Red Ken’s 10-day tour of USSR... organised by the KGB
KEN Livingstone last night admitted meeting a KGB spy posing as a journalist for a number of interviews in the 1980s – who even organised for him to go on a ten-day trip to Russia.
The former mayor of London said secret agents from the Soviet Union and its satellite states wanted to ‘sound out’ what he and ally Jeremy Corbyn would do if they ended up in power.
Mr Livingstone said ‘ from the moment’ he met the man posing as a Pravda journalist in September 1987, he suspected he was a KGB officer.
‘If he had asked me to do anything, I mean I would have said no,’ said Mr Livingstone. But he maintained contact, including visiting him at his London home, and went on a trip organised by him to Russia where he was shown around by a KGB guide.
Mr Livingstone, who was a Labour MP alongside Mr Corbyn at the time, said the Communist agents even ‘feared we were too left-wing’.
He told the Daily Mail: ‘When I got elected to Labour’s NEC (National Executive Commitfor tee) in 1987, suddenly there was all this stuff about how I might be leader of the party one day.
‘I think in talking to me or to Jeremy they were just sounding out what we might be like if we ended up in a major position.’
The veteran left-winger rejected allegations made at the weekend that he visited the Czechoslovakian embassy in London in the 1980s as ‘all b******s’.
But he said he did visit the Soviet Union embassy in London, where a diplomat told him: ‘We were very worried when you became leader of the GLC (Greater London Council in 1981) because of all the rumours you were a Trotskyist.’
Some years later, he said he was approached by a man called Yuri Sagadak, who it emerged was a KGB colonel.
He said: ‘He was interviewing me quite a lot, he organised a visit me to Russia. I suspected he was a spy from the moment he appeared, but it only came out when Thatcher threw him out in 1989.’ Asked why he kept meeting a man who he suspected to be KGB, Mr Livingstone said: ‘He basically turned up to interview me for his paper, I think I even once wrote an article for him.
‘You just deal with who comes. I think that what these people were doing was trying to suss out what we were.’
He said of the Russia trip: ‘It was very interesting, [but] it was endless bloody meetings. I think they were just collecting data about what we were all like, and they would have feared we were too left-wing.’
Jan Sarkocy, the Czechoslovakian spy who met Mr Corbyn in Parliament in 1986, claimed Mr Livingstone was a ‘good boy’ who visited his country’s embassy in London where he drank whisky.
Mr Livingstone yesterday branded Mr Sarkocy a ‘Czech nutter’. At the weekend, Mr Livingstone had claimed it was untrue because ‘whisky is not my drink of choice, it’s brandy’.
However, Mr Livingstone admitted drinking whisky while London mayor at a morning meeting at City Hall in 2007.
A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary showed Mr Livingstone swigging the drink at 10am.
After the meeting ended, an undercover reporter asked: ‘You must be punch drunk after that?’ Mr Livingstone responded: ‘It’s the whisky that keeps me going, otherwise I just cough.’
When the documentary aired in 2008, Mr Livingstone said: ‘The only way I can get through talking for two and a half hours with a severe cough or bronchitis is to use alcohol as an anaesthetic.’
‘I suspected he was a spy’