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. Origins Since 1946, many senior officials of both the Foreign Office and the Labour Party had proposed the creation of an anti-communist propaganda organ. Christopher Warner raised a formal proposal in April 1946, but Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Bevin was reluctant to upset the pro-Soviet members of the Labour Party. Later in the summer, Bevin rejected another proposal by Ivone Kirkpatrick to set up an anti-communist propaganda unit. In 1947, Christopher Mayhew lobbied for the proposals, linking anti-communism with the concept of "Third Force", which was meant to be a progressive camp between the Soviet Union and the United States. This framing, together with anti-British Soviet propaganda attacks during the same years, led Bevin to change his position and to start discussing the details for the creation of a propaganda unit. After sending a confidential paper to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1947, Mayhew was summoned by Attlee to Chequers to discuss it further. On 8 January 1948, the Cabinet of the United Kingdom adopted the Future Foreign Publicity, memorandum drafted by Christopher Mayhew and signed by Ernest Bevin. The memorandum embraced anti-communism and took upon the British Labour Government to lead anti-communist progressivism internationally, stating: To achieve these goals, the memorandum called for the