CIA tracked Corbyn links to Marxists in Latin America
AMERICAN spies kept records on trips made by Jeremy Corbyn to Latin America in the 1980s, declassified CIA files reveal.
The US intelligence agency noted how the Labour leader attended a conference in El Salvador organised by a Soviet-backed trade union.
Concerns were raised, according to archived documents, about links between The National Federation of Salvadoran Workers (Fenestras) and ‘Marxist-Leninist guerillas’, which the CIA warned were trying to oust the country’s government.
In November 1986, the US embassy in San Salvador sent a cable to Washington recording how Mr Corbyn had visited the country to attend the conference from the 8th to 17th of that month.
According to the file, which was declassified in 2013, Mr Corbyn also ‘endorsed Fenestras by allowing his name to be placed on a Fenestras newspaper ad’.
The news comes after days of headlines about Mr Corbyn’s activities during the Cold War.
He says claims he passed information to an agent of the Czech StB spy agency during the 1980s are ‘nonsense’.
US spies took an interest in Fenestras because of its ‘ close links’ to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which fought a civil war in the 1980s against the country’s Rightwing government using arms supplied by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
According to Mr Corbyn’s entry in the parliamentary register of member interests, his trip was ‘part funded by the El Salvador Solidarity Committee’.
In the same year he visited Cuba and Nicaragua ‘with some internal travel assistance from the Cuban Government’, as well as making another trip to El Salvador.
Mr Corbyn’s 1979 visit to Grenada is also noted. The Caribbean island was governed by a Marxist-Leninist leader at the time and had close links to Cuba.
This memos are among millions of the CIA’s historical records made available online.
Other documents uncovered in what was East Germany show how the former Soviet ally’s spies infiltrated an activist group Mr Corbyn helped lead.
Stasi agents targeted Labour Action for Peace in the 1980s because its members held antiAmerican and anti-Nato views, says a classified Stasi dossier. Mr Corbyn was an officer and vice president of the LAP in the 1980s, according to website Guido Fawkes which unearthed the document. He later became its president.
Earlier this week, officials responsible for the Stasi archives said Mr Corbyn was not named in any of their documents.
Yesterday a former British spy chief ducked questions on whether this country’s security services hold information on Mr Corbyn.
Asked about the row over Mr Corbyn’s alleged links with secret agents in the 1990s, Eliza Manningham-Buller,
‘Infiltrated an activist group’
the ex-MI5 director general, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I’m not going to talk about something that is so many years ago, allegedly, on which I have no knowledge at all.’
On the claims linking Mr Corbyn with agents of the former Soviet ally Czechoslovakia his office insisted any claim that he was ‘an agent, asset or informer for any intelligence agency is entirely false and a ridiculous smear’.
Files unearthed in the StB archives showed that Mr Corbyn met Czech agent Jan Sarkocy on at least three occasions – including twice in the Commons – during the 1980s and was codenamed Cob.