85 results found.
... the CPGB declined, the Party continued to play a significant role in the growth of labour militancy. Symbolised by Harold Wilson, a nominal 'left-winger' becoming Prime Minister in 1964, this perceptible shift to the left alarmed one group in particular, the professional anti-communist network in Britain, at the heart of which was the Information Research Department (IRD). For a supposedly secret agency, we now know quite a bit about IRD- certainly a great deal more than we did in 1978 when the organisation was closed. IRD finally got partly exposed because of its curious position of working with the intelligence services, but not for them; of being part of the Foreign Office but ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 261 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-06.htm
... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last| Contents| Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 Appendix 1: ISC, FWF, IRD The origins of the Institute for the Study of Conflict go back to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was set up in West Berlin in 1950 as the CIA's major cultural offensive during the cold war. (1) CCF is believed to have originated in the fertile mind of Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) which later became the CIA's covert Directorate of Plans. OPC was responsible for starting the business of front companies and groups ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 229 - 01 Apr 1986 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue11/lob11-13.htm
... Next Issue 37 Britain's Secret Propaganda War Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book- perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch's British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British parapolitics since Richard Fletcher's pioneering work on it in the mid 1970s; and for several years now a synthesis of all the extant material on IRD has been waiting to be done. But Lashmar and Oliver have gone way beyond that. Although that existing material has been digested, ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 201 - 01 Jun 1999 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue37/lob37-13.htm
... well be exaggerated and it is not clear how successful they were. For all this anti-Labour propaganda, Labour's total vote went up in the 1951 General Election. The Information Research Department In the labour movement the Trades Union Congress was working with the newly-formed, Foreign Office-based, political warfare executive, operating under cover as the Information Research Department (IRD), in an anti-communist drive. IRD was not an innovation. British politics since World War 1 is studded with clandestine propaganda operations involving the mass media of the day. The claims of massive post-World War 2 media penetration by Aims of Industry and the Economic League are reminiscent of the operations of the post World War 1 propaganda network ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 199 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-03.htm
... Forum World Features: travelled to Africa and the Persian Gulf to investigate terrorist and other threats to petroleum shipments coming to Europe and the Americas- Benton's oil study contains a detailed breakdown of Soviet intelligence personnel in Africa: wrote ISC Conflict Studies: author of espionage/thriller novels. CLIVE Nigel: Long career in MI6: one-time head of IRD(1968-70): wrote for ISC and recently ISC editorial consultant. CLUTTERBUCK Richard: Expert on counter-insurgency: WW2 served in Western desert and Italy: Palestine 1947, Malaya 1956, Singapore 1966: instructor at British and US Army staff colleges: chief army instructor, Royal College of Defence Studies (1971-72): lecturer in politics, ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 186 - 01 Apr 1986 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue11/lob11-20.htm
... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 38) Winter 1999 Last| Contents| Next Issue 38 George Orwell and the IRD John Newsinger In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell's decision to collaborate with that organisation's anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that 'George Orwell's reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with the IRD's Cold Warriors, even offering his own blacklist of eighty-six Communist fellow-travellers...'(1) This echoed the newspaper coverage of the revelations which were originally sensationalised by Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne in ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 163 - 01 Dec 1999 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue38/lob38-03.htm
... ) £25. Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was throughly manipulated by the Foreign Office- just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of Mayhew reminiscing about his involvement with IRD. His recollections were taped and edited by Lyn Smith, author in 1980 of one of the first big academic articles about IRD. One or two passages, for example on pp. 27 and 29, seem to me to show signs of Smith inserting material from that article. Much of the material will be familiar if you have ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 152 - 01 Dec 1998 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue36/lob36-14.htm
... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 19) May 1990 Last| Contents| Next Issue 19 In a Common Cause: the Anti-Communist Crusade in Britain 1945-60 Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12. Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P. Christopher Mayhew, who had served in one of the 'secret armies' (The Phantoms) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the war. The received chronology is that ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 112 - 01 May 1990 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue19/lob19-01.htm
... for the British and American intelligence services. Crozier would deny that he worked for anybody: 'at all times I remained independent, executing only tasks that were in line with my own objectives.'(pp. xii, xiii) But on p. xii of the preface he tells us he 'worked with' the CIA, MI6 and IRD; on p. 20 he tells that briefings he had been getting from an MI6 officer secured for him the job as editor of the Economist's Foreign Report; on p. 51 he writes of a 'part-time consultancy for IRD'; and on p. 86 that IRD 'put an office at [his] disposal.' He also ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 106 - 01 Dec 1993 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue26/lob26-11.htm
... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 55) Summer 2008 Last| Contents| Next Issue 55 Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53 The Information Research Department Andrew Defty Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004, £23.99, p/b Thinking about this book, I wondered why people like me have been so interested in IRD for the last 30 years. There are two reasons, I think. The first is that way back in the 1970s, when information about the British secret state was virtually non-existent, some articles were published about IRD. They got onto the agenda when there was almost nothing else on it and so they loomed large. Second, the discovery ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 101 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-50.htm
