[A-List] UK secret state: the Information Research Department

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Salaam writes:

If "Cannon Brookes was the front man for several news agencies and
 publishing firms, ostensibly quite independent, which spread round
 the Near and Middle East notions of how the free world should run",
does anyone know exactly which agencies and publishers he fronted?

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Thanks for forwarding this. Foot tantalisingly trails off with the merest
hints of what Cannon Brookes spent most of his life doing, having
concentrated on a relatively short period of time in which few would find
fault, considering the object of his work at SOE. Nevertheless it was SOE
that partly spawned all the empire loyalist lunacy that captivated the upper
and middle echelons of the British state right up until the 1980s. The "old
boy network" benignly referred to here was in fact a very closed circle
whose mores were ultimately disastrous for the interests they purportedly
served (the British Empire) but certainly costly for the unfortunate
colonists of that empire (including Zimbabwe and Northern Ireland) in
addition to the British working class.

The IRD was set up by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1948 with the
original intention of disseminating propaganda favourable to a British
"third position", in which the model of the Attlee government would serve as
an alternative to both untrammelled capitalism and especially Soviet
communism. Naturally, considering the type of people responsible for making
the body run (civil servants) and Bevin's own fanatical anti-communism, the
IRD very quickly established itself as a fiercely anti-Soviet media
manipulation outfit dedicated to furthering British (and increasingly US)
interests abroad, and domestically. The story is told in some detail by Paul
Lashmar and James Oliver, in "Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977"
(Sutton Publishing, 1998), according to whom:

"Victor Cannon Brookes had been in the SOE during the Second World War as
private secretary to Lord Selbourne. After the war he set up in private
practice as a solicitor, where he was to run the legal side of a network of
MI6/IRD front companies for more than thirty years. At the end of the war,
nearly all of the SOE's office workers had returned to civilian life, but
Adelaide Maturin remained in government service and was appointed a career
officer in the Secret Service, a post in which she continued until her
retirement in 1970. According to former ANA staffer Bob Petty, Maturin was
in charge of the money, spent time in the agency's London office and had to
be consulted over any expenditure. As we will see she in effect became the
managing director of a chain of new agencies that at their height employed
some 600 staff located across the world. Between 1948 and 1952, Cannon
Brookes, on behalf of his secret employers, launched three further news
agencies: Near and Far East News Ltd (NAFEN), NAFEN (Asia) Ltd and Arab News
Agency (Cairo) Ltd. Adelaide Maturin was registered as company secretary in
each case." (p. 78)

"The MI6-subsidized agencies and Reuters were to snuggle up close. In the
mid-1960s, all of the agencies had as their London office, St Brides House,
10-11 Salisbury Square, then largely occupied by Reuters and backing onto
the Reuters building at 85 Fleet Street. At this time there appeared to be a
new burst of IRD-orchestrated activity, with three new companies being
launched by Cannon Brookes: Regional News Services (Mid East) Ltd and the
RNS (Latin America) Ltd (St Brides House, Capital £50,000 and £40,000) and
International News Rights and Royalties Ltd (118 Fleet Street, capital
£40,000). " (p.79)

"The two Near and Far East News companies continued in existence. NAFEN
increased its capital in 1970, bringing to 21,500 the shareholdings of both
Maurice Macmillan [son of PM Harold -- MK] and Lord Hillingdon. Hillingdon
(C. H. Mills) was a member of the family that had long been associated with
Glyn Mills, the bankers. Other directors were journalists Norman Morris and
William Loving; Conservative MP and former MI6 officer Cranley Onslow, noted
for his 'fiery anti-Communism, which sometimes smacks of McCarthyism'
[according to an Andrew Roth profile in the New Statesman -- MK], and R. P.
T. Gibson, now Lord Gibson, chairman of the huge publishing group Pearson
Longman Ltd from 1967.Labour MP and News of the World's 'The Voice of
Reason' Woodrow Wyatt, was a shareholder from 1952. As about the time of the
split with Reuters, all of the news agencies changed their registered
address to Buchanan House, 24/30 Holborn WC1, a tall austere Victorian
building, just yards from the home of Mirror Newspapers. In 1972 the
solicitors firm of Cannon Brookes and Odgers also moved to Buchanan House."
(p.80)

