[…] 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 […]
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, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the Army and the Information Research Department. During my time at HQ Northern Ireland none of the staff belonged to Defence Intelligence. Pincher’s failure to mention the IRD involvement is very interesting because of the key input the department made to the unit and the fact that its presence there has been widely reported […]
[…] There are new accounts here of some of the major landmarks of British post-war decolonisation, Malaya and Cyprus; but, oddly, nothing on Kenya. The two chapters on IRD and the one on the covert support of the post-war European unity movement, contain both succinct and comprehensive syntheses of the extant material and a lot […]
[PDF file]: […] a more critical view see Peter Weiler, chapter 1. 18 6 loyally to keep an agreement. 19 In 1948, a member of the U.S. State Department, Th ird Secretary at the London Embassy, Herbert E. Weiner, reported from London on ‘Attitude of Trades Union Congress Towards World Federation of Trade Unions and American International […]
