Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department (Studies in Intelligence)

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In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the Foreign Office, the innocuously titled Information Research Department (IRD), was established to collate information on communist policy, tactics and propaganda, and coordinate the discreet dissemination of counter-propaganda to opinion formers at home and abroad.

Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department (Studies in Intelligence) Review

In 1948 the Labour government founded the Information Research Department, a secret section of the Foreign Office, to conduct covert, worldwide, anti-Communist propaganda. Funded under the secret vote, it worked closely with the CIA, and also with MI6. As the Foreign Office Order Book of 1951 said, "the name of this department is intended as a disguise for the true nature of its work, which must remain strictly confidential."

The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, William Strang, said, "it is vital to the success of the operation that His Majesty's Government should not overtly appear to be conducting a worldwide anti-Communist campaign, and we must in no circumstances appear to be interfering in the domestic affairs of friendly nations." Foreign Office Minister Christopher Mayhew said, "we shall have to be satisfied that there would not be undue risk of leakage either to the public or to the communists that the British Government were supplying such material."

The IRD's job was to coordinate the discreet dissemination of propaganda to `opinion-formers' at home and abroad, in trade unions, political parties, churches, the newspapers and the BBC. (The Drogheda Committee into Overseas Information Services candidly reported, "This is not to suggest that the BBC External Services are not in fact a weapon of propaganda.") For example, the IRD reported in July 1949 that the Daily Telegraph "splashed on page 1 a story from its Vienna Correspondent giving details of life in forced labour camps allegedly told by people who have escaped, but in fact all based on various IRD papers."

The IRD's secrecy helped to recruit some of the `left' to the anti-communist cause. As its head wrote in 1948, "It would embarrass a number of persons who are prepared to lend us valuable support if they were open to the charge of receiving anti-communist briefs from some sinister body in the Foreign Office, engaged in the fabrication of propaganda directed against the Soviet Union." George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, like Robert Conquest and Peregrine Worsthorne, supported the Department.

In the early 1970s, the IRD secretly promoted Britain's entry into the EEC. It was officially wound up as a separate department in 1973, although the practice of lying for the state lives on.

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