By Steve Sailer
04/22/2023
Earlier: Foreign Propaganda Interference Done Right: Brits in 1940s U.S.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
St. Louis Black empowerment activists charged with role in Russian propaganda scheme
Erin Heffernan 2 hrs ago
ST. LOUIS — A federal indictment claims three activists behind a St. Louis Black empowerment group took part in a yearslong Russian “agitation and propaganda” campaign to sow dissent in the United States.
The Florida grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday alleges that Russian intelligence officers directed funds and instructions to the African People’s Socialist Party, a nationwide activist group that’s organized protests, carried out community projects and supported two candidates for the Board of Aldermen in St. Louis. The group’s 81-year-old founder Omali Yeshitela founded the organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, before expanding to St. Louis in 2017, drawn to the city by the Ferguson protests.
The indictment charges Yeshitela and two other organizers active in St. Louis, Penny J. Hess and Jesse Nevel, with conspiracy to defraud the United States and impersonating agents of foreign governments. They’re accused of posting Russian propaganda on the organization’s website, taking Russian funds and agreeing to a Russian directive to pen a letter to the United Nations complaining of a “genocide of African people” in the U.S.
U.S. Justice Department officials on Tuesday said the case reveals the Russian government’s efforts to divide U.S. society and influence elections.
From the Associated Press:
Among other things, the indictment charges that an unnamed candidate for local office in St. Petersburg received clandestine funding and political strategy from the group. Ionov and another Russian said at one point that their Florida effort would extend to the 2020 presidential campaign, which they called the “main topic of the year.”
The Uhuru group did have a candidate who ran unsuccessfully for St. Petersburg City Council in 2019, Eritha Akile Cainion, who is not charged in the indictment. She held a news conference in 2022 in which she defended Russia, saying “world colonial powers have been collaborating against Russia” for more than a century.
Today the St. Petersburg City Council, tomorrow the world!
Eritha Akile Cainion lost 82-18.
Russian incompetence is such that in an era when every dimwitted black racist was being lauded, they managed to pick out the only ones nobody ever heard of. Of course, if Tim Cook was competing with Jamie Dimon to subsidize your anti-white grift, why take Putin’s money?
In contrast, when the British wanted to propagandize Americans in the early 1940s, they used Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Michael Korda, David Niven, Roald Dahl, David Ogilvy, William Stephenson, Noel Coward, etc. etc.
“British Security Coordination” ran several hundred agents out of Rockefeller Center.
The American friends of BSC included FDR, OSS head William J. Donovan, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Winchell.
At the end of the war, Roald Dahl and several other secret agents wrote up a secret history of the BSC for its boss William Stephenson. It was finally published in 1998. From the Washington Post in 1989:
HOW CHURCHILL’S AGENTS SECRETLY MANIPULATED THE U.S. BEFORE PEARL HARBOR
By David Ignatius September 17, 1989
A SECRET HISTORY of British intelligence operations in America during World War II reveals that Britain was engaged in a far broader — and more cynical — attempt to manipulate the United States in the two years before Pearl Harbor than has previously been revealed. The British planted propaganda in American newspapers, covertly manipulated radio stations and wire services, harassed their political enemies in Congress and the labor movement and plotted against American corporations that were unfriendly to British interests, according to the secret history.
They also pushed for creation of an American intelligence agency and helped install William J. Donovan — whom the British referred to as “our man” — at its head. Among its many revelations, the history lists the publishers or editors of five of the nation’s leading newspapers as friends “who rendered service of particular value” to the anti-Nazi propaganda campaign. The study also boasts of British contacts with three leading columnists of the day: Walter Lippmann, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson.
Intelligence experts say it was a masterful covert-action program — arguably the most effective in history. And by drawing the United States out of isolationism and into the web of British secret operations in a global war, it changed America forever. “BSC ran a vast range of covert operations which, in effect, became the foundation of subsequent OSS and CIA operations,” says Thomas F. Troy, a retired CIA officer who is a leading historian of American intelligence activities during the war. …
Details of the British campaign are contained in a 423-page document that carries the bland title, “British Security Coordination (BSC): An Account of Secret Activities in the Western Hemisphere, 1940-45.” This study, marked “top secret,” was prepared in 1945 by BSC historians. Ten leather-bound copies were distributed, supposedly to Roosevelt, Churchill and various British intelligence chiefs. None has surfaced publicly, until now. The Washington Post was shown a copy of the BSC history last week and allowed to take extensive notes on it by an individual who asked to remain anonymous.
