Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G. The six months since the last Lobster have been the most interesting period in defector politics – the attempted political exploitation a Soviet defector – that I can remember. Oleg Gordievsky has really been having himself a time and putting himself about! Even I have a Gordievsky anecdote.
About 18 months ago a journalist – or someone purporting to be a journalist – rang me up, asked me a question about something. This is routine, background noise, and I wasn’t paying too much attention; I didn’t take notes – not even to write down his name. In his search for information on ….whatever it was, this journalist had been to see Mr G. Upon learning that the journalist was also going to ring me, Mr G told him that the KGB were big fans of Lobster. Told this, I laughed. Later I thought, ‘How does Mr G know this?’ Mr G defected in 1985, around the time of Lobster 6, and it seems very unlikely to me that the KGB would have come across something as piffling as the then Lobster. I’m flattered that Mr G has heard of Lobster but the KGB bit was just a little smear from Mr G’s current sponsors.
Crozier gets first bite
The present burst of G-exploitation false-started in 1993 with Brian Crozier’s memoir, Free Agent. On p. 115 he named Labour MPs or former MPs Stan Newens, Jo Richardson, Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun and Joan Maynard as ‘confidential contacts’ of the Soviet embassy and ‘fellow travelling MPs’. Crozier had been told of their role as ‘confidential contacts’ by a ‘senior KGB defector in London’. That can only have been Mr G. At this stage there was no mention of former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, Richard Gott or any of the other names to have emerged more recently. Alas for Crozier, the major media took no notice.(1)
On December 10 1994 the Spectator kicked off the Gordievsky season proper with its piece naming the Guardian’s Richard Gott as ‘the KGB’s British writer-in-residence’.(2) On 27 December the Guardian printed a photograph of Mr G being embraced by Ron Brown, the former MP for Leith, and Bill Michie MP. It was a busy day for Mr Michie, for he was also named in The Times in a long letter from three former members of the Brian Crozier network, Tony Kerpel, Julian Lewis and Edward Leigh MP. This trio of mouseketeers told Times readers how, in the 1980s, they had ‘felt it necessary to set up a campaigning group, funded by individuals and institutes in friendly Nato(3) countries, in order to counter subversive propagandists in peace time.’ They had to do this because ‘MI5 has a policy of doing nothing at all to punish or deter agents of influence….’ because ‘it is not illegal to co-operate in peace-time with hostile intelligence agencies to feed Western media with disinformation’.
So, now you know: once again the public sector shows itself to be incompetent (or infiltrated) and the private sector has to step into the breach. The group was the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, UK counterpart of the US group with the same name. (In the US group was a US General called Stilwell, a member of the Pinay Circle, whose meetings were also attended by Mr Crozier.)
Pranks by MI5 and IRD
Like their friend? mentor? case officer? Brian Crozier, messrs Lewis, Kerpel and Leigh are really bemoaning the demise of IRD in 1978. For it was IRD’s role to combat communism, and the ‘problem’ of agents of influence. (In the 1980s the ‘agents of influence’ must be presumed to be CND.) One of the interesting snippets in the new Bower biography of Dick White (reviewed below) is the claim that such activity used to be in MI5’s brief. This is on page 145:
‘On the crazy edge of that effort [to recruit students and trade unionist ‘sleepers’] were F Branch’s dirty tricks. In co-operation with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, MI5’s agents were encouraged to disrupt subversive organisations, even impregnating lavatory paper with an itching substance at halls hired by communist organisations.’
This is the first time such operations have been acknowledged. When this stopped and what it amounted to we do not know. (Presumably such operations were not all so childish.)(4)
These comments of Lewis et al were a preamble to the real target of their letter, the presence of the Labour MP Allan Rogers on the new Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. They quote examples of his support for left-wing causes taken from the Conservative Party’s 1992 Who’s Left: An index of Labour MP’s and Left-wing causes 1985-1992 (which Julian Lewis had a hand in compiling). Mr Rogers comes in about mid table, supporting seven: top of the table, supporting seventeen, were Bob Parry – and the aforementioned Bill Michie
Les trois amis de Crozier concluded, somewhat obscurely, that, ‘None of this makes Mr Rogers a spy, or even an agent of influence. It simply serves to illustrate why agents of influence and fellow-travellers need fear as little opposition from the Security Service in the future as they have done in the past.’
In 1994, ‘fellow travellers’ with whom?(5)
‘Nigel West’ lends a hand
The unnoticed Crozier allegations were then kick-started by Rupert Allason MP (‘Nigel West’), who brought them to the attention of one of those named, Joan Lestor, who was reported on 12 January 1995 as considering taking legal action against Crozier. (I contacted Lestor to warn her that if she took on Crozier in the courts she would probably be up against not only sections of the Anglo-American intelligence and security services, but also the financial resources of the Goldsmith Foundation, the fund set up in the late 1970s by Sir James Goldsmith to fund legal action by people like Crozier against the left. I do not know if she proceeded.)
Then on February 19, while the debate about Richard Gott having admitted taking money from the KGB was still trundling along, out came the extracts from – based on would be better – Mr G’s memoir, in the Sunday Times, with Mr G’s list of ten people who had…what? Been agents? Not quite; not in all cases. Mr G and/or the Sunday Times named Michael Foot, Jack Jones, Ray Buckton, Lord Richard Briginshsaw, Bob Edwards, Ron Brown, Ian Mikardo, Lord Fenner Brockway, Fred Halliday and Jim Slater.
