Nicholas Bethell’s memoir Spies and Other Secrets (Viking, London, 1994) includes a curious section in which Bethell describes how in 1970, after he had been involved in the first publication of Solzhenitzen’s Cancer Ward in the West, he was attacked by a curious alliance of the left, Private Eye, and various people in and close to the British state.
‘The instigators of the attack were not Private Eye satirists but professional rivals…..experts from the Sovietology world, Kremlinologists on the fringes of the CIA or MI6, other writers and journalists who specialized in Soviet issues, academics like Leonard Shapiro, rival translators like Max Haward……. [who] were gripped by the paranoia of those days, the belief in the all-conquering guile of the KGB…… Leo Labedz, editor of the CIA-funded quarterly about the Soviet bloc, Survey ……feeding lies about my work to columnists on a scurrilous magazine, frightening my House of Lords boss, George Jellicoe, with insinuations that could but not remind him of the difficulties he had himself faced as Burgess’ and Philby’s close colleague in Washington in 1951… And it was these same “guardians of the nation’s security”, according to my Chief Whip, Michael St Aldwyn, who ad-vised Edward Heath that he would be running a risk of scandal if he retained me as a minister in 1970.’ (pp. 29, 300-1)