When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  A new employer

  John Peet, having resolved any problems about trust by leaving Reuters in a very sudden and public way, set about finding new employment. He went from being a paid correspondent for a news agency to being a paid propagandist for a government.

  His first task was to write about his experiences at his old employer for his new employer, the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). His articles for their newspaper, Neues Deutschland, also appeared in a left-wing French newspaper. But they didn’t appear in the British Daily Worker, his favourite read in his schoolboy days, because, according to Peet, the paper said that British libel laws would make publication impossible.357 He also wrote a booklet in German, ‘I Choose Peace’.358

  The other part of his work was addressing public meetings around East Germany. He spent six months addressing up to three meetings a day for the German Peace Council, part of the Soviet ‘World Peace Council’. He said his travel amounted to ‘40,000 kilometres by car and train to every corner of the Republic’.359

  But reports in the archive of the East German secret service, the Stasi, seen by British academics Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte, ‘showed little enthusiasm about Peet and his message’.360 A photograph of one of the meetings, printed in his autobiography, shows Peet standing on a platform in a rather crumpled suit reading out his speech to some rather bored-looking East Germans standing below.361

  When his appeal to East German audiences began to dwindle, Peet and his employers decided to turn their attention to the audience in Peet’s homeland, with some surprising success.

  The Democratic German Report, the DGR, is thought to have been the only foreign-language newspaper in Communist Europe produced almost single-handedly by a Westerner. According to Berger and LaPorte’s study of Peet’s life in the GDR, the DGR appeared every fortnight as an eight-page newsletter. The articles were by-lined by ‘John Peet’, ‘Eustace Gordon’ or ‘Frederick Ford’. In reality they were all written by John Peet.

  Of the 38,000 copies, half were posted to Britain, targeting trade union activists, teachers, journalists and particularly MPs. For a time the DGR had a feature called ‘Our Hansard’ which reprinted questions which MPs had asked based on information which Peet had provided.362

  Peet knew that an audience existed among left-wing Labour Party members who wished the GDR well and were suspicious of developments in the rival Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). First and foremost the Democratic German Report was an anti-Fascist publication highlighting where former Nazis had been accepted back into public life in West Germany. Peet said that the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth first learned of the ‘Odessa’ network of former Nazis from the pages of the DGR.

  Coupled with this focus, Peet emphasised what he saw as the threat to world peace that the re-armament of West Germany posed. His other task as a ‘critical friend’ of the GDR was to present a positive picture of developments, which he did while expressing a few concerns in order to try to maintain some semblance of independence.363 As one might expect from a former news agency man, the magazine was well written. But those like Berger and LaPorte who have studied all Peet’s articles have concluded that ‘the regularly held belief that Peet regularly poked fun at Communist jargon and the regime’s sullen lack of humour is a myth’. In their judgement, the degree of direct criticism of the East Berlin regime was marginal.364

  At the time of his defection, the New York Times reported, ‘In the same coolly rational tone in which he had delivered his indictment of the British and Americans, Mr Peet retorted that many things in Eastern Berlin had roused his criticisms and that he hoped to be able to voice critical as well as commendatory views.’365 That was to turn out to be a touch naive. Stasi files reveal that privately Peet was critical of events such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968.366 But in public he was fiercely loyal to the Soviet bloc, especially on the big issues.

  No issue came bigger than the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In his autobiography Peet repeated the GDR line that the wall had to be built to protect the East’s economy from ‘not just a brain drain, but a muscles drain and a skills drain’.367 He further argued that a subsequent recovery in the economy and standard of living was ‘not the only satisfactory result of a painful decision’. The division of the city had, in his mind, prepared the way for the treaties a decade later which formalised the creation of the two states, the GDR and the FRG.

  He forecast that

  the division of the old Germany into two separate and distinct states today looks as permanent as anything else in a world largely divided between two power blocks. As long as the balance of power rules the world scene, any reversal appears inconceivable.368

  Free to come and go

  What of Peet the person as opposed to Peet the polemicist? Unlike those who, like Philby, Burgess and Maclean, had defected to the Eastern bloc after working for the Russians from within the British secret service, John Peet had committed no offence under British law. He was free to return to his homeland, which he did every second year to visit relatives. He gave lecture tours and, on one trip, he sat down with an interviewer from the Imperial War Museum and recorded his memories for an oral history of the Spanish Civil War. In his autobiography he said he was ‘very happy with my fourth – and presumably last – wife, a GDR girl who does not even remember the Second World War’. He also socialised with former colleagues, gave interviews to visiting British television crews and even attended the opening of the new Reuters office in East Berlin in June 1987.369

  To those who would wonder ‘yes, but was he happy?’ his relatives maintain that he lived a good life. But Sandy Gall, a Reuters man turned ITN anchorman, continued to meet Peet at press conferences in East Berlin and formed a different view. ‘I would say rather a sad person because once he’d defected they lost interest in him because you know he’d given them their propaganda coup and he had a rather miserable time, probably didn’t have much money.’370

  John Peet contracted bowel cancer and died in East Berlin on 29 June 1988. He was seventy-two. His autobiography was published posthumously the next year. The publisher titled it The Long Engagement: Memoirs of a Cold War Legend.

