[…] the disinfo stories that were built around Kincora none of which (thus far) have ever amounted to anything, despite the possibility of considerable compensation for the victims. IRD reborn? On 17 October 2008 in ‘Paedophiles unite with terrorists online’, ‘an investigation by The Times’ claimed that examination of Jihadists’ computers showed that some contained […]
[…] 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 ‘legitimate’ for legitimate, ‘described’ for described and ‘conscious objector’ for […]
[…] with new information; I just don’t know (or care). There are some striking omissions. Not a word on nuclear weapons, for example, and only one reference to IRD, on page 145: ‘On the crazy edge of that effort were F Branch’s dirty tricks. In co-operation with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, MI5’s agents […]
[…] a recent term for a range of activities hitherto called propaganda, public relations, advertising and psy-ops. So while this book could have been been about the CIA, IRD, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its little UK cousin, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and all those American interventions in the Soviet bloc since […]
[…] have evidence, hard concrete evidence, that the KGB is funding the party. It is absolutely solid gold.’ Nudge, nudge; wink wink. Thus emboldened by official sources – IRD, I would guess – they took the fact of CPGB influence on the trade unions, and added the assumption of Soviet control. What a thrill to […]
[…] psy-ops people in the state. The intimate relationship between a Peter Mandelson and certain journalists is a facsimile of the relationship that the state’s disinformation people IRD most notably had with journalists all the way through the Cold War. Oborne tells us that New Labour’s mendacity amounts to a ‘new epistemology’, a […]
[…] destroy each other) the (deliberate?) failure of the assault on Dieppe, civilian bombing by the RAF and so forth. After WW2 we get the CIA in Europe, IRD, and the Korean war (US biological warfare). From the 1950s we skip to the 1980s and Reagan-era disinformation about the Soviets (shooting the Pope etc); and […]
David Miller, Pluto Press, London, 1994, £14.95 (paper) 40.00 (cloth) In his introduction Miller thanks his ‘colleagues at the Glasgow University Media Group’, from whence came the pioneering studies of the way the British media handle politically sensitive events, such as Bad News, More Bad News and Really Bad News. That, with the book’s title, […]
[…] phone-calls to major newspapers in Washington and the U.S. from Intelligence sources, including the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy’. The latter is a kind of updated IRD, and ‘public diplomacy’ is a 1980s euphemism for disinformation and psychological warfare. Morgan found that ‘The same story was also being pushed by what the Pentagon […]
[…] Socialism. In 1998 Mandelson eased Matthew Taylor into Holtham’s old IPPR job.(14) Manager of Norwich Union’s £106bn ‘socially responsible investment’ strategy,(15) Holtham took part in the Th ird Way Nexus debate. He advises: ‘accept the inevitability of free market Capitalism and ask whether and how a shrunken state should use its residual powers to […]
