Information Research Department

The Information Research Department, founded in 1948 by Christopher Mayhew, was a department of the British Foreign Office set up to spread propaganda against the Soviet Union and communism in general, and to combat pro-Soviet views amongst the international labour movement.

The Soviet Union was fully aware of its existence as Guy Burgess had been posted to IRD for a period of two months in 1948 before being sacked by Mayhew for being "dirty, drunk and idle."

Origins

In a confidential paper to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1947, Mayhew, at the time a junior minister, had proposed a "propaganda counter-offensive" and Attlee summoned him to Chequers to discuss it further. 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

The first head of IRD was Ralph Murray, later a diplomat. John Rennie, who subsequently served as head of MI6, was head of the department between 1953 and 1958. The last head of the IRD was Ray Whitney, later a Conservative member of parliament and junior minister. IRD was staffed with many emigres, from Iron Curtain countries. IRD officials were ordered not to tell even other FO staff where they worked. IRD flourished in the 1950s. The staff of the Soviet section alone rose from 20 to more than 60. Embassies had resident IRD men under cover who planted material on local journalists – and opinion formers. Other staffers included Robert Conquest and his assistant Celia Kirwan, who was given Orwell's list.

Propaganda

IRD's main targets were in the Third World. However, it was also set out to "be of use to" British media and opinion formers. As well as supplying material to the BBC World Service, secret lists were compiled of approved journalists and trade unionists to whom material was offered, if not always accepted.

British introductions to IRD were made discreetly. Journalists were told as little as possible about the Department. 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.

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, anticommunist 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? Russell was fully aware of the funding for his books, while others, such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who contributed The Democratic Revolution, were outraged when they found out.

Other publications were written by IRD staffers such as the scholar and author Robert Conquest.

Likewise, the IRD funded the Burmese, Chinese, and Arabic editions of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Possibly its most notorious "project" was the joint operation with the CIA to set up Encounter magazine, edited by Stephen Spender from 1953 to 1966. Spender resigned after it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine, was being covertly funded by the CIA.

Activities

Indonesia

Following the abortive Indonesian coup attempt of 1965 and the subsequent anti-Communist mass killings, the IRD's South East Asia Monitoring Unit in Singapore assisted the Indonesian Army's destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) by circulating unattributable anti-PKI propaganda through several radio channels including the British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Malaysia, Radio Australia, and the Voice of America, and through newspapers like The Straits Times. The same anti-PKI message was repeated by an anti-Sukarno black propaganda radio station called Radio Free Indonesia and the IRD's black propaganda newsletter. Recurrent propaganda themes propagated by the IRD included the alleged brutality of PKI members in murdering the Indonesian generals and their families, Chinese intervention in the coup attempt, and the PKI subverting Indonesian on behalf of foreign powers. The IRD's propaganda efforts were aided by the United States, Australian and Malaysian governments which had a vested interest in supporting the Army's anti-Communist purge and opposing President Sukarno. The IRD's propaganda efforts helped corroborate the Indonesia Army–controlled press' propaganda efforts against the PKI. In addition, the Harold Wilson Labour Government and its Australian counterpart gave the Indonesian Army leadership an assurance that British and Commonwealth forces would not step up the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation.

Controversy

The ethical objection raised by IRD's critics was that the public did not know the source of the information and could therefore not make allowances for the possible bias. It differed thus from straightforward propaganda from the British point of view.

Orwell's list

Main article: Orwell's list

Among the many lists of journalists and trade unionists, etc., kept by the department, one that came to light to much polemic more than fifty years after it was compiled was a list drawn up by novelist George Orwell, an early anti-Stalinist.

On 2 May 1949, Celia Kirwan, a close friend of Orwell's who worked for the IRD, received a list compiled by Orwell containing thirty-eight names of journalists and writers who, in his opinion, "are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists." The list, divided into three columns headed "Name" "Job" and "Remarks" included Charlie Chaplin; J. B. Priestley; the actor Michael Redgrave; the historian E. H. Carr; the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin; the New York Times's Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty; the former Trotskyist writer Isaac Deutscher; Labour MP Tom Driberg and the novelist Naomi Mitchison, as well as other lesser-known writers and journalists.

On the list was the name of Peter Smollett, who Orwell claimed "...gives strong impression of being some kind of Russian agent. Very slimy person." Smollett had been the head of the Soviet section in the British Ministry of Information, while in fact being a Soviet agent who had been recruited by Kim Philby.

Closure

The department was closed down by then Foreign Secretary, David Owen, in 1977.

See also

• Anatol Goldberg

External links

• Ups and downs of a maverick, book review from The Spectator
• The Orwell Files, an essay by Andrew N. Rubin, excerpted from Alif: The Journal of Comparative Poetics