Previously classified documents reveal how a spoof punk recording baffled the UK and US security services during the early 1980s. Do they owe us a living?
Official documents released today reveal that a spoof recording made by anarchist punk band Crass resulted in MI6 informing Margaret Thatcher that they may have uncovered a new form of Soviet propaganda campaign.
Crass – known for releases such as "Nagasaki Nightmare" and "Penis Envy" – undertook a variety of anti-establishment protests during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
None were more successfully subversive as when, in 1982, the band spliced together recordings of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan to make it sound as though they were arguing over the Falklands War and discussing the possibility of launching nuclear weapons at Germany.
Crass then posted the tape to Dutch newspapers, who swiftly dismissed it as a fake. But a few months later the US State Department got hold of a copy and loudly proclaimed it to be an example of underhand Soviet Union propaganda.
Official UK government documents, declassified for the first time today, show that Margaret Thatcher was kept updated on the incident by the Foreign Office. The papers also suggest that MI6, the CIA and the US State Department were in communication with each other regarding the tape for up to two years.
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A Foreign Office official first wrote to Thatcher in 1983, warning the Prime Minister that the recording could be an Argentinian or Soviet intelligence operation designed to discredit her, according to one of the newly-released letters.
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The embassy in Hague recently passed to London a tape recording of a purported telephone conversation between the Prime Minister and President Reagan during the Falklands crisis.
This looks like a rather clumsy operation. We have no evidence so far about who is responsible. SIS [also known as MI6] doubt whether this is a Soviet operation. It is possible that one of the Argentine intelligence services might have been behind it; or alternatively it might be the work of left-wing groups in this country.
Then The Sunday Times ran a piece entitled "How the KGB fools the West’s press" based on a US State Department briefing about the tape. It blamed the Russian security services for the forgery.
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