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The Information Research Department (IRD)

The Wikipedia article for this organization is damning enough:

The IRD was a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda, provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers, and to use weaponised information, but also disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. 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. The IRD was heavily involved in the publishing of books, newspapers, leaflets, journals, and even created publishing houses to act as propaganda fronts, such as Ampersand Limited. Operating for 29 years, the IRD is known as the longest-running covert government propaganda department in British history, the largest branch of the Foreign Office, and the first major anglophone propaganda offensive against the USSR since the end of World War II. By the 1970s, the IRD was performing military intelligence tasks for the British Military in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.

The IRD was the government department to which George Orwell submitted his list of suspected Communists (Orwell’s list), including many prominent people such as Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, and Michael Redgrave. With the help of Orwell’s widow Sonia Orwell and his former publisher Fredric Warburg, the IRD gained the foreign rights to much of Orwell’s work and spent years distributing Animal Farm onto every continent, translating Orwell’s works into 20 different languages, funding the creation of an animated feature film based on Animal Farm, and working with the CIA to create the feature-length Animal Farm animated movie, the first of its kind in British history. Many historians have noted how Orwell’s literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA. The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences. The IRD funded the activities of many authors including Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Conquest.

Internationally, IRD agents took part in many historic events, including Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Malayan Emergency, The Troubles, the Mau Mau Uprising, Cyprus Emergency, and the Sino-Indian War. Other IRD activities included forging letters and posters, conducting smear attacks against British trade unionists, and attacking opponents of the British military by planting fake news stories in the British press. Some of these fabricated stories the IRD created included accusations that Irish republicans were killing dogs by setting them on fire, and falsely accusing EOKA members of raping schoolgirls.

Although the existence of the IRD was successfully kept hidden from the British public until the 1970s, the Soviet Union had always been aware of its existence, for Guy Burgess had been posted to IRD for a period of two months in 1948. Burgess was later sacked by the IRD’s founder Christopher Mayhew, who accused him of being “dirty, drunk and idle”. 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. An exposé published in The Guardian titled by David Leigh “Death of the Department that Never Was”, became the first public acknowledgement of the IRD’s existence.

— Wikipedia. Information Research Department