Deery, Phillip. "Covert Propaganda and the Cold War: Britain and Australia, 1948-1955." The Round Table 361 (2001): 607-621.
Deery, Phillip. "Covert Propaganda and the Cold War: Britain and Australia, 1948-1955." The Round Table 361 (2001): 607-621.
Defty, Andrew. "'Close and Continuous Liaison': British Anti-Communist Propaganda and Cooperation with the United States, 1950-51." Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 100-130.
The author asserts that "the extent of cooperation between Britain and America in the field of anti-Communist propaganda was far greater than has previously been appreciated." The British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) produced "discreet propagenda" targeted on the free world; the CIA's "mighty Wurlitzer" focused on the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain countries. Thus, "[i]n many respects British and American approaches to anti-Communist propaganda were complementary."
Fletcher, R. "British Propaganda Since World War II -- A Case Study." Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 97-109.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Library and Records Department. Historical Branch. IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department, 1946-8. London: LRD/FCO, 1995.
Aldrich, I&NS 11.1: "This publication covers the early origins of IRD.... [M]aterial on co-ordination with the United States and with other British clandestine departments is ... rather thin."
Jenks, John. British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
According to O'Malley, H-Albion, H-Net Reviews, Jan. 2008 [http://www.h-net.org], this "detailed, convincing, and scholarly work" deals with the "British government's handling of domestic and international propaganda in the late 1940s and the 1950s." the author provides "a detailed analysis of the nature, purpose, and range of activities of the Foreign Office's (FO) Information Research Department (IRD).... This book makes a valuable, empirically rich contribution to studies of the media and the state in the United Kingdom."
Lashmar, Paul, and James Oliver. Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998.
Wilford, I&NS 14.2, notes that this is "a popular narrative history" of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department from its beginning in 1948 to its demise in 1977. The work "has some flaws but more virtues." The authors' "high-calibre research work" is flawed by "patchy and unreliable" citing of sources, and some of their judgments show a "lack of subtlety or nuance." Consequently, the book "needs to treated with some caution."
For Shaw, Journal of Cold War Studies 3.3 (Fall 2001), the authors "cast a discerning eye over the IRD's manipulation of newspapers, magazines, news agencies, and radio stations from the 1940s to the 1970s. Indeed, they tell a fascinating -- if at times overly sensationalist -- story of a unit that was kept secret from the British public during its lifetime." The book "draws impressively on a range of documentary material," but "is marred ... by the numerous inaccurate or missing references, faults compounded by a disconcerting reliance on oral testimony." It also has "numerous typographical mistakes and spelling errors."
Lucas,
W. Scott, and C.J. Morris. "A Very British Crusade: The IRD and the
Beginning of the Cold War." In British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51, ed. R.J. Aldrich, 85-111. London: Routledge, 1992.
Mayhew, Christopher. A War of Words: A Cold War Witness. London: Tauris, 1998.
Shaw, Journal of Cold War Studies 3.3 (Fall 2001), notes that the author "was the driving force behind the establishment of the Information Research Department (IRD) at the British Foreign Office in 1948." Mayhew's "memoir provides useful information on how bodies such as the British Council and its offshoot, the Soviet Relations Committee, used 'friendship' as a political weapon behind the Iron Curtain." Nevertheless, he "adds little of any consequence to the findings hitherto reached by scholars in relation to either the IRD specifically or British Cold War propaganda policy generally."
Shaw, Tony. "The Information Research Department of the Foreign Office and the Korean War, 1950-1953." Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 2 (1999): 263-281.
Smith,
Lyn. "Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department,
1947-77." Millennium: Journal of International Studies 9, no.
1 (1980): 67-83.
Vaughan, James R. "'Cloak without Dagger': How the Information Research Department Fought Britain's Cold War in the Middle East, 1948-56." Cold War History 4, no. 3 (Apr. 2004): 56-84.
Wark, Wesley K. "Coming in from the Cold: British Propaganda and Red Army Defectors, 1945-1952." International History Review 9, no. 1 (Feb.1987): 48-72.
The author reviews (and praises) the work of the Information Research Department (IRD) in processing Russian defectors.
Wilford, Hugh. "The Information Research Department: Britain's Secret Cold War Weapon Revealed." Review of International Studies 24, no. 3 (Jul. 1998): 353-369.
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