Black Propaganda

Black propaganda is covert communication designed to influence an audience while disguising its source or purpose. The novel presents it as a practical craft of impersonation, selective disclosure, and channel management: a false voice can deliver damaging misinformation, while a seemingly respectable newspaper can make military defeat disappear from public view. Its effects reach beyond individual beliefs, shaping wartime morale, public opinion, and the political conditions under which violence can be denied or concealed.

Covert voices and manufactured credibility

Sefton Delmer’s wartime work offers the clearest account of black propaganda as impersonation. After joining Britain’s Special Operations Executive in September 1940, he presented himself as a German Nazi living in Britain and broadcast to German occupation troops in Western Europe from clandestine stations that continually changed their frequency and supposed location. The broadcasts pretended to support the occupiers, making the false identity part of the message’s credibility rather than an incidental disguise.

The broadcasts supplied invented reports that sounded like information from within the German war effort. They told listeners, for instance, that authorities had already suppressed bread-shortage riots in a region or controlled a virus epidemic said to have killed hundreds of children in a city. Such claims were meant to undermine morale by suggesting that hardship and disorder were widespread, even as the broadcast adopted the voice of a German source. The operation’s force lay in this double movement: it concealed its actual origin while exploiting the audience’s trust in the identity it performed.

Delmer’s most celebrated operation was Soldatensender Calais, or Radio Calais. It deliberately gave German forces incorrect information about the location of British defenses, information that could have led German ships into disaster in the event of an invasion. At the same time, the station taught its listeners simple English phrases, including “My tailor is rich, I love my mom, My ship is on fire.” The contrast between elementary language lessons and strategically consequential misinformation makes the station’s method vivid: a broadcast could pass as an ordinary service to its audience while quietly distorting its picture of the battlefield.

News management and the silence around Stalingrad

Hans Lazar’s work in Madrid shows a different route to propagandistic influence. On 2 February 1943, the German embassy press attaché knew that Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus had surrendered at Stalingrad with what remained of the German Sixth Army, after Germany had lost close to two hundred thousand men. Lazar understood that the defeat might mean that the war itself had been lost. His immediate concern, however, was that the Spanish public should not learn what had happened.

The treatment of the news in ABC demonstrates how that concealment operated. Its 3 February front page showed the Soviet city in ruins, but the accompanying item likened German resistance to the stand at Thermopylae and to the Spanish nationalist myth of the Alcázar of Toledo. It omitted the words surrender and capitulation, and did not name Paulus. On 4 February, the paper claimed that the Sixth Army was rapidly regrouping after the setback; on 5 February, it led with photographs of what it called a triumphant Axis submarine campaign in the Atlantic. The sequence did not need to erase Stalingrad from view altogether: it could show the ruins, recast resistance as heroic, deny the surrender in its language, and redirect attention to supposed victories.

Lazar’s influence depended on both payments and social access. He rewarded prominent journalists, but the dinners hosted by him and his wife, Baroness Petrino, cultivated a more personal form of allegiance. Carefully selected Madrid journalists shared fine food and wine and mingled with senior Francoist officials and Nazi diplomats; the hospitality made them feel admitted to the circles of power. The novel stresses that this social bond could secure more loyalty than the money alone.

The resulting reach extended beyond Spanish reporting. Lazar helped infiltrate the newly founded EFE news agency so that it could disseminate Berlin’s views in Latin America, and he used Spanish organizations without leaving proof that either the embassy or the German government directed the operations. He thus combined press influence, social patronage, and deniable institutional connections to foster what the narrative describes as the most pro-Axis public opinion in a neutral country.

The concealed source and the visible consequences

The novel sets these operations against other forms of mediated information. A clandestine Spanish manuscript later appeared in French in Les Temps Modernes, accompanied by a statement that insisted its account was neither autobiography nor propaganda but a record of what was happening under dictatorship. Its author described the risks borne by those who typed, copied, and carried the text across the border, and appealed to readers not to abandon those still resisting. The passage foregrounds the danger of making suppressed events visible, in contrast to propaganda that obscures responsibility or manipulates what the public is allowed to know.

A related scene shows how information itself can determine a person’s survival. After Rafael Cuesta Sánchez was brought to an infirmary as a presumed corpse, a commander found his Public Order Council credential. A police commissioner instructed the commander that if Rafael was dead he must be buried as an unknown man without registration, and if alive he must be kept out of hospitals under his own name because someone might try to kill him again. The order withheld its explanation, saying only that the man was vital to the Republic. Here secrecy is protective rather than manipulative, but the episode shares black propaganda’s recognition that names, records, and the circulation of facts can have material consequences.

The novel also makes the handling of evidence part of the story of political concealment. When Guillermo returned to his home after Francoist forces entered Madrid, he found the safe removed and the house ransacked: the gold of Don Fermín was gone, while family wills and deeds lay trampled on the floor. The envelope Manolo had given him remained locked in a desk drawer, untouched. Guillermo checked its contents and kept it hidden, then spent three days in the darkened house with the blinds closed. The episode does not describe a broadcast or newspaper campaign; instead, it shows the physical vulnerability of documents and the private precautions required to preserve information.

The same logic of concealment appears in the novel’s account of state violence, though it is not simply another example of propaganda. In Madrid, an unidentified man killed by a gunshot to the neck was officially treated as having died of cardiac arrest. His body went to a common grave at La Almudena among undocumented dead recorded with the same vague cause, and even the undertakers focused on taking his new-looking coat. The false record, the burial, and the casual handling of the body illustrate how an authoritarian system can make violence disappear from its administrative account of events.

The novel draws a further, later connection in its description of Argentina’s dictatorship. Under Operation Independence, military commanders received sweeping authority over five zones, while repression extended beyond guerrillas to teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures. The account estimates that around thirty thousand people were forcibly disappeared between 1976 and 1982. Secret task groups divided the work among abduction, clandestine detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children’s identities. The death flights, in which living prisoners were drugged, bound, and thrown from military aircraft over the sea, represent the extreme endpoint of a system that destroyed both people and the evidence of what had been done to them.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, black propaganda is not limited to a single technique or political side. Delmer’s fabricated German persona delivers false battlefield information to weaken the enemy; Lazar’s influence over Spanish news reframes a genuine German defeat and shifts attention toward supposed Axis success. The contrast lies in their purposes and positions, but both depend on controlling the source, framing, and circulation of information.

The wider narrative places such media tactics beside protective secrecy, endangered documents, false official records, and clandestine violence. That juxtaposition prevents the concept from collapsing into a simple synonym for lying: a hidden identity may shelter a threatened person, a preserved document may carry testimony, and a falsified account may erase a killing. The decisive question is who controls the channel and what the distortion makes possible. In this world, propaganda can make defeat look like endurance, while administrative silence can make violence look like an ordinary death.