by Nil
Rory Cormac’s Fakers is not merely a history of British covert propaganda. It is an anatomy of a state learning to weaponise uncertainty. Its most unsettling achievement is to show that the most sophisticated form of disinformation does not necessarily consist in making people believe a particular lie. It may be more effective to make them doubt whether truth itself remains recoverable. Cormac captures this darker logic when he writes that Soviet disinformation sought “not necessarily to persuade a reader of something but more subversively to undermine trust in all media sources, in democratic authority, and even in truth itself” (p. 67). That formulation gives Fakers its contemporary force. Yet the book’s deeper significance lies elsewhere: it demonstrates that Britain, while opposing Soviet deception, repeatedly developed remarkably similar methods of manipulation. The uncomfortable question raised by the book is therefore not simply who lied better during the Cold War, but whether states fighting disinformation can remain morally distinguishable from the propagandists they condemn.
Cormac begins with the mechanics of deception, but his subject quickly becomes the psychology of political manipulation. The principle is brutally simple: “Facts are boring; people… would believe what they wanted to believe, clinging to lies that felt familiar, or else confirmed their beliefs” (p. 21). This is perhaps the book’s most important proposition. Propaganda does not manufacture belief from nothing; it identifies existing prejudices, anxieties and ambitions and gives them a persuasive fictional form. Hence the extraordinary importance of what Cormac calls the propagandist’s appeal to the target’s “inner Schweinhund” rather than to abstract ideology (p. 15). The phrase is deliberately crude, but the insight is sophisticated. Effective propaganda is rarely an intellectual argument. It is emotional engineering. Its success depends less upon the objective plausibility of a message than upon whether it confirms something the audience already wants to believe.
That makes the British record particularly uncomfortable. The book repeatedly punctures the comforting distinction between democratic propaganda and authoritarian disinformation. One early forgery, Cormac notes, contained a statement of British policy that officials privately admitted was “in many ways, near the truth” (p. 6). The irony is devastating. A forgery can become credible not because it invents an implausible world but because it exaggerates, distorts or rearranges elements of the real one. Cormac understands this paradox well: “The dilemma became more urgent… when a supposed fake was, in many ways, near the truth” (p. 68). Once audiences recognise genuine grievances within fabricated narratives, fact-checking alone becomes almost powerless. The lie acquires credibility from reality itself.
The book is particularly revealing when it examines the meticulous craftsmanship behind these operations. Welser’s “golden rules” demanded that intelligence be “100% correct and up-to-date”, while paper, printing and posting methods had to replicate authentic documents (p. 23). The sophistication is almost artisanal. Yet Cormac makes clear that technical accuracy served an ethically dubious purpose: to manufacture false provenance. The instruction “Confuse to conceal, confuse to conceal” (p. 31) captures the underlying philosophy. The objective was not merely to deceive an individual reader but to complicate attribution until certainty became impossible. The paradox is that propaganda becomes more powerful as its authors become less visible.
Cormac is equally sharp on the colonial assumptions embedded within British psychological warfare. Some of the language reproduced in these operations is shocking. Africans are described as “primitive”, “backward” and emerging from the “jungle darkness of want” (p. 47), while another operation transformed African characters into people supposedly enslaved by the “mumbo-jumbo” of “barbaric ancestors” (p. 259). These passages are not merely embarrassing historical curiosities. They expose the racial hierarchy underlying supposedly sophisticated British statecraft. The British were manipulating audiences while simultaneously imagining those audiences through crude imperial stereotypes. The propaganda therefore reveals as much about its authors as its intended targets.
The same contradiction appears in the treatment of racial tension. Cormac records that British operatives were willing to “stoke racial tension if it meant driving a wedge between the Communists and the Global South” (p. 48). The phrase deserves to be read slowly. Here propaganda ceases to be an instrument for communicating policy and becomes an instrument for manufacturing social conflict. The Soviet Union was doing the same thing: KGB operatives allegedly produced anonymous racist letters purporting to come from white supremacists and ordinary Americans (p. 93). The symmetry is disturbing. Both sides recognised that racial hatred could be converted into geopolitical leverage. The difference between democratic and authoritarian propaganda consequently becomes less a difference of method than a question of purpose, restraint and accountability.
