by Mark Curtis
In August and September 1965, Mustafa Barzani, president of the largest Kurdish group in Iraqi Kurdistan, claimed to the British Prime Minister that Iraq had purchased large quantities of toxic gases for use against Kurdish inhabitants'. Barzani appealed to Wilson to stop arming Baghdad and to intercede with the regime to 'prevent the latter carrying out their alleged intention of launching gas attacks against the Kurds'.48 No British reply was sent to this letter, or to others sent by Barzani; the British refused to have any formal contacts with the Kurds.
This refusal came despite the understanding that the Kurds had good intelligence connections in the Baghdad regime. It also came in the knowledge that in September 1964 the Iraqi Ministry of Defence had approached the British, West German, US and Soviet governments with a preliminary enquiry for an order of 60,000 gas masks 'for urgent delivery'. Finally, British officials received 'an account which we believe to be reliable, of the Army's plan for putting an end to the Kurdish problem'.49
Moreover, the British embassy wrote in September that:
The Iraqis would have little humanitarian compunction about using gas if things were (as they are) going badly for them. They would probably believe they could hush up the incidents and might not worry very much about world opinion. They are certainly showing a strong current interest in chemical warfare. We believe they may well have stocks of some gas (probably of the riot control variety) and likely looking cylinders have actually been seen.
Although the memo went on to say that it was difficult to see the Iraqis using gas in current circumstances, it also stated that, 'on the other hand there is ample evidence that the Kurds are genuinely worried at the possibility that gas will be used'.50 The interesting revelation from this is British unwillingness to intercede with Baghdad anyway even given major concerns and evidence.
The Baathist regime that came to power in Iraq for the first time in February 1963 was itself overthrown in another military coup in November. By this time, Britain had reduced much of its earlier backing for the regime; but the record clearly states that this was not for humanitarian reasons.
"They began well', the British ambassador said in December 1963 after the regime had been replaced. The problem was that the Baathists eventually pursued similar policies to Qasim, including an Arab nationalist attempt to unite Syria, Egypt and Iraq in the United Arab Republic. Before long, the new regime had 'alarmed the business community with their hints of nationalisation of industry, banking and trade'.51
It was not until 1968 that the Baath party, following a succession of governments through the 1960s, took power again – and this time held it until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The 1968 coup brought into power the Baathist General Ahmed al-Bakr, who had been Prime Minister after the February 1963 coup. Saddam Hussein became Vice President, before taking over from al-Bakr in 1979. The 1968 coup was also backed by the CIA, which immediately developed close relations with the ruling Baathists.
The Baath regime of 1968 was also immediately welcomed by Britain: 'The new regime may look to the United Kingdom for military training and equipment and we should lose no time in appointing a defence attache', the ambassador in Baghdad wrote. The regime's new Defence Minister, General Tikriri, was invited to the Farnborough Air Show and was told by the ambassador that 'it seemed to me we now had an opportunity to restore Anglo/Iraqi relations to something of their former intimacy'. In reply, 'General Tikriri said that during the Baathist regime of 1963 he had greatly appreciated the cooperative attitude of HMG'.52
From these roots emerged the Saddam regime, and Britain's support for it.
PART II
PROPAGANDA, REALITY
6
PSYCHOLOGICAL
WARFARE BEYOND IRAQ
The government's propaganda campaign over Iraq is not a oneoff, but part of a wider strategy to mislead the public over its foreign-policy objectives. It is the culmination of the lessons learned from numerous British military interventions. Indeed, this strategy goes beyond propaganda; it is more properly called 'perception management' – a polite term for thought control. It is designed to counter the major threat to Britain's foreign policy: the public.
The campaign has two major elements. First, the constant rhetoric about moral motives and the most noble of intentions, which permeates every speech and public comment by British ministers. All governments have, of course, done this; but New Labour has taken proclamations about its moral purpose to new heights. Second, and the subject of this chapter, are specific 'information operations', which are viewed as an increasingly critical part of government policy, including military interventions.
Information operations
The leading independent critic of such 'information operations' in Britain is Professor David Miller of Strathclyde University. Miller refers to the strategy as one of 'information dominance' which amounts to a 'philosophy of total propaganda control'. Such operations are already a formal part of US military strategy. According to the Pentagon, the US must be able 'to conduct prompt, sustained and synchronised operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air and information'.
The US army defines information operations as
The employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security . . . to affect or defend information and information systems, and to influence decision making.
