Britain's Challenge To Communism

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1999 by Dennis L. Bird

Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver. Sutton Publishing. [pounds]25.00. 223 pages. ISBN 0-7509-1668-0.

To anyone born since 1960 or thereabouts, the Gold War must seem a strange nonevent, in which two great ideologies, confronted one another in armed impotence. The authors of this book may be of such a generation, for they seem unwilling to recognise the climate of the time. As so often nowadays, they judge the past by the fashionable attitudes of the present, and see Britain in a bad light.

To those of us who survived the Second World War, 1948 was a crucial year. The USSR, always an awkward ally in wartime, had shown an alarming truculence and intransigence afterwards. It clearly sought to dominate Eastern Europe, as was made dramatically clear by the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. A few months earlier, the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) had been set up. Even the authors recognise that it 'was not a debating chamber but a tool of the Soviets.'

A flood of anti-Western propaganda was soon pouring out from Moscow and elsewhere. A valiant junior Minister in Britain's Labour Government, Christopher (later Lord) Mayhew, thought something should be done because the Communists were threatening to take power in Paris and Rome. At his instigation, the Cabinet in January 1948 approved the establishment within the Foreign Office of an Information Research Department (IRD) to check the inroads of Communism by taking the offensive against it.

Our authors, however, do not start their book with this rational response to an overt threat. Instead, their first chapter is indignantly entitled 'Indonesia: Prelude to Slaughter,' and indicts the IRD for helping to bring down the despotic President, Ahmed Soekarno, in 1967 in order to support the more pro-Western General Raden Suharto -- who had to resign in 1998.

Only after that somewhat tendentious chapter do we read the chronological history of IRD. Subsequent chapters are well researched and fascinating: IRD and Korea; relations with the BBC and 'MI 6' (the Secret Intelligence Service); and IRD publications. But there is consistent disparagement of the organisation, as in the pejorative chapter heading 'IRD's Fellow Travellers' -- about the patriotic writers who were willing to help combat Communism. One of these was George Orwell, whose reputation, the authors say, 'took a body-blow from which it may never recover' because he told IRD of thirty-five people he suspected of being Communist supporters. As his list included Professor J.D. Bernal, the 'Red Dean', Dr Hewlett Johnson, D.N. Pritt, Q.C., W.N. Warbey, MP, and Konni Zilliacus, MP, Orwell seems to have been pretty accurate. And as he said, 'I don't suppose it will tell IRD anything they don't know'.

Of course IRD was not always right. In 1956 they stigmatised Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser as 'a Soviet dupe'. He was not; he was an Arab nationalist who cleverly played off the West against the East.

The British ambassador in Guinea in 1962 discovered that some IRD briefings were merely based on newspaper cuttings.

In general, however, IRD carried out effectively the task for which it was set up. It helped promote writers whose books exposed the true face of Communism, such as Animal Farm, 1984, and Douglas Hyde's I Believed. At home it fought the Communist hegemony in the Electrical Trades Union. It supported Sir Edward Heath's campaign to take Britain into the then European Economic Community, and with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gave financial backing to Sir Stephen Spender's journal, Encounter.

Eventually, however, IRD over-reached itself. As its founder, Lord Mathew, said in 1995, 'it probably expanded its sphere of operations too far'. The Foreign Secretary in 1975, Anthony Crosland, wanted it to oppose 'all forms of tyranny and oppression' -- but it was resolute in adhering to its original brief, fighting against Communism only. A later Foreign Secretary, David Owen, closed it down in 1977.

Summing up, the authors somewhat grudgingly concede that 'most of IRD's output was indeed true and accurate' -- and then immediately qualify their judgement: 'However, it was selective, delivered with a careful spin'. Is that not what all Governments do, everywhere?

This book is a mine of miscellaneous information on an obscure aspect of British foreign policy. Who knew that the novelist, Faye Weldon (on the Polish desk) was the niece of Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, or that Anthony Wedgwood Benn's services were sought? (He declined.)

There are a few small errors -- James Callaghan was not Prime Minister in 1975; the Polish Communist leader was Boleslaw Bierut, not Beirut, and 'Britain's finest hour' was not Dunkirk but the Battle of Britain.

The most important omission is an Appendix on the structure of IRD. As Robert Conquest, a former member, pointed out in The Times Literary Supplement (August 21, 1998), it was in no sense an intelligence or security Department; its staff were ordinary members of the Foreign Service, serving for two or three years before going on to other posts.