I understand that Sir Harold Wilson was approached by MI5 and asked if he had ever been ‘propositioned’ by the KGB while in Moscow. He robustly replied that he had not and that his only contact, which had been unpleasant, had been an occasion when he was picked up by the Moscow police for taking a photograph in the street.
It is my intention to produce a book devoted entirely to the left-wing penetration of the Labour Party, but, meanwhile, in the context of their trade being treachery, some general observations about certain other MPs and peers are relevant here.
In his evidence to the Franks Committee, Sir Martin Furnival Jones said, ‘If the Russian intelligence service can recruit a back-bench MP and he climbs to a ministerial position, the spy is home and dry.’ He did not make that remark without case evidence to back it. While MPs are immune from telephone tapping – unless Margaret Thatcher has changed the rules, which I doubt – the Soviet bloc people with whom some of them communicate are not, so details of their conversations are occasionally overheard and recorded. Furthermore, if MI5’s watchers who are keeping surveillance on a Soviet bloc intelligence officer happen to see him or overhear him talking with an MP or peer, they are required to report on the meeting.
There is also the evidence of Soviet bloc intelligence officers who continue to defect in far greater numbers than the public suspects. So, while MI5 and Special Branch are almost powerless to take any action, there are fat files on more than sixty Labour MPs and on a score or so of Labour peers.
Such files indicate that while some are helpful to the Soviet cause for money, sometimes coupled with threat of blackmail, the majority are ideological agents of influence, giving their assistance because they are secret members of the Communist Party.
When people join the Communist Party of Great Britain, they are required to make a statement in their own handwriting giving their reasons for wanting to join. If they are accepted, this document is kept with other information about them in a separate folder and provides some degree of hold over them.
The folders on the overt members of the party, who number some 30,000, are kept in the headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden, in London. The files on the secret members are kept separately, usually in the house of some highly trusted member, under the closest possible security. Currently, the number of secret members exceeds 50,000. This is an indication that the Communist Party is far more influential and far more subversive than is generally appreciated.
Some of the secret members either insist on secrecy from the start or are advised to be secret, being what is known inside the party as ‘beefsteaks’ – of indeterminate colour outside but deep red inside. Most of them begin as overt members but are later advised to ‘go underground’ and become secret members because in that situation they will be more useful to the cause. If they cannot think of an excuse for doing this, then one is provided for them. They pretend to have turned against communism, using some pretext like the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the savage crushing of the Hungarian Revolution or an event like the invasion of Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. Being an organisation rooted in deception and fraud, the Communist Party encourages its secret members to attack it publicly if that will serve its long-term interest. They are even advised to join anti-communist organisations, as Philby and Burgess joined the Anglo–German Fellowship, to improve their cover for subversion and espionage. As a result, nobody who has ever joined the Communist Party can ever be regarded as being entirely free of suspicion concerning continuing membership. This is hard on those who genuinely revolt against its principles, but the security authorities feel that they must err on the side of safety.
This view received official backing from the post-war Labour government under Attlee, and most of its successors, by the banning of communists and their close associates from appointments either in government establishments or in industry, where they could have access to secret information. Existing employees and new recruits were given the opportunity to reveal past or present communist links. Most of those who did not do so were surprised to find that the security authorities knew about their secret membership, in spite of their long years of careful cover-up. There have, of course, been some notable exceptions, one, with whom I was involved, being a guided-missile scientist responsible, at the time, for liaison with American scientists working in that field. His links with communism, which he had never declared, were discovered very late in the day, and he was quietly shunted to non-secret work.
I am not prepared to reveal just how MI5 knows the identities of the secret members, but, though it may come as a shock to certain crypto-communists in high places, the fact is that it does. I would be surprised if there was a single crypto-communist in Parliament whose real purpose is not known to MI5.
