“Why is the Arab nation at this time afflicted by so much sorrow and disaster? Why were the brave forces defeated in the jihad by the evil heathen Zionists?… The answers are [easily] to be found … we are departing fast from the right path, we are following the course chosen for us by the communist-atheists for whom religion is a form of social disease,” read a statement issued by the IRD.

The documents also revealed that the British organization used other faked material to accuse Moscow of a lack of support for Palestinian armed nationalist groups in the six-day war.

The IRD was shut down in 1977, but according to the report, the British government carried out similar disinformation operations for nearly another decade.

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