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:
So ONA invented stories. They invented a story about Nazi sex slavery even before they were on Britain's payroll.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.’”
This quote is direct and explicit. Britain surreptitiously used ONA to "channel propaganda" both against unsuspecting Americans and abroad.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.”
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.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.
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:
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".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.
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.
