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 of an official state organisation which had apparently been putting out propaganda against sections of the British Left, and had cosy relationships with a large chunk of the British media, confirmed some of the worst suspicions on the left; and, though this was rarely if ever articulated, offered a partial explanation for its failure. So, when I see a book about IRD in a publisher’s catalogue I ask for it; and sometimes I get it.
Although this has the dreaded words ‘based on a PhD’ in its introduction, this is rather better written than many of the genre. This is an account of the bureaucracy of IRD, its internal relations with the rest of Whitehall – especially the various other state information functions – and its external relations, notably with American equivalents. This is an account of what you find in the official paper record now that some of the papers have been released after 50 years. There is almost nothing on specific operations. There is almost nothing on the use of disinformation: one reference to the existence of black propaganda; nothing, for example, on IRD’s use of forgeries in the early years of the Cold War, hyping-up the Soviet menace, about which there has been the occasional hint. If IRD officials in this period wrote and filed papers describing their disinformation operations, they have apparently been ‘weeded’. But there is brief, official discussion of the basic IRD technique of ‘surfacing’ items in friendly (or bribed or owned) foreign outlets and then importing the material back as non-IRD sourced.
I was surprised to find so little about Anglo-American rivalries: perhaps that all came later on in the 1950s. The version here shows Anglo-American co-operation, with the usual British spin of the period, the Greeks and Romans metaphor: the Yanks might have all the money but we have the nous and the subtlety. It might even be true: the British state certainly had more colonial experience and much of the ideological struggle at this time was taking place in the developing world.
The book ends with the arrival of John Foster Dulles as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and the brief period, leading up to Hungary, when the fantasies of ‘rolling back’ the Soviet empire were taken half seriously and the themes of the propaganda war changed.
‘The most striking feature of the new policy was the central role of propaganda directed over the Iron Curtain and aimed directly at the transformation of the Soviet regime. What had previously been a side-show of the IRD’s attempts to combat communism in the free world, was now the central tenet of British anti-communist propaganda policy.’ (p. 239)
This books tells us the story we might have guessed in outline (had we given it some thought). There are no surprises. But knowing this is valuable enough. Now that the official papers have been revealed, it turns out that the version put together from the unofficial fragments by people like Paul Lashmar was basically correct.
What isn’t here is anything that hints at how the British secret state developed in the fifties and sixties, how IRD came to circulate (and the rest of Whitehall let it circulate) material about the ‘Soviet threat’ within the British labour movement; and how this nonsense came to be inserted into the conflict in Northern Ireland (‘Britain’s Cuba’ as IRD christened it ). For that – what little hasn’t been weeded – we will have to wait for the equivalent account of the next ten or fifteen years.