Miller argues that such a strategy goes beyond traditional conceptions of propaganda – which involve crafting a message and distributing it through the media – to incorporating, gathering, processing and deploying information via compu- ters, intelligence and military command and control systems. The US already has 15 'information dominance centers' in the US, Kuwait and Baghdad.
One aspect of the strategy is the system of 'embedding' journalists with the military, as in Iraq, to make journalists dependent on the military and ensuring that 'friendly information' is reported. Another is direct attacks on journalists reporting 'unfriendly information'. This has now become a permanent feature of the recent Anglo-US wars, as demonstrated by strikes against Reuters and al-fazeera offices in Baghdad in the 2003 invasion, against the al-Jazeera office in Kabul during the bombing of Afghanistan, and the attacks on the Serbian television building in Belgrade during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.1
According to David Miller, the British government has significantly stepped up its machinery of 'information operations' in recent years, and has 'comprehensively overhauled' its 'internal and external propaganda apparatus', outside of any significant media or parliamentary scrutiny. In 2002, the British army stated that in future conflicts, 'maintaining moral as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection'. Two years earlier, armed-forces minister John Spellar had commented that 'we shall depend increasingly, not on simple numerical superiority in firepower, but on information dominance'.2
The Foreign Office has rebranded its propaganda work as 'public diplomacy'. Following a review of its activities in this area, it concluded that the government needed an 'overarching public diplomacy strategy' that would shape 'the core messages that we wish to put across to our target audiences'. Such a strategy is considerably aided by the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank established by New Labour. Its director Mark Leonard is one of the most passionate intellectual articulators of this new form of propaganda. One of the major threats identified by Leonard, for example, is 'the rise of global NGOs and protest movements' which 'have changed the nature of power and put even greater constraints on the freedom of action of national governments' – have increased, that is, the danger that the public might influence policy.3
The Foreign Office's 'public diplomacy' operation now costs £340 million per year for operations based in London alone, excluding those undertaken in embassies around the world. The operation is 'entirely outside of democratic co
ntrol' and works 'on the basis that anything goes so long as it is calculated that it can be got away with'.4
More traditional activities – such as unattributably planting information in the domestic and foreign press – continue under the headings 'grey' and 'black' propaganda operations. These stories then get recycled, and are used by governments as 'proof of otherwise unsubstantiated claims.5
Britain's leading analyst of MI6, Stephen Dorril, has written that 'intelligence agencies continually create alarmist disinformation'. Examples from the past include: the story of 'red mercury', the mysterious substance that was meant to be a source of cheap nuclear weapons for terrorists; the nuclear artillery shells that supposedly went missing from Soviet southern states; and the 'Islamic bomb' which terrorists were meant to be building to be in use by 1995.
'Since 11 September', Dorril argues, 'the intelligence agencies with the aid of gullible journalists, editors desperate for endless copy and politicians on a crusade have constructed a truly global conspiracy theory'. At the top is Osama bin Laden, a mastermind as in every Ian Fleming fantasy, who is meant to control a vast network of thousands of terrorists across the world intent on murdering us in our beds. Numerous scare stories continue to be spread about al Qaeda's supposed plans.6 The threat from terrorists is real, but as with the 'Soviet threat' throughout the cold war, details are exaggerated and often deliberately fabricated as part of a strategy to achieve domestic and foreign-policy goals.
For example, in April 2004 we were told that the security services had foiled a fiendish plot by international terrorists to detonate a dangerous chemical weapon in London, based on a substance called osmium tetroxide. Brian Jones, former head of the branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff responsible for analysing intelligence on chemical warfare, wrote that he had never heard of this substance. 'It all begins to sound like so much froth', he added: 'at first, it crosses my mind that this information could have entered the public domain as a result of an ill-conceived attempt to boost the reputation of one or other of the hard-pressed intelligence and security agencies'. Or it could have been 'inspired by the Home Office to support their policy initiatives'. Either way, Jones concludes that it is 'frightening' that those leading the counter-terrorism effort 'either do not understand the requirement' or 'are prepared to see the public misled as a short term expedient to achieve policy goals'.7
Investigative journalist David Leigh has recently written that 'British journalists – and British journals – are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies' in three ways: the first is by attempting to recruit journalists to spy on other people or for spies themselves to go under journalist cover; the second is when intelligence officers pose as journalists to write tendentious articles under false names; the third is when propaganda stories are planted on willing journalists who disguise the origin from their readers. On this latter aspect, Leigh identifies 'a very active programme by the secret agencies' to promote 'information operations'. He cites the example of the Spectator publishing a pseudonymous article by an MI6 officer on the subject of Bosnia in 1994.8
The government has stated that, following Iraq, propaganda will increase. A Ministry of Defence report entitled Operations in Iraq: Lessons for the future, published in December 2003, says that in future British military strategy 'will place greater emphasis on information and media operations, which are critical to success'. In a section called the 'key lessons' of the Iraq campaign, number one is: 'An information campaign, to be successful, needs to start as early as possible and continue into the post-conflict phase of an operation'.
