Misfits on the Frontline of Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War
A review of Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War by Terry Stiastny (WH Allen, 2025)
IN A CITY STUNNED BY DEFEAT IN WAR the government official I spoke to was clear, and defiant. He had used words, not weapons, when his country fought against a stronger invader. ‘In this century, and in a conflict where you have a huge power against a small state, I think that’s almost as important as the military battle,’ he said.
He was speaking of the current century, but the many and varied characters who feature in Terry Stiastny’s impressive Believable Lies would recognize the sentiment. They too were dealing with new technology, the nature and potential of which they did not fully understand, during a war in which they were striving to save their country from conquest.
In their case, the technology was radio. It was relatively new as a mass medium, and growing into its role in global communication. Arriving in Moscow in the fall of 1941, Charlotte Haldane reflected that, ‘every correspondent in a foreign country now, of course, relies on the radio for both news and official propaganda.’ The Soviets’ response, Haldane continued, was to confiscate all private radio sets when war broke out. They understood its power, and wanted to control it as far as they could.
On the other side of Europe, Stiastny tells us, ‘During the Second World War, Britain produced fake news. It believed it was doing so with a political, a military, and even a moral purpose.’ As Haldane was on a ship to the Soviet Union in the late summer of 1941, the British government was renaming the organization that was in charge of ‘propaganda to occupied and enemy countries’. It became the Political Warfare Executive. ‘Black propaganda would use the newest technology available: radio was central to its reach,’ Stiastny explains.
Believable Lies relates in impressive and engaging detail how they went about it: including the debates about the extent to which the British government should knowingly put out false information. Rudolph Hess’s unexpected wartime landing in the UK provides a propaganda opportunity–but officials agonize over how best to exploit it. ‘The important thing is, not to distort the truth in a way that can be detected,’ argues one.
When something more outrageous is needed, the ‘black’ propaganda radio stations take over. These were staffed by an ‘eccentric mixture of journalists, politicians, intelligence officers, authors, advertisers, artists and forgers.’ They included exiled native speakers of the languages in which they were broadcasting. Their output was crafted to give the impression it was being broadcast from within areas under Nazi control. In fact much of it was coming from Woburn Abbey, some 75 km north of London.
The official with whom I discussed 21st century media wars was Georgian. We spoke in the fall of 2008, after his country’s forces had been humbled by the Russian army in a brief war in August of that year. Today, with Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine now in its fifth year, the August war with Georgia seems like a warning of what was to come.
So too does the justification that Richard Crossman, one of the main characters in Believable Lies, offers for recording on film some of the horrifying sights British soldiers saw when liberating Nazi death camps. ‘One day there will be people who will stand up and say there were no such things as concentration camps, and that the whole story was a frame-up by Hitler’s enemies. We can’t be too careful.’
Terry Stiastny’s remarkable book brings to life a time now at the fringes of living memory–and in doing so, tells us much about the ideas that shaped the relationship between war and media in our own. In her conclusion, she reflects, ‘The deliberate creation of what we would now call ‘fake news’ set a dangerous precedent.’