The book becomes even more morally troubling when Cormac follows propaganda into the territory of violence. Indonesia is perhaps the clearest example. British officials understood that their operations might contribute to political change while admitting that “it is impossible, of course, precisely to assess the degree of cause and effect” (p. 141). That uncertainty should not be treated as an exoneration. Indeed, it may be precisely the problem. One British participant later claimed, “We got rid of Sukarno probably 2 or 3 years earlier than he would have gone anyway” (p. 142). Cormac’s account of the Indonesian bloodshed consequently raises a question far larger than the history of one intelligence operation: what does responsibility mean when covert influence contributes to a political catastrophe without directly causing it?
His answer is contained in one of the book’s most chilling formulations: “Complicity, rather than culpability, was their mark on the killings” (p. 137). The distinction is legally and morally important. States can avoid direct responsibility while still benefiting from violence, encouraging political actors or manipulating information in ways that increase the probability of bloodshed. The testimony of Gilchrist makes the moral failure even harder to dismiss: “400,000 people murdered… ‘They were communists.’ Were they? And are not communists human beings?” (p. 139). This is where Fakers moves beyond espionage history. It becomes an examination of how ideological categories make human beings morally disposable.
Yet Cormac does not turn his protagonists into cardboard villains. Welser, Rayner and their colleagues are presented as talented, intelligent, funny, vain and frequently absurd. Their personal lives matter because they expose the distance between the glamour of clandestine work and the ordinary weaknesses of the people conducting it. Rayner is portrayed as a man “always performing slightly” (p. 43), while Welser appears capable of turning even deception into a kind of personal theatre. Their marriages, affairs, drinking and office rivalries puncture the mythology of the omnipotent intelligence professional. These are not omniscient masters of history. They are fallible human beings improvising inside opaque institutions.
That fallibility is essential to Cormac’s argument because the book repeatedly shows propaganda escaping the control of its creators. The “Loyal African Brothers” existed only on paper until Soviet operatives effectively resurrected the fictional organisation and used it against its British creators (pp. 93-94). The forgers had been forged against. Elsewhere, a fabricated story acquired an independent life because denunciation itself encouraged audiences to believe the conspiracy (p. 88). This is perhaps the most modern insight in Fakers: once released into an information ecosystem, disinformation becomes difficult even for its creator to control. The propagandist may light the fire, but cannot determine where the smoke travels.
Cormac is also admirably attentive to the epistemological problem at the heart of covert propaganda. “What was the difference,” officials wondered, “between disinformation and unsavoury ideas?” (p. 67). That question remains unresolved. When does spin become deception? When does selective disclosure become manipulation? When does a genuine fact embedded in a false narrative cease to function as truth? Rayner’s own maxim that “truth had a sharper edge than fiction” collapses when, as Cormac observes, “It felt true, and that was enough” (p. 115). This is the book’s deepest warning: factuality and credibility are not the same thing.
The eventual collapse of the Information Research Department reinforces another important point: covert institutions can become victims of their own institutional logic. The IRD was criticised as wasteful, isolated and increasingly disconnected from political control (p. 220). Its output was small, its effectiveness difficult to measure and its methods increasingly difficult to justify. The destruction of files — “a bonfire of secrets, consigned to oblivion” (p. 222) — provides a fittingly sinister conclusion. An organisation devoted to manipulating historical memory ended by destroying some of its own history.
Fakers is therefore at its strongest when it refuses the comforting morality play of democracy versus dictatorship. It does not suggest that British and Soviet propaganda were identical; their political systems, objectives and institutional constraints were profoundly different. But it demonstrates that democratic states can acquire habits of secrecy, manipulation and strategic deception that deserve scrutiny precisely because they operate in the name of national interest. The book’s title consequently carries a double meaning. The obvious fakers are the propagandists manufacturing counterfeit documents and phantom organisations. The deeper fakers are political systems that present manipulation as information, covert intervention as communication, and uncertainty as strategy.
Cormac’s greatest achievement is to show that propaganda ultimately depends upon a vulnerability that no intelligence service can permanently defeat: the human desire to believe. His propagandists understood that “there are dangers in telling the truth in a bogus way” (p. 169), because once truth is deliberately contaminated, even genuine facts become suspect. That is the paradox that makes Fakers far more than a Cold War history. In an age in which fabricated documents, anonymous sources, manipulated narratives and political conspiracy can circulate instantly, the old intelligence craft described by Cormac has not disappeared. It has escaped the secret state and entered everyday political life. The most disturbing lesson of Fakers is therefore not that governments once lied successfully. It is that they discovered how easily people can be persuaded to participate in their own deception.
