In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the Foreign Office, the innocuously titled Information Research Department (IRD), was established to collate information on communist policy, tactics and propaganda, and coordinate the discreet dissemination of counter-propaganda to opinion formers at home and abroad.

In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the Foreign Office, the innocuously titled Information Research Department (IRD), was established to collate information on communist policy, tactics and propaganda, and coordinate the discreet dissemination of counter-propaganda to opinion formers at home and abroad.

From its inception in 1932, overseas broadcasting by the BBC quickly became an essential adjunct to British diplomatic and foreign policy objectives. For this reason, the World Service was considered the primary means of engaging with attitudes and opinions behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Although funded by government Grant-in-Aid, the Service's editorial independence was enshrined in the BBC's Charter, Licence and Agreement. London Calling explores the delicate balance of power that lay in the relations between Whitehall and the World Service during the Cold War. This book also assesses the nature and impact of the World Service's programmes on listeners living in the Eastern bloc countries. In doing so, it traces the evolution of overseas broadcasting from Britain alongside the political, diplomatic and fiscal challenges that the country faced right up to the Suez crisis and the 1956 Hungarian uprising. These were defining experiences for the United Kingdom's international broadcaster that, as a consequence, helped shape and define the BBC World Service as we know it today. London Calling is an important study for anyone interested in the media and foreign policy histories of Great Britain or the history of the Cold War more generally. Winner of the Longman History Today Book of the Year Award 2015

Based on archives from governments, parties, organisations and individuals, this book investigates the relationship between the British left and Algerian liberation movements during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). It explores the presence of representatives of the Mouvement national algérien (MNA) and the Front de libération nationale (FLN) in London, where they actively sought support for peace, independence from France and the global end of European domination. By surveying their interactions with individuals and groups in the anticolonial left, including prominent Labour MPs, and Trotskyist groups, Asian and African associations and students' unions, Torrent shows how and why solidarity was interpreted differently across the left, and in relation to Britain's own end-of-empire conflicts. Tracing connections across Europe and beyond, this book demonstrates how the war influenced conceptions of socialism, communism and internationalism in Britain, what being European meant, and what place the Commonwealth should have in a world where armed struggle and liberation diplomacy disrupted boundaries.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of how interactions between government policy and Fleet Street affected the political coverage of the Greek civil war, one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. During this period the exponential growth of media influence was an immensely potent weapon of psychological warfare. Throughout the 1940s the press maintained its position as the most powerful medium and its influence remained unchallenged. The documentary record shows that a British media consensus was more fabricated than spontaneous, and the tools of media persuasion and manipulation were extremely important in building acceptance for British foreign policy. Gioula Koutsopanagou examines how this media consensus was influenced and molded by the British government and how Foreign Office channels were key to molding public attitudes to British foreign policy. These channels included system of briefings given by the News Department to the diplomatic correspondents, and the contacts between embassies and the British foreign correspondents.

During the Cold War, radio broadcasting played an important role in the ideological confrontation between East and West. As archival documents gathered in this volume reveal, radio broadcasting was among the most pressing concerns of contemporary information agencies. These broadcasts could penetrate the Iron Curtain and directly address the ‘enemy’. Radio was equally important in keeping sustained levels of support among the home public and the public of friendly nations. In the early Cold War in particular, listeners in the West had to be persuaded of the need for higher defence spending levels and a policy of containment. Later, even if other media – and in particular television – had become more important, radio continued to be used widely. The chapters gathered here investigate both the institutional history of the radio broadcasting corporations in the East and in the West, and their relationship with other propaganda agencies of the time. They examine the ‘off-air’ politics of radio broadcasting, from the choice of theme to the selection of speakers, singers and music pieces. The key issue tackled by contributors is the problem of measuring the impact of, and qualifying the success of, information policies and propaganda programmes produced during the Cultural Cold War. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cold War History.

During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.