Research, Information and Communications Unit

The Sunday Times reported in December 2007 that:

The alleged airline plot in August 2006 caused another of the government’s periodic rethinks. For all the work on pursuing terrorists, the government realised that its strategy on preventing more taking their place was not working. After a bureaucratic tussle, the Home Office has become the centre for a new strategic hub for all counterterrorism policy: the Office of Security and CounterTerrorism.

The rethink also led to the creation of the nebulously titled Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). Officials deny this is in any way a propaganda department, although one conceded: “It does sound horribly cold war.”

Its task is to analyse the way in which key audiences at home and abroad (in other words, Muslims) react to messages from the government and to try to give more coherence to those messages to undermine the ideology of Al-Qaeda. In the counterterrorist jargon of the day, its job is to build and promote a counter-narrative to the single narrative that Al-Qaeda and its allies propagate. “You can do it without it looking like government propaganda, because if it looks too much like government propaganda then I don’t think people are going to listen, nor should they,” argues Mottram.