"In the last wave of IRD fronts in 1971, Victor Cannon Brookes registered a
new company called World Feature Services Ltd (WFS) with the same address
(Buchanan House) and personnel as the other agencies. At about the same
time, INRAR ceased trading. The new agency moved to offices in Lambeth, with
shareholders listed as Derek Charles, a journalist; and Tom Neil, chairman,
a former colonial civil servant who rose to be chief British official in
Kenya at the time of independence in 1963. He then became director of the
Thomson Foundation. In 1968 INRAR had bought thirty-five out of ninety £1
shares in a Kenya company called Africa Features, of which James Holburn was
a director. Three years later, Africa Features was registered as a British
company by Victor Cannon Brookes at the same address as WFS. Its first
directors were Holburn; Sir Kenneth Granville Bradley, a Colonial civil
servant; and John Collier, a British journalist in Kenya. Collier, the
managing director of Africa Features, was an assistant editor with Visnews,
'the world's leading suppplier of TV news film' (from the BBC, NBC and the
Japanese NHK network), before he returned to Nairobi in 1966 'to start
Africa Features service'. Majority shareholder in Africa Features was
Seventh Nominees Ltd, a nominee company controlled by Cannon Brookes.
Holburn and Bradley resigned in July 1975 and were replaced by Derek Charles
and Tom Neil. Africa Features and WFS were then housed in the same office
with shared staff, and with Neil as chairman of both companies." (p.81)

"IRD's entry into full-scale publishing only came with the cooperation of
the IRD/MI6 'front' team of Sheridan, Maturin and Cannon Brookes: it was to
be another combined operation. In 1946, Leslie Sheridan had registered at
Companies House a publishing company called Ampersand as a commercial
venture. In 1950 it was to become the first of IRD's covert publishing
operations.
    The first Ampersand titles were the Bellman Books series, edited by
Michael Goodwin, who was to work for Ampersand from 1952 to 1955. [Goodwin
was closely involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom -- MK] He was to
become a ubiquitous figure among the professional Cold Warriors. He had
joined the BBC in 1935 and stayed with it except for a break for active
service with the Royal Artillery (1940-3). From 1947 to 1952 he edited the
magazines 19th and 20th Century.
    Bellman Books were a dozen concise handbooks, each on a different
anti-Communist theme. One by Denis Healey, entitled Neutralism, implied that
neutralism was akin to Communism. The books did not sell well, probably
mainly because Ampersand lacked a proper distribution system, a defect that
was later corrected by arrangements made with an established publisher,
Allen & Unwin. Between the early 1950s and 1977, more than twenty titles
were published by Ampersand, including works by Robert Conquest, a former
employee of IRD, and the ex-Communist Douglas Hyde, who had once been news
editor of the Daily Worker. Hyde had left the Communist Party in 1948, and
his 1951 bestseller I Believed, published by Heinemann, was an exposé of the
workings of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
    However, by far the largest IRD publishing operation was not under the
Ampersand imprimatur but was published by companies that may have been
unaware of any relationship with the department. This operation was fronted
by Stephen Watts, a pre-war Sunday Express film critic, who had worked for
MI5 during the war. A series of books was published under the general title
of Background Books, with Watts as editor. The first titles in the series
were published by Batchworth Press in 1951, with a large white question mark
on a bright red cover. Through the question mark was printed the title and
the author's name. The first books were Why Communism Must Fail, by Bertrand
Russell, and Trade Unions: True or False, by Vic Feather, then Assistant
General Secretary of the TUC." (p.100)