Allied deceptions, psy-ops and atrocity propaganda.

[Wetzelrad]

There's an article on the Jewish Daily Forward about how British intelligence conspired with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to "stop Hitler" by pushing "fake news". This was done through an offshoot of the JTA called the Overseas News Agency (ONA), founded in 1940.
https://forward.com/culture/412422/shar ... il-hitler/

That article is substantially based on Religion News Service's article.
https://religionnews.com/2018/10/01/the ... do-hitler/

Either article gives a good overview, but below I will quote instead from the source, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections between Espionage and Journalism in Washington, written by Steven Usdin. All quotes from chapter 9, titled "Fake News". Usdin writes:

From the start, attacking Nazi Germany was a higher priority for ONA than hewing to the truth. Much of its copy was based on sources close to the imagination of its writers and their friends in London. For example, its second bulletin, distributed in August 1940, cited anonymous “qualified Czech” sources reporting that “Czechoslovak girls and young women have been transported from the Protectorate to German garrison towns to become white slaves.” It claimed that “Nazi officials, dispatching these trainloads of prospective white slaves to the Reich, informed husbands and relatives that the women ‘will be entrusted with the important work of amusing German soldiers, in order to keep up the morale of the troops.’”

So ONA invented stories. They invented a story about Nazi sex slavery even before they were on Britain's payroll.

There can be no doubt about the ONA's close relationship with British intelligence. As the BSC history notes, ONA's primary value “lay in its ability not only to channel propaganda outwards but to assure wide dissemination of material originated by BSC and intended for internal [American] consumption.”

This quote is direct and explicit. Britain surreptitiously used ONA to "channel propaganda" both against unsuspecting Americans and abroad.

A few weeks before ONA opened its Washington office, the president and chairman of JTA reached an agreement with William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination. BSC agreed to give the ONA a monthly subsidy in return for a promise of cooperation. The commitment included giving ONA credentials to British spies around the world. British intelligence reports to London about propaganda activities in the Americas routinely mentioned securing ONA employment as cover for agents. ONA also recruited its own spies.

So Britain paid ONA, British spies used employment at ONA as a cover, and ONA's own personnel acted as spies too. Usdin adds that JTA's founder Jacob Landau also approached both the FBI and KGB offering to collaborate, even offering up the whole continent of South America's Jews to help in the war effort, but he did not find records showing that either of these partnerships happened.

Usdin then gets in to Britain's rumor factory, which is already covered upthread. He writes that, "For many [rumors], the first stop was ONA's New York and National Press Building offices."

He describes several rumors about British weapons, including a weapon that could set the English Channel on fire, a more powerful depth charge, and, the most outlandish one, that man-eating sharks had been released into the Channel.

Usdin tracked some of these rumors to newspapers. He writes that ONA's stories were picked up by "scores of newspapers, ranging from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post to tiny papers like the Circleville, Ohio, Daily Herald". He also found British rumors in the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Daily Telegraph, and the Morning Post. He also briefly discusses radio:

One of ONA's tasks was to help BSC get disinformation broadcast on WRUL, a shortwave radio station located on Long Island with a powerful signal that could be heard clearly throughout Europe. The operating rules for WRUL, which had programming in several languages, specified that it would broadcast only news that had already appeared in print. ONA published BSC-generated rumors, WRUL repeated them, and by the time other newspapers and radio stations picked them up, BSC's and ONA's fingerprints had disappeared.

WRUL was actually located in Boston at that time, but aside from that this seems to be factually accurate. The Wikipedia page says WRUL was used "for conducting political warfare on behalf of the British" and "had become unknowingly an arm of the BSC".

Now for some of my own thoughts.

The ONA was apparently quietly shuttered after the war, so it must not have been needed any longer. I get the impression that it was set up merely to be a front for its staff to travel through Europe and incite for war without being easily recognized as Jews. And whereas JTA has published a lot of its archive material on its own website (e.g. mass electrocution of Jews) I'm finding it difficult to locate any archives for the ONA. Suspicious. I wonder what happened to the staff -- were they simply reintegrated to the JTA? This deserves further investigation.

