How CIA propaganda infiltrated the pages of The Canberra Times in the Cold War
March 11, 2025
It was the mid-60s andThe Canberra Timeshad a problem.
Rupert Murdoch was setting up_The Australian_just up the roadon Mort Street: a fresh, modern-looking broadsheet with a national agenda. The_Times_, serving the national city since 1926, had a local challenger.
It prompted the Shakespeare family, whichestablished the_Times_, to sell the paper in April 1964 to Fairfax & Sons, the powerful family business behind_The Sydney Morning Herald_.
Under new ownership, the_Times_was to be a broadsheet with coverage of local, national and international news. John Douglas Pringle, a Scottish-born journalist who had edited the_Herald_and served as deputy editor of_The Observer_in London, was appointed editor.
With meagre resources and a small newsroom, the_Times_had to find a way to fill its new, bigger pages. It needed a way to do it quickly and cheaply. It certainly didn’t have the budget for a roster of its own foreign correspondents.
The answer came in the form of a news service based in London. In late 1965, Pringle, now editing the_Herald_in Sydney, prompted Fairfax to seek the exclusive Australian rights to material distributed by Forum World Features for exclusive use in the_Times_. Pringle had written to Forum to praise the “quite excellent articles”.
Each week, a packet of stories from Forum World Features would be delivered to the Fairfax office in London and express air-mailed to Australia. The stories were featured prominently and extensively in the_Times_, which reached a small but influential readership in the Australian capital.
But Forum World Features was a CIA front, distributing pro-US and anti-communist propaganda to newspapers across the world at the height of the Cold War.
‘Classic grey propaganda’
Peter Putnis, emeritus professor of communication at the University of Canberra, has worked for a long time on the history of international news networks, including how international news comes to Australia.
“I’ve never written specifically on_The Canberra Times_, but a colleague actually in North America at the Dominican University in Illinois, who’s a specialist in working on British propaganda, contacted me and said that he’d been getting material from the British National Archives … about the way in which a particular organisation called Forum World Features was distributing propaganda on behalf of the CIA,” he says.
“And he sent me some documents and lo and behold,The _Canberra Times_was quite prominent in these documents.”
Professor Putnis’ research, written with the Dominican University’s John Jenks, waspublished in the peer-reviewed journalMedia Historylate last month.
The paper sets out the history of Forum World Features at a time during the Cold War when the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency was working hard to distribute propaganda. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front established in West Berlin in 1950 and dissolved in 1979, funded conferences and journals, and supported writers and artists. The CCF’s links to the CIA were exposed by _The New York Times_in 1966.
The CCF established Forum Information Service in 1957, a London-based feature service. Forum was made over in 1965 and separated from the CCF. John Hay Whitney, the_New York Herald_ _Tribune_publisher, was the figurehead, Putnis and Jenks write, but the CIA provided the money and direction.
Forum World Features launched properly in January 1966, pledging to editors that it would be “independent, without political or national affiliations”. But, write Putnis and Jenks, the service was a “classic grey propaganda operation” with deliberately obscured origins and motivations. Its articles appeared fact-based and conventional.
“It is highly unlikely that a truly commercial service would invest in strategically important but commercially negligible articles on, for example, domestic politics on the island of Mauritius,” Putnis and Jenks write. (The_Times_ran a Forum World Features piece in February 1968 titled “Racial and religious strife in Mauritius”.)
“It is also unlikely that newspapers would rush to print stories from a publicly acknowledged CIA proprietary [firm]. Hence, the CIA backing and the independent facade.”
Brian Crozier, an Australian-born Brit with vast experience in journalism who had worked with the Information Research Department, the British Foreign Office’s secret propaganda department, was appointed director of Forum World Features.
When Crozier died, aged 94, in 2012,an obituary described himas the “ultimate Cold-War warrior: a political vigilante who unashamedly cultivated a close, mutually beneficial, relationship with MI6, MI5 and the CIA, successfully courted Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and praised the dictators Pinochet and Franco”.
Forum World Features lost money. But by 1971, there were 173 newspapers in 65 countries taking material from the service. The contract with Fairfax would have provided the_Times_with more than 2000 stories between 1965 and 1973. In 1971, the_Times_published 284 Forum stories.
‘A cheap source of international news’
Professor Putnis does not condemn the_Times_for taking up the propaganda service, even if the decision was ultimately regrettable.
“I don’t think they looked very deeply into the nature of the organisation. … It was a cheap source of a lot of international news material, and it was just too tempting for them not to take it up,” he says.
