Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department, and: The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Middle East, 1945–1957: Unconquerable Minds (review)

At the height of East-West détente in 1977, British Foreign Secretary David Owen dissolved the innocuously named Information Research Department (IRD). The little-known agency, Owen said, was no longer fit for its purpose, and its organizational style was "out of step with our more open democracy." Outside Westminster and Whitehall, no one batted an eyelid at Owen's decision. A year or so later, however, the role that the IRD had played during the Cold War began to come to light in the British press. Under mischievous, sinister-sounding headlines like "Death of the Department That Never Was," left-of-center journalists with contacts in Whitehall detailed how the IRD had been running clandestine anti-Communist propaganda operations in Britain and overseas since 1948. This being the era of Watergate and the Church Committee's hearings on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conspiracy theories abounded about the IRD. Was the IRD a British version of the CIA, some asked, only more secretive and therefore more effective? What was a Foreign Office department doing meddling in British domestic affairs? And why had the British government felt the need to conduct propaganda, surely the preserve of totalitarian regimes, anyway?

Years later, the IRD was still causing agitation among British political commentators. Witness the furor that erupted in the late 1990s after the release of documents from the British archives showing that George Orwell had provided the IRD with a list of alleged crypto-Communists and fellow travelers shortly before his death in 1950. This controversy helped to spawn a cottage industry in studies of Orwell and the secret state, with the likes of the historian Scott Lucas and the writer Christopher Hitchens ranged on opposite sides of an increasingly bad-tempered debate not only about the Cold War but also about contemporary events in the Middle East.

The authors of the two dissertations-cum-books under review here are not interested in political point scoring. Their aims are to capitalize on the recent declassification of official records in Britain and the United States in order to trace the origins and development of Western propaganda policy during the first decade of the Cold War. Both books scrutinize the close relationship that developed between London and Washington in the formulation and execution of anti-Communist propaganda. Andrew Defty's book is an institutional history that looks at the Anglo-American relationship principally through the eyes of the IRD during the period from Yalta in early 1945 to the end of the Korean War in mid-1953. James Vaughan's book provides the first detailed analysis of Western propaganda targeting the Arab world in the years from 1945 to 1957, a period that witnessed the establishment of Israel and the Suez crisis of 1956. Both books are well-written, cautious, yet persuasive accounts of the important role Western politicians and diplomats assigned to propaganda during the Cold War's formative years.

Does Defty's analysis vindicate historians like Peter Weiler who for years have argued that the IRD helped to manufacture an aggressively anti-Communist consensus in Britain in the late 1940s? Or other historians who insist that without the state's manipulation of public opinion during this period Britain might have opted for a "Third Way" between Soviet Communism and American capitalism? In short, no. Defty shows that the IRD certainly established a network of links with groups and organizations like the Church of England and the Trades Union Congress in order to keep them free of Communist "infection." But he concludes that there is no evidence of a coordinated campaign primarily directed at the orchestration of public opinion in Britain. That said, Defty points out that where other historians have...