Though Sir Harold Wilson now seems deeply perturbed by the extremist penetration of the Labour Party, he was inclined while in office to dismiss warnings about it by the security authorities. I understand that he was told how an MI5 agent had heard a Russian intelligence officer claim from memory that thirty-one Labour MPs were ‘full party members completely on our side and who will do anything to help us’. Wilson is said to have dismissed the information as ‘reds under the beds’ propaganda.
Because of the immunity restrictions, all that the security authorities could do to limit the espionage danger was to organise the distribution of secret documents in certain Whitehall departments so that suspect ministers were denied access to especially sensitive information. If questioned about this, they had to deny that it was taking place because it was a technical breach of the immunity, but, nevertheless, it was accomplished to some extent.
When deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1961, Lord George-Brown tried hard to secure a list of the crypto-communist MPs from MI5 so that they could be expelled from the party. He was thwarted in this by the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, who feared repercussions in Parliament if he permitted it.
MI5 has evidence from defectors to the effect that some crypto-communist MPs are under such close day-to-day control that they are used to ask parliamentary questions calculated to damage the interests either of Britain or her allies. Soviet bloc intelligence officers are detailed to make a close study of Parliament and to make use of its privileges, wherever possible. They will frame an embarrassing question based on intelligence material and induce one crypto-communist MP to ask it. A second MP will then ask the even more embarrassing supplementary question.
Some of the MPs are even named – by their codename – in KGB radio traffic. The late Konni Zilliacus was one of them, and Driberg was another. I greatly regret that, at this stage, I am unable to name others who are still alive and shelter behind the libel laws, as it is difficult to induce any intelligence source to appear as a witness, as MI5 itself knows only too well.
This difficulty, coupled with the immunity restrictions, has prevented any action against at least two Labour MPs who are believed to be on the regular payroll of Soviet bloc intelligence. This, of course, makes them effectively agents of the KGB, for apart from their own ideological motives in wanting to overthrow British democracy and establish a Soviet-style system, once they have accepted money, they are driven to take any orders they are given.
A crypto-communist MP need not have access to secrets to be of great value to Russia as an agent of influence. He or she – the KGB pays particular attention to women – can influence parliamentary and Labour Party committees on which they serve. Ministers and junior ministers can pack government advisory committees, on subjects like disarmament and arms control, with left-wingers who are difficult to get rid of when a right-wing government subsequently inherits them.
The attention that the KGB pays to ministers is invariably carefully concealed if it is discovered. During one of the Wilson governments, a quite prominent junior minister was required to resign on ‘personal grounds’ because he was being subjected to attempted KGB blackmail and the Prime Minister felt that it would be dangerous for him to remain in office
. The details would have caused a political scandal, so they were suppressed not only to the benefit of the Labour Party but, incidentally, to that of the KGB. Lord George-Brown has told me how he refused to be party to the cover-up when asked to find a nongovernment post for this man.
More recently, the conviction of Lord Kagan, a long-time close personal friend of Sir Harold Wilson, for theft has led to publicity about the way he was courted by the KGB, which would automatically be interested in anyone so close to a Prime Minister. The first news that MI5 received about Kagan’s friendship with a man who was known to be a senior officer of the KGB came from Oleg Lyalin, who defected in London in 1971. Lyalin told the security men that Kagan was on friendly terms with Richardas Vaygauskas, who, like the peer who had made a fortune out of Gannex raincoats, was a Lithuanian. Lyalin confirmed that Vaygauskas, who was a personal friend and exchanged details about his espionage activities with him, was a senior officer of the KGB and eventually he was among the agents expelled from Britain or refused re-entry.
Several times during the six months while Lyalin was under MI5 control before physically defecting, he gave details of the Kagan–Vaygauskas relationship. Kagan has admitted that he was friendly with Vaygauskas and that they played chess together on the Russian’s frequent visits to Kagan’s home. But Kagan insists that he had no idea that Vaygauskas was a spy and that Vaygauskas made no attempt to use him as a source of questions to Wilson. According to Wilson, nor did Kagan make any attempt to pump him on anything of political interest to Russia.
