THE Government was spoiling for a fight with the BBC over its coverage of an Iraq-related story, claiming it was breaking a strict censorship ban on reporting the movements of an Arab Nationalist leader. And that was in 1941.

Documents released by the National Archives yesterday show that Anthony Eden, Churchill’s wartime Foreign Secretary, sanctioned a whispering campaign to destabilise the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in a shady episode with present-day parallels.

Late in 1940, after a failed Arab rising in Palestine, the Mufti, a Palestinian named Haj Amin El Hussein, took refuge with Rashid Ali, the pro-Nazi Prime Minister of Iraq.

British leaders, worried that the Mufti could cause trouble for the struggling 8th Army in North Africa, planned to create a dodgy dossier by claiming he was in the pay of Italy, a country with which Britain was then at war. False documents backing this claim were to be planted all over the Western Desert.

But Whitehall backed out of the plot because it knew that it could not create the paper trail to support the claims. In a Foreign Office document dated January 7, 1941, Eden backed the whispering campaign, saying that urgent action was necessary to discredit the Mufti in the Arab world. “Even if he is not a grave danger to our war effort, he is certainly an infernal nuisance.”

But then, as now, the BBC was refusing to toe the government line. Ministers accused the corporation of using a “doubtful” source to break a strict censorship ban throughout the Middle East on the Mufti’s movements.

And Eden was persuaded by Foreign Office officials that it was the wrong time to go for the Mufti. The disposal of the Iraqi Prime Minister was “a greater priority.”

There was also unease among civil servants about the whole undercover scheme against the Mufti. In December 1940 a Colonial Office official said in a memo to his superiors: “The sooner we can start debunking him the better.” But he added: “We must avoid any propaganda reference to documents that do not exist and cannot be produced; if we claimed to have found documents which the Italians knew did not exist, we might compromise the source of our information. I feel that we must stick to our original plan of setting the ball rolling by a whispering campaign.”

General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief in India, when asked what he thought of the Mufti being harboured in Iraq, said: “He is probably less nuisance in Iraq than elsewhere in the Arab world. Iraqis are a thoroughly unreliable crowd anyhow, and probably better he should continue corrupting them than start elsewhere.”

British officials were subsequently incensed that the BBC had broadcast German radio reports “of unknown authenticity” that the Mufti had reached southern Italy.

They were equally annoyed that the BBC and Reuters news agency described him as “the Grand Mufti” Sir Harold McMichael, the High Commissioner for Palestine, said: “The use of this high-sounding title is undesirable as it sustains his waning prestige.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• A vicar’s wife: ‘There is no one to fight for us’
• Every little helps at the supermarket
• Ugg or Fitflop? The battle of the boots