Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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. 31Together 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.” 32Driberg 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. 35Frolik claimed that the StB had been warned off by the KGB on the grounds that Driberg was “their man.” 36Mitrokhin’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, 37he 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.” 40If, 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. 41Wilson’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. 42There 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. 43According to his KGB file, one of the firms with which Wilson was involved breached the COCOM embargo on “strategic” exports. 44Wilson’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.” 45The 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. 47Wright went on to devise several conspiracy theories of his own, among them the claim that thirty MI5 officers later conspired against Harold Wilson. 48