The War of Ideas
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘The propagandist writes solely with the intention of appealing to his readers’ interest. He aims to hit, because he cannot afford to miss.
Accordingly his work is based on the formulae of modern advertising, to whose task his own runs broadly parallel.
It differs only in that the propagandist is at greater pains than the copywriter to disguise his medium. The reader of an advertisement should never be provoked into feeling: “This is only an advertisement.” The reader of propaganda should, if possible, never be allowed even to suspect that he is reading propaganda.’
These words, written in April 1943, are contained in the syllabus used at the Special Training Schools of the Special Operations Executive, which were declassified in 2001. Variations of the same text were used in different schools, and this comes from the syllabus used by STS 103 in Canada, also known as Camp X, where members of SOE and OSS were trained together.
As this was document was used to train secret agents, its authors names do not appear anywhere in it, but we now know that two senior SOE instructors wrote it: Paul Dehn and Kim Philby. Dehn, a poet and novelist, became a well-known scriptwriter after the war, working on the screenplays of both The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Goldfinger. Philby went on to rise through the ranks of MI6 and was tipped by many to head it, but was eventually exposed as being a double agent working for the Soviets, having been recruited while a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s.
There is a chilling irony in the fact that Kim Philby was one of the writers of the syllabus used to train British secret agents during the war—and one has to wonder how much of it might be propaganda.
This is what James Jesus Angleton famously referred to as the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ that populates espionage. Even when being taught about propaganda, I may be subject to it.
In October 1953, a new monthly magazine was launched in Britain: Encounter. An Anglo-American publication, it was a literary magazine that also dabbled in politics: it was liberal but broadly anti-Communist. Its first editors were Irving Kristol and the poet Stephen Spender and it was funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). It soon became very influential, publishing the work of many of the most famous writers and thinkers of the day, including WH Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Bernard Russell. But in 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was a CIA front, and that most of the finances for the magazine had come straight from the CIA’s coffers, with the remainder being provided by the British Foreign Office’s innocuously named Information Research Department—a secret propaganda group.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, but fact, as the CIA itself now acknowledges. Stephen Dorril also discusses it at length in his excellent book, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The idea for the magazine grew from meetings between MI6 and the CIA, who wanted a way to influence the thinking of the liberal intelligentsia in Britain. The mastermind behind the idea was CIA officer Michael Josselson, a former member of the US Psychological Warfare Division. On the British side, the two leaders of the project were initially Tosco Fyvel, a member of the IRD who had been a close friend of George Orwell, and Malcolm Muggeridge, a senior journalist at The Daily Telegraph who also worked for MI6 ‘part time’. Muggeridge eventually grew disillusioned with the way the behind-the-scenes machinations and withdrew from the project. He was replaced by Goronwy Rees, another MI6 agent. But we now know that before the war Rees had passed information to the Soviets, who had given him the codenames FLEET and GROSS.
To ensure that Encounter’s propaganda was effective, its audience could not perceive that it was propaganda. As a result, the CIA and MI6 left the majority of the content alone. That way, the magazine established itself, and was taken by British intelligentsia as a genuine and unadulterated liberal voice. Articles that criticized censorship of the arts behind the Iron Curtain were quietly encouraged, and articles that criticized American foreign or domestic policy were quietly discouraged. Stephen Dorril also reveals in his book on MI6 how British agents write articles in magazines under pseudonyms, and discusses articles about the former Yugoslavia published in The Spectator in 1994.
As a result of this, figuring out today which of Encounter’s articles were written with no agenda and which were placed to plant ideas in readers’ minds is a difficult task. Similarly, some articles might have been sincerely meant by their authors, who had no idea of the magazine’s real backers, but were published either because they served as good propaganda, or because they served as good cover for other propaganda to be slipped between.
A good example of this dilemma is the issue of May 1966. It contains articles by, among others, Anthony Burgess, Eugène Ionesco, Robert Graves, Frank Kermode (by then an editor of the magazine), Tom Driberg, Malcolm Muggeridge and John le Carré. It’s an extremely impressive line-up of contributors, but also an intriguing one from a political perspective. Some of these writers might have been used, without their knowledge, by the CIA and MI6—and some might even have been used against the CIA and MI6.
