Peter Pomerantsev on Winning an Information War

All this stuff about half of America just won't listen to this. You're just not trying. You're just not trying. I fear in America people don't try to reach people in echo chambers.

Peter Pomerantsev

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. His past books include Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda. His most recent book is called How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Sefton Delmer - 3:37
• Der Chef - 11:34
• Communication and Propaganda - 25:27
• Winning an Information War - 37:45

Key Links

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

Follow Peter Pomerantsev on X @peterpomeranzev

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Samuel Woolley on Bots, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Propaganda

Allie Funk of Freedom House Assesses Global Internet Freedom

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Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

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100 Books on Democracy

Transcript

Over the past few years, I have come across plenty of books about disinformation and misinformation. I’ve even spoken to some of the authors on this podcast. But Peter Pomerantsev has a new book with an interesting twist. Rather than focusing on defense, he gives us some insight into how to go on offense in an information war.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. You might remember his past books Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda. Peter has become among the most insightful thinkers on issues of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and deceitful forms of communication. His new book is called How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler.

Our conversation explores what Sefton Delmer’s propaganda efforts during World War II teach us about information wars today. Peter explains some of the positive and negative lessons we can learn. What I liked most about this conversation is it gets us away from some of the same talks we have about the evils of misinformation and disinformation. Instead, we look at proactive steps taken in the past that offer insight into what is possible for the future.

The Democracy Paradox is proud to count as one of its sponsors the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program is a leading source of research and ideas about supporting democracy globally. You can learn more at ceip.org/programs/democracy.

The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website.

You may have noticed the show now has a second sponsor. It’s great news, but I still need more help to keep this podcast producing episodes every week. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or would like to discuss ways to partner with the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. Like always I’d love to talk more with you and your organization.

But for now… This is my conversation with Peter Pomerantsev…

jmk

Peter Pomerantsev, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Peter Pomerantsev

I think it's going to be a pleasure being here. I hope so.

jmk

I think it will. Well, Peter, I loved your book, How to Win an Information War: Sefton Delmer, The Genius Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler. It's an interesting book because it's a little bit history, but at the same time, it's running parallels throughout the book to bigger picture questions about how you win an information war. Should you even fight an information war? What does that mean? You're making direct parallels to Russia and Ukraine throughout it. So, while this book is about history, it's written in a way that has particular relevance to the present day.

But it's also about a figure, Sefton Delmer specifically. He comes across in your book as somebody who's just a very consequential historical figure. And yet, I have never heard of him before now. Why haven't I heard of him? Why is he completely new and more or less unknown today?

Peter Pomerantsev

What a brilliant question. He feels so contemporary to our present moment, because what he's essentially wrestling with is how can democratic forces compete with authoritarian propaganda when we kind of know already that the attempts to just talk about democratic values and liberal values and just values in general ain't going to cut it. I mean, we're about to hit this in such a big way in the US where it does seem that a large part of this election is going to be around something as vague as like saving democracy. And is that really going to work? I mean, Sefton Delmer would probably be screaming that, ‘Mate, that is not going to work!’ If you really want to get to that percentage of people who don't agree with you already, that isn't going to work. That's basically the conclusion he comes to.

He is the head of British essentially covert propaganda operations. It's called special operations head of the political warfare executive. But essentially, how do you do clever communications campaigns to reach Germans during the Second World War and people throughout occupied Europe? Essentially, the conclusion that he comes to is that reaching to them about how great democracy is and how evil Hitler is just is not going to work. The ones who care about that have either left or are in jail and the rest don't want to listen. So, he's dealing with this question of echo chambers. How do you reach audiences at a time when simply hoping for a marketplace of ideas to help you out and that the best information will rise to the top, just is not going to cut it.

The problem set that he's confronting feels so relevant whether you're somebody like me who thinks a lot about how do you do communicate into dictatorships like Russia, China, to a certain extent Iran. These information wars that we’re locked into in an era of great power competition or if you're thinking about how you reach the voters of authoritarian populists throughout the world. Delmer doesn't only write about the Second World War. He writes about Germany in the First World War. He writes about the rise of the Nazis, which he witnesses. He writes about authoritarian dangers in democracies like West Germany. I mean, Germany's obviously his great topic. He also writes about the power of war propaganda in England in World War I.

