# Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/historyextra-podcast-746104/masters-of-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-in-the-cold-war Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/historyextra-podcast-746104/masters-of-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-in-the-cold-war.md Podcast: [HistoryExtra podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/historyextra-podcast-746104) Published: 2026-06-11T23:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR8459493479.mp3 Audio file: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR8459493479.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/historyextra-podcast-746104/episodes/masters-of-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-in-the-cold-war Duration seconds: 2081 ## Resource They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Mizen to the comically absurd – and dangerously controversial – tactics deployed by a group of misfits and mavericks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the 1950s and 60s. ----- GO BEYOND THE PODCAST To hear more from Rory Cormac on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to him discussing Queen Victoria's spy network here: https://bit.ly/4sHYQKJ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/historyextra-podcast-746104/episodes/masters-of-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-in-the-cold-war/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/historyextra-podcast-746104/masters-of-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-in-the-cold-war.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.