The geographies of the Information Research Department: Intelligence, diplomacy and the British secret state

In 1948, the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) embarked upon a global anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda war. Drawing upon recently declassified records, this article investigates IRD's Middle Eastern Cold War. Outlining IRD's operational methods and the activities in which it engaged, it concludes that although IRD's Middle Eastern operation before the 1956 Suez Crisis must ultimately be regarded as a failure, the frequently employed caricature of IRD as a group of doctrinaire Cold Warriors is misplaced and that, by the eve of the Suez Crisis, IRD had evolved into a flexible instrument of psychological warfare which, in the Middle East, was to be primarily employed against anti-British nationalist movements.

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

ABSTRACTBritain's post-war interventions in former colonial territories remain a controversial area of contemporary history. In the case of India, recent releases of official records in the United Kingdom and South Asia have revealed details of British government anti-communist propaganda activity in the subcontinent during the Cold War period. This article focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It specifically examines the 1960s: a time between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, when IRD operations peaked. The Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China, but cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain's propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence, and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one focused on Communist China, and declared to the Indian government; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviets. In this context, Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India.

This paper uncovers British newsreel media’s largely unknown role in propagating Yugoslavia as a country that defied the Cold War binary. My archival research of the British Information Research Department (IRD), the first anti-communist propaganda agency, shows how the IRD and British newsreel companies’ cooperation helped establish Yugoslavia’s Cold War myth as ‘a pleasurable’ albeit socialist country. From 1946, numerous newsreel films established representational tropes that became synonymous with Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. This is also a story of how the British state reshaped and appropriated British newsreel media and photojournalism from their politically subversive role in the 1930s to the post-war British state’s greatest asset in the Cold War. This article expands our usual understanding of newsreel media as tools of propaganda by insisting on the history of their unruliness and subversion; the British state appropriated newsreel media within the debates over the future of the liberal world-system. If we want to understand mid-twentieth century politics, this article argues that we need to pay closer attention to the role of non-fiction media such as newsreels in undermining and supporting official governmental policy.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Britain’s strategic role in the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia shaped the post-WWII contours and ramifications of what Winston Churchill famously dubbed the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. Through its clandestine Information Research Department (IRD), Britain targeted anti-communist propaganda, focusing on neutral nations and the overseas Chinese communities. The IRD assessed communist influence among emigrant Chinese communities along with their views of the United States. The IRD served to support American goals while bolstering Britain’s regional influence. Despite occasional divergences, the IRD and the United States Information Agency (USIA) coordinated efforts to counter communist expansion, reflecting the adaptability of their ‘special relationship’.

This article examines the role of the Information Research Department (IRD) in Northern Ireland during the first half of the 1970s. After discussing British conceptualisations of propaganda, it offers a detailed account of IRD activity, including how a Foreign Office department came to be involved in operations on British soil; how IRD propaganda fitted into the broader British state apparatus in Northern Ireland; the activity in which the IRD was engaged—both in Northern Ireland and beyond; and some of the challenges it faced, which ultimately limited the campaign’s effectiveness. It argues that the IRD’s role was driven by decisions taken at the very top of government and took shape against a context of financial cuts, a deteriorating security situation in Northern Ireland, and a tradition of domestic propaganda in the UK. The IRD sought to advance four key themes: exploiting divisions within the IRA; undermining the IRA’s credibility amongst the population; linking the IRA to international terrorism; and portraying the IRA as communist.

On 11 September 1973, a military coup was successfully launched against Chilean President Salvador Allende. British-made Hawker Hunter jets were used to attack the Chilean presidential palace, and the British government’s swift recognition of Augusto Pinochet caused outrage across the country. A solidarity campaign was launched to oppose the junta, and industrial action was taken to limit the sale of arms to Chile. While Britain’s support of Pinochet is well known, British covert action in Chile prior to the coup is not. This study will use recently declassified documents to demonstrate how, between 1960 and 1973, a secretive propaganda unit within the Foreign Office sought to prevent, and later weaken, an Allende presidency. The unit, named the Information Research Department (IRD), distributed strategically valuable information in order to damage Allende or legitimise his political opponents. Within this propaganda offensive, the IRD collaborated with the US government by sharing intelligence and assisting a CIA offshoot. Private IRD discussions suggest that this policy was guided by a geopolitical desire to keep Latin America on the ‘right side’ of the Cold War. British intervention in Chile will be contextualised by an analysis of the IRD’s furtive march into Latin America after 1949.

Editor's Note

During i 948, as the Cold War settled over a divided Europe, the British government became alarmed by the increasing volume and ferocity of Soviet propaganda directed against the West, the Marshall Plan, and the political viability of those Western European democracies to which US aid would flow.1 The propaganda offensive seemed but one part of a concerted Soviet attack in that year: the takeover of the Prague government by the Czech Communist party in a well-engineered coup in February, followed by the tightening blockade against West Berlin, and signs of Soviet pressure on Finland and the Scandinavian powers. To counter the Soviet propaganda offensive, Great Britain created a peacetime covert propaganda agency known as the Information Research Department (IRD).2 The IRD, housed at the foreign office, was a true child of the hightension atmosphere of international politics into which it was born, and typified the serious attention given to the ideology of the Cold War within Whitehall. There was even a perceptible sense of mission at the onset of the propaganda war: a paper prepared for the cabinet in 1951, defending the value of British propaganda, did not hesitate to describe the Cold War as a 'struggle for men's minds ... a struggle to determine whether the mass of mankind shall look for hope towards the Soviet Union or towards

