The recent outburst of spy mania needs to be taken with a large
dose of salt, writes Paul Anderson. But we should resist the notion that Soviet
intelligence agents in Britain were harmless saps
It almost goes without saying that you have to be highly sceptical
about the recent spate of hysteria in the media about British subjects who
acted – or are alleged to have acted – as agents and informers for Soviet bloc
intelligence services during the latter stages of the cold war.
After the publication of The
Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin and the
screening of David Rose’s BBC Two series The
Spying Game, newspaper editors fell over one another in the rush to
publish juicy tales of intrigue and deception, taking little care to ensure the
veracity of their sources.
Some of the claims that appeared are outrageous smears – in
particular the suggestions that Dick Clements and Bruce Kent were “agents of
influence”.
Clements, as editor of Tribune
from 1959 to 1982, certainly had contacts among Soviet bloc embassy
staff whom he knew were intelligence officers – just like scores of other
journalists, myself included. (My contact at the Czech embassy, Jan Sarkocy,
was thrown out of the country for espionage in 1989.) He also encouraged Soviet
bloc press agencies to advertise in his cash-strapped paper. We did the same
when I was Tribune’s reviews
editor in the late 1980s.
But the idea that he was an “agent of influence”, as claimed by
the Sunday Times, is
preposterous. Journalists are public figures by definition. Their “influence”
comes down to what they write or, as editors, publish by other writers. And Clements is, and always has
been, a democratic socialist with libertarian leanings.
His first published pieces in Tribune were on the plight of anarchist political prisoners in
Franco’s Spain. Under his editorship, the paper took a principled stance
against Soviet totalitarianism, backing the dissidents in the Soviet Union
itself, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the demands of Solidarity in
Poland. One contributor to the Clements Tribune,
Ken Coates, even managed to compile a book attacking the anti-democratic
“socialism” of the Soviet bloc from his contributions to the paper.
Similarly, Kent, as general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament at its height in the 1980s, took a less critical position on the
Soviet Union than many people in the European Nuclear Disarmament group – myself
included -would have liked.
But the suggestion that he was a tool of Moscow is incredible. He
was a founder supporter of END, which was hated in official Soviet circles
because of its support for dissidents and its criticisms of Soviet militarism.
Under his leadership, CND consistently maintained its opposition to the nuclear
weapons of both sides in the cold war.
Even where there is evidence to support the spying allegations – and
it is significant that Clements and Kent are not named in The Mitrokhin Archive and were not
mentioned in The Spying Game – there
are plenty of reasons for taking the stories with a large dose of salt.
Of the Britons alleged for the first time to be spies in the book
and the TV series, only one, Melita Norwood, had any access to state secrets – and
it is by no means clear that the information she passed to the KGB made any
significant difference to the Soviet atom bomb programme or indeed anything
else.
Neither Tom Driberg nor Raymond Fletcher, the two Labour MPs named
as agents in The Mitrokhin Archive – somewhat
implausibly given Driberg’s love for unreliable gossip and Fletcher’s
dipsomania – had significant influence in the Labour Party.
Vic Allen, the Leeds University professor who passed on
information about CND to the East Germans, was not a “CND leader” – as the Sunday Times had it and The Spying Game implied – but merely
the most prominent member of a tiny pro-Soviet faction in the organisation that
had little influence on its policy and was distrusted by everyone else.
As for Robin Pearson, the Hull University economic historian
accused of reporting on fellow academics to the East German Stasi, there is no
evidence to suggest he handed over anything that was not already in the public
sphere.
Perhaps most important, all the material on which the stories are
based is tainted. As historical sources, intelligence and secret police files
are notoriously unreliable by their very nature, if only because the reports on
fellow they contain were written by people with a vested interest in
exaggerating their own successes to their superiors.
To make matters worse, the material from the KGB archives copied
and smuggled out of the Lubianka by Vasily Mitrokhin has also been vetted by
the British intelligence services to ensure that the book contains nothing they
do not want revealed.
Nevertheless, it would be a big mistake to dismiss The Mitrokhin Archive and The Spying Game. With all due qualifications, there is much in the book that is new
and fascinating, in particular on the activities of the NKVD (the predecessor
of the KGB) in Spain during the civil war in the 1930s, on the KGB’s reliance
on Western communist parties after 1945 and on its role in Eastern Europe as
the Soviet system entered its death throes in the 1980s. (On Britain,
incidentally, contrary to the impression given by the newspapers, the picture
Mitrokhin and Andrew paint of the KGB’s operations after the early 1950s is
largely one of incompetence and failure except in the case of scientific and
technical espionage.)
The work done by journalist David Rose for The Spying Game is much closer to home. Although the series is
open to criticism for taking at face value the accounts given by spooks on both
sides of the cold war concerning their own influence on events, Rose has
unveiled a lot of important material – especially from the archives of the
Stasi- about the 1980s.
As a one-time deputy editor of END Journal, END’s magazine, I was particularly struck by what he
has found out about the exhaustive information gathering by communist states’
intelligence agencies on everyone from the West involved in contact with
dissident groups in the East.
END was set up in 1980 by Edward Thompson, Mary Kaldor, Ken Coates
and others to campaign for a nuclear-free Europe “from Poland to Portugal”. It
made a point of its opposition to Soviet nuclear arms and of its support for
independent movements in the Soviet bloc set up to oppose them. Throughout the
1980s, its supporters regularly visited eastern Europe to engage in face-to-face
dialogue with dissidents and independent peace groups.
I was a minor player in all this. I went on one such trip,
visiting East Berlin and Budapest in early 1985. In Berlin, after going to a
conference in the West of the city, I went to a single meeting in the East with
an independent peace group whose members subsequently became the core of the
movement that toppled Erich Honecker in 1989. I then spent a week in Budapest
wandering around the city visiting dissidents and independent peaceniks. When I
got home, I wrote reports of my conversations for END’s co-ordinating committee
and its working groups on the German Democratic Republic and Hungary.
Like every other ENDer involved in dialogue with dissidents, I
worked on the assumption that I was being monitored by the security services.
(In Budapest, I was tailed for one day by two men in large white macs, just
like in the movies.) I also assumed that there were certain people in Britain
who would pass on anything they could find out about the dissidents – the
dwindling band of Stalinist supporters of “actually existing socialism” and the
employees of the Soviet bloc embassies.
But I did not for a moment think that Soviet bloc security
services had penetrated END. Yet that is what Rose discovered while researching
The Spying Game. In the Stasi
archives he found a substantial collection
of END materials – among them my reports on my 1985 trip – that could only have
come from an END member in Britain.
Precisely what happened as a direct result of this Stasi mole’s
activities is impossible to tell. I doubt that many END contacts in the Soviet
bloc were arrested, beaten up or intimidated by the secret police simply
because the secret police had lots of boring END documents in their possession.
I am sure that the mole thought the same at the time and does so now. But we
both know we could be wrong – and, such was the publicity surrounding
persecution of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, the mole must have known at the
time too.
I find it difficult to get worked up about someone who, in the
mistaken belief that the Soviet Union was a socialist Utopia, handed over
scientific documents that might or might not have had a marginal impact on the
Soviet atom bomb programme. But to hand over material to a secret police force
that could only be of use in the persecution of fellow human beings is an
unforgivable act of betrayal.
