Rory Cormac Profile picture
Sep 24, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
In the mid-1960s, British propagandist forged Muslim Brotherhood leaflets to attack Indonesia’s President Sukarno.

Pigs meat, prostitution and sex trafficking

They didn’t hold back

A short #fakefriday thread

1/5
Through 3 forgeries, the IRD (of @FCDOGovUK) aimed to:

💥 expose Sukarno’s desire to take over leadership of the Muslim world
💥 antagonise Muslim leaders in the Middle East
💥 discredit Sukarno 2/5
Forgery one:

Prostitutes
Fake Muslims
Pigs meat
Coating lips with paint

“A great insult to the whole Islamic world” 3/5
Forgery 2:

“Up to his ears in sexual pleasures with cheap and easy women”

(Sukarno did have a notorious sex life) 4/5
Forgery 3:

Allah was punishing Sukarno - had put a curse on him

Sukarno had trafficked Japanese women in return for trade deals. 2 had attempted suicide. Others had “disappeared”

Like I said, they didn’t hold back 5/5

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More from @RoryCormac

Jan 23, 2023
I've been on at least 6 hiring panels this year so far, from post-doc to professor across the faculty.

Here's 10 things I've learnt (all entirely personal, and unofficial!):

1. Put grant bids - with amounts - high up in your CV. It shouldn't be an afterthought.
2. Don't pollute your publication list. Hiding a stellar publication amongst a parade of book chapters and book reviews isn't helpful.

3. If you have a Routledge/Palgrave book (everyone seems to), give a sense that it's been well-reviewed / made a splash.
4. Help the panel out with journals - there are so many and some sound really niche! How does the panel know your article is significant? This doesn't mean relying on impact factors but some context can help. & - wider point - choose your journals carefully.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 31, 2022
“He is becoming a nuisance”

How do you deal with an anti-West journalist who has academic credentials, is given a BBC platform “for balance”, but doesn’t write anything “factually and provably wrong”?

One who is a “ready made channel for motivated disinf.”?
Recent files from 1974 are fascinating:

- a word with the BBC to stop inviting him as an expert
- a quiet word with the newspaper editors to drop him
- publishing an anon letter to the editor
- “inspiring” a critical article somewhere else to discredit him
- set the US on him
The Information Research Dept considered all of the above.

- BBC eventually dropped him
- Guardian were not receptive to a quiet word
- warned the US (he was also writing for WSJ)

but it didn’t seem to harm his career long term
Read 4 tweets
Sep 6, 2022
Who wants a 🧵of my top ten fake groups set up by UK for propaganda purposes during the Cold War?

Some were used multiple times, others just once.
Some were sophisticated, others, shall we say, less so...

All are revealed in the latest IRD declassifications at @UkNatArchives
10. International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations

An entirely fake think tank with offices supposedly in Vienna, Stockholm, Rome, and Cairo. It was the most frequently used fake group and issued non-consecutive bulletins to expose Soviet activity
9. Centre d'Etudies Micro-analytiques

Another notional research institute also designed to expose Soviet activity. Its bulletin was called Microscope.

A bit dull - - but that was the point
Read 13 tweets
Sep 5, 2022
It's out! It's finally out!

My new article analyses 350 UK "black" propaganda operations conducted during the Cold War

It delves into the most significant UK archival releases in well over a decade to argue... 🧵

direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-a…
1. The UK approach involved more "black" productions - those with fake sources - than previously assumed, and continued after the closure of IRD

2. These didn't lie but the fake sources did deliberately deceive audiences and end up shaping the content
3. They were sometimes mundane (fake think tanks) and sometimes provocative (forging Muslim Brotherhood)

4. They did more than expose Soviet lies, but discredited, disrupted, divided and on occasion incited violence and even religious tension
Read 7 tweets
Aug 25, 2022
This is absolutely fascinating:

A pro-western influence operation - lasting 5 years - exposed and removed by Twitter & Facebook

A THREAD w/some thoughts and historical comparison. Guess what? It's not new and we shouldn't be surprised

Report here: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/sio-au…
All of the focus in recent years has been on Russian/Iranian/Chinese ops

As per @stanfordio
"We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western influence operations on social media to be reviewed and analyzed by open-source researchers to date"
ON SOURCES:

Actors created fake personas linked to fake - supposedly independent - media outlets.

This kind of thing happened a lot in the Cold War. Fake news agencies / think tanks / even liberation groups popped up. The aim was to ensure credibility of the message
Read 12 tweets
Aug 23, 2022
There's been some talk about the possibility of the US covertly supplying certain weapons to Ukraine of late

an explainer thread: what, why, and does it matter that people are speculating?
first off, what are the (speculative) claims?

That the US is providing Ukraine with more weapons than publicly admitted

See here in @politico
politico.com/newsletters/na…
and this, which concludes

"Ukraine now looks to be firing longer-range missiles it wasn't using before... According to one former CIA official, 'That would be the textbook definition of Western covert action assistance.'"

news.yahoo.com/ukraine-atacms…
Read 13 tweets

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