A review of Information Operations: Facts Fakes Conspiracies by Dr Steve Tatham (Howgate Publishing, 2024). This personal review does not reflect the views of my employers.
This is a timely book, for at least two reasons.
Firstly, victory in the Russia-Ukraine war may go to the side best able to use information operations to sustain its own national will and degrade that of their opponent. Both Moscow and Kyiv are using extensive information activities to target multiple audiences, including each other’s armed forces, civilian populations and leaderships, along with audiences in their own countries, the West and the Global South. Anyone following the conflict should therefore be aware of the role that information activity plays in modern warfare.
The second reason is UK-specific. Although published before the British general election and the new government's announcement of its Strategic Defence Review, Captain Steve Tatham RN may now see his book, with its many recommendations, as a here’s-one-I-prepared-earlier personal submission to Lord Robertson’s review.
The book is a very rare example of its type. There’s no shortage of volumes giving advice on influencing the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of others, in the context of commercial advertising or political campaigns. Less common are books devoted to such activities as part of military operations, and there are very few indeed by British authors who write from extensive personal experience of practising such arts.
The grandfather of this niche genre was Sefton Delmer. In the 1930s, as Berlin correspondent of the Daily Express, he saw the Nazis rise to power. Within a few years he was the intellectual and practical dynamo in the organisation that ran Britain’s external-facing information activities in the Second World War. This was the cross-government, civilian-led but heavily military-focused, body called the Political Warfare Executive (PWE).
Black Boomerang (published 1962), one of Delmer’s three volumes of autobiography, is an entertaining memoir of his wartime service, describing some of his many ventures. These went well beyond his now well-known projects such as the bogus geheimsender (secret transmitter) Gustav Siegfried Eins (GS1). Supposedly transmitting secretly from within the Reich, Delmer used GS1 to air the thoughts of his brilliant creation “Der Chef” – a foul-mouthed, often pornographic, ultraconservative and ultranationalist Prussian officer who combined anti-Nazism with anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism and Anglophobia – embodying Delmer’s conviction that it would be more effective to appeal to Germans’ baser natures than their nobler ones (a view that ruffled feathers elsewhere in PWE and the British government).
Later in the war, Delmer devised and ran the much more ambitious radio stations Kurzwellensender Atlantik and Soldatensender Calais. Unlike GS1, which was, in the jargon of information warfare, the blackest of “black” (falsely attributed; claiming to be something it most certainly wasn’t), these two later stations were deliberately “grey” (not explicitly attributed), allowing (indeed, encouraging) listeners to make up their own minds about their affiliation, while engaging in the self-delusion and cognitive dissonance to which Delmer saw Germans as prone. He also edited Nachrichten für die Truppe, the daily “grey” newspaper for the Wehrmacht produced in Britain during the last year of the war and dropped over German positions by the US Army Air Forces.
Black Boomerang is deservedly a classic, but it’s not a fully accurate record. Delmer was no fantasist, but presumably he didn’t have access to PWE’s files when he wrote the book almost two decades after some of the events he described, and apparently also not having kept a diary, he made too many mistakes about dates and the sequence of events for the book to be treated as a reliable document of record.
Nevertheless, Black Boomerang remains an inspiration for today’s practitioners, and Delmer’s insistence that the PWE should seek to influence the behaviour of Germans, rather than change their attitudes or beliefs, is matched 80 years later by the strong advice that Steve Tatham gives.
The other former British practitioner to write a full-length memoir of military-related information operations – and I’ll now follow Tatham’s example by sticking to the abbreviation IO – was Neil ffrench-Blake. His 2015 book, The Pol Pot Conspiracy, deals mainly with how he was hired to set up and run Voice of Khmer, a clandestine radio station launched in 1984 by Singapore, financed by the CIA and based in Thailand. It supported efforts by the West and pro-Western states in Southeast Asia to drive the Vietnamese army out of Cambodia, an objective eventually achieved in 1989.
ffrench-Blake was offered the job by MI6, who owed Singapore a favour, and MI6 had turned to him because he had run the MOD’s tactical “off-white” psyops station Radio Atlantico del Sur during the Falklands War. His book includes an extensive account of what he did during the South Atlantic conflict and the lessons he drew from it. These included – echoing Delmer’s view and anticipating Tatham’s – his insistence (and that of his MOD masters) that Radio Atlantico del Sur’s objectives should be entirely limited to changing the behaviour of Argentine troops, not their attitudes.
Like Delmer and ffrench-Blake, Tatham is an IO practitioner – and one with a length of experience to outmatch that of his two predecessors combined. He’s been working on IO for a quarter of a century.