So, all caveats apply when we talk about the Nazis. They're uniquely nasty. You know, we should be very careful making comparisons, but Delmer makes those comparisons and the people around him make those comparisons and they see patterns in propaganda and how you can fight it. So, that's why I do as well. I mean, it's because Delmer himself wanted to look at the larger challenges that I was like wow, this guy is dealing with issues that now confronts us as well.

jmk

So, I completely understand why Sefton Delmer appeals to you. I mean, based on your previous writings, your previous book, articles I've read from you, Sefton Delmer definitely comes across as the type of historical figure that Peter Pomerantsev would want to know more about. But he's not somebody that jumps out of the page in histories about World War II. I would imagine you really had to dig deep to find out about him. How did you even discover who he was?

Peter Pomerantsev

So, there was actually a lot of interest in him in the 1960s when he published his memoirs. There are his memoirs. They're completely out of print. They cost ludicrous amounts of money online and they're good fun. He was a tabloid journalist as well for The Daily Express, so he writes very engaging prose. They sold very well in the 1960s. He was on TV a lot. He gave a lot of interviews. He was actually a very, very famous journalist when he wasn't doing his counter propaganda or propaganda work during World War II. So, it's not as if he's unknown, but he's been forgotten. I mean, his son always thought he'd been forgotten, because a lot of the things that he did in World War II were very, very sneaky and were deceptive and use a lot of disinformation.

In my book, I'm very clear that the lessons he has for us are both positive and negative. His son always felt that the British didn't want to think about that too much. We like to glamorize the Second World War. We don't like to focus on the more morally complex chapters. Delmer plays with this all the time in his memoirs. Right at the start he does this little anecdote where he basically says, ‘Am I a goody goody or a baddy baddy?’ He goes, ‘No, I'm a baddy baddy.’ He's sort of having a conversation with his daughter. He's somebody who plays up that he was a bit of a naughty antihero. Delmer clearly plays into this idea and loves exaggerating it in many ways.

That was his son's sort of conclusion. People didn't focus on it because unlike the story of the RAF or something, it is a story of a bunch of people sitting around creating covert radio stations. There's not a lot of physical bravery and to the extent that he was remembered it was for creating these kind of pornography stations, because a lot of his early experiments were pornography, essentially, or mixing pornography in with news. All this kind of stuff the British didn't like to talk about. But I think now is the time to look at him again, because he was doing a lot more than that.

Actually, the more I explored him, the more I was fascinated with what insights he had about why people are drawn to propaganda and how you can wean them off it, essentially. First, the British didn't like to think about this nastier side to their history and B, I don't know if information was that big a subject as it is now. I think now we're so hyperaware with the internet age of a new generation of authoritarian propaganda that suddenly the whole topic of propaganda has returned as a very, very, very fresh one. So, come with the crisis, come with the history.

jmk

Well, there's definitely a renaissance into a lot of the propaganda writings, the writings on public opinion…

Peter Pomerantsev

Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that. That's another guy actually that I’m actually thinking about doing my next book about. Not just Lippmann, but the whole world around him. So yeah, actually the US 1920s is an era that I want to come back to in a future book. You're quite right. I read Walter Lippmann to my students at Hopkins and everyone's like, ‘Wow, this guy is one of us.’

Lipman's been a little… He was never forgotten, but there hasn't been like a biography of Walter Lipman, perhaps the most important American intellectual of the first half of the 20th century, for a long time now. So, another good parallel there. Walter Lipman wrote kind of this great book, Public Opinion, where he defined what a stereotype is in the 1920s. A huge figure in his time. Again, he hasn't been forgotten, but neither is he in the center of our public debates.

jmk

No, definitely, definitely. Well, let's jump into Sefton Delmer. You've implied that he was a little bit unsavory, that some of the propaganda that he was doing wasn't what we would expect, but we've just been nibbling around the edges, if you will. Tell me about the Der Chef program. What was it? Why was it something that was unorthodox? Why was it something that made other people in British communications feel a little bit cringe while he was doing it?

Peter Pomerantsev

Yeah, that's a great word there. So, this is 1941. I'm going to set the time here. The Nazis control pretty much all of Europe. France has fallen. Britain looks like it’s the next to fall. The blitz is raging. America hasn't entered the war. Hitler hasn't even started war with Soviet Union. I mean, it looks like Britain's about to fall. So, these are desperate, desperate days. You’ve got to remember that. I mean, this is very, very back to the wall stuff. Delmer actually before that is doing stuff with the German service for the BBC and he's like, ‘This is pointless.’ Because the German service of the BBC is doing these liberal intellectuals and emigres telling the Germans about how democracy is better than fascism.

