Driberg later described how, during their evenings together in Moscow, he had seen Burgess “getting a bit sozzled on vodka.” The KGB, however, would tolerate no reference to Burgess’s alcoholism. Driberg’s biography thus quotes Burgess as saying that, despite his previous heavy drinking in the West, he no longer drank vodka in Moscow except—improbably—as “the best cure for an upset stomach:” “You know, Tom, living in a Socialist country does have a therapeutic effect on one.” Driberg praised the “passionate sincerity” of Burgess’s convictions and “his courage in doing what he thought right” to work for “better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West.” Burgess and Maclean, claimed Driberg, had been the victims of British media attacks as outrageous as “the extreme excesses of the McCarthy witch hunt” in the United States:
That does not mean that I personally agree with the decision that Burgess and Maclean took. As a Socialist, I take the view that, on the whole, one should go on working for Socialism by such means as are available in one’s own country—in Britain, specifically, through the Labor Party. But this is a matter on which opinions differ…
While it was “silly for Western Socialists to defend every action of the Soviet Government,” the achievements of Soviet industrial democracy deserved to be better known in the West. Driberg extolled the example of a Party meeting he had attended in a Moscow machine-tool factory:
At this meeting a large percentage of those available to attend were present voluntarily to take an active, proud and responsible part in the running of their factory; and they seemed to feel that it was indeed theirs, as the workers at a factory in Dagenham or Coventry or Detroit can never, as things are, feel that the factories in which they work are theirs.28
The propaganda impact of Driberg’s book was somewhat spoiled by the fact that, just as it was published in November 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising. His KGB file records, however, that he continued to be used for KGB active measures.29 Though Mitrokhin’s summary of the file gives few details, the Centre probably considered Driberg’s main use as an agent of influence to support the campaign within the Labor Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament. At the Scarborough party conference in October 1960, the left proved strong enough to pass two unilateralist motions, despite the impassioned opposition of Hugh Gaitskell, party leader, who implored his supporters to “fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love.” Doubtless to the Centre’s delight, Driberg was made a member of the “Committee of Twelve,” appointed by the NEC to draft a new defense policy. Though Gaitskell complained that Driberg was behaving on the committee “like a tired snake,” his supporters pushed through a pro-NATO and antiunilateralist policy later adopted by the 1961 party conference, which reversed the vote at Scarborough a year earlier.30
It is unlikely that, after the publication of his biography of Guy Burgess, the KGB had any major subsequent influence on Driberg’s speeches and articles—though it doubtless tried to claim some of the credit for his denunciation of the British nuclear deterrent and America’s role in Vietnam. Driberg’s campaigns on these and other left-wing causes sprang from conviction rather than KGB dictation. His main usefulness to the Centre probably lay in enabling it to boast to the Politburo that it had an agent at the heart of the Labor leadership who would probably figure in the next Labor government.
The Centre was doubtless deeply disappointed when there was no place for Driberg in the government formed by Gaitskell’s successor, Harold Wilson, after the Labor election victory of 1964. Wilson distrusted him too much to think of making him a minister.31 Together with Ian Mikardo, Driberg formed the left-wing Tribune Group, which opposed many of Wilson’s policies from the back benches. After Wilson won an increased majority in 1966, however, the Tribune Group’s protests became less effective. The Daily Express compared the impact of a protest organized by Driberg and Mikardo against a proposed wage freeze to that of “a piece of wet cod dropping in a snowdrift.”32 Driberg began to try to distance himself from the KGB, end secret contacts and limit himself to official meetings with Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. When the KGB tried to increase pressure on him, he broke off contact altogether in 1968.33
Agent LEPAGE’s decision—in KGB jargon—to “refuse to cooperate” may have been related to his worsening health. In January 1968, while on a tour of Cyprus as chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party, he had a minor heart attack. Though warned that the attack might have been triggered by “overdoing it” sexually, Driberg insisted on inviting Cypriot youths into his hospital bed. Later in the year, after his return to London, he spent several further months in hospital with a detached retina, becoming blind in one eye. At the end of 1970, he decided to retire at the following election.34
It is uncertain whether Wilson ever learned from MI5 that Driberg was a Soviet agent. He was, however, informed in the late 1960s that a defector from the Czechoslovak StB, Josif Frolik, had reported that Driberg had been in the pay of the StB.35 Frolik claimed that the StB had been warned off by the KGB on the grounds that Driberg was “their man.”36 Mitrokhin’s brief summary of Driberg’s file contains no reference to a Czech connection. But his notes on the file of another agent in the Labor Party, the journalist Raymond Fletcher, who served as MP for Ilkeston from 1964 to 1983, record that he was involved with the StB as well as the KGB.
