Maurice Tugwell

Information Policy

As Aly Renwick puts it:

In Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden inquisitive journalists had been kept away from the action, but this was not always possible now. In Northern Ireland, reporters appeared to be everywhere, and the army quickly realised that an ‘information policy’ was required. The writer Liz Curtis, in her book Ireland - The Propaganda War, detailed the build up of Army public relations in Northern Ireland:

In September 1971, soon after the start of internment, the army reorganised its information service in the North, setting up an ‘Information Policy’ department. This was initially headed by paratroop Colonel Maurice Tugwell, whose title was Colonel General Staff (Information Policy). Tugwell had previously been an intelligence officer in Palestine, and had also served in Malaya, Cyprus, Arabia and Kenya.

... Tugwell’s job as ‘Information Policy’ chief was, ... described [as] ... ‘not merely to react to the media - or to events - but to take a positive initiative in presenting the news to the best advantage for the security forces’.

... The army began training officers in how to be interviewed on television, and by the end of 1971 more than 200 officers had been through courses at the Army School of Instructional Technology at Beaconsfield. Here they were taught basic lore, such as always to look at the interviewer to give the impression of sincerity, and told how to answer ‘typical’ TV questions.[31]

'Bloody sunday' propagandist

On Monday, former British Army intelligence officer Maurice Tugwell, formerly a Colonel in the Information Policy unit admitted that the claims he made in an interview after Bloody Sunday that four of those killed were on a wanted list of IRA men were wrong. He said he had made the claims after "oral" intelligence checks.

He told the inquiry that "Later, I am not sure when, I discovered that the allegation that four men were on a wanted list could not be sustained." It was, he said, "an honest mistake".

During the radio interview Tugwell had claimed that, "One of the dead men was found in a car ... with four nail bombs in his pockets ... And of the others who are dead in the hospital, preliminary investigations show that four of them at least are on the wanted list."

"We have sent our investigators to the hospital and it is rather interesting that two of the wounded men, with gunshot wounds, have admitted that they were out on the streets armed with guns."

Speaking about the events of Bloody Sunday itself, at which he had in fact been present taking photographs of the marchers, Tugwell had told the interviewer that "Whilst they [the Paras] were on that operation, they came under fire, mainly from the area of the Rossville Flats, and there were altogether 25 shooting engagements, in 10 of which they could not identify the source of the fire and they did not fire back at all. In the other 15 they did identify and they fired back in all of them."

"On one occasion the soldier, who was armed with a riot gun which only fired rubber bullets, found himself facing a gunman with a pistol who fired two shots at him. All the bloke could do was to fire back with rubber bullets and then beat it. But on all the other occasions they fired back with live ammunition." All of this information, Tugwell admitted, came from 1 Para.

Smearing the Green movement

Having arrived in Canada and set up the Centre for Conflict Studies in 1980 with David Charters Tugwell proceeds to engage in similar propaganda techniques to those he had used in Ireland. but this time the target and the paymaster was different. Seeking sponsorship from corporations he bagan attacking the green movement and smearing it as being linked to 'terrorism'.

Robert Stanley provides a good account of this period.

Peace with Freedom

In 1988 Tugwell published Peace with Freedom, a book which criticised the Canadian peace movement as an ‘internal threat’. In the book Tugwell ironically portrayed the peace movement as a threat to peace. He divided the movement movement into three categories - the churches, the mainstream, and the communists. The church and the mainstream he argued sought to leave Canada defenceless against the USSR, and were in any case influenced or controlled by the communists who were conduits for Soviet propaganda. One (sympathetic) reviewer described the book as follows:

Maurice Tugwell describes, unambiguously and in detail, how Canada's

"new class" - academics and schoolteachers, politicians and manadarins, artists, clerics, journalists, retired generals and union leaders - has been infiltrated by Soviet agents and sympathizers. The book is a program guide to players in the drama of subversion that would destroy the West's

will to oppose, let alone defeat, the march of international communism.

Affiliations

• Parachute Regiment
• Information Policy early 1970s
• Centre for Conflict Studies, Director 1980-86
• Conflict Quarterly, co-editor
• Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution and Propaganda, Director, 1986-91

Contact, Publications, References and Resources

Publications

• The unquiet peace: Stories from the post-war army by Maurice Tugwell (A. Wingate, 1957)
• Airborne to battle by Maurice Tugwell (Kimber, 1971)
• Maurice Tugwell, 'The Knocking Game: a case study in propaganda', unpublished paper, April 1972, produced while Tugwell worked as a propagandist at British Army HQ in Northern Ireland.
• Tugwell, Maurice (1973) 'Revolutionary Propaganda and the Role of the Information Services in Counter-insurgency Operations', Canadian Defence Quarterly, 3, Autumn:27-34
• Arnhem by Maurice Tugwell (Thornton Cox : [distributed by Seeley, 1975)
• Skiing for beginners by Maurice Tugwell (Seeley, 1977)
• Skiing for beginners by Maurice Tugwell (Futura Publications, 1978)
• Tugwell, Maurice (1980) 'Revolutionary Propaganda and Possible Counter Measures' Unpublished PhD, March, King's College, University of London.
• Tugwell, Maurice (1981) 'Politics and Propaganda of the Provisional IRA', Terrorism, 5, 1-2:13-40
• No Substitute for Peace Tugwell, Maurice; David Charters, Dominick Graham (eds.) University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick, Canada, 1982.
• Skiing for Beginners by Maurice Tugwell Drawings by Toby Buchan(Frederick Warne Publishers Ltd, January 31, 1985) Unknown Binding
• Tugwell, Maurice, (1986) 'Terrorism and Propaganda: Problem and Response' Conflict Quarterly, 6, Spring: 5-15
• Tugwell, Maurice, (1987) 'Terrorism and Propaganda: Problem and Response', in P Wilkinson and A Stewart, Contemporary Research on Terrorism, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
• A mythology of peace by Maurice Tugwell (Mackenzie Institute for the Study of Terrorism, Revolution, and Propaganda, 1987) ISBN-10: 0921877013 ISBN-13: 978-0921877011
• Armies in Low Intensity Conflict: A Comparative Study of Institutional Adaptation to New Forms of Warfare by David A. Charters (Author), Maurice Tugwell (Author) 272 pages, Elsevier (Dec 1988), ISBN-10: 0080362532
• Peace with freedom by Maurice Tugwell Toronto, Ont., Canada : Key Porter Books, c1988. ISBN 1550131281
• Deception Operations: Studies in the East-West Context (Hardcover) by David A. Charters, Maurice Tugwell (Editors) 436 pages, Elsevier (Dec 1989), ISBN-10: 0080367062
• The legacy of Oka by Maurice Tugwell (Mackezie Institute, 1991) ISBN-10: 0921877218, ISBN-13: 978-0921877219
• Herzl Street by Maurice Tugwell (Xlibris Corp., 1998)

Resources

• Maurice Tugwell, extract from The "Terrorism" Industry
• Robert Stanley Maurice Tugwell: The Art of Propaganda, New Maritimes (Nova Scotia, Canada), June 1986: p.13.