Confronting the Cominform: George Orwell and the Cold War Offensive of the Information Research Department, 1948-50

Abstract

In the voluminous records of the Information Research Department (IRD), there is one slim file that attracts immediate attention. The IRD was the top secret propaganda department of the British Foreign Office created in early 1948.1 It soon became a crucial instrument in Britain's covert ideological offensive against the Soviet Union during Cold War. The files of the IRD are currently being released by the Public Record Office in London, and their diversity exemplifies the wide front on which the Cold War was fought: bundles of documents cover Soviet labour camps, support for anti-communist activity behind the Iron Curtain', encouragement of Red Army defectors, the establishment of a Singapore office to counter communist activity in Malaya, the sponsorship of an anti-communist trade union paper, Freedom First, and the compilation of confidential lists of politicians and BBC employees to whom 'non-attributable' IRD propaganda could be sent for use in speeches and broadcasts. Although the IRD will not fully emerge from the shadows until the bulk of its files are released (as yet, only the first two years of its operations, 1948 and 1949, are open to the public), few of the aforementioned activities, which in part mirrored those of the Soviet-backed Cominform, should surprise historians of the Cold War. But one file, FO1110/189, has the capacity to surprise, even shock, those who open it, for it concerns the relationship between the IRD and, arguably, one of this century's most prolific political journalists and influential novelists, George Orwell. In March 1949, the sister-in-law of Arthur Koestler, Celia Kirwan, visited a sick friend in the Cotswold hills. She spent the day discussing communism with George Orwell, then terminally ill with tuberculosis in Cranham, a Gloucestershire sanatorium. Celia first met Orwell at Koestler's home in late 1945, and they had remained close friends until Orwell's death in January 1950.2 But her visit also had a political purpose. She informed Orwell that she worked for the Information Research Department. So their conversation turned to the IRD: T discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence, and he was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims'.3 Orwell was too ill to do any further writing himself he had just completed the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four but suggested various writers and one publisher, who could be 'trusted' and whom he thought would support the work of the IRD. The writers Orwell named included Darcy Gillie, the Paris correspondent for The Guardian, Franz Borkenau, who wrote for The Observer and the critic Gleb Struve.4 The publisher was Victor Gollancz who had rejected Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in 1937 and (along with 22 other publishers) Animal Farm in 1944. In 1949 Gollancz was, it appeared, still preoccupied with the question of Palestinian dispossession in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel, so Orwell suggested that 'it might be a good plan to allow him to get these Arab refugees out of his system before trying to interest him in our plan'. However, according to Orwell, because his books 'always