The British government targeted the American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael and sought to weaken the Black Power movement with covert disinformation campaigns, recently declassified documents have revealed.
The effort was the work of a secret unit known as the Information Research Department, based in London and part of the Foreign Office, which created and distributed literature from fake sources as part of a broader effort to destabilise cold war enemies.
Though focused primarily on the Soviet Union and China, leftwing liberation groups and leaders the UK saw as threats to its interests, the discoveries reveal the IRD from the late 1960s sought to counter more diverse targets too.
“We can see a large-scale attempt to shape events overseas, but one that was moving away from communism and targeting whole new areas. This shows the breadth, scope and scale of British covert information operations,” said Rory Cormac, an expert in the history of subversion and intelligence who found the material when researching his recent book, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft.
The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent.
Based mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials.
The documents show the IRD created a fake west African organisation called The Black Power – Africa’s Heritage Group, which produced a pamphlet calling Carmichael an “unbidden prophet from America” who had no place on the continent.
“Enough is enough – why Stokely must go! – and do his thing elsewhere,” read the pamphlet, alleging Carmichael was “weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism” and was controlled by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and former president of Ghana who had been deposed in a coup in 1966.
The IRD’s effort did not attack Carmichael as a pro-Soviet or communist stooge, a hitherto frequent line of attack. Instead, the unit sought to portray its target as a traitor to other Black Power activists with a patronising attitude to African peoples.
By coming to Africa, Carmichael had “deserted the cause” in the US “which needs him more than we do” and had been arrogant in preaching Black Power to a continent “where it already truly belongs”, the pamphlet said. It also claimed Carmichael was a “burning zealot”, who seemed to imagine Africans as “savages” and compared him unfavourably with other radical activists who had recently arrived on the continent from the US such as Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, who was living in Algeria.
“We are capable of formulating our own plans for our part in the struggle for equal rights and freedom for the Black man everywhere … and when we are launching ‘Black Power’ it will be our own brand ‘African Power’ and not the African American brainchild Stokely is trying to impose on us,” the fake statement read.
The smear operation against Carmichael received enthusiastic endorsement from officials within the IRD and elsewhere in the British government, including in the Foreign Office west African department. It came amid rising concern in Whitehall about the Black Power movement elsewhere in the world too. The IRD was particularly worried by the movement’s potential influence in the Caribbean.
In February 1969, the IRD learned of a Black Power conference to be held in Bermuda the following August and decided that rather than ban the event, it should attempt to discredit it. British intelligence services were asked for information on Black Power leaders, and any evidence of Soviet, Cuban or Guyanese links to the movement. This was only available from US intelligence services that had begun investigating links between black radicalism in the Caribbean and advocates of Black Power in the US from around 1968.
The IRD then prepared a series of articles for distribution to newspapers in the Caribbean and elsewhere. These accused the Black Power movement of being exploited by Havana and claimed the forthcoming conference would ruin Bermuda economically.
The IRD also prepared and distributed an article about Black Power leaders targeting Trinidad. This suggested that communists were behind Black Power aspirations on the island, and that outside powers operated “with the collusion of ambitious locals seeking their own ends”.
Some tactics in Bermuda were rejected for fear of stoking racial tensions, and local officials in the Caribbean were not supportive of the campaign. “There were limits to what the IRD was prepared to do. In the Caribbean, the concern was that racial tension could lead to riots and disruption of tourism and so the wider economy. In general, the IRD was happy to insinuate something without evidence but not with outright lying,” Cormac said.
In 1969, the IRD also created a new fake group: The Organisation of African Students for African Power. This was supposedly based in East Germany and adopted contemporary radical New Left ideas, “proclaiming a plague on both” the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc.
The IRD felt this provided a better platform to “damage opponents” than the dated nationalist approach, while being difficult to trace back to Britain because many similar groups had genuinely sprung up in the late 1960s. The group attempted to link a wave of assassinations in Africa to the Soviets.
The British were not alone in using such tactics. The KGB committed significant resources to disinformation campaigns throughout the cold war and achieved some significant successes. One pamphlet produced by the Soviet service reported accurate American statistics and real cases of race crimes in order to turn African audiences against the US. It was made to look like it had been written by an African-American organisation agitating against the Ku Klux Klan.
The CIA built extensive networks across sub-Saharan Africa, and used cultural ambassadors such as Louis Armstrong as a “Trojan horse” for intelligence-gathering.
The agency continued to be interested in Carmichael after his flight from the US in 1969 and “wrote typescript memos on [his] travels abroad during a period when he had dropped from public view”, a summary of activities released by the agency in 2007 revealed.
“The UK effort was a lot smaller than that of the Americans or the Soviets and more restrained too, but it was broad in scope. The UK was doing this all over the world,” Cormac said. “Information operations were seen as a force multiplier. It is clear there was a recognition that we were small and in decline but that this was a clever way of maintaining a global role on the cheap.”
