[1][3] Soon after its creation, the IRD broke away from focusing solely on Soviet matters and began to publish pro-colonial propaganda intended to suppress pro-independence revolutions in Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Middle East.

[6] The IRD promoted works by many presumably anti-communist authors including George Orwell,[7][8][9] Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Conquest.

[18] The IRD closed its operations in 1977 after its existence was discovered by British journalists after an investigation into a heavy amount of anti-Soviet propaganda being published by academics belonging to St Antony's College, Oxford.

Christopher Warner raised a formal proposal in April 1946, but Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Bevin was reluctant to upset the pro-Soviet members of the Labour Party.

[20] In 1947, Christopher Mayhew lobbied for the proposals, linking anti-communism with the concept of "Third Force", which was meant to be a progressive camp between the Soviet Union and the United States.

[18] On 8 January 1948, the Cabinet of the United Kingdom adopted the Future Foreign Publicity, memorandum drafted by Christopher Mayhew and signed by Ernest Bevin.

The memorandum embraced anti-communism and took upon the British Labour Government to lead anti-communist progressivism internationally, stating:[22] It is for us, as Europeans and as a Social Democratic Government, and not the Americans, to give the lead in spiritual, moral and political sphere to all the democratic elements in Western Europe which are anti-Communist and, at the same time, genuinely progressive and reformist, believing in freedom, planning and social justice—what one might call the 'Third Force'.To achieve these goals, the memorandum called for the establishment of a Foreign Office department "to collect information" about Communism and to "provide material for our anti-Communist publicity through our Missions and Information Services abroad".

The department would collaborate with ministers, British delegates, the Labour Party, trade union representatives, the Central Office of Information, and the BBC Overseas Service.

[1] The IRD founded under Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour Party government (1945-1951) was headed by career civil servants including Ralph Murray, John Rennie, and Ray Whitney who became a Conservative MP and minister.

Although the vast majority of IRD staff were British subjects, the department also hired emigres from the Soviet Union, such as the rocket scientist Grigori Tokaty.

[27] Many IRD agents were former members of Britain's WWII propaganda department, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), including former Daily Mirror journalist Leslie Sheridan.

Some of these authors include George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Czesław Miłosz, Brian Crozier, Richard Crossman, Will Lawther, A. J. P. Taylor, Baron Wyatt of Weeford, Leonard Schapiro, Denis Healey, Douglas Hyde, Margarete Buber, Victor Kravchenko, W.N.

[36] In return for his services to British propaganda, the IRD assisted Koestler by purchasing thousands of copies of his book Darkness at Noon and distributing them throughout Germany.

[37] The IRD created, sponsored, and distributed a wide range of propaganda publications both fiction and non-fiction, in the form of books, magazines, pamphlets, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and cartoons.

[10] In Britain, the department used its propaganda to spread smear stories targeting trade union leaders and human rights activists, but was also used by the Labour Party to conduct internal purges against socialist members.

[42] The IRD gained the translation rights to Animal Farm in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Indonesian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Published in the United Kingdom, it was a largely Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left, intended to counter the idea of cold war neutralism.

[45] In 1948, fearing a victory of the Italian Communist Party in the general election, the IRD instructed the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Rome to disseminate anti-communist propaganda.

Ambassador Victor Mallet chaired a small ad hoc committee to circulate IRD propaganda material to anti-communist journalists and Italian Socialist Party and Christian Democracy politicians.

The IRD's propaganda efforts were aided by the United States, Australian and Malaysian governments which had an interest in supporting the Army's anti-communist mass murder and opposing President Sukarno.

In addition, the Harold Wilson Labour Government and its Australian counterpart gave the Indonesian Army leadership an assurance that British and Commonwealth forces would not step up the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation.

The IRD created a fake west African organisation called The Black Power – Africa's Heritage Group, which criticised Carmichael as an "unbidden prophet from America" who had abandoned the U.S. Black Power cause, with no place in Africa, who was "weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism", controlled by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and former president of Ghana deposed by a coup in 1966.

In the lead up to the election, the IRD was told by a British Cabinet Office unit called the "Counter-subversion Committee's Working Group on Latin America" that "it will be important to prevent significant gains by the extreme left".

[55] The IRD became the subject of heavy controversy in the UK after it was revealed that George Orwell had given the department a list of 38 people he suspected of being secret Communists or "fellow travellers".

During the Cyprus Emergency, IRD agents used newspaper journalists to spread fabricated stories that guerrillas belonging to the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA), had raped schoolgirls.