Meanwhile, the Germans are just conquering everything. Delmer is like, ‘Why are we trying to give them lectures about values?’ The first show he creates is a station, which is as un-BBC as you could possibly imagine. It is hosted by an obscenity spewing far right German senior officer who sounds to people listening to him… And this becomes the most well - according to sources at the time, German sources - the most popular station in Germany. They probably mean non-Nazi station, sort of the most popular underground station. So, he's obscenity spewing. He sounds like he’s talking to other soldiers. He's not even talking to the listener. It's as if he's sending short wave messages to other soldiers. So, you think you're part of a community of an incipient rebellion.

He is pouring incredible invective over Nazi officials. He's not anti-Hitler, but he definitely hates Himmler and Goering. What he really gets into is the corruption, sexual depravity, and gluttony of mid-level Nazi officials. So, the kind of people you and I haven't heard of. Sort of the mid-SS man in a German village, but that Delmer had incredible information on. It's one of the things you'll realize about him. He was actually obsessed with getting as much truth in his shows as possible. He had this huge research operation. They were gathering information from partisans, from spies, from open source - what we call open-source material - by actually listening secretly into the conversations of German soldiers, POWs, to find out all the latest rumors, stories, and gossip about ordinary Nazi officials.

This guy, Der Chef, who never names himself, he's just called Der Chef, is just doing these incredible stories about mid-level corruption full of this remarkable, almost burlesque venom. And a lot of porn scenes. A lot of like stories about how the Nazis try to enforce sexual morality, but behind the scenes they're having these sadomasochistic orgies in confiscated churches. A lot of sadomasochistic sex. It is incredibly popular. It breaks what in communications theory we'd call the spiral of silence. Suddenly, somebody is saying these truths. It helps reinforce this sense that there's actually splits between the army and the Nazi party and it gets a huge following. Goebbels is incredibly annoyed by this. We have different sources showing how effective it was in terms of gaining listenerships - and it was.

This is just Delmer's first experiment. It's his most famous one. And once every 10 years, there'll be some British documentary made about Der Chef and Britain's secret pornography in the war, which is what it's reduced to, which is silly because it’s such a small part of what Delma did. It kind of blows up in his face quite fast. First, as you implied, when British officials of the more Victorian sensibility find out about this, these orgies that are being broadcast for British government money, they're outraged. There's a guy called Sir Stafford Cripps, who's meant to be next in line to Churchill, a very, very senior diplomat who's a complete prude. He goes ballistic when he finds out about this and basically stomps into Foreign Minister Eden's office and says, ‘If this is how we win the war, I don't want us to win the war.’

He is appalled by this and completely doesn't understand why it would be useful and it's quite funny. There's a letter that he writes describing in detail an orgy scene where a German admiral, I think, is using his helmet and a lot of butter to have a bit of a scene with some male sailors and females. We don't actually know the details of that show, but it's in Eden's letter. Cripps sort of goes, ‘I see no reason for this. Why is this being done?’ Delmer's answer is because butter is actually a scarcity and by showing how Nazi officials are abusing this rationed product for their orgies, you're highlighting the decadence of Nazi officials. That was the reason it was there. But also, just to get listeners in. I mean, Delmer understood that sex sells, so it's just to get people in.

But it blows up, and Delmer's almost taken off air because the show is seen as so scurrilous. But even more than that, the real problem is that the Nazis work out it's the British pretty fast and use it against the British and start saying, ‘Look, the British are trying to lie to you again.’ They debunk it and I think the big lesson that comes out of that, which is very relevant for today as well, is that covert media that pretends it's one thing is not another. It's going to get busted pretty soon, I mean, apart from the ethics of that. It was busted by the Nazis because they actually quite cleverly worked out the wavelengths and where the wavelengths were coming from. They actually got it to around a few kilometers from where it was being broadcast from.

Nowadays, it's going to happen even quicker. You've got to be careful with the efficacy and the blowback from stuff like this. We have cases like this. There's been several good stories by media about Pentagon attempts to do online campaigns in central Asia. I mean, maybe somewhere they're doing something incredibly clever, but the stuff that we then hear about is just pretty lame, certainly nothing as good as Delmer. But Delmer learns from this and the reason I actually started to do the book was because of what he does next. I want to be clear. Everybody was creating covert radio stations in the Second World War. The Soviets were doing it. The Nazis did it first.