When Fletcher (codenamed PETER) was recruited by the London residency in 1962,37 he was preparing a scathing attack on Conservative defense policy, published in the following year under the title £60 a Second on Defense, which called for major defense cuts and the abandonment of the British nuclear deterrent. Fletcher ridiculed most of the security measures designed to prevent British defense secrets reaching the Soviet Union. “Classification,” he declared, “is more a device for concealing incompetence than for concealing information from a potential enemy:”
If the object of the deterrent exercise is to convince the Soviet Union that… “unacceptable damage” can be inflicted if aggression is embarked upon, why conceal the methods by which it is to be inflicted? We do not, of course. Such is the dismal state of our security procedures that it is a safe bet that more is known about British security procedures in the Kremlin than in the House of Commons.38
Shortly before his election as Labor MP in 1964, the Centre learned that Fletcher was also “cooperating” with the StB. On this occasion, instead of warning off the Czechs—as allegedly happened in the case of Driberg—the KGB seems to have broken off contact with Fletcher. The Centre was also disturbed by a report from the Polish SB that a letter in the possession of the British Communist Party appeared to show (almost certainly wrongly) that Fletcher had been “cooperating” since 1957 with the CIA.39
A few months before his death in 1991, Fletcher admitted that during the 1960s he had contacts at the Czechoslovak embassy in London whom “it was later claimed were intelligence personnel,” but that he had thought “I was safe because I reported all my contacts to Goronwy Roberts at the Foreign Office.” MI5, he implied, thought differently. They were, he declared, “a complete bunch of bastards” who “tried to break my nerve and nearly broke my spirit.”40 If, as Fletcher believed, MI5 did have him under surveillance, his KGB file suggests that they had some reason to do so.
The most important British politician identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin as a target for KGB recruitment was Harold Wilson. Given the extent of his contacts with the Soviet Union, unusual for a Western politician in the early years of the Cold War, Wilson was an almost inevitable target. As President of the Board of Trade and the youngest member of the Attlee cabinet from 1947 to 1951, Wilson had been actively involved in promoting East—West trade. He increased that involvement during Labor’s thirteen years in opposition after 1951. His Tribune pamphlet In Place of Dollars, published in 1952, urged the government to relax controls on “strategic” exports to the Soviet Bloc and ignore the inevitable American protests which
would follow. In May 1953, two months after the death of Stalin, he became the first major British politician to visit Moscow since the Berlin crisis five years earlier. There he renewed his acquaintance with Anastas Mikoyan, with whom he had established friendly relations during visits in 1947, and held wide-ranging talks with the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. On his return to London, Wilson addressed a special meeting of the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP) and was congratulated by Attlee on a “magnificent inside report” on post-Stalin Russia.41 Wilson’s information on British politics seems to have been rated equally highly by the Russians. According to his KGB file, it was passed on to the Politburo.42 There is, however, no indication that any of Wilson’s conversations with Soviet officials (some, inevitably, undercover KGB officers) was any more confidential than his talk to the PLP.
