Information Research Department

The Information Research Department, founded in 1946 was a covert anti-communist propaganda unit within the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The department was closed down by then Foreign Secretary, David Owen, in 1977. The last head of the IRD was Ray Whitney, later a Conservative Party member of parliament and junior minister.

The IRD, a unit in the Foreign Office and creation of the British Intelligence community, played a major role in Western news and cultural media from 1948-1977. It financed a publishing house ‘Ampersand’ and at one time employed a staff of 300. A secret Foreign Office memo in February 1948 described the establishment of the IRD as a response to the “developing communist threat to the whole fabric of Western civilization”. The origins of the IRD lie in the recommendations in a paper put up by the Imperial Defence College.

In their book on the IRD, Lashmar and Oliver note that “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies, papers and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left”.

IRD fed information and propaganda on 'communists' within the labour movement through confidential recipients of its briefings one of whom is now known to be the late Vic Feather into the media, and into the Labour Party's policing units, the National Agent's Department and the Organisation Subcommittee.

However a more insidious role has been documented by Lashmar and Oliver. These authors explain that in the 1960s the Foreign Office was fearful that the British-backed neighboring Malaysian Federation would be influenced by Sukarno's independent stand and this would result in the loss of the world's largest source of rubber. Moreover, Britain had a 40 percent stake in Royal Dutch Shell with its monopoly status in Indonesia, controlling at the time 75 percent of the world's oil production. Their book details the role of IRD and British propaganda efforts against Indonesia's Sukarno in 1965, before and after the so-called abortive "coup," which became the excuse for Suharto's genocide against the PKI. IRD and MI6 "black" operations were intense before and after this alleged coup, as forged documents suggesting PKI atrocities and Chinese intervention were combined with sophisticated signals intelligence that monitored Sukarno's every move.

By the late-1960s the IRD was cut back by the Labour Government, and Intelligence writer Stephen Dorril states that it found additional work in Northern Ireland: “its Information Policy section was engaged in the 1970s in running propaganda campaigns against mainland politicians”. IRD was closed down in 1977 because its cover was blown by a persistent researcher Richard Fletcher. The Foreign Secretary at the time, David (now Lord) Owen was reported in The Guardian (18 August 1995) as stating that the IRD had become involved in the grey area of manipulating journalism and that clandestine operations were MI6’s job, not that of a “civil department”.

(Sources: Britain's Secret Propaganda War By Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Sutton Publishing, 1998; MI6: Fifty Years of Legal Thuggery By Stephen Dorril, Fourth Estate, 1996)

BBC - willing propagandist 1950s – 1980s

From the outset of its creation in 1948, the Information Research Department (IRD) in the Foreign Office set out to manipulate the BBC. Ralph Murray, the first head of the IRD is quoted as saying “our situation is now such that it seems essential that we should approach the BBC and cause them, by persuasion if possible, to undertake such programme developments as might help us”.

Michael Nelson, who was allowed access to the BBC archives notes, “The Foreign Office regarded the BBC as by far the most important propaganda weapon it had in Eastern Europe”. He disclosed that BBC correspondents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, including the veteran broadcaster Charles Wheeler, were fed classified material gleaned from covert intercepts of Soviet bloc communications to generate anti-communist propaganda broadcasts during the cold war. In another private arrangement between the BBC and the Foreign Office, confidential letters written to BBC correspondents by people living in the communist bloc at the start of the cold war were passed on to the MI6.

Some of the BBC’s senior management was unabashed with this propaganda role, notwithstanding public statements of impartiality and objectivity. In the 1950s, shortly before he became Director General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Green devoted much of an address to the NATO Defence College in Paris on psychological warfare to a description of the BBC and propaganda. He did not hesitate to use the word propaganda repeatedly.

People

1940s-50s

• Ralph Murray, founding director, former BBC journalist, then PWE 'radio operations in the Balkans before taking on broader responsibilities for propaganda and political warfare, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean.
• John Peck, director following Murray ifrom 1951-3
• John Rennie, 'had done propaganda in the United States during the war' and who subsequently served as head of MI6, was head of the department between 1954 and 1958.
• Lt Col Leslie Sheridan, in 'charge of channeling the propaganda' as 'Editorial Adviser' had 'worked in Fleet Street before joining SOE where he created espionage and propaganda networks in neutral cities using journalists as cover; even in IRD a colleague (Norman Reddaway) said Sheridan "tended to go back to the era of dirty tricks"'
• J. H. Adam Watson, Deputy director

Early staff included: Robert Conquest | Hugh Lunghi | Jack Brimmell | Cecil Parrott | Peter Wilkinson | Norman Reddaway

1970s

• Clifford Hill, based in Stormont from 1971

Resources, sources, external links, notes

What is Communism? By a Student of Affairs, Background Books, London: Batchworth Press, 1951 (covert product of the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office - This copy used to belong to the Economic League (Central Council) Information and Research Departments, whose stamp can be seen on the inside title page.)

Sources

• Overt and Covert: The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez Crisis, 1956 by Gary D Rawnsley, 1956. Intelligence and National Security, 11:3 (July 1996), pp. 497-522
• MI6. Fifty Years of Special Operations by Stephen Dorril, Fourth Estate)

(Sources: MI6 : Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service by Stephen Dorril, Touchstone Books, 2002

• War of the Black Heavens: The Batles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War by Michael Nelson, Brassey’s, 1997
• The Guardian, 28 July 1985
• The Guardian 19 August 1985
• The Observer, 1 September 1985
• The Times, 20 October 1997)

External links

• David Leigh, "Death of the department that never was", Guardian (UK), January 27, 1978, page 13.
• Ups and downs of a maverick, book review from The Spectator'
• The Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials, with Essays, Reviews, and Comments J. Ransom Clark Emeritus Professor of Political Science Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio UNITED KINGDOM Post-World War II, Information Research Division (IRD)