ABSTRACT
In March 1946, Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Foreign Office Under-Secretary responsible for information activities, claimed that counter-propaganda would be easy to arrange if the Government decided to attack communism.1 Kirkpatrick’s claim was finally put to the test almost two years later, when the Foreign Secretary conceded the need for a coordinated global response to communist propaganda and launched Britain’s new propaganda policy. In the early months of 1948, Britain moved from an ad-hoc, piecemeal response to hostile Soviet propaganda to a coordinated and wide-ranging propaganda policy in which the positive ‘Projection of Britain’ was combined with offensive propaganda designed to oppose the inroads of communism and ‘give a moral lead to the forces of anti-communism in Europe and Asia.’2 The new propaganda policy, which Kirkpatrick had played no small part in formulating, was placed before the Cabinet at its first meeting of 1948. In the months that followed, the short Cabinet paper on ‘Future Foreign Publicity Policy’ was developed into a detailed propaganda policy in consultation between Bevin, the Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff, the Foreign Office Russia Committee and a new Ministerial Committee on anti-communist propaganda. Britain’s existing propaganda apparatus was redirected to follow the new policy, and arrangements were made to provide new instruments with which to coordinate and implement the new propaganda policy. The change in direction in Britain’s propaganda policy was conducted with some urgency against the backdrop of increasing evidence of hostile Soviet intentions in Europe, most notably in the communist-backed coup in Czechoslovakia.