During his years in opposition Wilson accepted a series of consultancies with firms trading with the Soviet Union, which paid him, on average, about 5,000 pounds a year.43 According to his KGB file, one of the firms with which Wilson was involved breached the COCOM embargo on “strategic” exports.44 Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler, accepts that this was probably the case: “The export of many items was forbidden; inevitably a grey area grew up in which trading might or might not be illegal. Some of Wilson’s associates strayed into that area or even beyond it.”45 The high value placed by the KGB on Wilson’s political gossip, together with the dubious nature of some of his business contacts, probably explain the Centre’s decision in 1956 to give him the codename OLDING and open an “agent development file” in the hope of recruiting him. The file records, however, that, “The development did not come to fruition.”46
Allegations that Wilson was ever a KGB agent derive not from credible evidence but from unfounded conspiracy theories, some of them elaborated by the KGB officer Anatoli Golitsyn, who may have known of the existence of the “agent development file” and claimed after his defection in December 1961 that Wilson was a Soviet mole. When Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, Golitsyn developed the bizarrely improbable theory that he had been poisoned by the KGB to enable Wilson to succeed him as Labor leader. Sadly, a minority of British and American intelligence officers with a penchant for conspiracy theory—among them James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5—were seduced by Golitsyn’s fantasies.47 Wright went on to devise several conspiracy theories of his own, among them the claim that thirty MI5 officers later conspired against Harold Wilson.48
Far from using Wilson as an agent or confidential contact after he became prime minister in 1964, the London residency commissioned articles attacking various of his policies by an agent codenamed DAN, recruited in 1959, who contributed to the left-wing weekly Tribune. DAN’s file records that he published material given him by the KGB and wrote articles on “theses” devised by Service A, the active measures section at the Centre. Though Mitrokhin’s brief notes on the file do not record whether DAN received regular payment, they do mention that in February 1967 he was given a “reward” of 200 pounds.49
The most prominent British journalist targeted by the Centre during the early years of the Cold War to be identified in the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin was Edward Crankshaw. From the start of the Cold War until some years after his retirement in 1968, Crankshaw was Britain’s most authoritative commentator on Soviet affairs. During the Second World War he had served for two years with the British Military Mission in Russia. In 1947 he was “half-flattered, half-bullied” by the editor of the Observer, David Astor, into returning to Moscow as the paper’s Russian and East European correspondent. For the next generation, he kept up what he called “a continual running commentary on what I thought the Russians were up to” in the Observer, its globally syndicated Foreign News Service, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and “lectures and broadcasts all over the place.”50 Crankshaw’s voluminous “running commentary,” diffused around the world, was a source of continuous annoyance to both the Kremlin and the Centre. “There is only one group of people in the world today,” he wrote in 1951, “which is actively and deliberately… committed to the downfall of our society: the group of Russians who form the government of the Soviet Union.”51
The KGB tried various methods of bringing pressure on Crankshaw to modify his views—all without success. Some of the methods used were attempts to exploit his sexual liaisons in Moscow. Though “slight and gentlemanly in appearance,” according to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, “Crankshaw controlled a wild and independent nature.”52 While serving with the wartime military mission, he had lived with the artist T. S. Andreyevskaya and her friend E. S. Rosinevich. In 1948 both were arrested, forced to confess to being British spies and sent to labor camp.53 Crankshaw was not intimidated, but the fate of the two women may well have inspired a moving description by him in 1948 of others who suffered similar fates:
Another thing you become aware of in the north, and which dominated your ideas, is forced labor in its many different forms. As you sit at breakfast in your hotel you hear the dreadful sound of a woman wailing, half hysterically, in the street outside. And looking out you see thirty or forty women and girls being marched along the frozen street by guards with fixed bayonets, each woman with a small bundle. You do not know where they are going; but you know that they are being marched away against their will, that the call came suddenly and roughly, and that behind them they are leaving homes which are, as it were, still warm, while they trudge through the snow with nothing but their bundles.54
