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Voltaire Network — Jan 25, 2020

Official documents declassified by the UK National Archives in early 2020 show that between 1945 and 1977 Her Majesty’s government secretly subsidized the Reuters News Agency and the BBC to disseminate Fake News against the USSR and communist sympathizers.

During the Cold War, the Foreign Office founded the Information Research Department (IRD), an apparatus in charge of identifying and discrediting supporters of the USSR. In particular, it created the Globe News Agency, the Near and Far East News Ltd (NAFEN) based in Istanbul and Delhi, the Star News Agency in Karachi and the Arab News Agency in Cairo and, as of 1956, in Beirut. Many well-known figures actively participated in this disinformation program, including George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, A.J.P. Taylor and Bertrand Russell.

The IRD also swayed British public opinion in favor of the United Kingdom’s accession to the European Economic Community (now European Union), via the European League for Economic Cooperation (ELEC) (British equivalent of the American Committee on United Europe) [1].

The IRD was dissolved in 1977 by Lord David Owen to shut down the propaganda activities aimed against the left wing of the Labor Party.

All these facts and many more have been known for a long time [2], but these documents constitute irrefutable proof. They show that for around thirty years, the MI6 (and its US counterpart, the CIA) have dominated information flows throughout Western and Third World countries, as denounced by Sean McBride before UNESCO, in 1973.

These documents are linked to the Chilcot Commission revelations on the manipulation of public opinion during the war against Iraq (2003) and to our own revelations on the current device of the Foreign Office: Innovative Communications & Strategies (InCoStrat). Since 2014 to the present, this Istanbul-based agency has fabricated a false narrative regarding the war in Syria, which it managed to impose on the international media as a whole.

  • The Reuters News Agency was taken over by Thomson Financial in 2008. It no longer seems to have ties with the MI6, but with the CIA: it has permanent access to the Pentagon’s command center and can therefore release Fakes News, in real time, as much and as often as necessary.

These facts teach us that it is stupid to think that only authoritarian regimes try to intoxicate their own population. Democracies do it too.

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