The IRD at Home
New light on the domestic side of British Cold War propaganda
Intelligence researchers Rory Cormac and Dan Lomas have a new research note out on the Information Research Department (IRD), the secretive unit which ran Britain’s covert propaganda during the early Cold War.1
The article, in Intelligence and National Security, focuses on the IRD’s ‘English desk’, a striking anomaly in a Foreign Office department.
Founded as an instrument of anti-communist political warfare in the late 1940s, the IRD’s role became increasingly contested by the mid 1970s, and it was ultimately closed by Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.2 This trajectory has obvious parallels with the media operations of the CIA, which came under scrutiny from the Church Committee the previous year. There were significant differences, however.
For one thing, while the CIA was officially meant to avoid influencing domestic opinion, this was always part of IRD’s intended role. For another, while the CIA’s domestic operations sparked public controversy from the mid-1960s onwards, the IRD’s existence did not become public until a 1978 Guardian article by David Leigh.3 The contestation which led to its demise was within the state itself.
Despite its creation under Clement Attlee’s Labour Government, the IRD’s Cold War mentality led to increasing tensions with Labour ministers. Although Cormac and Lomas deprecate more conspiratorial interpretations of the IRD’s role, their evidence has a bearing on long-standing allegations that the British secret state undermined Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
In January 1974, just weeks before another general election, it began to produce a ‘weekly digest of overt statements of a subversive nature’, circulated to a ‘very limited distribution’ list. Although he insisted it did not ‘trespass into Party politics’, the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, assumed that ‘IRD would immediately suspend its production if a Labour Government were returned to power’.4
IRD apparently suspended co-operation with journalists during the two election campaigns of 1974, but it would be very interesting to know what material made it into the digest.
The period between the Conservative defeat in February 1974 and the establishment of a bare Labour majority the following October was a particularly febrile one for British politics. According to Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, the satirical magazine Private Eye received anti-Labour briefing material during this time which closely resembled IRD documents retained by Colin Wallace.5
Documentary releases brought out by Cormac and Lomas may shed new light on this period. Using the Freedom of Information Act to study secret matters can be a frustrating process, but their work has resulted in a number of files being passed to the National Archives, and their account of the process is well worth a read for those pursuing similar efforts.
Rory Cormac & Dan Lomas (2023) Research note: ‘a cuckoo in the diplomatic service nest’: freedom of information and the ‘English Desk’ of the Information Research Department (IRD), Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2023.2263947
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p.171. A smaller section survived as the Overseas Information Department (OID), while the covert element was incorporated into MI6. According to Cormac and Lomas the English Desk’s parent International Section survived the cut and continued to study domestic subversion into the late 1970s.
David Leigh, Death of the department that never was, Guardian, 27 January 1978. Archived at CambridgeClarion.org
Cormac & Lomas, op. cit.
Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, Fourth Estate Limited, 1991, pp.240-241