Lest we forget, Fleet Street’s other red mole
ONE of the most notorious KGB agents to work in Fleet Street was The Guardian’s Richard Gott, pictured right.
He resigned from the Left-wing paper in 1994 after being revealed as an ‘agent of influence’, a tag he denied, having been recruited by the KGB. Gott did, though, admit ‘culpable stupidity’.
He had joined the paper as a leader writer and held numerous other influential positions such as features editor and foreign news editor.
Winchester and Oxford-educated Gott admitted meeting the KGB and accepting what he called ‘red gold’.
Chillingly, he seemed to treat such traitorous work as a joke. He said: ‘I rather enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere which will be familiar to anyone who has read the spy stories of the Cold War.’
His contacts with the Kremlin dated back to 1964 and it wasn’t until 1994 that he was exposed — to the horror of the paper’s then editor, the genuinely incorruptible Peter Preston.
Gott explained that he had first been contacted by the Soviet embassy while working at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He was taken for lunches in ‘distant suburbs’.
Gott’s cover was blown when the Spectator magazine accused him of holding secret meetings with the KGB and gave precise details of how he was remunerated by his KGB case officers (including a ‘welcome back’ payment after a period of inactivity). Gott confessed only to having taken expenses-paid trips to Athens, Nicosia and Vienna to meet a Soviet intelligence operative.
Pathetically, he described the Spectator’s allegations as ‘tactical slime from the archives’.
In fact he was a lifelong supporter of the
hard Left, once writing of his ‘simple belief that Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung were admirable men who had been doing interesting things’. While a reporter in South America, in 1967 he had been at the scene of the death of fellow Marxist Che Guevara and broke the story.
According to Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel formerly based in London who defected from the Soviet Union, Gott was one of ‘fewer than ten’ so-called ‘agents of influence’ recruited in Britain by the KGB. According to Gordievsky, Gott received at least £10,000 in cash, not just the lunches and free travel that he admitted.
No wonder Guardian colleagues called him ‘Gott the Trot’ and ‘Pol Gott’.
In a delicious irony, Jeremy Corbyn, who in recent days has been at the centre of stories about meeting a Soviet spy in the Eighties, employs Seumas Milne as Labour’s director of communications.
Like Gott, Milne went to Winchester College and the University of Oxford, and was for many years a senior figure at The Guardian.
A communist sympathiser from his schooldays, Milne began at The Guardian in 1984 and later defended Gott after he confessed to meeting KGB officials and taking money from a Soviet spy, saying that the allegations ‘seemed absurd’.