Information Research Department
The Information Research Department was a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda, provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers, and to use weaponised information, but also disinformation and "fake news", to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. Soon after its creation, the IRD broke away from focusing solely on Soviet matters and began to publish pro-colonial propaganda intended to suppress pro-independence revolutions in Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Middle East. The IRD was heavily involved in the publishing of books, newspapers, leaflets and journals, and even created publishing houses to act as propaganda fronts, such as Ampersand Limited. Operating for 29 years, the IRD is known as the longest-running covert government propaganda department in British history, the largest branch of the Foreign Office, and the first major anglophone propaganda offensive against the USSR since the end of World War II. By the 1970s, the IRD was performing military intelligence tasks for the British Military in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.
The IRD promoted works by many presumably anti-communist authors including George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Conquest.
Internationally, the IRD took part in many historic events, including Britain's entry into the European Economic Community, the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Malayan Emergency, The Troubles, the Mau Mau Uprising, Cyprus Emergency, and the Sino-Indian War. Other IRD activities included forging letters and posters, conducting smear attacks against British trade unionists, and attacking opponents of the British military by planting fake news stories in the British press. Some of the fabricated stories the IRD created included accusations that Irish republicans were killing dogs by setting them on fire and falsely accusing members of EOKA, also anti-communist, of raping schoolgirls.
Although the existence of the IRD was successfully kept hidden from the British public until the 1970s, the Soviet Union had always been aware of its existence, for Guy Burgess had been posted to the IRD for a period of two months in 1948. Burgess was later sacked by the IRD's founder Christopher Mayhew, who accused him of being "dirty, drunk and idle". The IRD closed its operations in 1977 after its existence was discovered by British journalists after an investigation into a heavy amount of anti-Soviet propaganda being published by academics belonging to St Antony's College, Oxford. An exposé by David Leigh published in The Guardian, entitled "Death of the Department that Never Was", became the first public acknowledgement of the IRD's existence.
Origins
Since 1946, many senior officials of both the Foreign Office and the right of the Labour Party had proposed the creation of an anti-communist propaganda organ. Christopher Warner raised a formal proposal in April 1946, but Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Bevin was reluctant to upset the pro-Soviet members of the Labour Party. Later in the summer, Bevin rejected another proposal by Ivone Kirkpatrick to set up an anti-communist propaganda unit. In 1947, Christopher Mayhew lobbied for the proposals, linking anti-communism with the concept of "Third Force", which was meant to be a progressive camp between the Soviet Union and the United States. This framing, together with anti-British Soviet propaganda attacks during the same years, led Bevin to change his position and to start discussing the details for the creation of a propaganda unit. After sending a confidential paper to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1947, Mayhew was summoned by Attlee to Chequers to discuss it further.On 8 January 1948, the Cabinet of the United Kingdom adopted the Future Foreign Publicity, memorandum drafted by Christopher Mayhew and signed by Ernest Bevin. The memorandum embraced anti-communism and took upon the British Labour Government to lead anti-communist progressivism internationally, stating:
To achieve these goals, the memorandum called for the establishment of a Foreign Office department "to collect information" about Communism and to "provide material for our anti-Communist publicity through our Missions and Information Services abroad". The department would collaborate with ministers, British delegates, the Labour Party, trade union representatives, the Central Office of Information, and the BBC Overseas Service. The new department was finally established as the Information Research Department. Mayhew ran the department with Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick until 1950. The original offices were in Carlton House Terrace, before moving to Riverwalk House, Millbank, London.
