| Summary/Abstract |
The British Foreign Office Information Research Department (IRD) was established in 1948 to counter Cold War-era disinformation promulgated by the Soviet Union.1 The Future Foreign Publicity Policy cabinet memorandum, which established the IRD, stated that the department would be a “small Section in the Foreign Office to collect information concerning Communist policy, tactics and propaganda and to provide material for our anti-Communist publicity….”2 However, the memorandum’s authors failed to anticipate the scale of specialized resources that would be needed to adequately fight communist disinformation worldwide. Not only would Sir Ralph Murray, first head of the IRD, need substantially more than a small staff; he would also require specialized skill sets that were not well represented in the diplomatic services and were difficult to recruit. Primarily, they recruited “authors and publishing houses to serve as conduits for non-attributable IRD ventures, and some of the most respected names amongst the British democratic left ended up authoring works quietly organized and funded by the IRD.”3 This was especially noteworthy in 1949, when the IRD attempted to dramatically scale up its operations by influencing British commercial publishing.
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