Wilson has also stated that Sir Arthur Young, the commissioner of the City of London Police, who died in 1979, was put in touch with Vaygauskas so that he could find out more about Soviet spy networks. What happened, according to my sources, is that Wilson approached Young after he heard of Lyalin’s defection and told him about Kagan’s relationship with Vaygauskas. Young expressed surprise that he had not gone direct to MI5, and Sir Martin Furnival Jones was furious.
The MI5 case officer in charge of the Vaygauskas and Lyalin inquiries saw Wilson, who told him that he had no idea of Kagan’s relationships with Russians except in relation to trading and that he was sure that Kagan was acting in Britain’s best interests. According to Wilson, Kagan arranged meetings between Vaygauskas and Young, who, on retiring, accepted a job with Kagan’s firm.
Though MI5 retained its interest in the Kagan–Vaygauskas link, Kagan, who was already a knight, was made a peer in Wilson’s Resignation Honours. On the advice of Margaret Thatcher, the Queen has recently withdrawn the knighthood awarded to Kagan, a very rare recriminatory action. Removal of a peerage would require legislation.
While Kagan was not a Member of Parliament until he became a peer and had no official immunity, MI5 had become chary about challenging any of Wilson’s friends and associates. It seems that Wilson deeply resented routine inquiries that MI5 made about those who happened to be involved with East–West trade, which he wanted to encourage. He did not like the way MI5 was automatically suspicious of Kagan because he had managed to escape from the Soviet zone after the war, even though this might be a standard method of intruding spies in the guise of refugees. The warnings that MI5 gave him about personal friends, including MPs, when he became Prime Minister are believed to have been the root cause of his dislike and distrust of the organisation.
The KGB has always believed in aiming high, and it has scored on some targets of great distinction and value. Some of the names that appeared in the regular KGB radio traffic and have been tracked down as a result of ‘Operation Bride’ beggar belief, though inquiries substantiate their reality. One of them was Eduard Benes, the second President of Czechoslovakia, who suffered a communist coup d’état for his pains in assisting the KGB. This was perhaps poetic justice, for, through his services to Stalin, Benes had been instrumental in touching off the purge in which hundreds of Red Army officers and other Russians were murdered. Heydrich, Hitler’s security and intelligence chief, faked a report that the chief of the Red Army’s general staff, Marshal Tukachevsky, was collaborating with the German high command to overthrow the Stalin regime. Heydrich used Benes to leak the false information to Stalin, and the great purge followed.
CHAPTER 22
SECURITY AND THE UNIONS
NEXT TO THE death of Gaitskell in 1963, the event that has been most responsible for accelerating the Labour Party’s lurch to the left was a decision taken at the Annual Conference of the Labour Party in 1973. Until then, it was forbidden for members of the Labour Party to belong to, or to give support to, certain organisations known to be offshoots of the Communist Party. As Aneurin Bevan, an old-style Labour left-winger, had put it:
The Communist Party is the sworn, inveterate enemy of the socialist and democratic parties. When it associates with them, it does so as a preliminary to destroying them. The communist does not look upon the socialist as an ally in a common cause. He looks upon him as a dupe, as a temporary convenience, and as something to be thrust ruthlessly to one side when he has served his purpose.
Though the communists had never concealed their loathing of the British style of democracy because they favoured a totalitarian system that the voters could never reverse, the Labour Party’s National Executive was so heavily infiltrated by extremists that in 1973 it was able to induce the conference to abandon the proscribed list of communist-front organisations.
This move horrified the security authorities, whose prime duty is to prevent subversion by communists and their associates. Their fears that this would lead to a takeover of the Labour Party by extremists, of whom many are known to be secret communists, have proved to be well founded.
Labour MPs and ministers were not long in appearing openly on Communist Party platforms, supporting the scurrilous Morning Star, the pro-Soviet newspaper.
