BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.