Editing Robert Conquest (section)

===Information Research Department===
In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's [[Information Research Department]] (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] [[Clement Attlee|Attlee]] government<ref name="Leigh"/> in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications."<ref>Timothy Garton Ash. "Orwell's List" (review), ''New York Review of Books'', 23 September 2003.</ref> The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion.<ref name="Baltic Worlds 2">{{cite web|last1=Samuelson|first1=Lennart|title=A pathbreaker. Robert Conquest and Soviet studies during the Cold War|url=http://balticworlds.com/a-pathbreaker-robert-conquest-and-soviet-studies-during-the-cold-war/|website=Baltic Worlds|accessdate=22 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him.<ref name="Brown"/> He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.<ref name=Telegraphobit/>

In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached [[George Orwell]] for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. [[Orwell's list]], discovered after her death in 2002, included ''[[The Guardian|Guardian]]'' and ''[[The Observer|Observer]]'' journalists, as well as [[E. H. Carr]] and [[Charlie Chaplin]].<ref name="Homberger">{{cite news |last=Homberger |first=Eric |date=5 August 2015 |title=Robert Conquest obituary |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/robert-conquest |newspaper=The Guardian |accessdate=11 September 2015}}</ref> Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems.<ref name=Telegraphobit/> One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of [[Donald Maclean (spy)|Donald Maclean]], one of the [[Kim Philby|Philby]] spy ring, who fled to Russia with [[Guy Burgess]] in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems.<ref name="Brown"/> At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on in ''The Great Terror''. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts&nbsp;– a Communist Tactic".<ref name=Telegraphobit/> In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.{{citation needed|date=October 2020}}