An example of the latter could be Tom Driberg’s article. Driberg was a prominent journalist, Labour MP and later Baron Bradwell. He was also gay, and on visiting Moscow in 1956 to interview the British double agent Guy Burgess, he made the mistake of frequenting a lavatory behind the Metropole Hotel to try to pick up men. The KGB showed him ‘compromising material’ of these photographs, and he was recruited as an agent, codenamed LEPAGE. One of his first acts was the publication of a book on Burgess that claimed he had never spied for the Soviet Union. But Driberg broke off contact with the KGB in 1968, and his very dull 1966 article about Edith Sitwell is not a piece of propaganda for either side in the Cold War. Still, it is intriguing that a Soviet agent of influence was writing articles in an MI6/CIA-fronted magazine.
Another article in this issue was titled ‘Africa Without Tears’. It was written by Rita Hinden, a socialist South African academic at the University of London, in reaction to news of a series of political murders that had recently taken place in Nigeria—murders that turned out to be the firing shots in what would become a lengthy civil war. I don’t know whether Hinden wrote the article directly on the behest of the CIA or MI6, but I think it might well have suited their aims, as she essentially argued why everyone should turn a blind eye to the worsening political situation in Nigeria and, in effect, let them get on with it.
Hinden made this argument in a way that appears extremely heartless with the knowledge of the deaths that resulted in the civil war, but even without hindsight it is an example of the sort of bizarre double-think some intellectuals engaged in at the time. She developed her thesis over several thousand words, but I think a sense of what she was doing can be seen in the callousness of the title, and the article’s final paragraph:
‘As long as we continue to regard Africans as a “special case” to be courted, flattered, excused, expected-greater-things-from, grieved-over, explained-away, we will still not have recognized that they have, once and for all, severed the naval cord which used to bind us. And Africans will continue to regard us with the irritation—merging eventually into pity—which marks the attitude of grown-up children to their anxious, ridiculous parents.’
I’ve read this article many times, because my first novel Free Agent was set in the Nigerian civil war and I discovered a lot about it while researching. The article shocks me every time I read it. Hinden was the editor of another magazine, Socialist Commentary, which reflected the views of the pro-American right wing of the Labour party at the time, and was also involved in the Fabian Society’s journal, Venture, which was funded by the CCF. Michael Josselson described her as a ‘good friend of ours’ and said that the CIA relied heavily on her advice for their African operations.
This article might not have been CIA propaganda, but it was nevertheless CIA-funded, and I think it was propaganda. Its aim was to plant the idea in readers’ minds that post-colonial guilt was the real crime on which they should focus. She argued that a ‘guilt complex’ and ‘emotionalism’ was preventing people from seeing Africa in its proper perspective, and suggested that anyone who felt that Britain had a responsibility to its former colonies was being condescending to Africans—and perhaps even racist. But her claim to respecting Africans was insincere, a pretence that offered readers a convenient excuse for ignoring a growing crisis in a country that, in 1966, had been independent just six years, following 160 years of British rule. It’s not callous to be indifferent to the situation in Nigeria, she argued: it’s treating them as the adults they want to be. It plants some very unpleasant ideas, which were no doubt repeated at dinner parties across England in various forms in May 1966 and after.
The British government did become involved in the war in Nigeria, but mainly as a supplier of arms to the side they thought had the greater chance of winning and continuing their oil contracts following a ceasefire (the federal side). Many in Britain didn’t feel the way Rita Hinden did, and were deeply shocked and moved by the events that took place in Nigeria, and many did something about it. Many Nigerians were irritated by Western involvement but many others weren’t, as lives were saved by organizations such as the International Red Cross, Caritas and others.
Finally, there’s the article by John le Carré, which is perhaps the most intriguing of the lot. In 1966, he was already very much against American foreign policy, and it is hard to imagine a writer less likely to work for the CIA than him. Even unknowingly, his article goes against what both MI6 and the CIA would have liked the magazine’s readers to think, because although it attacks many of the problems in the Soviet Union, he concludes that ‘there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery’.
In February 1966, three months before this issue was published, le Carré had been interviewed on the BBC’s Intimations programme by Malcolm Muggeridge. In that interview, Muggeridge had revealed with a mischievous glint in his eye that he had been a spy during the Second World War. In fact, he was still involved in the espionage world. Le Carré didn’t reveal that he too had been an intelligence officer, and I suspect he had no idea he was then used by MI6 and others in service of an elaborate propaganda operation. The part he played in the operation was tiny: he wrote an article about James Bond.