The allegation against Michael Foot that he had been some kind of ‘agent of influence’ collapsed almost before it was made: even the major media refused to buy it, and both Tribune and the New Statesman gleefully dug out details of Foot’s attacks on the Soviet Union over the years. Only one of the list, trade union leader Lord Briginshaw, conveniently dead, was described a ‘paid agent’.(6) The late Bob Edwards, we were told, ‘provided low-level Nato secrets to the KGB’, secrets he obtained as ‘chairman of the defence committee of the Western European Union.’. This is dubious for two reasons. In the first place, I doubt very much that anything secret (and what is a low-level secret?) was given to a body as insignificant as the defence committee of the Western European Union, which in Edwards’ day, the late sixties and early seventies, was the most obscure of NATO talking shops. In the second place, Edwards, while an Independent Labour Party left-winger in the thirties, had become a highly visible anti-Stalinist and anti-communist during the war and was actually on the Advisory Council of the anti-communist group, Common Cause in the 1950s, and had written for Aims of Industry.(7)
Professor Fred Halliday’s presence is on this list may explain why he was put under surveillance by MI5. Halliday was already on the Anglo-American subversion-spotter’s list because of his association with the Institute for Policy Studies in the USA. The subversion spotters believed – or pretended to believe – that the IPS was a KGB operation.(8) Having presumably got the allegation about Halliday from Gordievsky during his debriefing after his defection in 1985, Halliday was under surveillance for over a year and this ‘unsuccessful attempt to uncover potentially embarassing links with Soviet officials was only abandoned after year-long secret inquiries failed to turn up any evidence.'(9)
Jack Jones, former leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, is accused of talking to Mr G – under cover as a journalist – about British trade union leaders. Wow! In his memoir Mr G describes Jack Jones’ flat as ‘a typical council flat, and a typically philistine environment, with few books, and everything in an exaggerated state of tidyness’. That Mr G is a snob is probably not his fault: he has had to spend a lot of the last decade with the public school boys who work for HMG.
Not KGB, HMG!
David Ross in Tribune on 24 February was right on the money. In the original Gordievsky article the Sunday Times used part of a front page of Tribune in 1961, the bit showing the headline ‘Hands Off Cuba’, to illustrate the Soviet influence on the paper (via money allegedly given to Michael Foot). Ross recounted how that Cuba story – his story – had come, not from the KGB as the Times implied, but from the British Foreign Office alarmed at the imminent US invasion of Cuba and trying to head it off with leaks!
In the midst of all this the Spectator brought together Mr G and Fred Halliday, one of his ‘victims’. The transcript, printed in the Spectator 4 March 1995, is the single most interesting document to have emerged from this farago. While this is never actually articulated, it shows that in Gordievsky’s view of things, since the Soviet Union was the evil empire, anybody in the West who had anything like normal dealings with any aspect of the regime was in effect, aiding it.(10)
A good man fallen among….
Mr G’s memoir will be quite interesting if you have never read a Soviet defector’s account before; and he was undoubtedly important in ending the Cold War. However, I find it hard to take Mr G as seriously as he probably deserves. This is partly because the first book under his name, KGB, written with Professor Christopher Andrew, was so crappy and so badly judged. (How could they think they would get away with all those footnotes which just said ‘Gordievsky’?) The other thing has been the way the exploitation of Mr G has been so reminiscent of the operation to exploit the Czech defector, Joseph Frolik, in 1974 and 1975
Andrew and Mr G recycled Frolik in KGB . ‘During the 1960s’, they told us, ‘the StB (Czech) residency in London ran three Labour MPs.’ They named one of the three, Will Owen MP, citing as sources Frolik’s memoir, ghost-written while under CIA control, and Chapman Pincher! (This bit must be down to Andrew.) They did not mention that Owen was conning the Czechs, getting paid a lot of money for material that was not classified. They also reported Frolik’s claim that the late John Stonehouse was a Czech agent. In so doing they prefered Frolik’s memory of someone else’s case to the fact that Stonehouse had informed his departmental MI5 officer of the initial approach from the Czech ‘diplomat’ Husak. Until the Andrew/Gordievsky/Pincher side of the argument addresses the fact that alleged Czech agent Stonehouse followed MI5’s instructions, I will continue to regard the Stonehouse allegations as disinformation.
Mr G is a brave man, who fought the good fight. He deserved better than to end up being exploited by the academic and media allies of the British secret state.
Notes
- I did. See the review of Free Agent in Lobster 26.
- The next day the Sunday Express named Peter Jay, former son-in law of Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, as ‘one of the best sources of information’ of KGB officer Oleg Tsarev.
- For reasons I can only guess at, in recent years what used to be, and should be NATO, has become Nato.
- For pre WW2 examples of this kind of stunt against the Left, see Roy Bean, ‘Liverpool Shipping Employers and the Anti-Bolshevik Activities of J.M. Hughes’ in Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Spring 1977.
- Lewis et al seem unable to admit that not only is the Cold War over, their side won. You can tell: count the homeless.
- And this allegation does not appear in Mr G’s book.
- On writing for Aims, see New Statesman, 12 January 1952.
- This is the subject of the execrable Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave novel, The Spike. I have yet to see anything resembling evidence for the claim that IPS was a Soviet operation.
- The Observer, 2 October 1986.
- Mr G was helping the ‘good guys’, including those wonderful humanitarians in the Reagon regime arming the death squads of Central and South America.