So, the Nazis created all these shows that they broadcasted into Britain that would pretend to be the British worker station and it'd be a couple of cockneys, POWs, going let's bring down Churchill and his Jewish masters and stuff like that. There was a radio show that pretended to be Scottish nationalists that said Scotland doesn't need to be part of the war. There's one for Christians that said Christians should not go and serve in the English army. So, it is actually standard to do covert stations during the Second World War. Every side was doing it and the Nazis were the most advanced. But what all these stations suffered from was that they were covert, because in Britain everyone worked out it was the Nazis doing the shows as well and laughed at them. Der Chef kind of explodes in the same way.

jmk

Well, the Nazi covert stations were pretty obvious - at least that's the way how you describe it – because it was so anti-Semitic that it just came across as something that the Nazis would have come up with. At first, it sounded like something that could just be general people being frustrated with the fact that there were so many air raids and people dying. They were saying that the British were purposely delaying the air raid sirens so that more people could die and they're coming up with these conspiracies that people might actually believe. But because they just had the kind of language that would be part of the Nazi world, it became very easy to recognize this isn't really coming from genuine people.

The challenge was how do you get your message into one of these covert stations, while still sounding like you're one of the authentic people that you're trying to reach. How do you make it authentic enough that you're able to plant seeds that change the way that they think? I mean, that seemed to be the challenge and Der Chef was interesting because it was so far right that it didn't seem like it could possibly be something from the British.

Peter Pomerantsev

Yes, and he did go through a period before he was busted of being believed.

jmk

It lasted for a few years, I thought. At least like…

Peter Pomerantsev

He went on broadcasting actually until the end of 43, I think, but he was busted actually quite fast. I can't remember. A year, I think, just under a year. He starts in May, June 41 and I think he's busted by the end of the year, early 42. So, his peak is like that first bit. The next stations that Delmer did were actually much bigger. I mean, Der Chef is the one that if you Google Sefton Delmer, you'll get something about Der Chef. But as he expands his operation - and the person who supports him is Ian Fleming, Delmer’s friend and the future author of James Bond, who's working in intelligence for the admiralty. He's the one that goes, actually, you're onto something here. He supports Delma to build this into something much bigger.

First, Delmer, by the end of the war is running dozens of stations in many languages. But the really, really big one that he does is almost like the BBC in the sense that it's live. Der Chef is like half hour recordings that would come out like podcasts. The big one that Delmer does is live. I can't remember how many hours a day off hand, but like a lot, maybe eight hours a day or something like that. A really big block. It's got news. It's got entertainment. It's got a big band that's playing great music. It's got speeches by Hitler and Goebbels on it. So, it sounds like a genuine Nazi station and then interspersed is news from the front lines which are, again, a bit like Der Chef in content.

These are sort of incredible stories of corruption, soldiers abandoned with dysentery, the horror of being a German worker, but now narrated in a much more level style, like it's kind of the voice of the soldier. Soldiers are going, this is what it's like on the front. It's that sort of style. It's not this crazy rant, but very similar in its detail. Often it is kind of like invective, but not done by this sort of burlesque character and this station is broadcasting on medium wave. Now to broadcast on medium wave, it's basically moving from, I don't know, YouTube to being in your regular cable package.

If you're on medium wave, you've got to be in the Second World War, a government station. So, either you're a German station or a British station or someone else. There's no way that somebody is doing an underground station on medium wave. You need very serious transmitters. Delmar understands that he wants his audiences to understand that this can't be a genuine German station because the content is just too subversive. He wants his audiences to understand that this is the British dressed up as the Nazis and the audience understands that it's the British dressed up as the Nazis. It's this sort of a masquerade where Delmer isn't trying to deceive anyone, but he's giving them cover.

Cover in the first sense that if their officer walks in or the Gestapo come by, you can always say, ‘Oh, I thought this was a real Nazi station. I didn't know, sir.’ Because listening to foreign stations was punishable by hanging. But even more sophisticatedly, more intricately, in the psychological sense, Delmer and all his team is working with psychiatrists, philosophers, a lot of exiles from the German Berlin cabaret scene, a lot of Jews, actually. A lot of Jews who would be playing Nazis on the shows almost like a Mel Brooks character sort of territory here.

They worked out that people needed psychological cover and it's quite hard to get your head around this, this sort of consensual self-deception that when people hear the word us Germans or we, even though they know the British are behind it, it's easier for them to tune in. Easier because they don't feel like dissidents. Easier because they don't feel they're being disloyal. Easier because we play these very complex games with ourselves in order to legitimize things that we feel at some level might be wrong and cover in the sense that all of Delmer's philosophy of propaganda was that what propaganda does is not persuade. What propaganda does is legitimize and allow what you wanted to do in the first place, but there were barriers to do so.