Staff and collaborators
The IRD was once one of the largest and well-funded organisations of the UK Foreign Office, with an estimated 400-600 employees at its height. The IRD founded under Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour Party government was headed by career civil servants including Ralph Murray, John Rennie, and Ray Whitney who became a Conservative MP and minister. Ann Elwell, over a twenty year career, became a central figure in the IRD. Although the vast majority of IRD staff were British subjects, the department also hired emigres from the Soviet Union, such as the rocket scientist Grigori Tokaty. Other staffers of note include Robert Conquest, whose secretary Celia Kirwan collected Orwell's list. Tracy Philipps was also based at the IRD, working to recruit emigres from Eastern Europe. Many IRD agents were former members of Britain's WWII propaganda department, the Political Warfare Executive, including former Daily Mirror journalist Leslie Sheridan. This high level of PWE veterans within the IRD, coupled with the similarities between how these two propaganda departments operated, has led some historians to describe the department as a "peacetime PWE".Outside of full-time agents, many historians, writers, and academics were either paid directly to publish anti-communist propaganda by the IRD or whose works were bought and distributed by the department using British embassies to both translate and distribute their works across the globe. Some of these authors include George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Czesław Miłosz, Brian Crozier, Richard Crossman, Will Lawther, A. J. P. Taylor, Baron Wyatt of Weeford, Leonard Schapiro, Denis Healey, Douglas Hyde, Margarete Buber, Victor Kravchenko, W.N. Ewer, Victor Feather, Fay Weldon and hundreds of others. Some authors such as Bertrand Russell were fully aware of the funding for their books, while others such as the philosopher Bryan Magee were outraged when they found out.
Bertrand Russell
As part of its remit "to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anti-communist publications", it subsidised the publication of books by 'Background Books', including three by Bertrand Russell, Why Communism Must Fail, What Is Freedom?, and What Is Democracy? The IRD bulk-ordered thousands of copies of Russell's books, including his work Why Communism Must Fail, and worked with the United States government to distribute them using embassies as cover. Working closely with the British Council, the IRD built Russell's reputation as an anti-communist writer, and to use his works to project power overseas.Arthur Koestler
Koestler enjoyed strong personal relationships with IRD agents from 1949 onwards and was supportive of the department's anti-communist goals. Koestler's relationship with the British government was so strong that he had become a de facto advisor to British propagandists, urging them to create a popular series of anti-communist left-wing literature to rival the success of the Left Book Club. In return for his services to British propaganda, the IRD assisted Koestler by purchasing thousands of copies of his book Darkness at Noon and distributing them throughout Germany.Propaganda
The IRD created, sponsored, and distributed a wide range of propaganda publications both fiction and non-fiction, in the form of books, magazines, pamphlets, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and cartoons. Books which the IRD believed could be used for British propaganda purposes were translated into dozens of languages and then distributed using British embassies. Most IRD material targeted the Soviet Union, but much IRD work also attacked socialist and anti-colonial revolutionaries in Cyprus, Malaya, Singapore, Ireland, Korea, Egypt, and Indonesia. In Britain, the department used its propaganda to spread smear stories targeting trade union leaders and human rights activists, but was also used by the Labour Party to conduct internal purges against socialist members.British introductions to IRD were made discreetly, with journalists being told as little as possible about the department. Propaganda material was sent to their homes under plain cover as correspondence marked "personal" carried no departmental identification or reference. They were told documents were "prepared" in the FCO primarily for members of the diplomatic service, but that it was allowed to give them on a personal basis to a few people outside the service who might find them of interest. As such, they were not statements of official policy and should not be attributed to HMG, nor should the titles themselves be quoted in discussion or in print. The papers should not be shown to anyone else and they were to be destroyed when no longer needed.
''Animal Farm'' - George Orwell
Animal Farm was republished, distributed, translated, and promoted for many years by IRD agents. Of all the propaganda works ever supported by the IRD, Animal Farm was given more attention and support by IRD agents than any publication in the department's history and arguably given more support from the British and American governments than any other propaganda book in the Cold War. The IRD gained the translation rights to Animal Farm in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Indonesian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. The Chinese version of Animal Farm was created in a joint operation between British and American government propagandists, which also included a pictorial version.To further promote Animal Farm, the IRD commissioned cartoon strips to be planted in newspapers across the globe. The foreign rights to distribute these cartoons were acquired by the IRD for Cyprus, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Trinidad, Jamaica, Fiji, British Guiana and British Honduras.