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, this isn’t just that synthesis; this is a giant step forward.
In almost every chapter there are major revelations among the new information. To take just two examples: the chapter on IRD’s role in the removal of Sukarno of Indonesia will entail a complete revision of extant accounts of that event; and students of the media will have to take on board the chapter on IRD and the BBC – not to mention the extraordinary fact that as late as 1976, 92 British journalists were on IRD’s distribution list. So how many were on the list in, say, 1966, or 1956, when the Cold War was more intense? Although a great deal of information is presented here about IRD’s media and publishing operations there are no equivalent figures for the fifties and sixties and we simply do not know how big or how significant the IRD press network was in the 1950s and 60s.
The book contains many fascinating leads. I didn’t know, for example, that ‘After 1964 George Thomson presided over longer-term IRD activities’. (p. 138) George Thomson, later ennobled as Lord Thomson of Monifieth, was one of the leading pro-EEC members of the Wilson Cabinet and a former Chair of the Labour Committee for Europe. He resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1973 when Labour policy shifted into an anti-EEC position, and joined the European Commission. Thomson is the father-in-law of Roger Liddle, Blair’s adviser on Europe, and the chair of one of the companies run by the man who is in charge of the ‘blind trust’ running Liddle’s business interests …….(1) and IRD played a role – though how big a role we don’t know yet – in the 1973 EEC Referendum campaign, part of which is described here…..
But for me the potentially most important section is the short chapter on IRD’s domestic political operations. In his A War of Words (reviewed in Lobster 36) the late Christopher Mayhew revealed the existence of a meeting in 1956 between IRD, MI5 and the Cabinet Secretary which, in Mayhew’s words ‘led, among other things, to the ousting of Foulkes and Haskell from the leadership of the electrical trade union’ (emphasis added).
Among other things……. I said in my review that this fragment of Mayhew’s ‘may point the way to a completely new interpretation of anti-communism in Britain in the 1950s and 60s’, and Lashmar and Oliver’s chapter on IRD’s domestic operations takes that contention a good deal further forward.
The authors tell us that in 1956 the Conservative MP Douglas Dodds-Parker, a former anti-communist ally of Labour Foreign Secretary Bevin, had been appointed to the Foreign Office as Under-Secretary – and apparently in formal charge of liaison with IRD.(2) Dodds-Parker contacted IRD’s Norman Redd-away who suggested using the files of the Home Region Committee ‘which had been set up in the 1950s to gather information on the activities of Communists in British Industry’. (p. 106) This committee – whose existence is revealed here for the first time, I think – was comprised of personnel from Ministry of Labour, Home Office, police (presumably Special Branch), IRD and MI5. This looks very important – if there is anything on this committee. Unfortunately the authors do not tell us if there are minutes, files, records of any kind and I infer from their silence that none exist. Dodds-Parker then convened the meeting which Mayhew described, attended by the Cabinet Secretary Brook, Patrick Dean of the FO, Reddaway from IRD and Roger Hollis D-G of MI5, at which the Cabinet Secretary ordered MI5 to give their intelligence on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to IRD for their use. This meeting marks the beginning of official British secret state offensive operations against the CPGB.
The authors link this to Peter Wright’s claim in Spycatcher that ‘by 1955…..the CPGB was thoroughly penetrated at almost every level’. I would speculate that this is also linked to Wright’s revelation that by 1956 – as the result of their penetration of the CPGB – MI5 knew that the Soviet Union was covertly funding the CPGB and that the Party’s Reuben Falber was the man who handled the money. Was it the Soviet link which formally legitimised the MI5-IRD campaign against the CPGB? Is this why the Soviet funding was never revealed? For had it been exposed, the funding would have ceased and with it would have gone the legitimacy of the MI5/IRD operation.
What that operation consisted of we know only fragments. As I had guessed, it produced the Woodrow Wyatt pamphlet The Peril in our Midst and the 1962 Aidan Crawley series in the Sunday Times; most famously it produced the campaign against the CPGB leadership of the Electrical Trades Union; and the authors tell us it also produced a less well known campaign against the leadership of the Fire Brigades Union in 1956. Who has the time and patience to go through the whole of the British press in the post 1956 period to see what else there was?
I would speculate here that it also produced the change in the anti-communist grouping Common Cause, the abandonment of its membership structure, and the formation of the Common Cause industrial wing, IRIS, both events taking place in late 1956. In Lobster 19 and in The Clandestine Caucus I suggested that the post-1956 Common Cause must have been a CIA operation because of the presence on its post-1956 board of two men with links to the CIA. I now think this is probably false. The revelation of this 1956 British state decision to begin domestic operations against the CPGB makes it virtually certain in my view that the reshaping of Common Cause in 1956 and the appearance of its off-shoot, IRIS, are the results of the joint IRD-MI5 operation against British communism – or, more accurately, ‘communism’, for the targets of Common Cause and IRIS stretched much further than simply CPGB members.
If Common Cause and IRIS are eventually shown to have been fronts for this IRD/MI5 operation we will have to completely reexamine our understanding of British labour – and Labour Party – politics after 1956. For the Common Cause/ IRIS network meddled extensively in Labour Party and union business.
Personnel from various intelligence agencies, including IRD, were in or around the so-called Wilson plots and the other psy-ops operations leading up to the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979. If Common Cause and IRIS are also eventually shown to have also been state operations, historians of post-war British politics will have to rewrite their books to include the fact a largish chunk of their subject matter has, in effect, been covertly controlled by the British state. Which is more or less what Brian Crozier was telling us in his memoir, Free Agent, wasn’t it?
Notes
- See Tom Easton’s piece in Lobster 36.
- Dodds-Parker was also busy in the 1960s peddling smear stories about Harold Wilson.