Britain's secret propaganda war 1948-1977

Paul Lashmar & James Oliver, Sutton Publishing, hardback, £25.00

This book offers a fascinating insight into an extensive state-funded anti-Communist operation which reached through every corner of the British Empire. The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up in 1948 as the propaganda wing of Bevin's Foreign Office.

Led by the keen-as-mustard Christopher Mayhew, later to defect to the Social Democratic Party, the IRD employed hundreds of journalists, academics and politicians to spread the anti-communist message, not least in the Labour movement. As a result articles were placed in newspapers, journals and radio programmes using the names of journalists and writers but penned in the Foreign Office by Bevin's public-school-educated elite.

Many leading figures were associated with this deception designed primarily, like the cold war itself, to discredit socialist ideas and movements. They included Dennis Healey, Woodrow Wyatt and George Orwell. Healey was clearly heavily involved in the early years of IRD's work but is obviously not very proud of this. In his biography Healey describes Mayhew as "something of a boy scout" and the IRD as having "destroyed its usefulness by spreading disinformation".

Orwell not only made his talents available to IRD, he gave it a list of 86 "communist fellow travellers". So the "thought police" had recruited an unexpected co-conspirator in their propaganda war against the left.