He thought that's what the Nazis were doing. The Nazis legitimized people's sadism and people's desire to submit to a strongman. People wanted that and the Nazis gave it to them. He was trying to give them something else. He was saying deep down you want to defect. Deep down, you don't want to do what Hitler wants. Deep down your interests don't coincide with the Nazis. Deep down you know that. Let's do something else. Let's undermine the economy. Let's surrender. Let's defect from the front lines. Let's not follow Nazi orders. He was trying to find people's desire to not submit, act in their own self-interest, but also act following their psychological individuality.

Behind all this is a fascinating theory of communication. Delmer doesn't do philosophy. He never sits down and does a communications theory. But behind it is a very sophisticated theory of communication. The communication is not about brainwashing or subliminal messaging or any of that kind of stuff. Communication is about entering into a dialogue with the audience that enables them to roleplay their way into what they really want. So, the more I got into Sefton Delmer, the more I realized that behind the story of, I don't know, Britain's secret pornographer, which is how I'd heard him presented, was actually somebody thinking about communication and freedom in an incredibly sophisticated way.

jmk

So, does that theory or philosophy about communication, the idea that propaganda is giving you permission to believe something that you already want to believe, is that premised on the idea that we hold multiple contradictory viewpoints all at the same time? Because, on the one hand, you want to support the Nazi party in Germany, but at the same time, there's parts of you that do not. That's what it seems like. It feels like he's trying to create the tug of war within the person.

Peter Pomerantsev

That is beautifully put. That is absolutely beautifully put. That's something that is really strong in his memoirs and it starts with his courage to admit that about himself. So, he admits to really feeling the influence of World War I propaganda. One of the reasons Delmer could understand the Germans so well was he grew up in Germany. He was a kid in World War I. His dad was a professor of English literature at Berlin University. He's growing up in Germany in World War I, a British boy in a German school. He's bullied. He's 10 years old. He's kicked around for being the enemy school boy. But at the same time, during assembly where everyone's singing these German patriotic songs and marching in circles and celebrating this war jingoism, he's completely sucked into it.

He's got this incredible passage in his memoirs where he's sort of dramatizing himself in the third person. He's like, ‘I knew that I shouldn't feel this way. I knew that as a British boy, this wasn't right for me to feel this, but I did.’ And what's fascinating is he looks at people around himself and he sees that they all have these multiple selves. That on the one hand, yes, they do get into the propaganda of World War I, but they're also acting. We're always performing at some level and we can perform different selves. We can perform this patriotic self and then this very self-interested self that doesn't think about this and sees other important things and at the moment of performance believe it.

To completely believe the idea that the Nazi folk is what you belong to and then, actually, no, your family matters more or your church connections matter more. It seems very, very contemporary to today when we perform these different selves on social media. Delmer would have had a field day with analyzing social media about how people become something on social media and become that role and then go and be something else somewhere else. I mean, I've experienced it so many times where you meet people on social media and they're one thing and then you meet them in real life and they're somewhat different. Delmer would have loved all of that: the theater of the self.

I don't think he thought any one of those was your real self, by the way. I think he always thought you were always performing something. That's just life. Whenever you say anything, you're putting on some sort of costume. I think you put it very well that there's different use and it's up to him to set up this tug of war. I think you put it very, very well. He was playing on that tug of war. He wasn't like a believer that there was a true you somewhere. He was always very aware that there were different views.

The difference was, maybe this is what he was always trying to get to in his radio shows, that when you were performing your Nazi self, when you were being the SS man or the Nazi soldier or even the party member or something, that was a role that you were performing, especially the soldier, in the interests of somebody else. The propagandist was giving you that role and you were playing it because it may have a lot of, and Delmer would admit, pleasures playing that role. You get to feel part of a group. You get to feel superior. Delmer had a very dark view of human nature, but that's not you who created that role. Goebbels created that for you in Goebbels's interest.

He was like why don't you go and play something else in your interests where you're more in charge, where you're the writer and director of the performance. He's sort of like prodding people into that to bring it down to the level of information war. In the First and Second World War that means getting people to feign illness and go home from the front. One of the things that he gave people were these manuals about how you could fake your own illness, quite elaborate ones, including all the ways you can injure yourself using all sorts of rather horrible ingredients and concoctions including, I won't get into it, but including bits of, you know, gentle muck that would then sort of make it look as if you had like TB or something.

