The effort was the work of a secret unit known as the Information Research Department, based in London and part of the Foreign Office, which created and distributed literature from fake sources as part of a wider effort to destabilize its cold war enemies. Although they focused mainly on the Soviet Union and China, left-wing liberation groups and leaders that the UK saw as threats to its interests, the discoveries reveal that the IRD from the late 1960s was also trying to tackle more diverse targets. “We can see a large-scale effort to shape events abroad, but one that moved away from communism and aimed at entirely new areas. This shows the breadth, scope and scale of British secret intelligence operations,” said Rory Cormac, an expert on the history of coup and intelligence who found the material when researching his recent book, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Others Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft. Carmichael giving a Black Power speech at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference at the Roundhouse in London in 1967. Photo: © Horace Ové/Courtesy Horace Ové Archives The effort against Carmichael, an orator who traveled to west Africa, in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement, was aimed at portraying the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who he despised for the inhabitants of the continent. Based mainly in Guinea since July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had become an ardent supporter of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials. The documents show that the IRD created a bogus West African organization called The Black Power – Africa’s Heritage Group, which published a pamphlet calling Carmichael an “uninvited prophet from America” ​​who had no place on the continent. “That’s enough – why Stokely must go! – and do his thing elsewhere,” the pamphlet read, saying that Carmichael was “weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism” and was controlled by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and former president of Ghana who had been deposed in a coup in 1966. Carmichael attends a nonviolent student demonstration in Alabama in June 1967. Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive The IRD effort did not attack Carmichael as pro-Soviet or communist, a by then frequent line of attack. Instead, the unit sought to portray its target as a traitor to other Black Power activists with a patronizing attitude toward African peoples. By coming to Africa, Carmichael had “abandoned the cause” in the US “which needs him more than we do” and was arrogant in preaching Black Power on a continent “where it already really belongs”, the leaflet said. He also claimed that Carmichael was a “fiery zealot” who seemed to imagine Africans as “savages” and compared him unfavorably to other radical activists who had recently arrived on the continent from the US, such as Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of Black Panthers. , who lived in Algeria. “We are able to formulate our own plans for our part in the struggle for equal rights and freedom for the Black everywhere… and when we launch ‘Black Power’ it will be our own brand of ‘African Power’ and not the African-American spiritual Stokely’s child is trying to impose on us,” the fake statement read. The smear operation against Carmichael was enthusiastically applauded by officials in the IRD and elsewhere in the British government, including the West African department of the Foreign Office. It came amid growing concern in Whitehall about the Black Power movement and elsewhere in the world. The IRD was particularly concerned by the movement’s potential influence in the Caribbean. Carmichael at the City College of New York in December 1968. Photo: David Fenton/Getty In February 1969, the IRD learned of a Black Power conference to be held in Bermuda the following August and decided that instead of banning the event, it should try to discredit it. British intelligence was asked for information on Black Power leaders and any evidence of Soviet, Cuban or Guyanese links to the movement. This was only available to US intelligence agencies who had begun to investigate links between black radicalism in the Caribbean and Black Power supporters in the US from around 1968. The IRD then prepared a series of articles for distribution to newspapers in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They accused the Black Power movement of being exploited by Havana and claimed the upcoming conference would destroy Bermuda financially. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The IRD also prepared and distributed an article on Black Power leaders targeted in Trinidad. This suggested that communists were behind Black Power ambitions on the island and that outside forces were operating “with the collusion of ambitious locals seeking their own ends”. Some tactics in Bermuda were rejected for fear of igniting racial tensions, and local officials in the Caribbean did not support the campaign. “There were limits to what the IRD was prepared to do. In the Caribbean, the concern was that racial tension could lead to riots and disruption to tourism and thus the wider economy. Generally the IRD was happy to insinuate something without evidence, but not outright lies,” Cormac said. In 1969, the IRD also created a new fake group: the African Students Organization for African Power. This was supposedly based in East Germany and adopted the modern radical ideas of the New Left, “declaring a plague” on both the capitalist West and the Soviet bloc. The IRD felt that this provided a better platform to “damage opponents” than the outmoded nationalist approach, while it was difficult to trace back to Britain because many similar groups had actually emerged in the late 1960s. The group sought to link a killing spree in Africa with the Soviets. Stokely Carmichael (centre) circa 1960-66. Photo: Boston Globe/Getty The British were not alone in using such tactics. The KGB devoted significant resources to disinformation campaigns throughout the Cold War and achieved some significant successes. A pamphlet produced by the Soviet agency cited accurate American statistics and actual cases of racial crimes in order to turn the African public against the US. It was made to look like it was written by an African-American organization agitating against the Ku Klux Klan. The CIA established extensive networks in sub-Saharan Africa and used cultural ambassadors such as Louis Armstrong as a “Trojan horse” to gather intelligence. The agency continued to be interested in Carmichael after he fled the US in 1969 and “wrote typed notes to [his] travels abroad during a period he was out of the public eye,” a summary of the agency’s activities released in 2007 revealed. “The UK effort was much smaller than that of the Americans or the Soviets and also more restrained, but it was wide-ranging. The UK has done this around the world,” Cormac said. “Information operations were seen as a force multiplier. Clearly there was a recognition that we were small and in decline, but that this was a smart way to maintain a global role on the cheap.”