BLACK PROPAGANDA by Donal Kennedy 

A British Ofiicer, HUGH POLLARD, wounded in the First World War, wrote a story of Russian Troops travelling by train from Scotland  to help Britain in her war on Germany.

 It was utter nonsense but printed as a news item in the prestigious NEW YORK TIMES,. 

 His next coup was the invention of “THE GERMAN CORPSE FACTORY” accusing the Germans of using corpses of their soldiers to make fat to be used for the manufacture of Margarine. The story went down a treat with his employers and was spread far and wide to convince the world that the Germans were a uniquely barbarous nation. So Pollard was transferred to the British Military Intelligence service designated MI7.

 He surfaced in Dublin Castle with a charming propaganda unit including an Ofiicer named Darling, a future Provost of Edinburgh and Tory MP,a Great Uncle of  the New Labour Chancellor with a visceral hatred of our people. Also Sir Ormonde Winter afuture Big Noise in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Winter wrote a Memoir, claiming that he himself had arranged the infiltration of the RA by his agents that he had brought our Army to its Knees. The Propaganda Unit published a Weekly Summary for the “Auxiliary Police Cadets” and Black and Tans, to inspire them to inflict atrocities on our population. Pollard contributed to the propaganda, enlisting British Pathe, a willing tool of the British Regime to produce a Newsreel purporting to show an armed encounter between the IRA and Crown Forces near Tralee on Ireland’s South West (Atlantic Coast).

 The Newsreel when shown in Dublin gave rise to hoots of laughter as they recognised the Vico Road on Killiney Bay, on the Irish Seam within 15 miles of them and over 200 miles from Tralee,

 The stunt was not unprecedented.. About 20 years previously a “Newsreel” was shot on Hampstead Heath in London,  purporting to show action in the Second Boer War, many thousands of miles away.

 It says something of some cameramen and of some alleged witnesses and their reluctance to put  their backsides in harm’s way.

 Pollard’s greatest Irish coup was when the British captured the printing equipment and address list, of Dail Eireann’s official news sheet THE IRISH BULLETIN, surreptitiously produced and circulated to politicians, journalists and diplomats outside Ireland.

 The paper was published five days a week and some honest MPs questioned Government Ministers in Westminster about British Action in Ireland, to those Minister’s acute discomfort, Ordinary newspapers in Ireland were strictly censored by the British Regime there.

 So Pollard and his friends printed a Bogus IRSH BULLETiN inserting exaggerations here and falsehood there to discredit the genuine article.

The British Government had not advertised the capture of the Rebel Bulletin.

 What the British Government didn’t know was  that the Irish Bulletin had identical printing equipment and  a duplicate address list in a premises untouched by their agents and  that the IRISH BULLETIN didn’t miss a single issue, Regular readers could recognise what was real and what was phoney, So Hugh Pollard and his friends ended up with egg on their faces in Ireland,

 But there were other places where Pollard could do mischief for his King and  Country and against the cause of Democracy.

 With a friend and fellow spook and a girl for cover he piloted a plane from London to the Canary Islands where the Spanish Republican Government had posted General Francisco Franco so that he would be unable to do the State any mischief, They picked up Franco and flew him to Morooco where the Mutineer took command of the Moorish, mainly Moslem, soldiers to spearhead a “Crusade” to suppress the liberties of the Spanish people. When Madrid fell to Franco four years later, Pollard was posted to the British Embassy there,

 In later years he had a letter in THE TIMES defending the destruction of Guernica by the Luftwaffe, Pollard, together with other British agents planning Franco’s flight from the Canaries, was a Catholic.