Propaganda
IRD's main targets were in the Third World. However, it was also set out to "be of use to" British media and opinion formers. As well as supplying material to the BBC World Service, secret lists were compiled of approved journalists and trade unionists to whom material was offered, if not always accepted.
British introductions to IRD were made discreetly. Journalists were told as little as possible about the Department. Material was sent to their homes under plain cover as correspondence marked "personal" carried no departmental identification or reference. They were told documents were "prepared" in the FCO primarily for members of the diplomatic service, but that it was allowed to give them on a personal basis to a few people outside the service who might find them of interest. As such, they were not statements of official policy and should not be attributed to HMG, nor should the titles themselves be quoted in discussion or in print. The papers should not be shown to anyone else and they were to be destroyed when no longer needed.
As part of its remit "to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications", it subsidized the publication of books by Background Books, including three by Bertrand Russell: Why Communism Must Fail, What Is Freedom?, and What Is Democracy? Russell was fully aware of the funding for his books, while others, such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who contributed The Democratic Revolution, were outraged when they found out.
Other publications were written by IRD staffers such as the scholar and author Robert Conquest.
Likewise, the IRD funded the Burmese, Chinese, and Arabic editions of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Possibly its most notorious "project" was the joint operation with the CIA to set up Encounter magazine, edited by Stephen Spender from 1953 to 1966. Spender resigned after it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine, was being covertly funded by the CIA.
Read more about this topic: Information Research Department
Famous quotes containing the word propaganda:
“Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“As soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)