As you will recall, the 1983 election was apparently a disaster for the by now Hard Left-dominated Labour Party. Yet I suggest the outcome was in fact a blessing in disguise. For it led to the gritty and self-denying realism to which our true friends in the Party have agreed to submit themselves over the past forty months.
Briefly, out of 650 constituencies in Britain in 1983, the Labour Party won only 209. But it was not quite so bad as it looked. For one thing, of those 209 sitting Labour MPs, 100 were now firmly of the Left, 40 of them of the Hard Left. It may be small, but today’s Parliamentary Labour Party is the farthest left that has ever sat in the House of Commons.
Second, the defeat at the polls gave a jolt to those fools who thought the struggle for total control was already over. They soon realized that after the bitter but necessary struggle by our friends to win control of the Party between 1979 and 1983, the time had come to reestablish unity and to repair the damaged power base in the country, with an eye to the next election. This program began under Hard Left orchestration at the October 1983 Party Conference, and has been unswerving ever since.
Third, they all saw the necessity to return to that clandestinity demanded by Lenin of true believers operating inside a bourgeois society. Thus the leitmotif of the whole span of the Hard Left’s conduct these past forty months has been a return to that clandestinity that worked so well through the early and mid-1970s. This has been coupled with a reversion to an apparent and surprising degree of moderation. It has taken a vast effort of self-discipline to achieve this, but again the comrades have not been found wanting in this regard.
Since October 1983, the Hard Left has effectively taken on the clothes of courtesy, tolerance, and moderation; stress is eternally laid upon the primordial importance of Party unity, and a number of hitherto impossible concessions have been made in Hard Left dogma to achieve this. Both the centrist wing, delighted and amicable, and the media appear to have been completely taken by the new, acceptable face of our Marxist-Leninist friends.
More covertly, the takeover of the Party has been finalized. All the lever committees are now either in the hands of the Hard Left or could be taken over during a single emergency meeting. But—and it is an important “but”—they have usually been content to leave the chairmanship of these lever committees in the hands of a Soft Left person, and occasionally, when the voting supremacy is sufficiently overwhelming, even in the hands of a centrist.
The centrist wing, with the exception of about a dozen skeptics, has been effectively disarmed by the newfound unity and the absence of harassment of themselves. Nevertheless, the iron fist is still very much in the velvet glove.
At constituency level, the takeover of local CLPs by Hard Left elements has continued quietly and with very little public or media attention. The same thing has happened throughout the history of the trade union movement, as I have already mentioned. Nine out of the Big Ten and half of the remaining seventy unions belong now to the Hard Left, and here again the profile has deliberately been kept much lower than prior to 1983.
In summation, the entire Labour Party of Britain now belongs to the Hard Left, whether directly, through Soft Left surrogates, through intimidated centrists, or through the holding of a fast emergency meeting of the appropriate committee; and yet the rank and file of the Party membership and of the unions, the media, and the broad masses of the old Labour voters seem unaware of this fact.
For the rest, the Hard Left has for forty months approached the next British general election as if planning a military campaign. To win a simple majority in the British Parliament it would need 325 seats—say, 330. It possesses 210 that are regarded as in the bag. The other 120, lost in 1979 or 1983, or both, are regarded as winnable and have been designated as target seats.
It is a fact of political life in Britain that the people, after two full terms of one kind of government, often seem to think it is time for a change, even if the incumbent government is not really unpopular. But the British will change only if they trust what they are changing to. It has been the aim of the Labour Party these past forty months to win back that public trust, albeit by subterfuge on the part of our friends within it.
To judge by recent public-opinion polls, the campaign has been substantially successful, for the percentage gap between the ruling Conservatives and the Labour Party has closed to a few points. Bearing in mind also that under the British system eighty “marginal” seats actually control the outcome of an election, and that the marginals are swung one way or the other by the fifteen percent “floating vote,” the Labour Party has a chance of being returned to government at the next British general election.
The mere election to power of the Labour Party would not alone be enough to destabilize Britain to the revolutionary threshold and beyond it. It would be necessary to topple the newly triumphant Labour leader from office before he could be called to the Palace and sworn in as premier, and for him to be replaced by the preselected Hard Left nominee as Britain’s first Marxist-Leninist Prime Minister. It is this plan that is now well advanced.