In 1959 photographs were taken of Crankshaw while engaged in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “sexual frolics.”55 If the photographs were shown to Crankshaw, as was usual in such cases, he was, once again, not intimidated—although the episode may have helped to inspire his reminder in the Observer that past atrocities committed by the KGB remained “part of the present:”
Still no voice in the Soviet Union can be heard to say that the collectivization, the mass arrests, the deportations and killings were appalling crimes, past now, but never to be forgotten, and this means in effect that for all the remarkable changes since Stalin, the Khrushchev Government is still condoning those crimes.56
Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he gave his approval for an operation designed either to blackmail Crankshaw by using the photographs taken in 1959, and perhaps on other occasions, or to discredit him by sending them to the Observer. The operation, however, was abandoned at the urging of the London residency, which no doubt calculated correctly that Crankshaw would not give way to blackmail and that his editor would stand by him.57
Though the photographs of Crankshaw’s “sexual frolics” were never published, similar pictures were used in an active measure codenamed operation PROBA designed to discredit the Conservative MP Commander Anthony Courtney, who had aroused the ire of the Centre by campaigning against the growing size of the London residency.58 In 1965 the KGB produced a leaflet containing photographs of Courtney having sex with an unidentified woman, and circulated copies to his wife, other MPs and newspaper editors. Though intended to give the impression that Courtney was having an adulterous affair, the photographs had in fact been taken by the SCD four years earlier during a trip by Courtney, then a widower, to a Moscow trade fair. While in Moscow Courtney had been seduced by an Intourist guide who visited him in a hotel room fitted with a concealed KGB camera. The ensuing scandal, which began with a story in Private Eye, was largely responsible for Courtney’s failure to hold his seat at the 1965 general election.59 The KGB file on operation PROBA also claimed the credit for the breakdown of Courtney’s marriage and the failure of his business career.60
The KGB’s main targets for sexual compromise operations throughout the Cold War were foreign embassies in Moscow. The files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that few, if any, embassies escaped some degree of penetration by KGB swallows. The most successful seduction within the British embassy during the Brezhnev era, though it achieved far less than the entrapment of
John Vassall, was probably that of a 30-year-old married male diplomat codenamed KAREV, who was seduced by his family’s Russian maid, codenamed CH. On KGB instructions, using a stratagem successfully deployed against a number of foreign diplomats, CH pretended to be pregnant and sought KAREV’s help in arranging an abortion, for which she claimed to have received help from an embassy protection officer. KAREV was persuaded to show his gratitude by giving some biographical information on embassy personnel, including the identities of SIS officers working under diplomatic cover. To compromise KAREV further, CH then pretended that she was pregnant again and needed help in arranging another abortion. Soon afterward CH was arrested on KGB instructions for being found in possession of Western currency given her by KAREV. On this occasion KAREV sought the help of a Soviet official, whom he probably realized was a KGB officer, both to arrange the second fictitious abortion and to have charges against CH dropped. Since KAREV’s tour of duty in Moscow was about to end, he was persuaded to agree to a meeting with a KGB officer during his next posting. Once out of Moscow, however, KAREV succeeded in holding the KGB at arm’s length. On being shown his file, Philby advised against attempting to compromise KAREV publicly, as in the case of Commander Courtney, probably because the hand of the KGB would have been too obvious.61
IN BRITAIN, AS in the United States,62 the Centre’s strategy during much of the Cold War was based on the attempt to establish a network of illegal residencies which would prove more difficult for MI5 to monitor than the legal residency at the Soviet embassy, and which could continue to operate if the Cold War turned into hot war. Its first post-war choice of illegal resident was Konon Trofimovich Molody (codenamed BEN), the son of two Soviet scientists, who seems to have been selected in childhood as a potential foreign intelligence officer. In 1932, at only ten years of age, he was sent, with official approval, to live with an aunt in California and attend secondary school in San Francisco, where he became fluent in English before returning to Moscow in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War he joined the NKVD and, according to a stilted official hagiography, “made frequent sorties into the enemy’s rear… brilliantly displaying such qualities as boldness and valor.” After the war Molody took a degree in Chinese and worked as a Chinese language instructor before beginning training as an illegal in 1951.63
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