Another lesson is that:
Targeting of indigenous media infrastructure, where justified under international law, needs to take account of the respective needs of the information campaign and the overall military campaign.
The report also notes the success of the strategy of embedding journalists with the US-British military, stating that 'commer- cial analysis of the print output they produced during the combat phase shows that 90% of embedded correspondents' reporting was either positive or neutral.'9
The all-party House of Commons Defence Committee agrees on the importance in the future of 'information' and media operations, illustrating the degree to which elected MPs represent the interests of the public. In a report on the 'lessons of Iraq' published in March 2004, the committee stated that: Our evidence suggests that if information operations are to be successful, it is essential that they should start in the period when diplomatic efforts are still being made, albeit backed by the coercive threat of military force through overt preparations.
It added that 'we believe that the British information operations campaign' on Iraq 'did not begin early enough' and it was 'disappointing that the coalition is widely perceived to have "come second" in perception management'. 'Information operations are an activity which can be expected to become of increasing importance in future operations'. This includes media operations where:
The early establishment of a robust media operations capability in theatre must be a priority for any operation . . . Overall the embedding of journalists with combat units worked well. The experience is likely to be seen as a precedent for future operations.10
Indeed, 'information operations' – ostensibly run by the military and targeted at the military enemy – and 'media operations' – targeted at the international and domestic public – are in reality somewhat enmeshed. Air Marshal Mike Heath, ex-Director of the British military's Targeting and Information Operations section, has said that during the invasion of Iraq the information operation strategy was 'very closely tied to media operations' with staff meeting the Campbell group in No. 10 on a daily basis.11
The past as precedent
Current psychological-warfare operations have been honed through long experience of past military interventions, with their modern roots going back at least as far as the Second World War. The Ministry of Information had been set up in 1939; as Paul Lashmar and James Oliver comment in their study of British propaganda, its prime task was 'to generate propaganda aimed at the British people'. Its activities included government information policy, publicity campaigns and censorship. During the Second World War the BBC became 'an instrument of state information policy'.
After the war, the Labour government created the Information Research Department (IRD) within the Foreign Office specifically to disseminate propaganda about the Soviets and other enemies, which continued until it was closed down in the late 1970s. Stories about the Soviet threat were planted in the British and international media and IRD activities ranged widely across the globe, especially in Britain's colonies. The strategy was not so much to spread outright lies but carefully selected material which distorted the picture in favour of British foreign-policy objectives. Lash mar and Oliver conclude that while it may have appeared 'that a diverse range of media were separately coming to the same conclusions about communism and the nature of the cold war, in fact much of the media was singing from a hymn sheet which was provided by IRD'. IRD's strategy included targeting a range of domestic organisations; for example, one body called the Psychological Warfare Consultations Committee was established to carry out 'psychological operations against any peace movements' and 'planned intelligence service operations against progressive organisations in England'.
One particular IRD operation helped to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965. This was part of a wider Britishbacked campaign to replace the regime; the result was up to a million deaths in a bloodbath by the Indonesian army and its allies.12 The operation was managed by an IRD expert working closely with Britain's ambassador in Jakarta, whose brief from London was 'to do whatever I could to get rid of Sukarno'. It involved a campaign of manipulating the world's press by placing stories to blacken the PKI, the Indonesian Communist party which the Indonesian generals set out to destroy, and asserting that Indonesia was on the verge of a Communist dictatorship.13
Government propaganda towards the British public is a
permanent aspect of major operations, especially military interventions, in every British foreign policy I have looked at. Preventing the public from seeing a true picture of policy and concealing evidence are all normal features of strategy. The rest of this chapter uses the Vietnam war to provide a snapshot of media management.
As with Iraq in 2003, the biggest problem for the government was massive public opposition to escalating US aggression and Britain's support for it. Prime Minister Harold Wilson told President Johnson in December 1967 that he was under:
heavy political pressure and this was now not simply from left-wing opinion. There was in Britain now a wide-based opposition to the Vietnam war, including organs of opinion in the centre and right.14