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.

https://twitter.com/SarahLouMiller/status/1617598282795974687

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.

“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

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

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

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"

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…

#OTD 1955

Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox Boyd agrees to using covert action in colonial territories...

...so long as he maintained control

This was a big and controversial move. Why? officials hotly debated
❓whether it was right to subvert colonial populations
❓whether locally elected ministers should be consulted
❓whether MI6 - which operated on foreign territory - should be involved
❓whether the Foreign Office should have control

Haven't done a #FakeFriday for a couple of weeks, so here's a fun one about propaganda and the royals:

1977: The Palace didn't want Idi Amin to come to UK for commonwealth heads of government meeting during the jubilee year.

Shaking hands with the queen would be embarrassing as an aside, the Queen had dismissed similar fears a few years earlier, quipping it would not have been the first time she had met murderers.

With all the talk about #Bond and fact vs fiction, here are a few examples of fiction shaping fact

1. @CIA director Allen Dulles loved Bond's gadgets so much he instructed CIA to replicate - for real - as many as they could... He claimed CIA successfully managed to make a spring-loaded poison knife (as seen in From Russia with Love)

but failed to make a homing-beacon for a car (as seen in Goldeneye)

source: direct.mit.edu/jcws/article/1…

🦠 😷 In 1955, British counterinsurgents planned to stage a fake epidemic in a Kenyan forest.

Read on for a bizarre - and disturbing - story from the @UkNatArchives 🧵 1/10 Aim:

💥 “to stimulate fear in the forest”

💥 to draw insurgents “out of the forest onto the reserves, where they can be brought to battle more easily”

💥 divide insurgents from population

2/10

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

1968: mass protests, social unrest, opposition to Vietnam, assassination of Martin Luther King.

How did UK a propaganda exploit this?

With a fake “ultra-left” student group of course!

This week’s #fakefriday thread from the archives… 1/7 The 1968 World Youth Festival took place in Sofia.

The IRD swung into action to expose it as a Soviet front - using unattributed newspaper articles and even a reports by a fake thinktank

But they wanted to do more. 2/7

So this week I’m taking flak for being an establishment academic after our recent appointment of Sawers as hon prof

Yet at same time, I’ve been called too anti-establishment / critical to get funding (with all the impact required)

Just can’t win 🤷‍♂️ I have it on good authority that Prince Charles once called me “that little shit” though, so there’s always that

#OTD 1953:

The Iranian Shah, days after the successful #MI6 / @CIA sponsored coup, demands British intrigue must now stop. Enough.

The response?

1/2 “Steps that had been taken in this particular case were not in accordance with usual practice, but were due to the special importance of Persia”

(meanwhile the U.K. was stepping up covert ops all over the Middle East!!)

2/2

Who wants to see a real British forgery from 1963?

This one was designed to “intensify indignation” of African students towards the Soviets

A #fakefriday thread 🧵 1/9 First, some context:

In early 1963, African students in Bulgaria violently clashed with police after authorities banned their attempts to establish and all-African Students’ Union.

How could 🇬🇧 exploit this??

2/9

Copyedits arrived for 240k word book. One week to turn it around.

Proofs arrived for Disrupt and Deny arrived. To do at my “earliest convenience”.

And just realised today is essay deadline day for my module. And now nursery have sent my daughter home because she has a slight cough.

When will this madness end???

Lots of recent analysis plays up the importance of exposing hostile Russian intelligence activity as a core part of the Western response.

But this is flawed because exposure isn’t enough - and can backfire

Here’s what recent research tells us ... 🧵 1/7 Exposure isn’t “a switch”. To have consequences it requires revelation too: “a collective recognition that something has happened”. See @stamp in @SecDialogue 2/7

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

Turns out it’s the 50th anniversary of Allende’s election win in Chile.

Guess what?

The U.K. had a bash at covert action to undermine him too.

[short thread on how and why] 1/5 U.K. admission (incredibly rare to see):

“Because there is a v real danger that the communists might gain control of this country by constitutional means, we are concentrating on covert operations which we think could influence the result of the next election”

2/5

Want to know about a UK covert operation (just declassified)? [SHORT THREAD]

It’s 1966 and Gibraltar is soon to hold a referendum on its sovereignty

UK knows it will win but uses #disinformation to punish Spain for forcing the ref

1/5 First, 🇬🇧 created a fake group: the Front for the Liberation of the Spanish Maghreb.

It delivered a (fake?) petition to the UN calling out Spanish colonialism in Morocco

2/5

Interesting addition to ways UK secretly intervened in Vietnam.

UK used intell assets to resolve dilemma of domestic opposition to Vietnam but needing US support on a range of other issues. So UK intell:

https://twitter.com/los_fisher/status/1091611416283488258

1: covered for US intell in Europe in order to free up US capacity in Vietnam