US spy chiefs kept tabs on Corbyn visits to Marxist states

THE CIA took an interest in Jeremy Corbyn’s visits to countries with Marxist regimes in the same period that he was being courted by a Communist spy in London, declassified files show.

The US spy agency made references to Mr Corbyn visiting El Salvador and Grenada in his days as a backbench MP.

The files form part of a cache of documents that show deep concern within the CIA about the Labour Party in general during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

Mr Corbyn was not the only Labour MP the CIA was keeping tabs on; Neil Kinnock, then the Labour leader, crops up almost 40 times in the files.

In 1986, the US embassy in San Salvador cabled Washington with details of Mr Corbyn’s attendance at a conference of the El Salvador trade union Fenastras. The union was described as being connected to Marxist guerillas fighting the Us-backed military government in the country’s civil war, as well as being connected to the World Federation of Trade Unions, considered a Soviet front. The cable said “British Labor MP Jeremy Corbyn” had allowed his name to be used on a Fenastras newspaper advert.

Mr Corbyn’s trip to El Salvador from Nov 8-17 that year, according to his entry in the parliamentary register of members’ interests, 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 a second trip to El Salvador.

Mr Corbyn’s name also appears on a CIA global media monitoring list from 1984, referring to a visit he made in 1979 to Grenada. The island was governed by a Marxist-leninist leader at the time.

The Czechoslovakian secret service, the STB, also had a file on Mr Corbyn in the Eighties, when one of its Londonbased spies met the future Labour leader, describing him as a “very, very good source”. Mr Corbyn denies knowingly meeting spies during the Cold War or passing information to them.

MI5 also kept a file on Mr Corbyn because of concerns over his links to the IRA.