Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

WHILE RUNNING BLAKE as an agent inside SIS during the 1950s, the KGB also had ambitious plans to recruit leading British politicians. Among the targets recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was Tom Driberg, Labor MP, journalist, member of Labor’s National Executive from 1949 to 1974 and party chairman in 1957-8. 17In 1956, shortly after Burgess and Maclean gave the first press conference since their flight to Moscow, claiming to have come to Moscow “to work for the aim of better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West,” Driberg provided the opportunity for his own recruitment by requesting an interview with Burgess. 18The two men had become friends during the War—brought together by common interests which included, according to Driberg’s biographer, “contempt for the bourgeoisie” and “healthy appetites for alcohol and young men.” 19With the approval of the KGB, Burgess agreed to the interview, doubtless informing the Centre that Driberg was one of the most promiscuous homosexuals in British public life.

Whenever it saw an opportunity, the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) went to great pains to compromise foreign diplomats and Western politicians visiting Moscow by using female or male “swallows” to seduce them, photographing their sexual liaisons and then blackmailing them into “cooperation.” A year before Driberg visited Moscow, for example, John Vassall, a homosexual clerk in the office of the British naval attaché at the British embassy, had been lured to a party organized by the SCD. Soon afterward, Vassall recalled:

I was shown a box of photographs of myself at the party… After about three photographs I could not stomach any more. They made one feel ill. There I was, caught by the camera, enjoying every sexual activity… having oral, anal or a complicated array of sexual activities with a number of different men.

For the next seven years, while working at the Moscow embassy and at the Admiralty in London, Vassall handed over thousands of highly classified documents on British and NATO weapons development and naval policy. 20

As a compulsive “cottager” in public lavatories, Driberg proved even easier to recruit than Vassall. Instead of being compromised by an elaborate SCD sexual entrapment, Driberg obligingly compromised himself. During his visit to Moscow he discovered, to his delight, “a large underground urinal just behind the Metropole Hotel, open all night, frequented by hundreds of questing Slav homosexuals—standing there in rigid exhibitionist rows, motionless save for the hasty grope and the anxious or beckoning glance over the shoulder—and tended only by an old woman cleaner who never seemed to notice what was going on.” 21If the cleaner failed to notice the distinguished British visitor to the urinal, the KGB undoubtedly did not. Among Driberg’s sexual partners on that or subsequent evenings in Moscow was an agent of the Second Chief Directorate. Soon afterward, Driberg was confronted with “compromising material” on his sexual encounters (probably photographs similar to those shown to Vassall) and recruited as agent LEPAGE. 22Somewhat absurdly, in view of the use of blackmail, Driberg’s file alleges that “ideological affinity,” going back to his teenage membership of the Communist Party, played a subsidiary part in his recruitment.

For the next twelve years, Driberg was used both as a source of inside information from the Labor National Executive and to promote active measures. 23The importance of his role within the Labor Party may well have been exaggerated by the Centre, especially after he became party chairman in 1957. “Even before he held this post, whose nature often misleads foreign observers,” writes the political commentator Alan Watkins, “Driberg was assumed by several Russian politicians to be leader of the Labor Party. This was on account partly of his great episcopal manner, and partly of his ability to get on well with Russians.” 24Driberg was, none the less, wonderfully placed to report to his controller on both the evolution of Labor policy and the rivalries within the Party leadership. His mixture of political information and gossip was so highly rated by the KGB that it was passed on to the Politburo. 25

Driberg’s first active measure as agent LEPAGE was the publication in 1956 of a disingenuous study of Guy Burgess which concluded that he had never been a Soviet agent. At the time Driberg was temporarily out of the Commons, working as a freelance journalist, seriously short of money and being hounded by his bank manager. The book on Burgess brought him more money than anything else in his writing career, including the then-astounding sum of 5,000 pounds for its serialization in the Daily Mail. 26After his initial meeting with Burgess in Moscow, Driberg went back to London, drafted in about a month a short biography entitled Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, then returned to Moscow to go through the proofs. “Presumably,” he wrote later, “Guy had shown each chapter to his colleagues or superiors.” 27The proofs, in other words, had been carefully vetted by the KGB.

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. 29Though 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