Perspective: Black Propaganda and the Call from Inside the House
In an information war, both sides sometimes go on offense
Hi Everyone! This week has been unexpectedly busy and I’ve decided to roll the Weekly Roundup over to the start of next week. We’ll catch up on the news then, but in the meantime here’s an article I’ve been considering writing for a long time but felt inspired to dive into by some recent stories. Enjoy!
It seems like every week we have a new story under the heading “hybrid war.” The use of this term to describe the Kremlin’s attempts to undermine or destabilize countries with so-called “hybrid” tactics is something that appears in the news almost weekly across Europe. From sabotage operations to information warfare, outside of Ukraine there is neither a hot, nor cold, war afoot - instead things seem to be simmering.
Today I want to dig into the “information warfare” aspect of “hybrid war” and unpack the word “war” that we find both phrases. Often when we discuss these activities in Moldova the framing goes something like this - Russia / Shor distributes propaganda which attempts to shape the reality of Moldovan voters. On the other side we see fact-checkers, debunking, and law enforcement efforts to remove bot accounts and similar actions. This paints a clear picture of "attacker” and “defender.” In this framing, the war is a siege with the defenders doing their very best to keep the attackers outside the city walls.
But that’s not the whole story… and it’s a fairly specific type of information warfare. There’s a whole lot more going on here and today we’re going to look more closely at that. I’m going to do it by first looking at a fascinating new book on information warfare, and then digging into what I think are 2 interesting information operations - one that Russia is conducting, and one that I suspect has recently been sprung against the Shor network by another player - someone on the offense and not manning the city walls.
“How to Win an Information War”
By Peter Pomerantsev
Journalist and author Peter Pomerantev published his latest book in March 2024. You can find it on Amazon or wherever good books are sold1. At the beginning of this year Moldova’s Cartier publishing house released his book in Romanian and Mr. Pomerantev came to Chisinau to give a talk about the book - something I attended and really enjoyed. If you’d like to see a shortened version of this talk you can watch his recent Ted Talk about the book here.
Peter Pomerantev is a Ukrainian-born British journalist who fluently speaks Russian and worked in Moscow for many years. He had a front row seat to the rise of Putin and has written multiple books on Russian disinformation and propaganda. But this book isn’t about that, not directly anyhow. Instead it is a biography of Sefton Delmer - a British journalist turned propagandist in the Second World War.
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What makes the book fascinating is the focus on Delmer’s mastery of so called “black propaganda.” So let’s look at some definitions - “white propaganda” does not disguise where it comes from or what its intentions are. This is basically PR and overlaps heavily with marketing. You don’t expect a Coca Cola add to voluntarily tell you about the dangers of diabetes - they just talk about how good it tastes! Similarly white propaganda has straightforward spin. “Gray propaganda” starts to cross that line into misleading people as to who is behind it, but typically the goal is still pretty clear. Russia’s bots vomiting out anti-EU messages are something in this area.
Black propaganda by contrast is the phone call coming from inside the house. It seeks to convince the target audience that it is being produced by the very people it seeks to discredit. The most famous, and consequential, single example of this is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fabricated text was published in Russia2 in 1903 and purported to be from a secretive Jewish group outlining their plot for global domination. This single piece of anti-semitic propaganda has caused enormous suffering and continues to be cited by terrible people to this day.
Pomerantev’s book outlines a much more palatable application of these dark arts. He traces how Sefton Delmer pivoted the British propaganda efforts away from their initial (failing) strategy. At first, British propaganda sought to appeal to the “good Germans” and to encourage a liberal, democratic revolt against Hitler. Delmar had lived in Germany for decades and covered Hitler’s rise to power. He had even interviewed Hitler. Delmar’s insight was that these “good Germans” were simply too few, too dispersed or too far from power, to be useful. He wanted to instead appeal to the mass of every day Germans - and that sometimes meant meeting them in unsavory places.
Delmar created dozens of propaganda efforts, employing shortwave radio broadcasts that appeared come from inside Germany itself. He created characters like “Der Chef,” a rabid Nazi who maligned Churchill and appealed to the Reich’s true believers. After gaining their trust, Der Chef would undermine the Nazi war effort - not by suggesting that democracy was good, but by saying that Hitler was too soft and Germany needed a stronger leader. He was able to pepper in examples - Nazi defeats that were being censored by official radio stations and other news that the German government sought to suppress. Through this tactic Delmar’s actors and their characters gained the trust of the audience first, then brought them the message in a manner that they would listen to.
I can’t recommend the book enough as a dive into the incredible story of Sefton Delmer, and what it says about the history of propaganda. A topic that has very clear resonance today.
Now, let’s take a look at one of Russia’s “Der Chef” equivalents - aka “Kanzlerdaddy” (Chancellor Daddy) and what it says about the Shor network’s reach. Then we’ll look at something different - a call seeming to come from within the Shor network’s metaphorical house, and what it might say about Western black propaganda efforts.