104 results found.
... last great Goldsmith campaign - his hunt for the Red Menace in the late 1970s.(1 ) Then as now Goldsmith saw himself as the saviour of the nation and put his money where his mouth was.(2 ) He funded some of Brian Crozier's operations, created Now! magazine, giving a platform to Crozier and other former IRD wallahs,(3 ) and set up the famous libel fund to enable the poverty-stricken British Right to sue their wealthier opponents on the Left. (That last bit about the Left is a joke, by the way.) Like Crozier, Goldsmith was then obsessed with an alleged enormous Soviet disinformation offensive against the West. ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 15 - 01 Jun 1997 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue33/lob33-13.htm
... 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
... 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 ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 206 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-03.htm
... . The Congress's press agency was detached, reorganised and renamed Forum World Features, and Crozier was appointed its director in 1965.(125) Crozier claims that 'In 1968 the KGB made a first attempt to wreck Forum';(126) and perhaps in anticipation of the day when Forum was 'blown', with other personnel from the IRD network Crozier set up the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) between 1968 and 1970.(127) ISC The first funding came from Shell and BP but then, as Crozier puts it, 'the Agency [CIA] now came up with something bigger', and put him in contact with the American multi-millionaire ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 65 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-08.htm
... party, and the second most important part of the NATO alliance, is in the hands of someone who has spent the post-war years going to and from Moscow as an East-West trader! The rise of the left in the Labour Party and trade union movement, symbolised by the ascent of Wilson, was being monitored by IRD and its satellites, the Economic League, IRIS, Common Cause - and by Brian Crozier, who raised the alarm in the 1970 collection he edited, We Will Bury You..(73) Working the same seam - presumably for different sponsors - was former Army officer and Conservative MP, Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. In Stewart ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 48 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-07.htm
... five years before. It set up a national structure with local branches - in 1954 there were 14 - published a monthly Bulletin, and distributed many of the standard anti-communist texts of the time, for example Tufton Beamish's Must Night Fall?; some, such as the 'Background Books' series, published and/or subsidised by IRD; and leaflets from the CIA labour front in Europe, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).(97) In 1955 Common Cause's 'Advisory Council' included: Tom O'Brien and Florence Hancock, both past TUC presidents;(98) Bob Edwards, General Secretary of the Chemical Workers Union, 1947-51; ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 27 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-04.htm
... increasingly like IRD's last stand.) The rest of the state's information and diplomatic services involved in the insurgencies frequently objected to this line, sometimes successfully. Quite why the rest of Whitehall put up with IRD's incompetent meddling until 1976 remains a mystery: Carruther's account of the politics of official propaganda does not get that deep. Anybody interested in IRD - or the wider issues of propaganda in British counter-insurgency policies - will find important new material here. A short version of this, concentrating on the IRD sections of the book, is 'A Red Under Every Bed? Anti-Communist Propaganda and Britain's Response to Colonial Insurgency', in Contemporary Record, Vol. 9, ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 24 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue31/lob31-14.htm
... imprecise at best. Initially, post-war, the major focus of the state's anti-communists seems to have been on the Soviet front groups - the friendship societies etc. Eric Shaw mentions that in 1953 the Labour Party's Proscription List suddenly expanded with information about these groups assumed to come from 'the Foreign Office [i .e . IRD] and Special Branch' run through the International Department of the Party.(163) This focus on the CPGB front groups seems to be attributable to two things. If Bower's recent biography of MI5 head Dick White is accurate, one is the inadequacies of MI5 in the post-war years.(164) The second is ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 19 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-09.htm
... , The Democrat.... 'worked unofficially on Socialist Commentary" ' .. .. .and became a founder member of its offshoot, the Socialist Union, 'which served as a think tank for the emerging Gaitskellite wing of the Labour Party..... 'liaised, advised, wrote, lectured, published - and helped IRD [the Information Research Department] with the distribution of one of their early publications, The Curtain Falls. '( 40) The US post-war penetration of the British Labour Party and wider trade union movement climaxes with Joe Godson, who was Labour Attaché in London from 1953-59. Godson became very close to the Labour ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 13 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/caucus/lobcc-02.htm
... Liberties, Smythe described how, when he became Director of Mind in 1973, an anonymous document was circulated to some of the charity's most eminent supporters alleging that Smythe was some kind of communist agent. I wrote to Mr Smythe who kindly supplied me with part of the document. The document looks like a pretty obvious bit of state (IRD?) disinformation, doctored with some clumsy spelling errors and typos to make it appear non-official: for example 'legitamate' for legitimate, 'discribed' for described and 'conscious objector' for conscientious objector. What struck me most forcibly re-reading the document is this on page 7. 'Smythe was also involved with the International Confederation ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 13 - 01 Jun 1996 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue31/lob31-07.htm