Did Muggeridge put him up to it? Considering his connections with Encounter, his recent interview with le Carré and his own appearance in the same issue, it seems likely he played a part. In his article, le Carré also expanded on remarks he had made to Muggeridge in the BBC interview about Ian Fleming’s character:
‘I’m not sure that Bond is a spy… I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in this category at all. It seems to me that he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as is said, a licence to kill. He’s a man with unlimited movement, but he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s of no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States, or who is president of the Union of Soviet Republics. It’s the consumer goods ethic, really—that everything around you, all the dull things of life, are suddenly animated by this wonderful cachet of espionage: the things on our desks that could explode, our ties which could suddenly take photographs. These give to a drab and material existence a kind of magic which doesn’t otherwise exist.’
The previous year, le Carré had commented in a similar vein to Donald McCormick. In Who’s Who In Spy Fiction. McCormick quoted le Carré as saying that Bond would be ‘the ideal defector’ because ‘if the money was better, the booze freer and women easier over there in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot’.
Titled To Russia, with Greetings, his article in Encounter took the form of an open letter to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Union’s leading literary magazine of the day, concerning an article it had published several months earlier by a V. Voinov reviewing two of his novels, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Looking Glass War. Voinov had argued that, by assuming the role of impartial observer in the Cold War, le Carré was playing a subtler, but more insinuating, game of propaganda than that played by Ian Fleming, and that his fame in the West was a result of readers growing tired of Fleming’s ‘cheap romanticism’. Voinov also alleged that le Carré had been an intelligence agent.
Le Carré ignored the latter charge (which was true), but rebuffed the rest, pointing out that he was not an apologist for the Cold War at all, but opposed to the methods of both sides:
‘In espionage as I have depicted it, Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual’s right against the collective. That is Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because it took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the Communist’s evaluation of the individual’s place in society.’
The letter/essay ends with his analysis of Bond:
‘The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr Voinov, I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and political misery. And so he called me an apologist (he might as well have called Freud a lecher).
James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting, the kind of person in fact who emerges from Lonsdale’s diaries.
Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way.’
I discovered this article while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Rome about a decade ago (and some of the ideas in it influenced me when creating my own character, Paul Dark). But while I find le Carré’s comments on Bond fascinating, I think they address a popular perception of the character, especially as seen in the film adaptations, that isn’t borne out in Ian Fleming’s work. Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, is by no means a magic carpet taking us away from moral doubt. Yes, James Bond smokes, drinks and dresses well. But he is also betrayed and tortured, and wracked with doubts about his profession, motivations and more besides. Here is a speech Bond gives in the novel:
‘Take our friend Le Chiffre. It’s simple enough to say he was an evil man, at least it’s simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I’m afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.’
Fleming’s character is a patriot, but as can be seen here he is by no means an unblinking one. And if he were, how would that square with le Carré’s idea that he would defect to Moscow if he thought he could have a better time there?
In this passage and elsewhere, Fleming was influenced by earlier British thriller-writers, notably Geoffrey Household. But he also knew and was a great admirer of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Somerset Maugham. The influence of the latter is very clear in his short story Quantum of Solace, published in 1960—one could scarcely get further from the idea of ‘banishing perplexity with action’ than that story.
I think le Carré’s article acted as a lure: it was featured on the cover of the magazine, and his name would have attracted readers. But it also acted as cover, because readers of that article might also have then read, for example, Rita Hinden’s, and been influenced by it.
In his article, le Carré wrote of his own novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold:
‘I tried to touch new ground when I discussed the phenomenon of committed men who are committed to nothing but one another and the dreams they collectively evoke. At heart, I said, professional combatants of the Cold War have no ideological involvement. Half the time they are fighting the enemy, a good deal of the time they are fighting rival departments. The source of their energy lies not in the war of ideas but in their own desolate mentalities; they are the tragic ghosts, the unfallen dead of the last war.’
There were, doubtless, a lot of professional combatants who were involved in the Cold War in just this way. But the irony is that, unknown to le Carré, his own words were being used by men who did have an ideological involvement, and who were channeling their energies into the war of ideas.