The UK Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) produced a great deal of knowledge about communists and other enemies of the British state — real and perceived — during its 30-year existence. Some journalists, writers and academics grew to depend on the IRD’s tips, insights and inside information to build their careers. But it is unlikely that Donald McCormick was one of them.KeywordsPersonal AttackNational ArchiveInside InformationAuthoritative SourceForeign ManagerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War by Andrew N. Rubin Mark David Kaufman Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War. Andrew N. Rubin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 184. $39.50 (cloth). During a recent panel discussion held at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, Sheldon Pollock advocated a return to philology as a means of checking the reification and instrumentalization of the liberal arts. The goal of the humanities should not be to resolve complexity, Pollock suggested, but to foster it, by restoring contexts and reapplying skills that have lapsed with the advent of new technologies and critical practices.1 In Archives of Authority, Andrew N. Rubin concludes his engaging study of the relations between culture and power with a similar gesture. Combining investigational criticism with cultural historiography, Rubin reveals that state sponsorship of the humanities played a crucial role in the transfer of authority from Britain to the United States in the early years of the Cold War, and he argues that this transfer redefined "the position of the writer in society, the conditions of humanistic practice, the ideology of world literature, and the relationship between writers and the rising dominance of new and efficient modes of mass transmission" (17). Essentially, this shift in power dynamics transformed Weltliteratur into Weltkultur, the former a Goethean concept signifying not so much a global literature as the modalities that cultivate "an enlarged awareness of the shared, but discrepant experiences between nations" (2), and the latter understood as the appropriation of these modalities for ideological ends. In response, the author envisions an alternative humanism founded upon methods of philological inquiry resistant to synthetic conceptions of "world literature." Framing his critique as an appeal for "democratic criticism" (23), Rubin delves into little-known government archives. He particularly examines documents that concern how the Anglo-American intelligence community manipulated humanities discourse through Cold-War fronts like the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its media organs, magazines such as Encounter, Der Monat, and Black Orpheus. In the first chapter, he introduces a valuably reflective and interpretive perspective that is often lacking in otherwise informative accounts of the secret state's forays into the world of arts and letters, among which are Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) and James Smith's more recent British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-1960 (2013). As Rubin highlights the historical and critical implications of state sponsorship, he argues persuasively that the Cold-War transfer of power from Britain to the United States established a form of imperialism in which "the physical occupation of territory was replaced by the occupation of literary and cultural space" (20). Turning to specific instances of so-called "cultural diplomacy," the next two chapters examine how the work of the public intellectual was solicited, translated, and disseminated across the globe. For Rubin, George Orwell serves as a crucial case study for charting the modalities of transmission that worked to subsume anticolonialism under the imperative of anticommunism. Orwell's infamous blacklist, his secret roster of political undesirables compiled at the behest of Britain's Information Research Department, epitomized the larger relationship between his literary works and the IRD, which launched translations of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to perceived "communist" threats. Recontextualized in magazines, comics, and films, these adaptations co-opted and redirected the genuinely emancipatory energies of postcolonial discourse and made them to serve the reductive dichotomy between "totalitarianism" and the "free world." If emergent technologies permitted the deformative "reproduction" of Orwell's works, increasingly faster modes of "literary replication" facilitated the translation, diffusion, and juxtaposition of writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, and Jorge Luis Borges (21). In effect, the CCF commandeered print, film, and [End Page 791] radio culture-inasmuch as these are all venues for literary transmission-in order to stifle or manipulate dissenting voices, thereby reshaping the discipline of comparative literature. Explicitly tracing these Cold-War mechanics of power to the post-9/11 world, Archives of Authority asserts that such "forces" continue to "circumscribe our own procedures...

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.

The recent release of previously classified Foreign Office files has helped illuminate the early history of the secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). Although launched in 1948 by the Attlee government with the avowed intention of promoting Britain as a socialist ‘Third Force’ in world politics, IRD tended in practice to devote its earliest efforts to attacking the Soviet Union and Communism, not only abroad but also at home, where leaders of the Labour movement deployed its materials against the far left. By 1950 the Third Force mission had been abandoned altogether as British foreign policy shifted decisively towards support for an American-led coalition of Atlantic powers.

Relations between the post-war Labour Government and Britain's Security Service (MI5) have often been seen as strained. Utilising recently released material, the article argues that, rather than view the Service with disdain, Labour Ministers saw MI5 as an important instrument of Government, relying upon it for information on Fascist and Communist activities to inform government policy, particularly with the development of vetting procedures. It also details the development and early activities of the Committee on Communism (Home) and the involvement of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) in domestic propaganda. As such it can be seen that, by 1951 and the end of their tenure in office, Labour Ministers had overseen the development of a complex anti-Communist strategy aimed at protecting the British Cold War state.

This article looks at the small number of British subjects who visited China and North Korea during the Korean War with a view to influencing British opinion. Although none were brought to trial, all experienced some form of punitive action, whether the loss of employment, loss of passports, or damage to their reputations. The subject is placed in the context of the Cold War, and the wider concerns about disloyalty on the Left at the time, as well as the controversies surrounding the Korean War in Britain. It concludes that the actions of these individuals have to be understood in terms of their alternative loyalties (such as to the ‘new’ China, or to an alternative vision of the United Nations), which ultimately outweighed allegations of disloyalty.