  In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the two Germanys, which Peet had predicted would stay as permanent ‘separate and distinct states’, began to reunify. The German Democratic Republic, to which Peet had crossed an enormous line and for which he had dedicated half his life, ceased to exist.

  ‘Do you like Spanish watches?’

  In the final chapter of his autobiography he recalled how in the 1930s ‘when party members or fellow travellers were upset or mystified by inexplicable events in the Soviet Union, they were often assuaged with the glib phrase that you could not make an omelette without breaking eggs’. In an echo of Duranty’s earlier use of the term (Chapter 3) he put a new spin by asking some extra questions. The final words of his book were: ‘But where is the omelette?’ One friend has said that Peet’s original plan was to call the book ‘But Where Is the Omelette? I Am Still Looking’. It seemed to confirm the conventional wisdom that Peet was a naive but honest man, a reporter who’d sacrificed his career for his politics but had always been straight about it. His only proven dishonesty was that at his press conference in Berlin he denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party although he had, in fact, signed up as a schoolboy.

  But elsewhere in the book there was a sting in the tail to Peet’s story which suggested a wholly new and very different side to him. The publisher’s sleeve note explained that ‘John Peet died in East Germany in 1988. He had already drafted a vivid and entertaining autobiography, but when he learnt that his cancer was incurable he decided to add to this an account of his links with Russian intelligence.’371

  The ‘Long Engagement’ of the book’s title now appeared to be not just between Peet and Communism but Peet and the KGB. He revealed that he’d had a ‘commitment to t
he Soviet Union’ which went ‘well beyond the normal manifestations of support and sympathy’. He told how while in Spain in 1938 with the International Brigades he had been taken to meet ‘a thick-set middle-aged man in khaki uniform without insignia or badges of rank’ who spoke with a heavy German accent.372

  This man stressed to him how important it was that ‘the popular front should be fully informed about developments in every country, including confidential developments, and at this point I finally realised what he was getting at’. Peet said he replied, ‘If I understand you rightly, you are asking if I would be willing to be a Soviet spy.’

  Peet had apparently been waiting for this moment and was ready to commit. ‘For many months I had been fighting against Fascism with rifle and machine gun, intelligence work for the Soviet Union, the only power which had effectively aided the Spanish republic, and apparently the only reliable anti-Fascist bastion, was obviously a continuation of the struggle in a different field.’373

  His orders were that when he returned to Britain he should slowly sever any links with Communists, establish himself as a normal member of society, be patient and wait to be contacted. Under no circumstances should he take the initiative and make contact with any Soviet agency.

  He was given a code by which his first Soviet contact would identify himself. Nine months later, back in London a ‘very normal middle-class Englishman’ with tweeds, moustache and pipe asked Peet, ‘Do you like Spanish watches?’374 These were the code words. Peet was now talking to the Soviet secret service.

  However, according to Peet, it would be a full fourteen years before they contacted him again using the code. By then he was working as what he called ‘a public relations man (or paid propagandist if you prefer) for the GDR’ in East Berlin. Still believing that the Soviet Union appeared to be the ‘only hope for mankind’, he said he had agreed to meet Soviet officials and they reminded him of the commitment he had made back in Spain. Peet said an agent put to him ‘a series of preposterous suggestions, all of which I turned down’. First of all, they wanted him to make the acquaintance of a particular Western correspondent working in West Berlin. This could be done by taking the correspondent on a motoring tour, staging a breakdown at a specific time and place where the Soviet agent would suddenly appear as a friend. Next came the idea of what Peet christened a ‘fancy-dress kidnap’ in which Peet would dress as a British officer, drive to West Berlin, and ‘arrest’ a German whom the Soviets suspected of spying in the East. Having rejected these and other ideas, he said he agreed instead to transmit back ‘a certain amount of West Berlin journalistic scuttlebutt’.375

  He also described how later, while he was working for a time in Geneva, the Soviets asked him to get to know female staff at the UN agencies in the city. He said he had told them ‘that the seduction of prospective spies was not definitely not my line’. He had then told his minders, ‘I could see no future in any further collaboration.’376

  The revelations in his book confounded his immediate family. His brother Stephen told academics Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte that John only came up with this story after he had been asked by his publisher to rework the manuscript of his biography. Berger and LaPorte found no sign of Peet the spy in the files of the East German Stasi or the Comintern in Moscow.377

  Reuters’ own investigations into Peet at the time of his departure brought conflicting feedback from British intelligence. An initial message from the Berlin bureau to the London news desk said ‘hushhush boys equally surprised’. But in a more considered eight-page letter to Reuters head office from the agency’s head of operations in Germany, Alfred Geiringer, he reported that, ‘British intelligence in Berlin say that because he joined the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and still a member of the IB Association in London, they had a Peet dossier’. According to Geiringer, British intelligence claimed that they had ‘forwarded a report on Mr Peet to the Foreign Office with a request to inform Reuters’. There is no mention any such report reaching Reuters but it is fair to assume that if British intelligence ever informed Reuters that their chief correspondent was a Soviet spy they might have done something about it.378

  There is a similar conflict of emphasis in the files in the National Archives in London. A Foreign Office telegram from Berlin to London on the day of Peet’s defection recorded that he ‘has been known, both to his colleagues and to ourselves, as not being unsympathetic towards communism in general, but we had no evidence hitherto that he allowed these sympathies to influence his work as a correspondent’. This telegram focused on Peet’s private life, reporting that his wife had left him for personal reasons which had caused him to give ‘the appearance of being mentally unbalanced’. It also says that he ‘has been, for some time, a very sick man’ ‘suffering from duodenal ulcers’.