This chapter of the book totally ignores the Holocaust. Did the ONA not report any Jewish atrocities? Is it not possible that some of the disinfo planted in the ONA was false atrocity stories about Jews? Similar to the quoted story about Czechoslovaks? There were many stories like that in the JTA. It seems like an obvious and important possibility, worthy of discussion, but it must be verboten to even approach this topic. According to the RNS article, both MI6 and JTA have stayed mum about this secret relationship they had, and Usdin received some criticism just for writing this chapter of the book.

[Eye of Zyclone]

There's an article on the Jewish Daily Forward about how British intelligence conspired with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to "stop Hitler" by pushing "fake news". This was done through an offshoot of the JTA called the Overseas News Agency (ONA), founded in 1940.

For info, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) was founded ad headed by some Zionists. It was a poorly-disguised Zionist propaganda organ, tasked with disseminating Zionist narratives throughout the Jewish & non-Jewish world.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) is an international news agency and wire service that primarily covers Judaism- and Jewish-related topics and news.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency was founded in The Hague, Netherlands, as the first Jewish news agency and wire service, then known as the Jewish Correspondence Bureau on February 6, 1917, by 25-year old Jacob Landau.[2][3]

Landau, JTA's original publisher, later founded The Palestine Bulletin, an English-language broadsheet published in Mandatory Palestine in 1925. The Palestine Bulletin eventually became The Jerusalem Post.[20]

In 1940, the JTA spawned the Overseas News Agency (ONA).[14] Although designed to appear like a normal news agency, it was in fact secretly funded by the British intelligence service MI6.[15] ONA provided press credentials to British spies, and planted fake news stories in US newspapers.[15]

Editors-in-Chief
Boris Smolar joined the JTA in 1924, and retired as its editor-in chief in 1967.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Telegraphic_Agency

Jacob Landau (publisher)

Jacob Landau (1892-1952) was an Austrian-born American journalist who founded the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the first Jewish news agency and wire service.

Landau was born in Austria in 1892. As a student at the University of Vienna, he was active in the Zionist movement.[1]

In January 1925, Landau founded The Palestine Bulletin, an English-language broadsheet published in Mandatory Palestine. The Palestine Bulletin would eventually become The Jerusalem Post.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Landau_(publisher)

Boris Smolar

Boris "Ber" Smolar (May 27, 1897 – January 31, 1986) was a Russian-born Jewish-American journalist and newspaper editor from New York. He was editor-in-chief of the JTA from 1928 to 1967.[4]

He spent years covering the Mandatory Palestine, reporting on the 1929 riots and knowing various major Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann and Ze'ev Jabotinsky. In 1940, he provided an affidavit to allow Jabotinsky's son Eri Jabotinsky to leave Nazi-occupied France with his fiancee. He was in the United Nations when they voted on the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which he later described as "one of the most sacred moments of my life."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Smolar

Another amazing cohencidence: Churchill's Minister of Propaganda during World War Two was also his liaison officer to Zionist leaders at that time.

Nahum Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann (July 10, 1895 – August 29, 1982) was a leading Zionist. He was a founder of the World Jewish Congress and its president from 1951 to 1978 and was also president of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968.[1]

In 1936, Goldmann and Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise established the World Jewish Congress (WJC).[15] He is credited with early prediction of the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. In the spring of 1942 he said, "[W]ho can foretell what the Nazi regime, once brought into the position of the surrounded killer, will do in the last moment before it goes down to shame?"[16] Addressing the Zionist Organization of America in October 1942, having heard the reports of genocide, he lamented, "Our generation is in the tragic position that one-half of the generation is being slaughtered before our eyes, and the other half has to sit down and cannot prevent this catastrophe."[17] Goldmann called for an extraordinary Zionist conference in 1942 to form a cohesive strategy to attenuate the devastating effects of Nazi policies on European Jews, and the outcome was the Biltmore program, which called for, among other things, unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine.[25]

From 1951 he was the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency. In that year, he convened a meeting in New York City of 23 major national and international Jewish organizations to address the task of negotiating an agreement with the West German government for the reparations to Jews for losses caused by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (also known as the Claims Conference) was the organization that emerged from this meeting. On September 10, 1952, after six months of negotiations, a reparations agreement between the Claims Conference and Konrad Adenauer's government of West Germany was reached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahum_Goldmann