Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2010: . . . . The obituaries mentioned that, in 1995, Michael Foot won libel damages against The Sunday Times, for saying he had been an agent of the KGB during the Cold War. These accusations came from Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to Britain in 1985, our most important Cold War catch. Note that Foot did not sue Gordievsky for his book of memoirs (Next Stop Execution) from which the claims derived.
Some years ago, I discussed these claims with Gordievsky. He also told me about the even more serious accusations against Jack Jones, the most powerful trade union leader of the 1970s. After Jones died last year, Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5 confirmed that Jones had been a knowing KGB agent. Gordievsky was also proved right about other KGB contacts, such as Richard Gott, of The Guardian, who admitted that he had taken “Moscow gold”. Without the benefit of KGB and MI6 files, Gordievsky’s evidence is hard to corroborate, but his record is sound.
This week, Gordievsky gave me his full account. At the end of the 1940s, he said, when Foot was editor and managing director of the Left-wing paper Tribune (he continued in the latter role until 1974), the KGB decided that he was “progressive”. By this they meant that he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, at that time run by the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. Their officers in London, describing themselves as diplomats, approached Foot. He readily agreed to see them in Tribune’s offices. There they chatted to him and praised the paper, which was always short of money. They left a £10 note (about £250 in today’s values) in his jacket pocket.
For nearly 20 years, these meetings continued, roughly monthly. Foot did not conceal them, exactly, but they were not publicly known. He accepted the money, which was slipped into his pocket in a way which allowed him to ignore it, each time the KGB came. Foot freely disclosed information about the Labour movement to them. He told them which politicians and trade union leaders were pro-Soviet, even suggesting which union bosses should be given the present of Soviet-funded holidays on the Black Sea.
A leading supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Foot also passed on what he knew about debates over nuclear weapons. In return, the KGB gave him drafts of articles encouraging British disarmament which he could then edit and publish, unattributed to their real source, in Tribune. There was no protest by Foot to the KGB over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and he quite often visited the Soviet Union to a top-level welcome. The KGB classified him as an agent, codenamed BOOT. . . . .
Next Stop Execution
KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 205–National Security Policy and Counterintelligence Implications of Denial and Deception Practices