“I mean, they managed to get exclusive rights to this material for a very cheap rate of 1000 per year, which, even in those days, was a very cheap rate.”
Professor Putnis says there’s no evidence Pringle knew Forum World Features was actually funded by the CIA.
“But John Pringle would have known that this was a news service with the aim of promoting an anti-communist agenda. And that it was linked to another organisation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was well known as having that agenda,” he says.
“So it’s a bit of a middle ground, where the material actually suited The Canberra Times given its position politically and the position of its proprietors, including Warwick Fairfax.”
But Professor Putnis says there were editors in Australia at the time with little awareness of how they could be exploited for propaganda.
“There seemed to be a kind of acceptance of this material without the close scrutiny, which really one should have expected,” he says.
A prevalent anti-communist slant
Propaganda needs to be subtle to work.
“It’s commonly said that for propaganda to be successful, a targeted audience must not recognise that it’s obviously propaganda,” Professor Putnis says.
Forum World Features was not just producing political commentary. It offered a range of features that incorporated the CIA’s worldview but also gave off the appearance of legitimacy by offering articles on science, health and other topics.
“Now, let’s have a good cup of tea”, ran the headline of one piece from the news agency in the_Times_ of 18 January 1968.
“The Queen: symbol of social stability” was the headline of a piece provided by Forum World Features and written by a “London correspondent” in October 1967.
Putnis and Jenks write the stories on world affairs provided by Forum to the_Times_provided a breadth and depth of global coverage that distinguished the paper from its competitors.
“The prevalent anti-communist slant may have been propagandistic, but it was also in line with the paper’s editorial policy as laid down by Warwick Fairfax. CT’s international coverage was praised in Canberra and beyond. Its quality was noticed in a 1970 London_Times_review of the Australian press,” the pair write.
Two stories about South Africa written in 1967 by Crozier highlighted the anti-communist agenda of Forum. “Crozier’s purpose is to highlight the failure of communist ideology in South America and to belittle its revolutionary leaders (‘The Failure of Violence’, CT, December 13, 1967; ‘Reform without revolution’, CT, December 13, 1967),” Putnis and Jenks write.
“Crozier also has an article on Franco’s Spain which, like his biography of Franco, minimises problems arising from Spain’s authoritarian regime (‘Twilight of the Iberian Dictators’, CT, October 26, 1966).”
Is the risk today that newspapers, facing new commercial pressures, don’t do enough to check where their news is coming from?
There is a need for a greater focus on source checking, to investigate individuals and networks pushing information or providing it free.
“I imagine it’s still obviously a temptation and still clearly a responsibility for editors to be more aware of how they might be being used,” Professor Putnis says.
“I mean, when it comes to a certain kind of complacency about sources of material, and, for example, their commercial interests, there’s plenty of examples on the ABC program_Media Watch_.”
‘One side is being neglected consistently’
By the early 1970s, the_Times_editorJohn Allanwas becoming concerned by the output of Forum World Features. Allan had joined the_Times_in 1964 and replaced Pringle’s successor,David Bowman, as editor in 1968.
Meeting a Forum representative in London in November 1970, Allan told them of his “growing reservations about the increasing tendency of Forum World Features to push a right-wing political line”.
In 1971 he told Crozier: “I am increasingly of the opinion that one side of the political argument is being neglected consistently, and that this neglect, this lack of balance undermines the credibility of our report on the other”, noting a recent selection of stories had been entirely about the state of communism.
Putnis and Jenks write that Allan was not aware that Forum was a CIA-subsidised operation and may not have known, unlike Pringle and Bowman, that Forum had begun under the auspices of the CCF.
Fairfax cancelled the contract with Forum World Features on 31 January 1973. Forum World Feature’s CIA connection was revealed by Time Out_in June 1975 and covered by major international newspapers, including_The New York Times_and_The Guardian._The Canberra Times_did not cover the revelation.
Professor Putnis says the CIA was highly skilled in creating credible covers for organisations that got their material into newsrooms. He’s not unsympathetic to the decisions the_Times_made that allowed its coverage to be infiltrated by propaganda.
“It’s a period of international turmoil driven by the Cold War. Between America and the USSR, there was the related fear that Southeast Asia might become communist. Remember, it was only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, in October 1964, China exploded its first nuclear bomb,” he says.
“This is not trying to change the narrative of the article, but it was a period when the Cold War was very intense and all Australian newspapers were involved in Cold War politics, obviously on the United States side.
“But still,_The Canberra Times_was the exception in that it made extensive use of this particular CIA-funded material. Other people didn’t.”
Republished from The Canberra Times, March 09, 2025
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