Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Probably the most ambitious scheme devised by the London residency during the 1970s for the recruitment of a prominent agent of influence was targeted on Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, the socialist Bishop of Southwark. 61In October 1975 Stockwood delivered a public protest against a “Call to the Nation,” jointly issued by Archbishop Donald Coggan of Canterbury and Archbishop Stuart Blanch of York, claiming that it put too much emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and too little on the social injustices which caused so much human misery. The most remarkable feature of Stockwood’s protest, however, was that he chose to make it in the pages of the Communist Morning Star, and that he included in it an extraordinary tribute to the Soviet Bloc:

Those of us who have visited Socialist counties in Europe know that if a Communist government were to be established in Britain the West End would be cleared up overnight, and the ugly features of our permissive society would be changed within a matter of days. And heaven help the porn merchants and all engaged in the making of fortunes through the commercial exploitation of sex. 62

Sixteen Labor MPs signed a motion “marveling at the innocence” of Stockwood’s understanding of Communist regimes. Another fifty backbenchers supported a motion supporting the archbishops against his criticisms. One told the Guardian, “The Marxists seem now to have penetrated the higher echelons of the established Church.” 63The Soviet embassy, possibly on the initiative of the residency, established what a KGB file describes as “close contact” with Stockwood.

Hopes in the residency of the bishop’s potential for active measures reached their peak when he arranged a dinner party with Gordon McLennan, general secretary of the British Communist Party, as guest of honor, to which, apparently, at least one Soviet official (who, unknown to Stockwood, was a KGB officer) was also invited. 64Though Mitrokhin’s note on the dinner is tantalizingly brief, it seems to have been a boisterous evening. Stockwood frequently drank heavily at dinner parties to the extent that his friend Princess Margaret sometimes feared for the furniture at Kensington Palace. 65Over dinner Stockwood asked McLennan what the Communist Party thought about the Church of England. McLennan replied that the Church was a “moral force in society,” but regretted that, “Unlike before and during the War, we do not see members of the clergy at progressive meetings and demonstrations.” Stockwood retorted, “We also don’t see you at demonstrations at the Soviet embassy!” 66The residency seems to have concluded reluctantly that the Bishop’s tendency to launch into criticisms of the Soviet Union rendered him unsuitable for active measures.

THE EXAMPLES OF active measures noted by Mitrokhin suggest that the residency, in its reports to the Centre, sought to inflate a series of mostly modest successes. A characteristic example was its attempt to claim the credit for an article in the Guardian by Richard Gott (codenamed RON) attacking the role of the CIA in the overthrow of the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973, and denouncing the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet which had seized power after Allende’s death. 67Gott later denied reports that he had been a KGB agent, but acknowledged that after the Chilean coup he had been contacted by Yuri Mikhailovich Solonitsyn (who he later realized was a KGB officer) and had “quite a sort of interesting session” with him on Chile, as well as a series of subsequent meetings with both Solonitsyn and Igor Victorovich Titov (also a KGB officer). 68While the details of Gott’s articles may sometimes have been influenced by “interesting sessions” with Solonitsyn and Titov, his support for revolutionary movements in Latin America and loathing for American “imperialism” were so well established that he would have required little encouragement from the KGB to denounce either Pinochet or the CIA. 69

The London residency was equally prone to exaggerate its influence in the House of Commons. It tried to take the credit, for example, for the following parliamentary question put by the Labor MP James Lamond to Fred Mulley, Secretary of State for Defense in the Callaghan government, on February 21, 1978:

Does my right honorable friend agree that to deploy the neutron bomb in western Europe must lower the threshold of nuclear war? Does he accept that President Brezhnev was in earnest when he said in the Kremlin [ Conservative shouts of “Were you there?”] that the Soviet Union would develop similar weapons at enormous cost, if the neutron bomb were placed in western Europe? That would be a cost that neither the Warsaw Pact nor NATO could afford and would serve only unnecessarily to increase the enormous arms expenditure of the world. 70

There is absolutely no evidence that James Lamond had any conscious link with the KGB. He was, however, vice-president of the World Peace Council (WPC) and appears not to have realized that this was the leading Soviet front organization, devoted to pinning all the blame for the nuclear arms race on Western warmongering. 71Lamond’s parliamentary question, which received a noncommittal reply, derived from a much larger WPC campaign against the neutron bomb rather than from a brilliant initiative by the London residency.

The Centre usually responded relatively uncritically to exaggerated claims by residencies of the success of their active measures. It suited the Centre as much as the London residency to be able to inform the Politburo that it was able to inspire questions in the House of Commons and articles in the Guardian.

Despite Line PR’s attempts to inflate the importance of its active measures, it also had some undoubted successes. The Observer and the New Statesman were among a number of British print media taken in during the early 1980s by forged anti-American and anti-South African documents fabricated by Service A. 72The Observer printed a bogus memorandum from the Zaire security council under the headline, “US and S. Africa in Angola Plot.” 73The New Statesman published a forged letter from South African military intelligence to Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN, conveying its “gratitude” and referring to a birthday present sent to her “as a token of appreciation.” 74As late as 1986, the conservative Sunday Express based its main front page story on reports (also concocted by Service A) that the AIDS virus had originally been developed as part of an American biological warfare program. 75Claims that KGB active measures had succeeded in producing significant shifts in British opinion, however, were based on little more than wishful thinking.

The KGB’s shortage of major agents in the British media helps to explain why it chose a Danish rather than a British journalist, Arne Herløv Petersen (codenamed KHARLEV and PALLE) for its first major active measure against Margaret Thatcher after she became prime minister in 1979. Originally a confidential contact of the Copenhagen residency, Petersen had been invited to Moscow in the mid-1970s to “deepen the relationship.” 76Thereafter he was regularly used as an agent of influence not merely to write articles along lines suggested by his case officers but to publish, also under his own name, articles and pamphlets written in English by Service A. The first of the KGB/Petersen co-productions attacking Thatcher was a 1979 pamphlet, entitled Cold Warriors, which gave her pride of place as Europe’s leading anti-Soviet crusader. The next Petersen pamphlet ghostwritten by Service A, True Blues, published in 1980, was solely devoted to an onslaught on Thatcher. It made the mistake of attempting satire—a weak area of the KGB’s usually heavy-handed active measures—and carried the feeble subtitle “The Thatcher that Couldn’t Mend her own Roof.” The Service A author had an even feebler grasp of English geography, believing Mrs. Thatcher’s birthplace of Grantham in Lincolnshire to be “in the suburbs of London.” Though the Centre appears to have been curiously proud of them, both pamphlets (probably intended chiefly for mailing to British “opinion-formers”) had negligible influence. 77