Hang out with Czech spies, Jeremy? We’ve all done that
NIGHT was falling in communist Prague, and my wife and I were lost and worried. The low-grade Warsaw Pact map wasn’t much use and we were not even sure we were on the right tram. I’ll explain how we came to be there later, because it is important, but you’ll understand how pleased and relieved we were when a young man with perfect English offered to help us.
He wouldn’t leave us. He became, in a way, our friend. When our spartan hotel claimed to have lost our reservation, he sorted it out. By that time the restaurant was shut, so he took us out to dinner in a place we’d never have found, though I could have done without the pounding hangover I had the next day from the Bohemian wine.
He kept turning up. He even drove us out to Lidice, the village destroyed by the Nazis as a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. He worked, he assured us, for a Prague newspaper. But he hinted that he was assigned to menial roles because he was considered politically unreliable, a story designed to appeal to us. I was an ex-Leftist, but by that time strongly pro-Nato, pro-Bomb and anti-Soviet.
My wife, far quicker at picking these things up than I am, said from the start that he was a spy. I simply didn’t think that we merited such attention. She was right. As it happens we met plenty of other Czechs, and indeed some charming Cubans and an East German, all of them genuinely pleased to see Westerners in their dark, oppressed part of the world. This was 1978.
I will never forget the man who, with tears in his eyes, rapidly told us in a hushed voice how much the BBC’s then marvellous World Service radio broadcasts meant to him.
But our friend (I’ve entirely forgotten his name) wasn’t like them. He was too good to be true. And once we got home, I started getting odd, suspicious letters from him, asking for details of life in Britain.
I suspected that, had I answered them, they might have ended up being published in Czech papers, in some compromising way. I don’t know. But I have little doubt that a file on our long-ago visit has been mouldering for years in some cellar in Prague, perhaps near the one about Jeremy Corbyn.
We were there because we were adventurous about travel, and also because we had been urged to go by a very remarkable and rather fearsome woman – Evelyn Jones, wife of the trade union leader Jack Jones.
The Joneses (this is all so long ago I feel free to tell about it) had long been friends and neighbours of my wife’s parents, who were themselves veteran Leftists. As it happened they, too, had a nasty experience in Prague in the early 1950s, nearly getting into serious trouble for openly criticising a show trial then under way.
They all seemed to know and take for granted the fact that Evelyn Jones had spent much of the 1930s as a courier for Stalin’s international communist organisation, the Comintern, carrying gold and messages to the West. The Kremlin had paid for her to wear expensive clothes and stay in the best hotels, because wealthy travellers were so much less likely to be searched.
And one evening she told us: ‘You must go to Prague. I have such good memories of Prague. And it hasn’t really changed. It is the last surviving great European city of the 1930s unwrecked by war.’
And so we did. And she was right. It was thrilling. But what really matters about this? Was I targeted? Was it serious, or was it merely the old story of security men trying to make themselves look big by exaggerating the importance of those they follow and try to recruit?
THE real story was that of Jack Jones, who has now been (in my view falsely) accused of taking money from the KGB. I’ve no idea what he did with it, if so. He lived until his death in a small council flat, and took his holidays in a caravan in Devon. Power was the thing he longed for, not cash.
On the other hand I am more or less certain that Jack Jones was, in his heart and possibly in some secret filing cabinet, a serious lifelong communist. And, thanks to the fuzzy, unpatrolled border that lies on the eastern edges of the Labour Party, he was able to get the enormous power he sought. In fact, there was a time, especially in the 1970s, when the communists had an influence over our government wholly out of proportion to their size, thanks to their brilliantly organised penetration of the trade union movement.
That all ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. It was replaced by an equally concerted and far more dangerous takeover by Eurocommunists, smooth 1960s revolutionaries in expensive suits, who wanted and got a war against the married family, who destroyed MI5’s files on the student Left, who wanted and got mass immigration and the handover of our independence to the EU, and who now run the country (and the Tory Party, too) because most people still don’t understand what’s going on.
They are the Blairites, supposedly so nice.
That’s the problem. There really are conspiracies, such as the one the Joneses were in... gold, secret messages, agents of influence and all. And they really work. But it’s a positive disadvantage to know about them. People will just mock you as a conspiracy theorist, laugh, and get on with their lives. Which is just what the secret revolutionaries hope you will do.