Counter-Subversion in Early Cold War Britain: The Official Committee on Communism (Home), the Information Research Department, and ‘State-Private Networks’

Abstract

This article applies the concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘state-private networks’ to early Cold War Britain to analyze the aims and methods of governmental and non-governmental counter-subversion and propaganda in the ‘Cultural Cold War’. Using recently declassified and underutilized files, the article explores the roles of the Official Committee on Communism (Home) and, more particularly, the Foreign Office Information Research Department. The Attlee and Churchill administrations of the late 1940s and early 1950s increasingly perceived the primary non-military threat of communism to Britain as part of Soviet-inspired transnational subversion of western European societies. This created a growing impetus for a symmetrical, transnational response through both domestic and foreign clandestine ‘indoctrination’ campaigns operating via influential non-state British institutions. Despite constitutional concerns still relevant today, in 1951 ministers endorsed the domestic component of this response as a fully-fledged strategy that would encourage greater state intervention in British society in the Cold War struggle for both liberty and security.