Charles Moore:

Labour has a long history of loving the enemies of the West and the ideology still burns bright

This week, a gripping new book – The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre – tells the full story of Oleg Gordievsky, Britain’s most important double agent of the Cold War. Gordievsky, who worked for the KGB, was recruited by MI6 in 1974. From 1982, he worked in London, becoming KGB station head (“rezident”). In 1985, his bosses grew suspicious and recalled him to Moscow. Thence, thanks to MI6’S daring, he was “exfiltrated” – the only successful such escape from the Soviet Union.

The tale is not completely new. Indeed, it was told by Gordievsky himself in his book Next Stop Execution, published in 1995. But sometimes people do not want to hear history. In 1995, we in the West were basking in the New World Order we had created after Soviet Communism collapsed in 1989-91. Life had become easy. We did not care to read about when it had been hard.

In 2018, it is different. This is the age of the New World Disorder, and an EX-KGB man, Vladimir Putin, is master of the mayhem. His successors are

doing their bit for him. Their attempt to murder the Skripals in Salisbury is the most recent and lurid example. There is reason to suppose they want to murder Gordievsky too. Thirty-three years on, he still has to be protected.

A further relevant factor today is that the leader of the Labour Party is a steadfast supporter of the powers which oppose Britain and the United States, notably Putin’s Russia. Jeremy Corbyn has appeared on the Kremlin’s RT television station several times. He has a good chance of being our next prime minister. We naturally want to know what he thinks about people who try to kill our friends on our soil. So far, he has refused to link the Skripal poisonings to those ultimately responsible.

There is another reason why Gordievsky’s story did not reach as many people in 1995 as I hope it will in Macintyre’s version today. It ran into legal challenges. The Sunday Times, which serialised the book, had to pay damages to Michael Foot, the former Labour leader. Gordievsky had written that, from the end of the Forties until 1968, Foot had passed information to the KGB and in return received cash.

Since Gordievsky’s information derived from secret sources – he had studied the KGB’S files on Foot (whom they called Agent Boot) in Moscow – he could not produce public proof. Nor could he produce MI6 officers to support his claims in court since this would compromise their secret roles. The Sunday Times believed its story but had to pay Foot damages. I noticed at the time, however, that Gordievsky himself was not sued, as if Foot feared a court learning what he knew.

Working on my authorised

biography of Margaret Thatcher a few years later, I met Gordievsky. Mrs Thatcher considered “Mr Collins” (the pseudonym by which, at first, she knew him) uniquely important. He had conveyed very high-level political, as well as operational, information to Britain about Soviet intentions.

Thanks to Gordievsky, she felt, we had come more fully to understand the nature of Soviet nuclear fears in the early Eighties. And when she exclaimed to her advisers, “For heaven’s sake, try and find me a young Russian” who would change his country’s attitude to itself and the West, it was Gordievsky – working ostensibly for them, but actually for us – who explained “young” Mikhail Gorbachev to Britain and, with MI6 help, subtly indicated Britain’s attitudes to Gorbachev. When she first met Gorbachev in their historic encounter at Chequers in December 1984, she already had the benefit of Gordievsky’s information. By covertly fighting the Cold War for us, she believed, he had helped us win it peacefully.

While Mrs Thatcher was staying with the Queen at Balmoral in 1985, she was asked to authorise Operation Pimlico – the daring scheme to smuggle Gordievsky over the Finnish border in the boot of a car. She consented, and followed his escape with characteristically intense anxiety. To her, he was heroic.

I found Gordievsky an intelligent, accurate witness. I was fascinated by his Michael Foot story, although it was not, strictly speaking, relevant to my book, because the British “deep state” (otherwise known as Sir Robert Armstrong) had decided that it should not tell Mrs Thatcher about Foot’s past,

since this might embroil espionage in party politics. Armstrong’s tactic paid off because, two years before Gordievsky escaped, she had crushed Foot at the general election of 1983. Mrs Thatcher considered Foot an honourable man. While in office, she never learnt the facts which might have caused her to revise her judgment.

Listening to Gordievsky, I found it hard to sustain her kindly view. Almost nothing is certain in the murky world of espionage, but I noticed that Gordievsky’s other claims – about the trade union leader Jack Jones, for example, and the Guardian journalist Richard Gott – were borne out by events. When Foot died in 2010, thus passing beyond the protection of the libel laws, I wrote in this column about what Gordievsky had told me.

For many years after the war, as well as being an MP, Foot was editor, then managing director of the Left-wing magazine Tribune. Successive KGB men would give him lunch at the once-famous Gay Hussar restaurant. He would give them information about politics, Labour movement figures sympathetic to the Soviet Union and suchlike. They would slip money into his coat pocket – £10 on the first occasion, which would be more than £330 today. Probably he passed it on to Tribune rather than helping himself. Over the years, the sums totted up to £37,000 in modern values. Foot never commented on the gifts, but never refused them.

Accepting Soviet money in this way was a classic trap. Foot was now classified by the KGB as an “agent of influence”. This did not mean he was a traitor under orders, but it did show he was prepared to use his important

position to procure secret information to help the Soviets. Foot sustained this for roughly 20 years, stopping only after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was too much even for him. He had been, to use Lenin’s famous phrase, a “useful idiot”. If his behaviour had been known, it would have immediately made him unelectable. Luckily, in 1983, the voters took that view without having that information. If they had not done so, Gordievsky would have risked his life for Britain only to find himself serving a prime minister with a tendresse for the other side.

Some obloquy was piled on my head for what I wrote in 2010, but no serious refutation was attempted. It will be interesting to see what they try on with Macintyre.

Foot displayed extraordinary vanity if he thought he could have such dealings with a hostile, totalitarian power and remain untainted. He was a part of that phenomenon, quite common in the mid-20th century, which did not support Britain against its enemies, and opposed dictatorship only if it was fascist. When he first took “Moscow gold”, his ultimate paymaster was Joseph Stalin, Hitler’s equal in mass murder.

This is not all just ancient history. Significant, indeed growing elements of the Left in Britain get their inner energy from supporting the enemies of the West. Mr Corbyn seems positively proud of doing so. People like him lost the Cold War but, as Marxists love saying, “The struggle continues”.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion