Part I. Covert action in Britain from the Cold War to the War on Terror

By Tom Griffin, 4 September 2007 

Is Gordon Brown really “leading the way in counter-terrorist thinking”? That is what the Guardian claimed last month, when it revealed that Prime Minister was looking to the Cold War as a precedent for the ideological struggle with Islamic terrorism.

“In this he has recently been inspired by a 1999 book on the CIA and the cultural cold war, Who Paid the Piper? by the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders,” Matthew D’Ancona reported. “He was particularly intrigued by the CIA's management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as ‘the juggernaut of American culture’. Brown cites the success of the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom in harnessing the intellectual firepower of a generation of authors and artists, and funding journals such as Encounter, Transition and Partisan Review.”

It is not obvious from D’Ancona’s laudatory prose, but Brown’s big idea is far from original. If anyone deserves credit for ‘leading the way’ it is surely journalist Dean Godson.

“During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers,” Godson wrote in The Times last year. “For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.”

In fact there is reason to believe that Cold War methods of psychological warfare are already shaping the debate about Islam and the war on terror in Britain.

Dean Godson himself may be one the most successful practitioners. Certainly, he comes from a family with long experience of what the CIA calls ‘covert action’.

Dean Godson

During this period, many Gaitskellite intellectuals wrote for Encounter, an Anglo-American magazine co-founded by Irving Kristol. Not until 1967 would it be revealed that Encounter and its parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were funded by the CIA as part of the programme of covert action that has become known as the cultural cold war.

Godson at Burtons Biscuits, Edinburgh

Much of Godson’s work would be continued by his elder son Roy, a Georgetown Professor who served on the National Security Council and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1982 to 1988.

Roy Godson’s role in covert operations emerged most clearly in the aftermath of the Iran/Contra affair, when an independent counsel’s report found that he had helped Oliver North channel thousands of dollars to the Contras through the Heritage Foundation.

Since 1993, Roy Godson has been President of the National Strategy Information Center , a think-tank that has had a significant influence on the Bush administration.

In 1996, the NSIC published a report on the Future of US Intelligence, which called for an increased emphasis on covert action and strategic deception at the expense of scientific intelligence analysis. One of the report’s co-authors, Abram Shulsky, went on to head up the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which provided Donald Rumsfeld with intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda.

Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards

Godson attributes an important role to deep-cover officers who “can be journalists, politicians, student leaders, retired military officers, trade union leaders, businessmen, academics, or public relations specialists. Their colleagues do not generally believe they are collaborating with foreign intelligence services.”

Godson describes a number of missions that such officers can perform: the recruitment of agents of influence, the provision of covert funding and support to friendly non-governmental organizations, and the spreading of propaganda, including disinformation.

“The sponsor may judge that anonymous propaganda is more effective, or that at worst it can be disowned,” he writes. “Covert propaganda can be black (well hidden) or gray (disseminated with a thin veil of cover.) The propaganda itself may be truthful or intentionally false.”

It is tempting to interpret the activities of Roy Godson’s younger brother in the light of this methodology.

Like Roy, Dean Godson served in the Reagan administration, as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman.

He is better known in Britain as the former chief leader writer of the Daily Telegraph, and as a research director for the Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange. In the latter capacity, he has been at the forefront of the debate about the British Government’s engagement with the Muslim community.

He has been particularly critical of Government contacts with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which he describes as an ‘Islamist front group’.

In July 2006, Godson sponsored the publication of When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, in which New Statesman editor Martin Bright denounced the Foreign Office’s attempts to engage with political Islam, notably the Muslim Brotherhood. The pamphlet featured copies of twelve high-level Whitehall documents leaked to Bright by a Foreign Office official.

The individual responsible has reportedly been arrested under the Official Secrets Act, but Policy Exchange can nevertheless claim some success in influencing Government policy.

In October last year, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly called for a ‘fundamental rebalancing’ of the Government’s relations with Muslim organizations, a move that was widely seen as a repudiation to the MCB.

There are good reasons to be concerned about Dean Godson’s role in bringing about this change in policy. He has made no secret of his own advocacy of ‘political warfare.’ It is clear from the historical precedents that he cites, and the methodology that his brother describes, that deception and covert manipulation are an integral part of ‘political warfare.’

Journalism influenced by this covert action approach clearly invites scepticism. There is likely to be a hidden agenda, in line with Roy Godson’s injunction that: “to be effective, covert propaganda must be co-ordinated with overall policy. It serves little purpose to dabble in the trade unless there are important strategic goals to be achieved.” There are also likely to be unverifiable claims that should be treated with caution.

An intriguing episode from 2006 illustrates the importance of both these caveats. This will be examined in part II of this series of articles.