The Far Eastern Liaison Office (FELO) was a Second World War Propaganda and Field Intelligence unit set up under the orders of the Allied Land Commander, General Sir Thomas Blamey, on 19 June 1942. FELO became one of four sections of the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) which was established on 6 July 1942 to control and co-ordinate the activities of various intelligence organisations that had been set up after the outbreak of war with Japan.
Far Eastern Liaison Office was a propaganda organisation and was given a non-descriptive cover name to protect its real intelligence purpose. Its objectives were:
While some activity was common to both the Services Reconnaissance Department and FELO the general line of demarcation was that SRD was responsible for sabotage and physical operations while FELO was responsible for propaganda and misdirection.
FELO's methods, utilised in the S.W.P.A, were:
In its initial stages FELO was under the control of AIB but in September 1942 operational control was transferred to the three Australian Chiefs-of-Staff and the Senior Officer, Netherlands Forces. It was agreed that FELO’s political activities would be controlled by the Minister for External Affairs through the Political Warfare Division of his Department.
The personnel of FELO were formed from the Australian Services, and the Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service. The organisation, commanded by an executive with its headquarters located in Melbourne with elements stationed in Brisbane, consisted of eight operational sections:
Far from being deskbound professional influencers, FELO operatives performed some of the most hair-raising intelligence operations of the war. Personnel were heavily involved in field operations, often penetrating deep into Japanese-held territory in one or two man teams.
FELO was commanded by CDR J.C.R. Proud RANVR.
Due to the difficulty of deconfliction with other AIB operations, FELO undertook several operations with the Services Reconnaissance Department towards the end of the war.
Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British organisation formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and to aid local resistance movements during World War II.
Werwolf was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. There is some argument that the plan, and subsequent reports of guerrilla activities, were created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf", something that was not connected in any way with the military unit.
Psychological warfare (PSYWAR), or the basic aspects of modern psychological operations (PsyOp), has been known by many other names or terms, including Military Information Support Operations (MISO), Psy Ops, political warfare, "Hearts and Minds", and propaganda. The term is used "to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people".
Black propaganda is a form of propaganda intended to create the impression that it was created by those it is supposed to discredit. Black propaganda contrasts with gray propaganda, which does not identify its source, as well as white propaganda, which does not disguise its origins at all. It is typically used to vilify or embarrass the enemy through misrepresentation.
Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The activity emerged after Nazi Germany's Operation Barbarossa was launched from mid-1941 on. It was coordinated and controlled by the Soviet government and modeled on that of the Red Army.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Force 136 was a far eastern branch of the British World War II intelligence organisation, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Originally set up in 1941 as the India Mission with the cover name of GSI(k), it absorbed what was left of SOE's Oriental Mission in April 1942. The man in overall charge for the duration of its existence was Colin Mackenzie.
The Coastwatchers, also known as the Coast Watch Organisation, Combined Field Intelligence Service or Section C, Allied Intelligence Bureau, were Allied military intelligence operatives stationed on remote Pacific islands during World War II to observe enemy movements and rescue stranded Allied personnel. They played a significant role in the Pacific Ocean theatre and South West Pacific theatre, particularly as an early warning network during the Guadalcanal campaign.
The Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force was a joint Anglo-American organization set-up in World War II tasked with conducting (predominantly) white tactical psychological warfare against German troops and recently liberated countries in Northwest Europe, during and after D-Day. It was headed by US Brigadier-General Robert A. McClure. The Division was formed from staff of the US Office of War Information (OWI) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE).
The Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) was a joint United States, Australian, Dutch and British intelligence and special operations agency during World War II. It was responsible for operating parties of spies and commandos behind Japanese lines in order to collect intelligence and conduct guerrilla warfare against Japanese forces in the South West Pacific. The AIB was formed in June 1942 to coordinate the existing Allied propaganda and guerrilla organisations. The first controller of the AIB was Colonel C. G. Roberts. At its peak the AIB contained men from ten individual services and controlled or coordinated eight separate organisations. The role of the AIB was to obtain information about the enemy, "to weaken the enemy by sabotage and destruction of morale and to lend aid and assistance to local effort to the same end in enemy territories." One member of the AIB was Alfred Deakin Brookes, who went on to become the first head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in May 1952.
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.
Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), also known as Special Operations Australia (SOA) and previously known as Inter-Allied Services Department (ISD), was an Australian military intelligence and special reconnaissance unit, during World War II.
Secret Intelligence Australia (SIA) was a British World War II intelligence unit commanded by Captain Roy Kendall who reported directly to MI6 in London. SIA was known as Section B of the Allied Intelligence Bureau but was not accountable in any way to the Australians or the Americans.
Organizacja Wojskowa Związek Jaszczurczy was an organization of Polish resistance in World War II. Created in 1939 and transformed into National Armed Forces in 1942, it represented the far right of the Polish political spectrum (related to the National Radical Camp political party. It refused to recognise the broadly internationally recognised Polish Government-in-exile, although there was some uneasy tactical cooperation for practical reasons. It and descendants also refused to recognise the Soviet-aligned Polish Committee of National Liberation and continued to resist the new Polish communist regime and the USSR after the war.
Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service (NEFIS) was a Dutch World War II-era intelligence and special operations unit operating mainly in the Japanese-occupied Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia).
Morale Operations was a branch of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. It utilized psychological warfare, particularly propaganda, to produce specific psychological reactions in both the general population and military forces of the Axis powers in support of larger Allied political and military objectives.
The Luftnachrichten Abteilung 350, abbreviated as OKL/Ln Abt 350 and formerly called the, was the Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, before and during World War II. Before November 1944, the unit was the [[[Cipher Department of the High Command of the Luftwaffe|Chiffrierstelle, Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe]]] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |lit= (help), which was often abbreviated to Chi-Stelle/ObdL or more commonly Chi-Stelle.
The German Radio Intelligence Operation were signals intelligence operations that were undertaken by German Axis forces in Europe during World War II. In keeping with German signals practice since 1942, the term "communication intelligence" had been used when intercept units were assigned to observe both enemy "radio and wire" communication. When the observation of only enemy "radio" communication was undertaken, the term was "radio intelligence". The term "intercept service" was also used up until 1942.
The Funkabwehr, "Radio Defense Corps," was a radio counterintelligence organization created in 1940 by Hans Kopp of the German Nazi Party High Command during World War II. It was the principal organization for the monitoring of illicit broadcasts. The formal name of the organization was Funkabwehr des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (OKW/WNV/FU). Its most notable breakthrough occurred on 26 June 1941, when tracing teams at the Funkabwehr station at Zelenogradsk discovered the Rote Kapelle, an anti-Nazi resistance movement in Berlin and two Soviet espionage rings operating in German-occupied Europe and Switzerland during World War II. The Funkabwehr was dissolved on 30 April 1945.
The Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement was the central organ of military control of the Soviet partisans, resistance movements who fought against German occupation in World War II. Located at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command of the USSR Armed Forces, the GKO created it in May 1942 in order to unite the leadership of the Soviet partisan forces behind enemy lines. The State Defense Committee disbanded it in January 1944 due to most partisan detachments operating in Ukraine and Belarus, which already had their own headquarters for the partisan movement.