 The Information Research Department (IRD) was a propaganda unit set up by the Labour government in 1948 at the Foreign Office, after the start of the Cold War.Celia Kirwan, a close friend of Orwell who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD, visited Orwell at a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis in March 1949.Orwell wrote a list of names of persons he considered sympathetic to Stalinism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department, and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan.