Revealed: Australia’s Secret Propaganda Unit
June 18, 2022
Britain assisted Australia in setting up a team modeled on the U.K.’s notorious Information Research Department to run influence operations in the Asia-Pacific in the 1970s, John McEvoy and Peter Cronau report.
In the early 1970s, officials from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) visited Britain for propaganda training. This culminated in the creation of an Australian propaganda unit in 1971, whose operations were focused on preserving Western power across Asia.
The unit was modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), which was Britain’s covert Cold War propaganda arm between 1948 and 1977. It was also staffed with two former IRD officials.
The IRD covertly collected and disseminated material to the media to discredit human rights figures, undermine political opponents overseas, help overthrow governments, and promote U.K. influence and commercial interests around the world.
Details of Australia’s propaganda unit have remained secret until revealed in newly declassified U.K. Foreign Office files, and shine a renewed light on Anglo-Australian security co-operation during the Cold War.
‘Off With It Like a Racehorse’
In late 1970, U.K. Foreign Office official Norman Reddaway visited Canberra for a Four Power Information Meeting on defence and security strategy in South-East Asia, involving Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.
Reddaway was a seasoned British propagandist. After serving in the Second World War, he joined the Foreign Office and played a key role in setting up the IRD. In the 1960s, he was assigned as the “coordinator of political warfare” in Indonesia, where Britain was inciting massacres in its effort to overthrow President Sukarno.
By 1970, Reddaway was concerned about a “diminution of British interest” in Asia. Two years earlier, the Harold Wilson government had announced the withdrawal of British troops from major military bases in South East Asia, notably Singapore and Malaysia. Meanwhile, the IRD was undergoing a structural reorganization and facing funding and staff losses.
Reddaway thus wanted to plug a gap of declining Western influence in the Asia-Pacific, and recommended that Australia boost its propaganda effort in the region.
Recently declassified, this “Secret” file revealed for the first time that Australia had set up a propaganda unit in the Foreign Affairs Department, modeled on the U.K.’s Information Research Department, to run “information operations” spoon-feeding journalists with material designed to influence events in the Western Pacific and South East Asian region. (U.K. National Archives)==
In Canberra, Reddaway asked the Australian foreign affairs chief Keith Waller whether Australia “should contemplate doing some information policy work” of its own — “information policy” being a gentleman’s euphemism for “covert propaganda.” He proposed that Australia “send someone to London to look at the work and functions” of the IRD.
In February 1971, the head of the information and cultural affairs branch of DFA, Michael Wilson, was dispatched from Canberra to the U.K. for two weeks. In London, he held “several long talks” with IRD officials about “setting up an IRD organisation for Australia.”
He was also given “a comprehensive picture of IRD’s present structure, the work of Asia and editorial sections, and IRD activities in SE Asia.”
Wilson was impressed by “the bipartisan nature of the support for IRD” in Britain, as well as “the lack of any political controversy surrounding it.” In Australia, however, he expressed fears that a similar propaganda unit would be used domestically by rival Australian politicians.
In early 1971, in the face of the disastrous Vietnam war and a resurgent Labor Party, head of the Treasury Billy McMahon and Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser were plotters in an internal party coup against their sitting Liberal Party Prime Minister John Gorton, with McMahon emerging as the new prime minister.
Ross Smith had been Information Attaché in the Australian embassy in Djakarta from 1962 to 1965, providing contacts and information to Australian reporters and media outlets. His time there had coincided with the period IRD was very active in Indonesia producing propaganda designed to undermine left-leaning Sukarno….
…The newly released U.K. files help fill in the gaps in our understanding of the growth of propaganda and disinformation. Australian files on IRD and the PSR unit remain classified.
very long article….
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/18/revealed-australias-secret-propaganda-unit/