May 26, 2026
What happens when Britain fights the Cold War with typewriters, fake pamphlets, covert publishers, and even pretend hippies?
On this episode of Spybrary's Cold War Spy Files, Shane Whaley talks with historian Rory Cormac about his book Fakers: A Top Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Line.and the extraordinary true story of the Information Research Department — Britain’s secret propaganda and forgery machine.
A fascinating dive into Cold War deception, disinformation, and
'state-sanctioned skullduggery.' The conversation opens the file on
Britain’s Cold War covert propaganda machine, especially the
little-known
Information Research Department — the IRD — a blandly
named Foreign Office unit involved in unattributable propaganda,
forgeries, fake groups, and intelligence laundering.
Professor Cormac explains how the IRD moved far beyond ordinary government messaging, creating forged pamphlets, fake political organisations, covert publishing operations, and disinformation campaigns designed to expose or disrupt Soviet influence worldwide. The episode is packed with strange-but-true stories, from British officials posing as hippies to disrupt a Soviet-backed youth festival in Bulgaria, to the painstaking forensic details of typewriters, staples, paper, and fonts used in Cold War forgery work.
The discussion also highlights the
unusual people behind these operations: refugees, journalists,
women, fixer-agents, propagandists, and oddball bureaucrats working
in the shadows of British foreign policy. Rather than focusing on
famous spies or prime ministers, Fakers
reveals the human texture of covert influence work: the hustlers,
handlers, writers, typists, and paper experts who helped wage
Britain’s secret propaganda war.
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