  The telegram concludes, ‘We are taking the line to press enquiries here that he has been a sick man for some time and suffered also from the strain of overwork and family troubles.’ A Foreign Office man on the desk in London wrote on the file that this line ‘is the best they can do’.379

  But two years later when no less a person than the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, showed an interest in the Peet case, British intelligence were keen to project that they knew a lot about him. Writing to 10 Downing Street from Box No. 500, Parliament Street B.O., London SW1, the postal address used by MI5, an official immediately pointed out that ‘John Scott Peet, born in London on 27 November 1915, has been known to us for some considerable time’. It chronicled how, for instance, in 1936 he ‘had already established a connection with the Daily Worker’. It also recorded that in 1939 he was again reported as a member of the Communist Party and in consequence was turned down for a commission in the RAF. Peet’s suspicion at the time was that his spell in the International Brigade in Spain had cost him the commission so he had been on the right lines. MI5’s letter to Downing Street demonstrated the depth of their scrutiny of Communists in Britain but made no mention of him spying for anybody.

  Churchill had been alerted to the Peet case by someone who sent the Prime Minister a copy of the Democratic German Report. MI5 were able to tell Churchill how many copies had been ordered from Berlin after an advertisement appeared in the Daily Worker (100), how many copies (381) of one edition in 1952 were posted from Berlin to ‘provincial addresses in the UK’, how many of another edition to London addresses (575) and how many (ten) were sent to Collets bookshop in London, ‘one of the principal sellers of Communist literature in this country’.

  ‘In addition to the above we have spotted 213 back numbers going to various UK addresses.’ So the Prime Minister is to be assured that ‘the measures taken have been such that not many copies can have got to addresses unnoticed’.380 These secret documents were not released until 1994, forty-two years later.

  MI5’s hardworking team, busy counting copies of obscure German magazines, seem to have been matched in zeal by their counterparts over in MI6. They appear to have made their own contact with Peet, inviting the defector to defect back to the West. The Stasi files show him regularly reporting back to his East German masters on these approaches.381 Peet claimed in his book that an American journalist, apparently acting for the CIA, offered him twenty thousand dollars in cash to come back.382 But no one ever says Peet spied for them.

  So what are we to make of John Peet the committed Communist who apparently signed up as a Soviet spy but never got to do much real spying? Was this a much more serious crossing of journalistic ethical lines than going from reporter to propagandist or was it a fantasy dreamed up on his death bed under pressure from his publisher to sell a few more books?

  Undoubtedly John Peet liked reading about spies and liked helping people write about them. The master espionage novelist Len Deighton has acknowledged Peet’s advice on the detail of life in East Berlin. Deighton wrote the foreword to Peet’s book, calling him ‘one of the most intriguing men I ever met’. Deighton wrote of Peet, ‘His life is a puzzle, but the
n to some extent everyone’s life is a puzzle.’383

  There is one particularly interesting part of that puzzle. To believe Peet’s account that he was recruited as a spy but was an inactive one we would have to accept that the KGB would sit quietly for fourteen years with a man of Peet’s calibre on their books as he worked as a journalist in three hotbeds of espionage: wartime Palestine, post-war Vienna and Cold War Berlin, and only activated him after he had already broken cover as a Communist sympathiser by which time he was useless to them as a spy. If true it reads as if someone at KGB HQ fell asleep on the case of the long-term sleeper.

  This leaves two possibilities. One is that he was much more active as a spy than he chose to reveal but didn’t want to give away too much detail. He had demonstrated his care about such matters when he left West Berlin. He went to enormous trouble to destroy documents in his flat such as address books and Christmas card lists to avoid friends and acquaintances being ‘harried to some degree by the spooks of various nations’. Maybe on his death bed he didn’t want too many spy files being re-opened and old contacts questioned.

  The other possibility is that he crossed a different ethical line and made up the story of John Peet the Soviet Spy.

  Eighteen days before he died Peet provided a further twist to the story – one which he had not mentioned in his book. In a letter to Paul Moor, an American journalist based in Germany, Peet said that the same intelligence unit which had recruited him to the Soviet cause during the Spanish Civil War had hired another soldier in the Republican Army for what he called ‘a real job’.

  The man was to assume the identity of a fallen colleague in the International Brigade, find his way into what Peet called ‘Trot circles’, make his way to Mexico and get to work with an ice axe.