[…] nation and put his money where his mouth was.(2) He funded some of Brian Crozier’s operations, created Now! magazine, giving a platform to Crozier and other former IRD wallahs,(3) and set up the famous libel fund to enable the poverty-stricken British Right to sue their wealthier opponents on the Left. (That last bit about […]
[…] film ‘Scum’, which now obliges the IBA to vet potentially controversial programmes. Objections came from the Oman Government via Sultan of Oman’s propaganda adviser, Anthony Ashworth, ex IRD. Observer 29 July. See also Observer 26 June for events leading up to this. More police raids on bookshops reported in Rights (NCCL) Autumn 1984. Data […]
[…] 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 […]
