The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. […]
[…] the operations block at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. According to Holroyd the propaganda was carefully controlled and directed from London, run by a section of IRD, the Information and Research Department, formed in the days of the cold war as a propaganda unit. It was directly linked to MI6. One of those […]
[…] ‘Who Paid the Piper?’ and implied, rather than actually demonstrated, that the CIA was calling the tune. Over a much wider field than Saunders, with chapters on IRD, the New Leader, labor diplomats (American labor attachés), the European Movement and the creation of Bilderberg, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter/, Wilford questions the […]
[…] set up the strongest possible Communist cells within the Conservative Party ….’. This document, I suspect, is a product of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department ( IRD). This impression is greatly strengthened by Braddock’s report of another document, called ‘MVD Information’ (MVD became the KGB) ‘which circulates to executives of the Soviet secret […]
[…] with material for years. Leigh describes how, when Coughlin asked his source for evidence, he was shown but not allowed to copy documents. This is the classic IRD disinformation technique, described in use in Cyprus in the 1960s by Charles Foley in his book Legacy of Strife (2) and, more recently, by Colin Wallace […]
[…] working for any intelligence agency. Counterpoint is nicely produced, and rather good – or would be if you are interested in Soviet disinformation chiefly within the Th ird World. (And its got to be a spook operation.) Available from Ickham Publications Ltd., Westonhanger, Ickham, Canterbury CT3 1QN. Executive Intelligence Review We recently received a […]
[…] a high-ranking Iraqi defector’, former Iraqi ambassador to Venezuela, now seeking asylum in London. Later on in the story, on page 2, the defector denies the story. IRD is dead! Long live IRD! Liam Clarke and Barry Penrose (see review of The Committee, below) co-authored the story ‘Syria paid IRA to kill Mountbatten’ in […]
[…] writer and propagandist; active in the Monday Club and Foreign Affairs Research Institute. Although I am still unclear of his precise role, I think he was an IRD stringer. Henry Hopkinson Lord Colyton (Obituary Guardian 11 January 1995). Diplomat, MP, Minister; chairman of Tanganyika Concessions, and subsequently member of Anglo-Rhodesian Society and Foreign Affairs […]
Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed […]
[…] early post-war years had been one of the leading lights in the United World Federalists, before joining the CIA. Meyer was head of station in London, 1975-76. IRD The Sunday Telegraph April 27 1997 carried an important piece about the IRD operation between 1970 and 1972 to put out propaganda in favour of British […]
