Staff
The first head of IRD was Ralph Murray, later a diplomat. John Rennie, who subsequently served as head of MI6, was head of the department between 1953 and 1958. The last head of the IRD was Ray Whitney, later a Conservative member of parliament and junior minister. IRD was staffed with many emigres, from Iron Curtain countries. IRD officials were ordered not to tell even other FO staff where they worked. IRD flourished in the 1950s. The staff of the Soviet section alone rose from 20 to more than 60. Embassies had resident IRD men under cover who planted material on local journalists - and opinion formers. Other staffers included Robert Conquest and his assistant Celia Kirwan, who was given Orwell's list.
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Famous quotes containing the word staff:
“For the first fourteen years for a rod they do whine,
For the next as a pearl in the world they do shine,
For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve,
For the next matrons or drudges they serve,
For the next doth crave a staff for a stay,
For the next a bier to fetch them away.”
—Thomas Tusser (c. 1520–1580)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)