New revelations (link) about the UK government’s secretive Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) have prompted further interest in the country’s propaganda efforts. Established in 2007 by a former MI6 officer, the RICU was initially founded to help counter Islamic extremism.
Its remit within the Home Office eventually widened and the unit, which includes “social researchers, intelligence analysts, extremism analysts, communication, policy and project professionals”, went on to warn about the “manosphere” and claim that centre-right views were extreme (link).
Charles Farr, the man behind the creation of RICU, apparently modelled (link) the group on another shadowy organisation, The Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD, which sat in the Foreign Office, was disbanded in 1977 by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan when its cover was blown by the media.
There were serious concerns about the group’s involvement in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. It later emerged that its domestic dealings also included influencing British MPs and the media in a bid to help shore-up support for the UK’s accession to the European Communities in 1973.
The IRD, a bit like the RICU, had a varied and extended remit which arguably strayed from its original mission. Formed in 1948, the then Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Foreign Office minister Christopher Mayhew (who later became a BBC presenter and took psychological drugs on TV) wanted the IRD to counter Soviet propaganda.
The Civil Service co-founder of the group was Norman Reddaway and Ralph Murray would direct the first iteration of the IRD. Another key man in Britain’s new enterprise of selecting the right truths and countering the wrong ones was Adam Watson.
He was assistant to Murray and helped liaise with major journalists and intellectuals like Bertrand Russell on the IRD’s behalf. Sometimes the group would even publish books, especially reference guides, via a front company.
George Orwell got involved with the IRD near the end of his life thanks to Celia Kirwan, a young socialite who the journalist had desperately proposed to after the 1945 death of his first wife, Eileen.
By January 1949, a month after Orwell had completed 1984, Celia was working for the IRD. She met the ailing author in Cranham, Gloucestershire, in March of that year. Her report on the encounter, including Orwell’s list of ‘fellow travellers’ and alleged communists, became infamous.
Orwell, aged just 46, died in 1950 due to complications from his tuberculosis. The IRD would use his works, especially Animal Farm, to try and undermine the Soviet Union.
Likewise, the CIA, initially through its Office of Policy Coordination, would distribute hundreds of thousands of his books. The US agency would also go on to part-fund an animated drama of Animal Farm, which was released in 1954.
Though the IRD was disbanded in 1977, a new organisation called the Overseas Information Department emerged under Margaret Thatcher. When the government was asked about the unit in the House of Commons in 1981, it was revealed that 29 of the 79 staff (more than a third) had worked for the IRD “at some stage of their careers”.
As the years have gone by, more information has come to light about the IRD (link). The latest batch of files to be released to the public include the below revelations:
“Another tactic was to forge statements by official Soviet institutions and agencies. Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency.
“One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.
“The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East.
“One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.
“The IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.”
Intelligence historian Rory Cormac (link) is also finishing a new book on the IRD. He’s promised it will include a chapter on “hippies and sexually transmitted diseases; ghosts and (literal) echo chambers; and even a wife swap”.
It sounds like it might even beat Sefton Delmer’s attempt to convince the Nazis that there were Australian-imported sharks in the English Channel during World War II (link). Anyway, I hope you enjoy the documentary.
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