Information Research Department

rdf:langString Information Research Department

rdf:langString Information Research Department

rdf:langString right

rdf:langString Norman Mackenzie

rdf:langString Estimated 400-600 at height.

rdf:langString Carlton House Terrace, the original home of the Information Research Department's propaganda activities

rdf:langString "There seems to be general agreement by Orwell's fans left and right, to skate gently over these Orwellian suspicions of Jews, homosexuals, and blacks, also the extreme ignorance of his assessments, reminiscent of police intelligence files the world over. Of Paul Robeson Orwell wrote, 'very antiwhite. [Henry] Wallace supporter.' Only a person who instinctively thought all blacks were anti-white could have written this piece of stupidity. One of Robeson's indisputable features, consequent upon his intellectual disposition and his connections with the Communists, was that he was most emphatically not 'very anti-white,' Ask the Welsh coal miners for whom Robeson campaigned."

rdf:langString "Tubercular people often could get very strange towards the end. I'm an Orwell man, I agreed with him on the Soviet Union, but he went partly ga-ga I think. He let his dislike of the New Statesman crowd, of what he saw as leftish, dilettante, sentimental socialists who covered up for the Popular Front in Spain after it became communist-controlled) get the better of him."

rdf:langString The Guardian

rdf:langString Foreword to John Reed's 2012 Snowball's Chance

rdf:langString It is for us, as Europeans and as a Social Democratic Government, and not the Americans, to give the lead in spiritual, moral and political sphere to all the democratic elements in Western Europe which are anti-Communist and, at the same time, genuinely progressive and reformist, believing in freedom, planning and social justice—what one might call the ‘Third Force’.

rdf:langString Blacklisted writer says illness clouded Orwell's judgement

rdf:langString Future Foreign Publicity memorandum

rdf:langString The Fable of the Weasel

rdf:langString The Information Research Department (IRD) was a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda, provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers, and to use weaponised information, but also disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. Soon after its creation, the IRD broke away from focusing solely on Soviet matters and began to publish pro-colonial propaganda intended to suppress pro-independence revolutions in Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Middle East. The IRD was heavily involved in the publishing of books, newspapers, leaflets, journals, and even created publishing houses to act as propaganda fronts, such as Ampersand Limited. Operating for 29 years, the IRD is known as the longest-running covert government propaganda department in British history, the largest branch of the Foreign Office, and the first major anglophone propaganda offensive against the USSR since the end of World War II. By the 1970s, the IRD was performing military intelligence tasks for the British Military in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The IRD was the government department to which George Orwell submitted his list of suspected communists (Orwell's list), including many prominent people such as Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, and Michael Redgrave. With the help of Orwell's widow Sonia Orwell and his former publisher Fredric Warburg, the IRD gained the foreign rights to much of Orwell's work and spent years distributing Animal Farm onto every continent, translating Orwell's works into 20 different languages, funding the creation of an animated feature film based on Animal Farm, and working with the CIA to create the feature-length Animal Farm animated movie, the first of its kind in British history. Many historians have noted how Orwell's literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA. The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences. The IRD funded the activities of many authors including Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Conquest. Internationally, IRD agents took part in many historic events, including Britain's entry into the European Economic Community, the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Malayan Emergency, The Troubles, the Mau Mau Uprising, Cyprus Emergency, and the Sino-Indian War. Other IRD activities included forging letters and posters, conducting smear attacks against British trade unionists, and attacking opponents of the British military by planting fake news stories in the British press. Some of these fabricated stories the IRD created included accusations that Irish republicans were killing dogs by setting them on fire, and falsely accusing EOKA members of raping schoolgirls. Although the existence of the IRD was successfully kept hidden from the British public until the 1970s, the Soviet Union had always been aware of its existence, for Guy Burgess had been posted to IRD for a period of two months in 1948. Burgess was later sacked by the IRD's founder Christopher Mayhew, who accused him of being "dirty, drunk and idle". The IRD closed its operations in 1977 after its existence was discovered by British journalists after an investigation into a heavy amount of anti-Soviet propaganda being published by academics belonging to St Antony's College, Oxford. An exposé published in The Guardian titled by David Leigh "Death of the Department that Never Was", became the first public acknowledgement of the IRD's existence.