Abstract
The British and American propaganda machines that emerged after 1945 were sprawling and complex entities. Indeed, the number of governmental and private actors involved makes any analysis of Western propaganda during the Cold War impossible without first presenting an overview of the responsible agencies. This chapter examines how the transition from the Second World War to the Cold War transformed the West’s approach to mass persuasion and dictated the shape and organisation of the post-war propaganda instrument in the Middle East. The first section examines the changing role of propaganda after the end of the Second World War and the renewal of large-scale overseas propaganda programmes in the early Cold War. The second examines how these post-war propaganda machines were adapted for operations in the Middle East. A final section investigates the extent to which British and American propagandists succeeded in pooling their resources and engaging in joint operations in the Middle East.
Anybody of average intelligence can think up a propaganda line to suit a particular situation. But the line will be of no value unless there exist the men and machinery to put it across.
Robert Marett, Through the Back Door (1968), p. 177
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Notes
Rosenberg, ‘U.S. cultural history’ in May, E. (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (New York: Bedford Books, 1993), p. 163.
Brecker, ‘Truth as a weapon of the free world’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 278 (November 1951), p. 4.
See Lucas, ‘Campaigns of truth: The psychological strategy board and American ideology, 1951–53’, The International History Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 2 (May 1996), pp. 279–302.
There is a growing literature on the IRD. See, for example: Smith, ‘Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department 1947–1977’, Millennium, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1980), pp. 67–83; Fletcher, ‘British Propaganda since World War II: A Case Study’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1982),
Lucas and Morris, ‘A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War’, in Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1991);
Wilford, ‘The Information Research Department: Britain’s Secret Cold War Weapon Revealed’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1998), pp. 353–69;
Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Vaughan, ‘Cloak Without Dagger’: How the Information Research Department Fought Britain’s Cold War in the Middle East, 1948–56’, Cold War History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (April 2004), pp. 56–84; Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53.
Black, Organising the Propaganda Instrument: The British Experience (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 92.
Frances Stonor Saunders, Scott Lucas and Hugh Wilford have been at the forefront of recent historical research into the Cold War’s state-private networks. See Saunders, R. Who Paid the Piper (1999);
Lucas, Freedom’s War (1999);
Lucas, ‘“Total Culture” and the State-Private Network’, in Gienow-Hecht and Schumacher (eds), Culture and International History (2003); Lucas, ‘Revealing the Parameters of Opinion: An Interview with Frances Stonor Saunders’;
Lucas, ‘Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control: Approaches to Culture and the State-Private Network in the Cold War’, in Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe (2003);
Wilford, ‘Calling the Tune? The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War’ (2003). See also essays by Wilford, Aldrich, Kotek and Gienow-Hecht in the Scott-Smith and Krabbendam volume.
NAPRO, FO 953/386/PME67, Pollock minute, 9 February 1948. Further accounts of Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS’s) links to the Arab News Agency (ANA) can be found in Lucas, Divided We Stand; Dorril, MI6; Aldrich, The Hidden Hand; Emek, British Intelligence Services: A Short Report (London: Mandala 2 Projects, 1984);
West, The Friends (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
Read, The Power of News. A History of Reuters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 337.
See Eveland, Ropes of Sand (London: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1980), p. 125; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, p. 128;
Laville and Lucas, ‘The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NCP, and African American Identity in the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 1996), p. 577.
The Council was consistently on the receiving end of attacks from Beaverbrook newspapers, which repeatedly caricatured Council representatives as long-haired effete, effeminate and ineffectual money-wasters. It is this campaign that led Frances Donaldson, in her ‘official biography’ of the Council, to label Beaverbrook ‘one of the few deliberately wicked men in British history’ (Donaldson, The British Council The First Fifty Years (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1984), p. 63).
Jones, ‘The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn 2004), p. 405.
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© 2005 James R. Vaughan
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Vaughan, J.R. (2005). The Men and Machinery. In: The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945–1957. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230802773_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230802773_2
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