This book offers the first account of the foundation, organisation and activities of the NATO Information Service (NATIS) during the Cold War. During the Cold War, NATIS was pivotal in bringing national delegations together to discuss their security, information and intelligence concerns and, when appropriate or possible, to devise a common response to the ‘Communist threat’. At the same time, NATIS liaised with bodies like the Atlantic Institute and the Bilderberg group in the attempt to promote a coordinated western response. The NATO archive material also shows that NATIS carried out its own information and intelligence activities. Propaganda and Intelligence in the Cold War provides the first sustained study of the history of NATIS throughout the Cold War. Examining the role of NATIS as a forum for the exchange of ideas and techniques about how to develop and run propaganda programmes, this book presents a sophisticated understanding of the extent to which national information agencies collaborated. By focusing on the degree of cooperation on cultural and information activities, this analysis of NATIS also contributes to the history of NATO as a political alliance and reminds us that NATO was – and still is – primarily a political organisation. This book will be of much interest to students of NATO, Cold War studies, intelligence studies, and IR in general.

A range of clandestine Cold War activities in Asia, from intelligence and propaganda to special operations and security support, is examined here. The contributions draw on newly-opened archives and a two-day conference on the subject.

In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the Foreign Office, the innocuously titled Information Research Department (IRD), was established to collate information on communist policy, tactics and propaganda, and coordinate the discreet dissemination of counter-propaganda to opinion formers at home and abroad.

In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, My America was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life." Selling the American Way examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.

This new book examines the construction, activities and impact of the network of US state and private groups in the Cold War. By moving beyond state-dominated, ‘top-down’ interpretations of international relations and exploring instead the engagement and mobilization of whole societies and cultures, it presents a radical new approach to the study of propaganda and American foreign policy and redefines the relationship between the state and private groups in the pursuit and projection of American foreign relations. In a series of valuable case studies, examining relationships between the state and women’s groups, religious bodies, labour, internationalist groups, intellectuals, media and students, this volume explores the construction of a state-private network not only as a practical method of communication and dissemination of information or propaganda, but also as an ideological construction, drawing upon specifically American ideologies of freedom and voluntarism. The case studies also analyze the power-relationship between the state and private groups, assessing the extent to which the state was in control of the relationship, and the extent to which private organizations exerted their independence. This book will be of great interest to students of Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and IR/security studies in general.

During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

This is a study of the British state's generation, suppression and manipulation of news to further foreign policy goals during the early Cold War. Bribing editors, blackballing "e;unreliable"e; journalists, creating instant media experts through provision of carefully edited "e;inside information"e;, and exploiting the global media system to plant propaganda--disguised as news--around the world: these were all methods used by the British to try to convince the international public of Soviet deceit and criminality and thus gain support for anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad. Britain's shaky international position heightened the importance of propaganda. The Soviets and Americans were investing heavily in propaganda to win the "e;hearts and minds"e; of the world and substitute for increasingly unthinkable nuclear war. The British exploited and enhanced their media power and propaganda expertise to keep up with the superpowers and preserve their own global influence at a time when British economic, political and military power was sharply declining. This activity directly influenced domestic media relations, as officials used British media to launder foreign-bound propaganda and to create the desired images of British "e;public opinion"e; for foreign audiences. By the early 1950s censorship waned but covert propaganda had become addictive. The endless tension of the Cold War normalized what had previously been abnormal state involvement in the media, and led it to use similar tools against Egyptian nationalists, Irish republicans and British leftists. Much more recently, official manipulation of news about Iraq indicates that a behind-the-scenes examination of state propaganda's earlier days is highly relevant. John Jenks draws heavily on recently declassified archival material for this book, especially files of the Foreign Office's anti-Communist Information Research Department (IRD) propaganda agency, and the papers of key media organisations, journalists, politicians and officials. Readers will therefore gain a greater understanding of the depth of the state's power with the media at a time when concerns about propaganda and media manipulation are once again at the fore.