[…] writer and propagandist; active in the Monday Club and Foreign Affairs Research Institute. Although I am still unclear of his precise role, I think he was an IRD stringer. Henry Hopkinson Lord Colyton (Obituary Guardian 11 January 1995). Diplomat, MP, Minister; chairman of Tanganyika Concessions, and subsequently member of Anglo-Rhodesian Society and Foreign Affairs […]
Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] the Foreign Office: the second describes the formation of a world-wide network of news agencies and publishing companies created by MI6 to put out material created by IRD. These are essentially expansions of previous work by Fletcher – see, e.g. his piece in the Guardian 18th December 1981 – and are based on a […]
[…] responsible for the anti-unilateralist campaign in the Churches; Peter Blaker, Minister of State for Defence; Ray Whitney, MOD spokesman and formerly of the Cold War propaganda unit IRD (and also of the Institute for European and Strategic Studies (IESS) and the Council for Arms Control; Michael Heseltine (6) Secretary of State for Defence and […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