Tatham sets out too many conclusions and recommendations for me to summarise here, but there are two themes that run through the book:
Firstly, he says military IO is not used as extensively, or as well, as it should be by Western armed forces, including those of the UK. Its use is “very carefully prescribed, often very conservative”. Tatham clearly finds this deeply frustrating. He recalls how, in 2013 when the UK was poised to engage in military activity against Syria’s Assad (eventually rejected by parliament), he and his colleagues devised plans for IO to target the Assad regime – but they were never presented to the MOD’s senior leadership. We need to be “much smarter”, he says.
He sees the career structures of Western armed forces (including the UK’s) as contributing to this problem. Tatham has a personal gripe here, observing ruefully that in recent years the top IO job in the British armed forces has always gone to an officer with a background in the teeth arms rather than an IO specialist such as himself. He notes a similar issue in the US Army, where officers who have based their careers in the separate (though related) field of media ops (what Americans call “public affairs” – that is, speaking to the press) can rise to become Generals, but those who specialise in psyops will go no further than full Colonel.
Secondly, Tatham repeatedly voices his strong belief that IO should be devoted to changing behaviours rather than attitudes, a mistake he believes Western military IO has been prone to throughout his career.
Here are some other points that Tatham makes forcefully:
- The US military has wasted much money by hiring defence contractors to run IO, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it was much better at tracking the contractors’ “measure of performance” (e.g. how many million leaflets they’d distributed) than their “measure of effect” (how far this activity had changed the behaviour of the target audience).
- Excessive attention has been given to what he calls “social media scraping” (using IT experts and IT skills to analyse social media activity). He’d like to change that to an emphasis on using social science and psychological skills such as behavioural studies to understand the perceptions and motivations of the target audience.
- Discussing (and running) IO is hampered by the constant writing and rewriting of doctrine (sometimes reinventing the wheel by returning to a previous version), and then the failure of those concerned to follow it. Tatham doesn’t quote Rommel’s quip that “the British write some of the best doctrine in the world; fortunately their officers don’t read it” but he has a similar one from a Soviet officer: “One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.” An associated problem is “the tyranny of terminology”, with the failure of military staff to use jargon terms consistently and in line with their doctrinal definitions: terms such as psyops, information operations, information activity, information warfare, information exploitation and information advantage are used by different people to mean different things.
In support of his conclusions and recommendations, Tatham reviews past IO campaigns by the US and the UK, including those of the 21st century in Iraq and Afghanistan, though understandably refrains from talking about Western IO against Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The real-life examples he is able to give, particularly those from Afghanistan, where he served, will be the most interesting parts of the book for many readers, particularly those who may tire of theoretical debates about doctrine.
Although he covers Afghanistan in some detail, his experiences there deserve a separate book. He attributes the West’s defeat there as resulting from its failure to understand “the human dimension of the conflict and what motivated behaviours in Afghans”.
After a brisk and inevitably superficial canter through some of British military IO history since the Second World War, including in the Cold War and Northern Ireland, some readers may be surprised to learn about more recent British IO campaigns in places they would not have expected to find them, such as Jamaica (Operation Kingfish in 2003) and the Philippines (Operation Patwin in 2013).
One section of the book sits uneasily with the rest. In the second longest chapter (only slightly shorter than the one covering the US and British IO experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan) Tatham examines the “Cambridge Analytica affair”. Some readers may think the space could have been better used because, as he explains, Cambridge Analytica had nothing to do with the British armed forces or with any military IO. However, Tatham himself got caught up deeply in the story when it broke in the press in 2018 and says it was “one of the most stressful events of my life”, driving him into “deep depression”. Writing the chapter was therefore a chance for him to set the record straight.
Overall, this is a thoroughly good read, though as it’s a trim volume some interesting topics have been omitted. Thus, there’s no detail on the British use of IO in the 1950s campaigns in Malaya and Kenya, in the Middle East in the four decades after WW2, or in the Falklands War.
Tatham pushes one of his central ideas – the importance of behaviour over attitude – to a maximalist degree I feel is hard to sustain in all circumstances. It makes sense to prioritise changing behaviours in tactical and operational environments with their inherent time limits. But, to return to my point at the very start of this review, is national will influenced by, or expressed by, changes in behaviour or attitude? In which directions do the arrows point in a diagram showing the cause-and-effect relations between a population’s morale, and its behaviours and attitudes? How, for example, can Ukrainians’ belief in their ultimate victory be sustained? Such a belief is the guarantor of morale.
I’ll end on a personal note. As a member of BBC Monitoring for the past 43 years, I was delighted to read this passage among Tatham’s lengthy list of recommendations for action:
“We need to resource and expand BBC Monitoring back to its previous levels […] The BBC World Service is vital. And so too is BBC Monitoring: I, along with many others, wrote to Parliament when [in 2016] its potential disestablishment was announced. [I found during my work that] BBC Monitoring provided an exceptional insight into events on the ground and proved invaluable in so many previous operations. We are poorer for its reduced presence.”
Thanks!
© Chris Greenway 2024
