SPY WHO SAID DAVE ASKED KGB TO GET HIM DRUGS
AS DAVID CAMERON and an Eton schoolfriend sunbathed on a beach in the Crimea, they were approached by two older Russian men who spoke perfect English.
After chatting, the Russians asked the 1 -year-olds out to dinner — a feast of caviar and sturgeon accompanied by large quantities of vodka. This alone was odd: in 19 5, few Soviet citizens could have afforded such luxuries.
But young Cameron — travelling in Russia on his gap year — was uneasy about the turn the conversation took. Why did their hosts, who claimed to work in a local hotel, encourage them to criticise Mrs Thatcher and Britain?
Much later, in 2006, Cameron mentioned this peculiar encounter in Yalta when he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The men who had met him and his friend Anthony Griffith, he speculated, had probably been KGB agents. But were they trying to recruit him? My co-author and I decided to investigate. The Kremlin dismissed Cameron’s suggestion, claiming the men were notorious homosexuals.
But KGB veterans and intelligence experts told a different story. As soon as he’d applied for a visa, Cameron had almost certainly attracted attention from the authorities, not least because of his high- level family connections. His godmother, Fiona Aird, was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, and her husband, Sir Alastair, was Comptroller of the Queen Mother’s Household.
The two Russians, we found, were not locals and most probably had come from the KGB headquarters in Moscow. So what did they hope to achieve? The most compelling explanation — advanced by a retired spy — is that Cameron and his friend were being used by the KGB as part of a routine training exercise.
‘I am pretty certain there was no thought of recruitment,’ said the former spy. ‘These boys were straight out of school, and theirs was hardly an academy that produced ardent Communists.’ The two Russians were probably already destined to be posted to London, and were ‘trying to
get a hook on the British’. Or was there more to it?
We found a hitherto unnoticed interview with an individual who claimed to be one of Cameron’s mysterious hosts in a 2011 Russian weekly paper.
He was Igor Kuznetsov, who later became a KGB colonel. According to him, the dinner had been a recruitment attempt. Not only that, but it had involved a ‘swallow’ — spy jargon for an alluring female.
‘At first, there were only men,’ recalled Kuznetsov . ‘After the fifth glass of wine, a girl of fantastic beauty joined us. Her name was Oksana. She was the best “swallow” of the Yalta KGB office. We drank a lot that day. The black caviar was very much appreciated by the young aristocrats [sic].
‘But provocative Oksana, with her large breasts, did not attract them. The boys were more interested in a slim girl called Valery, an Intourist interpreter who was also in the KGB.
‘Oksana was the first to leave — she felt offended by the lack of male attention. Then we carried deadly-drunk Griffith to his room.
‘David Cameron kept going, but asked us to find some “grass” for him or maybe something stronger. We promised to do it the next day.’ However, his KGB bosses, Kuznetsov claimed, refused to let him supply Cameron with any narcotics, and decided to abandon any recruitment attempt.
Afterwards, he said, a Soviet intelligence chief based in London reviewed the incident.
‘In London, apparently, the Soviet resident considered Cameron to have no prospects: “Young man, likes drugs, he won’t go too far in his career.” As we see now, the Soviet intelligence resident made a serious mistake.’
Was Kuznetsov telling the truth about his encounter with Cameron? We may never know: two years ago, he took all his secrets with him to the grave.