establishment of a Foreign Office department "to collect information" about Communism and to "provide material for our anti-Communist publicity through our Missions and Information Services abroad". The department would collaborate with ministers, British delegates, the Labour Party, trade union representatives, the Central Office of Information, and the BBC Overseas Service. The new department was finally established as the Information Research Department. Mayhew ran the department with Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick until 1950. The original offices were in Carlton House Terrace, before moving to Riverwalk House, Millbank, London. Staff and collaborators The IRD was once one of the largest and well-funded of the UK Foreign Office, with an estimated 400-600 employees at its height. Although the IRD was founded under Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour Party government (1945-1951) the department has been headed by numerous different politicians of both the Labour Party and Conservative Party, including Ralph Murray, John Rennie, and Ray Whitney. Although the vast majority of IRD staff were British subjects, the department also hired emigres from the Soviet Union, such as the rocket scientist Grigori Tokaty. Other staffers of note include Robert Conquest, whose secretary Celia Kirwan collected Orwell's list. Tracy Philipps was also based at the IRD, working to recruit emigres from Eastern Europe. Many IRD agents were former members of Britain's WWII propaganda department, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), including former Daily Mirror journalist Leslie Sheridan. This high level of PWE veterans within the IRD, coupled with the similarities between how these two propaganda departments operated, has led some historians to describe the department as a "peacetime PWE". Outside of full-time agents, many historians, writers, and academics were either paid directly to publish anti-communist propaganda by the IRD or whose works were bought and distributed by the department using British embassies to both translate and distribute their works across the globe. Some of these authors include George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Czesław Miłosz, Brian Crozier, Richard Crossman, Will Lawther, A. J. P. Taylor, Baron Wyatt of Weeford, Leonard Schapiro, Denis Healey, Douglas Hyde, Margarete Buber, Victor Kravchenko, W.N. Ewer, Victor Feather, and hundreds (possibly thousands) of others. Some authors such as Bertrand Russell were fully aware of the funding for their books, while others such as the philosopher Bryan Magee were outraged when they found out. Bertrand Russell As part of its remit "to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it