This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

Chapter 5 looks at Amnesty’s development in the mid-1960s, and in particular the major crisis that engulfed the organisation in 1966-1967 over its involvement in the crises in Aden and Rhodesia. The chapter opens with an overview of the crisis, which resulted in the departure of Peter Benenson. Two key aspects are then explored in detail; first, Amnesty’s relations with the British state, in particular the secretive Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, and, secondly, Peter Benenson’s long-standing engagement with the problems of southern Africa. It is argued that the crisis was due, in part, to Benenson’s attempt to devise new mechanisms for non-governmental intervention. The chapter concludes with an account of the drive to reform and professionalise Amnesty under the leadership of Martin Ennals.