But again, in doing that he's trying to get you to think, ‘Hey, why don't you go play another role? Not the one of the ideal German soldier, go and play this role instead or go and have fun with this role and see where that gets you.’ He has this very performative view of our social selves. But also, of what propaganda is. Propaganda, essentially saying it gives you these roles to play which might be enjoyable, but are they good for you. I think you put it much more succinctly and better than I did by saying this. We have different selves and it's all about setting up the tug of war. I think that's exactly what he was doing. Thank you.

jmk

Well, I think a key driver of what he's trying to accomplish is oftentimes to destroy the morale of the German soldier, of the German citizen, of the Nazi party member and Der Chef is doing that by trying to create a sense of hypocrisy of the Nazi party leadership, whether it's true, which sometimes it was or if it was a fabrication, it didn't really matter. All that mattered is whether or not it seemed true and in his later work it was even more evident because he was giving valuable information to soldiers oftentimes as to where attacks were taking place and what was happening so that people were drawn to his programs because they were among the most helpful in the war.

But it meant that those soldiers were going to be getting the subversive content all at the same time that destroyed their morale. One of the stories that seemed just the most complicated ethically to do to somebody was how he would give announcements where he'd congratulate people for things. Like congratulations, you're a father and he does that to a person and the guy had been gone for more than nine months so it meant his child was not going to be his child. I mean, it just crushed this person and you can imagine him doing that with multiple people and it's a horrible, terrible thing to do that must have been profoundly effective in the field.

Peter Pomerantsev

Look, as I said at the start, Delmer's always asking us, is he a goody goody or a baddy baddy? In my book, I do not hold him up as somebody who just has good lessons for us. He has bad lessons, but he does confront the moral difficulties of conflicts and war and could be just as relevant for a hybrid war as much as for a hot war. He forces us to stare into that abyss. They're not easy answers. He actually does way more immoral things than that one. I mean, this guy was clearly looking for a reason to defect. Is that him crushing someone or someone going now I've got an excuse to surrender? But he does far more immoral things than that.

And my book is no way is meant to be… as I say, it's lessons good and bad. But he's very honest about it. There's a fantastic scene at the end of the book where he's shaving himself. It’s at the end of his memoirs, which I mentioned in my book, but again, showing the extent to which, he dramatizes himself and performs the role of baddie, he's shaving off a beard that he's worn since the start of the war. When the war starts, he grows a beard and doesn't shave it until 1945. He's shaving it off. He's staring into the mirror and as the beard comes off, he's like, ‘In front of me was the face of a dirty crook and this is what four years of covert propaganda had done to me.’

Again, he's playing, as he's always performing, and now he's performing this moral reprobate and again, he's slightly overplaying it. They do some pretty awful things, but compared to firebombing Dresden, compared to dropping the nuclear bomb, I mean, how awful is any of this? In order to achieve victory over Nazi Germany and its allies, we did a lot of horrible things and we should first be honest about it.

But we've also got to ask the really tough moral questions. When is it worth it and even if it's worth it, what are the costs and how do we deal with those costs? I'm afraid there are no easy answers. If we accept that we are often in an existential battle, which I mean, someone like Ukraine is clearly in an existential struggle. Those are the questions you have to ask yourselves. What's the moral cost benefit? Delmer forces us to think about these things, and we really shouldn't avoid them, frankly.

jmk

So, does waging an information war the way Sefton Delmer does, does it actually change us? Like I can imagine that there might be things that we're even doing right now that we don't realize that we're doing to the Russians in terms of propaganda. Prigozhin is somebody who reminds me a lot of Der Chef in terms of how he approached his Telegram account. I mean, if we found somebody of the nature of Prigozhin and we were able to flip them, but we told him, keep being on the far right. We just want you to start raising questions about the Russian regime. Try to become the Der Chef character for your social media audience, for the people that serve under you. Become that figure so that you cast doubt on what's happening.

I mean, does that change us? Does that change the person who is directing that type of propaganda, morally and spiritually? Does it affect them personally?

Peter Pomerantsev

I mean, Delmer suggested that it does, but so does going to war and killing people. That changes you profoundly and that's part of war. So, I think that for sure the Russians are much more sophisticated than the Nazis. They're very aware of the dangers of a totalitarian approach. My first book was about this. What Putin tries to do is to own all the narratives. So, the idea of Prigozhin and Strelkov who are supported by the Kremlin with the idea that you have your army over here. You don't want to get them too comfortable. So, you support these far-right figures who are constantly attacking the army to keep them on their toes. You want to own the opposition.

