No, we didn’t try to recruit teen Cameron as spy, say KGB
‘Agents’ were gays on the pick-up!
WHEN he was 19, David Cameron is fond of telling, the KGB tried to recruit him as a Cold War spy during his gap-year travels in the Soviet Union.
But yesterday the Kremlin claimed the two men Mr Cameron thought were Russian spies were in fact just a couple of dodgy salesmen.
A Moscow newspaper went on to suggest that Mr Cameron and his Eton travelling friend had simply been the target of a gay pick-up attempt.
The bizarre twist to the tale was published in a pro-Kremlin newspaper, which claimed Mr Cameron was actually a ‘trainee MI6 spy’ at the time of his 1985 journey across the Soviet Union. The Prime Minister first told his KGB tale in 2006 on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs, saying: ‘I met a great friend in Moscow.
‘We went down to the Black Sea and were on the beach in Yalta. These two Russians who spoke perfect English sort of turned up on the beach, which was mainly reserved for foreign tourists, and took us out to dinner, and interrogated us in a very friendly way about life in England and politics.’
The two were ‘obviously very careful and guarded in what we said, but later on when I got to university my politics tutor [ Oxford Professor Vernon Bogdanor] said that was a definite attempt at recruitment.’
However yesterday, Russia’s biggest-selling newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda – a mouthpiece of President Vladimir Putin – said the story was untrue. The newspaper quoted Gennady Sokolov, a Russian intelligence historian, who said he had been assured by highlevel secret service sources that there had been no bid to recruit the future Tory leader.
He said: ‘If the KGB had a task to work with a 19-year-old unknown young man, then there would have remained certain paperwork on this matter.
‘We have cautiously asked well-informed people if there is a file on Cameron in KGB archives. We got a definite reply that there is no such file in the archives. The KGB was not working on Cameron.’
Mr Sokolov claims to have tracked down the two men who approached the Old Etonians on the beach.
He said: ‘The pair planned to buy some foreign stuff like jeans to resell them later, and to make friends with two nice-looking British guys, there was also a gay motive.’
He added: ‘There are grounds to suppose that young Cameron got his chance to enjoy such an exotic trip with the help of MI6.’
‘No such file in the archives’