Permit me to make one second digression to describe the manner of the election of a Labour Party leader. After the inception of the so-called electoral college at the urging of our Hard Left friends, the procedure was thus: following an election, nominations for the post of Party leader closed thirty days after the MPs took their oath. There would then ensue three months during which rival candidates could press their claims before the electoral college met. In the event of a Labour defeat there might well be a change of leader; in the event of a victory it would be unthinkable to topple the Prime Minister, since those three months would permit countrywide canvassing of the masses, who would support him.
Then, last year, at the October conference, our friends who dominated the National Executive Committee managed to secure the passage of a tiny “reform.” In the event of a Labour victory at the polls, the leader would be confirmed quickly and efficiently by these means: any nominations would have to be in within three days of the declaration of the election result; then an extraordinary meeting of the electoral college would take place within four more days. After the electoral college meeting and the “choice” of the Party leader, no further contest would be held for two years, the intervening year being waived.
Those who wavered in supporting this “reform” were persuaded the whole “confirmation” process would be a formality. No one, obviously, would stand against the newly triumphant leader, still awaiting his call to the Palace. He would simply be reendorsed in an unopposed reelection, would he not?
In fact, the reverse is intended. An alternative candidate would propose himself for the leader’s post. The shortness of time would prevent any canvassing of the masses; the trade union national executive committees would cast their forty percent on behalf of millions of union members, and those committees are dominated by our friends. Ditto the constituency committees. Together with half the Parliamentary Party, the alliance would cobble together more than fifty percent of the electoral college. It would be the new leader the Queen would have to summon to the Palace.
Now to specifics. Within the heart of the Hard Left of the British Labour Party and the trade union movement there is a group of twenty who, together, may be said to represent the ultra-left wing. They cannot be called a committee because, although in touch with each other, they seldom if ever meet in one place. Each has spent a lifetime working his way slowly upward in the inner apparatus; each has at his fingertips a manipulative influence far, far beyond his apparent office or position. Each is a totally committed, “true believer” Marxist-Leninist. There are twenty in all, nineteen men and one woman. Nine are trade unionists, six (including the woman) are sitting Labour MPs, and the rest comprise two academics, a peer, a lawyer, and a publisher. These are the people who will trigger and stage-manage the takeover.
Once in the Party leadership and holding the office of Prime Minister, the newcomer would have carte blanche, backed by the Ha
rd Left-dominated National Executive Committee of the Party, to reform his Cabinet wholly in his own image and to embark upon the intended legislative program forthwith. In short, the populace would have voted for an apparently Soft Left traditionalist or at least reformist government, but a full Hard Left regime would have taken office without the irksome necessity of an intervening election.
As for the legislative program, it constitutes at this stage a plan for twenty desired measures that have not yet, for obvious reasons, been put to paper. All of those measures have long been the sought-after program of the Hard Left, though only a few are included in the official Labour Party manifesto, and then in watered-down form.
The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution—or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)
But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.
1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.
2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.
3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.
4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.
5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.
Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.
All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”
Yours sincerely,
Harold Adrian Russell Philby
The General Secretary’s response to the memorandum was surprisingly and gratifyingly prompt. Barely more than a day after Philby had consigned the memorandum into the hands of Major Pavlov, the inscrutable and cold-eyed young officer from the Ninth Directorate was back. He bore in his hands a single manila envelope, which he handed to Philby without a word before turning away.
It was another handwritten letter from the General Secretary, brief and to the point as usual.
In it the Soviet leader thanked his friend Philby for his efforts. He himself had been able to confirm the contents of the memorandum as perfectly accurate. In consequence of this, he considered the victory of the British Labour Party at the next general election to have become a matter of top priority for the USSR. He was calling into being a small, restricted advisory committee, responsible and answerable only to himself, to counsel him upon possible future courses. He required and requested Harold Philby to act as adviser to that committee.
Chapter 5
Preston sat in the office of a very worried Bertie Capstick and examined the ten photocopied sheets spread out on the desk, reading each carefully. “How many people have handled the envelope?” he inquired.
“The postman, obviously. God knows how many people in the sorting office. Inside the building, the front-office people, the messenger who brings the morning mail up to the offices, and myself. I can’t see you’ll get much joy out of the envelope.”