You want to control all of it, which is a much more sophisticated approach than the Nazis had, even though Hitler actually played Goebbels and Goering off each other nonstop. Even within the propaganda ministry played, or the propaganda played Goering and… oh my god I forgot his name, he was the head of news, who was constantly at war with Goering. So, Hitler knew this as well. He was always playing the different power structures off each other and there were actually SS newspapers that would have the remit to criticize Goering's propaganda ministry. So, Hitler wasn't as monoblock as well, but the Russians take it to a much further degree in that they would support someone like Prigozhin whose role was to criticize the army.

It also showed the dangers. It got out of control. Prigozhin got a big head. He started really taking himself way too seriously. You know, he was disposed of. Putin killed him. So that shows the Russians are trying to play that game internally to make sure that nobody does it from the outside. But it can get easily out of control. Are we doing it now? The Ukrainians will definitely be doing stuff. Of course, they're doing stuff. There's a war on. However, again, you've got to understand the scale of Delmer's success. Forty-three percent of soldiers, according to British government surveys of POWs, were listening to the stations. 43%. Believe me, if 43 percent of Russian soldiers were listening to a media, we would know about it because the Russians would be screaming about it, telling them to stop.

That is huge. Delmer’s stations were among the three most listened to in Munich in 43. Believe me. If we were one of the top three watched TV stations, because now it'd be TV, inside Russia, the Russians would be screaming about it. We would know about it. We're not talking about little psyops here. We're not talking about like a little Twitter account. We're talking about Delmer's media being almost mainstream in Germany during the war. The Germans were screaming about it. Goebbels was screaming about it. They're doing articles about it trying to discredit it. I mean, this was a big deal for the Germans who were trying to do something about it.

jmk

Did the information war actually contribute to winning the real war? I mean, you've just painted the picture of how big of a deal it was, how expansive it was, how much potential it had to make a difference. Did it actually make a difference?

Peter Pomerantsev

That's a great question. Obviously one that Delmer was asked a lot. Delmer avoided answering directly, probably very wisely. He said there's so many factors that go into influencing people that saying what my station did as opposed to bombardments is not serious. And by the way, a lot of communications theory today would try to avoid such a direct answer as well. Communications theory has tried to work out for 70 years whether watching violent movies makes people violent and with the ability to do control tests and laboratorial conditions, which Delmer certainly didn't have, we've decided that sometimes maybe for a bit.

This idea that you could parse out information influence over political, military, economic, social, cultural, historical, family -I mean, ad men will try to tell you that they've worked it out, but an honest ad man will tell you that we know that half of advertising doesn't work. We just don't know which half. We're into the rich soup of influence, which is very hard to parse out. What do we know? We know that it had really high engagement. Engagement is not the same as effects, but it's a sign. Frankly, a lot of media is more than happy with engagement as a marker of influence.

Secondly, we have more qualitative accounts of people surrendering because they listened to the radio. You gave us one there. There are many others. People said, I listened to this. After that, I defected. But those are qualitative things. We can't really put them into a huge quantitative survey. But lots of examples like that. Then we have the reactions of Nazi leadership themselves who in their internal correspondence are saying we're really annoyed by this. We've got to do something about this. This is damaging us. Again, really interesting anecdotal stuff. The Nazis, inside Hitler's bunker, inside the Nazi elite, they're very aware of the radio stations. The quality of information on them is so high, they're sure that one of them is leaking information to Delmer. They don't know who and they're constantly calling people into interrogations.

So just that sort of disruptive effect on trust and cohesion within elite decision making would be already a sign of success. Those are all different marks of success. But Delmer’s very clear if you don't get your military policy right, if you don't get your economic warfare right, if you don't get your everything else, your diplomacy right, if you don't get all that stuff right, no information will be able to do something magical. But neither does stuff get done without a good information campaign.

jmk

His ambitions were also remarkably humble. I mean, we keep talking about how expansive they were, how much he was getting information to the German people, to the German soldiers, but at the same time, just his philosophy behind the communication was not to completely change people's minds, completely change the way they thought, but just to almost remind them of other things that they also believed that might give them enough permission to be able to do something that they otherwise wouldn't. I mean, it's not necessarily that ambitious compared to things that we try to do with Voice of America and other things that were being done during the war in terms of trying to broadcast ideas about democracy and ideas about freedom and ideas about all these other big picture ideas to say embrace this other vision of the world.

He wasn't asking people to change their vision of the world. He was asking them to make small changes that would have large effects in the long-term. It's a very different way.