Labour Party officials and back-bench MPs have declared their support for an amalgamation of the Labour and Communist Parties by stating that the differences between them are now ‘negligible’.
Events have moved so quickly that a left-wing demagogue who supports nuclear disarmament by Britain and the weakening of defence relations with the United States – both high-priority Soviet aims – is now leader of the Labour Party, in the shape of Michael Foot. After the 1981 local government elections for the Greater London Council, moderate socialists who had led the Labour Party campaign and won it were then immediately voted out of office, their places being taken by left-wing extremists.
In all these moves, extreme left-wing leaders of certain trade unions have played a major role. A few of them, like McGahey of the Mineworkers Union, are open communists, but many more are on the secret communist list. They may admit to previous membership, but if so, they claim to have left the party years ago.
The extent to which efforts are made to suborn trade union officials was indicated in the evidence of the two Czech defectors Frolik and August. They named trade union leaders alleged to have been recruited when interrogated by the CIA and by the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
Through such people, the Communist Party has wielded influence out of all proportion to its size, and in many instances they are working primarily in the interests of the Kremlin. It must always be remembered that, as with KGB agents like Blunt and Philby, communist trade union officials are in regular touch with Soviet controllers. They are told what to do, step by step, from Moscow, and they are expected to do it. In 1980, a friend of mine involved in the British construction industry was visited by an MI5 officer to be questioned about one of his manual workers, who happened to be black. When a telephone call showed that the man had been away from work ‘ill’ for three days in the previous week, the MI5 officer revealed that he had, in fact, been in Moscow, his air trip having been paid by the Soviet authorities. The man was an agitator, especially among black workers, and had presumably been in Moscow to report and receive instructions.
One major union leader of recent times was under regular surveillance by MI5 and was seen in contact with Sovi
et intelligence men. His wife, moreover, is known to have been a Comintern courier. He was present in 1941 at a secret meeting of communist trade union leaders, at which they reviewed their position after Russia was forced into the war by the German attack. An MI5 agent was also present and reported the full proceedings. Defectors have named him as a KGB agent. Yet both Wilson and Heath forbade any interrogation of this man because, at that time, they wanted no trouble.
Another trade union leader, almost as well known, had occasional meetings with KGB men, specialising in trade union activity, to plan the disruption of the British economy. This plan was partly to promote the spread of communism in Britain but also to reduce living standards so that those prevailing in Russia would not seem so harsh – a deliberate KGB target throughout Western Europe.
Understandably, the Kremlin and its subversion arm, the KGB, pay increasingly close attention to the trade unions of the truly democratic countries where they have power, contrary to their situation in the Soviet Union, where they are merely cyphers. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) and individual unions have gone out of their way to establish close ‘fraternal relations’ with their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain, which are heavily infiltrated and controlled by the KGB. The extent to which communist unions are run by the state has been brought to public notice by the heroic attempts by Polish workers to gain a modest degree of freedom. The Soviet Union left the Poles in no doubt that, if necessary, it would impose its will by force of arms if the movement for free trade unions went too far for its liking. Yet the communist-inspired drive to link British trade unions with their East European counterparts-in-name continues – and the attitude of the TUC during the Polish crisis was shameful.
In 1975 there was a secret meeting in West Germany of communist trade union leaders from Europe and Britain to discuss tactics for disrupting industry in Western Europe over the following five years. It was sponsored by the Russians, whose main interest it was intended to serve; again, a western intelligence agent was infiltrated into it. The meeting decided that the motor car and commercial vehicle industry was the most vulnerable to disruption and sabotage and that the British sector offered the softest target. The results, at British Leyland in particular, are there for all to see. The motor industry and its numerous subsidiaries, which provide components and services, are prime employers of labour. Any unofficial strike or wildcat action that creates unemployment and destroys basic industries helps to till the seed bed of communism. One does not need to see the files of MI5 to appreciate that the near-mortal damage to the motor industry has been orchestrated from outside.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 30