“And the papers inside?”
“Just myself, Johnny. Of course I didn’t know what they were until I had pulled them out.”
Preston thought for a while. “Apart from the person who mailed them they might, I suppose, contain the prints of someone else who removed them. I’ll have to ask Scotland Yard to check them out. Don’t have much hope, personally. Now for the contents. It looks like very high-level stuff”
“The tops,” said Capstick gloomily. “Nothing short of top secret, the lot. Some of it very sensitive, concerning our NATO allies; contingency plans for NATO to counter a variety of Soviet threats—that sort of stuff.”
“All right,” said Preston, “let’s just run through the possibilities. Bear with me. Supposing this was sent back by a public-spirited citizen who for one reason or another did not want to be identified. It happens; people don’t want to get involved. Where could such a person have got these papers? A briefcase left in a cloakroom, a taxi, a club?”
Capstick shook his head. “Not legally, Johnny. This stuff should never under any circumstances have left the building, except possibly in the sealed bag to go across to the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office. There have been no reports of a Registry bag being tampered with. Besides, they are not marked for a destination outside this building, as they would be if they had been taken legitimately. The people who would even begin to have access to this sort of stuff know the rules. No one—but no one—may carry this sort of stuff home to study. Answer your question?”
“More than somewhat,” said Preston. “It came back from outside the ministry. So it had to be taken outside. Illegally. Gross negligence? Or a deliberate attempt to leak?”
“Look at the dates of origin,” said Capstick. “These ten sheets cover a full month. There’s no chance they all arrived on a single desk in one day. They had to be collected over a period of time.”
Preston, using his handkerchief, eased the ten documents back into their envelope of arrival. “I’ll have to take them to Charles Street, Bertie. May I use your phone?”
He called Charles Street and asked to be put straight through to the office of Sir Bernard Hemmings. The Director-General was in, and after a delay and some insistence from Preston, took the call himself. Preston simply asked for an appointment within minutes and got it. He put down the phone and turned to Brigadier Capstick.
“Bertie, for the moment don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Just carry on as if this were just another routine day,” said Preston. “I’ll be in touch.”
It was out of the question to leave the ministry with these documents but without an escort. Brigadier Capstick loaned him one of the front-hall commissionaires, a burly former guardsman,
Preston left the ministry with the documents in his own briefcase and took a taxi to the Clarges Apartments; he watched the vehicle disappear down Clarges Street before walking the last two hundred yards to Charles and his head office, where he could dismiss his escort. Sir Bernard saw him ten minutes later.
The old spycatcher looked gray, as if he were in pain, which he frequently was. The disease that was growing deep inside him showed little to the observer, but the medical tests left no doubt. A year, they had said, and not operable. He was due to retire on September 1, which with terminal leave meant he could depart in mid-July, six weeks before his sixtieth birthday.
He would probably have gone already but for the personal responsibilities that bore upon him. He had a second wife who had brought to the marriage a stepdaughter on whom the childless man doted. The girl was still at school. Early retirement would severely curtail his pension, leaving his widow and the girl in straitened circumstances. Wisely or not, he sought to carry on until the statutory retirement date in order to leave them his full pension. A
fter a lifetime in the job, he had virtually no other asset.
Preston explained briefly and concisely what had happened at the Ministry of Defense that morning, and the view of Capstick regarding the feasibility of the documents’ departure from the ministry’s being anything other than a deliberate act.
“Oh, my God, not another,” murmured Sir Bernard. The memory of Vassall and Prime still rankled, as did the acid reaction of the Americans when they had been apprised.
“Well, John, where do you want to start?”
“I’ve told Bertie Capstick to stay silent for the moment,” said Preston. “If we have a genuine traitor inside the ministry, there’s a second mystery: Who sent the stuff back to us? Passerby? Sneak thief? Wife with feelings of remorse? We don’t know. But if we could find that person, we might find where he got the stuff. That would short-circuit a lot of inquiry. I don’t hold out much hope for the envelope—standard brown paper sold in thousands of outlets, normal stamps, address in block capitals written with felt-tip pen, and already handled by a score of anonymous people. But the papers inside might have retained prints. I’d like Scotland Yard to test them all—under supervision, of course. After that, we may know where we go next.”
Fourth Protocol Page 8