Peter Pomerantsev

Completely. Look, probably you need a bit of everything. You need some of what Delmer was doing. I think on a deeper level in the sense that he was trying to get people to act in ways that were independent. I think there was actually a very strong democratic impulse there in the sense that democratic is not just about big, fluffy ideas about acting democratically and acting in ways that are independent. He was trying to get people to act independently. So, it's almost as if he's interested in the behavioral side of what is democratic behavior rather than democratic abstract thinking. But you probably need everything. You need Thomas Mann giving lectures about what are democratic values so that one day Germany can be that.

You need to create the mental space to be a different type of German. I think these great German writers that appeared on the BBC and on American networks were important in that sense. They created a space where you could be another German in the future. Delmer's thing was the future's all very well. We've got to win a war. How are we going to get there? So, you need both. You need everything. You need the full spectrum. But we often like to talk a lot about the sort of abstract value stuff and that's easy and comfortable. You've got to win a war first.

jmk

A more complicated question is whether it's appropriate to use those same strategies outside of the context of a war. Is it acceptable to use that type of propaganda against a government that you're not necessarily at war with, but you're trying to change the way that its population thinks? Is it okay to use that kind of propaganda against your own citizens that have undemocratic ideas and you're trying to be able to shift their behavior a little bit? I think that one in particular would bother me the most, but I'd like to get your thoughts on it. When is it okay to use those strategies outside of the context of a war?

Peter Pomerantsev

I think even in the context of a war covert stuff has to be taken very carefully. Even in the context of a war, Delmer’s lesson was that it can backfire easily. Outside the context of a war, it's probably not appropriate. But again, I really want to stress this idea. Delmer's stuff from 1943 is not meant to be deceiving people. It's meant to give them a safe space. So nowadays, I don't know if you have to give a safe environment for Russians or Chinese to tune into something. Do no harm comes first. If sharing a piece of content that is from what Russians call now, or Russian law now calls, a foreign agent, which basically means anyone they don't like, then probably it is okay to be less obvious about who you are. I think the question is the relationship with the audience.

Do no harm and keep people safe. That should be top of your agenda always. So, the question is if that helps them not get in trouble and not get arrested, then I think that's fine. Two, it's about whether you're trying to pull the wool over their eyes. If they understand the game, if Russian soldiers were to wake up tomorrow with a radio station that's called, I don't know, Radio Zvezda and it's got a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, yes, we're a Russian station, but look at all this juicy material we're giving about corruption among your commanders. As long as the audience is in on the game, I think that's fine. I think that's the thing to learn from Delmer. That it's all about the relationship you have with the audience.

I think within democracy, there's just no need to do that. It's the other way around. The positive lesson to learn from Delmer is the absolute opposite. Today, we complain a lot about not being able to penetrate echo chambers. People are in a hyper partisan bubble. They're not ready to listen to anything that isn't the people they agree with already and that they know. So just to be clear, Delmer's audience, German soldiers and German citizens, knew that the people trying to kill them were broadcasting this content. Literally their mortal enemy, not their enemy in a culture war, but their enemy in a war with bombs. Yet they trusted Delmer's media because it had this amazing detail about their lives. It understood what they were going through. It sympathized with them and they felt that this media had their back.

So that is the thing to learn, that you can penetrate echo chambers. The like of which present media wars are a tiny battle compared to the very real wars that Delmer was involved. So that's the lesson to learn. That even though people knew that the British were behind it, they trusted it because it was just so amazingly well researched and reflected their pain. So, all this stuff about half of America just won't listen to this. You're just not trying. You're just not trying. I fear in America people don't try to reach people in echo chambers. There's no obvious profit to it. It's not easy money. Sadly, there seems to be very little financial motivation to do it.

So, the lesson for me is that if we're serious about breaking through echo chambers and breaching hyper partisanship, you can do it if you really want to. Maybe we're just not trying.

jmk

Is there anybody that's coming close?

Peter Pomerantsev

Local media does a much better job of it. There are these little micro-experiments in breaking through hyper-partisanship, but they're usually on the micro, very local level. There's not like a big cable news thing trying to do it and there's not a big media trying to do it. Again, I think it's about bottom line stuff. Quick profit is playing into partisanship. That's the quickest way to profit. The easiest thing to do is to whip up your side against the other. But if you'll do the much harder work of reaching audiences, it's hard, but it'd be way much more work. It'd be way much more research. You've got to overcome suspicion. It's just a lot more work, just much harder.

jmk

Peter Pomerantsev, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to plug the book one more time. It's called How to Win an Information War: Sefton Delmer, the Genius Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the book.

Peter Pomerantsev

Oh, it was a fun book to write and thank you for your really, really, really penetrating questions and your very succinct summaries of what I was trying to say, you know, much better than I did in the book. Thank you.