… The study is a virtual textbook in the art of manipulation. And it portrays the America of 1940 and 1941 as a society almost laughably easy to manipulate. Boasting at one point of BSC’s success in peddling to U.S. newspapers the anti-Hitler predictions of a bogus Hungarian astrologer named Louis de Wohl, the study observed: “It is unlikely that any propagandist would seriously attempt to influence politically the people of England, say, or France through the medium of astrological predictions. Yet in the United States this was done with effective if limited results.” …
Stephenson’s answer was to declare “political warfare” on Britain’s enemies in America. His most important allies were sympathetic journalists. “The conduct of {BSC’s} political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy,” notes the BSC history. “For that reason the press and radio men with whom BSC maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded.” The roster of BSC’s friends included some of the most prominent names in journalism. “There is no need to list them all,” says the BSC history, “but among those who rendered service of particular value were George Backer, publisher of the New York Post, Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM, Helen Ogden Reid, who controls the New York Herald Tribune, Paul Patterson, publisher of the Baltimore Sun, A.H. Sulzberger, president of the New York Times, Walter Lippmann and several other columnists … .” …
The British spymasters played this media network like a “mighty Wurlitzer,” to borrow a phrase used by CIA Deputy Director Frank Wisner in the 1950s to describe American cold war propaganda. Like so many other things, the Americans learned to manipulate the media from their British cousins. Indeed, the BSC history is almost a menu for the covert-action techniques that have been used ever since by the CIA.
… Even the BSC historians sound chagrined in recounting what they did to WRUL. The discussion of this operation concludes: “Thus it happened that an American wireless station with an unsullied reputation for impartiality was, for many months during the most critical period of the war, unknowingly harnessed to the task of broadcasting British propaganda … .”
In explaining Britain’s campaign against Axis propaganda in the United States, the BSC history included this chilling account of America’s susceptibility to foreign manipulation: “IN PLANNING its campaign, it was necessary for BSC to remember … the simple truth that the United States, a sovereign entity of comparatively recent birth, is inhabited by people of many conflicting races, interests and creeds. These people, though fully conscious of their wealth and power in the aggregate, are still unsure of themselves individually, still basically on the defensive and still striving, as yet unavailingly but very defiantly, after national unity and indeed after some logical grounds for considering themselves a nation in the racial sense. It is their frustrated passion to achieve a genuine nationalism which leads them to such extravagances — more wishfully assertive than fervently patriotic — as the annual ‘I am an American’ Day and to such absurdities of expression — often heard — as ‘Wishing you a real American Christmas.’” …
As part of its “political warfare” campaign against Germans and Nazi sympathizers, British intelligence suggested that “freedom-lovers” around the world should secretly compete in harassing the enemy by playing a game called “Vik.” The game’s purpose, explained the BSC history, “was to use ridicule as a weapon against the Nazis.” In practice, it bore an eerie resemblance to American fraternity-house hazing — and to the “dirty tricks” used a generation later in the Watergate affair. Here’s an excerpt from a memo that was prepared by BSC’s Station M, near Toronto, suggesting some ways to play the game: A NAZI “can be telephoned at all hours of the night and when awakened can be apologetically assured that it is the wrong number; the air can mysteriously disappear out of his motor car tyres; shops can be telephoned on his behalf and asked to deliver large quantities of useless and cumbersome goods — payment on delivery; masses of useless correspondance can reach him without stamps so that he is constantly having to pay out petty sums of money; his lady friend can receive anonymous letters stating that he is suffering from mysterious diseases or that he is keeping a woman and six children in Detroit; he can be cabled apparently genuine instructions to make long, expensive journies; a rat might die in his water tank; street musicians might play ‘God Save the King’ outside his house all night; his favorite dog might get lost. With a little thought it should be possible to invent at least 500 ways of persecuting a victim without the persecutor compromising himself.”
David Ignatius is editor of the Outlook section.
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