The Kremlin high society banquet... in Mayfair
A COUSIN of Prince Charles and a courtier to the Queen were guests at the launch of a Russian tsarist- era society accused of links to Vladimir Putin’s spies, it was revealed yesterday.
Colonel Christopher MackenzieBeevor, the most senior permanent officer of the Queen’s ceremonial bodyguard, gave a speech to the British branch of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IOPS).
Guests included Prince Charles’s cousin Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia, the Marquess of Bristol and former Conservative MP Lady Olga Maitland, who has previously told MI5 that a Russian KGB colonel once tried to recruit her.
The society, founded in 1882, celebrates ties between Russia and the Middle East, but has been accused of links to Russian intelligence.
Its international head, Sergei Stepashin, preceded Mr Putin as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and in 2008 a leaked US State Department cable said the IOPS was ‘not independent of the [Russian] government’. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a 2016 interview that the IOPS was ‘an essential instrument for consolidating Russia’s positions’. Last year the Greek government expelled two Russian diplomats accused of trying to bribe state officials and interfere in the country’s internal affairs in order to ‘impose the presence’ of IOPS in Greece. Russia denied the charges.
The chairman of the new British branch, Michael Wynne-Parker, a businessman who has previously worked with Prince Michael of Kent, said it was a religious and cultural organisation and he was ‘not aware’ of any intelligence links.
He told The Sunday Times that the dinner had brought together ‘members of the Establishment who are not persuaded that Russia is the enemy’, adding: ‘The idea that we are a den of Russian collaborators is crazy. The people involved here are of the highest integrity and are loyal subjects of the Queen.’
Col Mackenzie-Beevor told the newspaper he had spoken at the request of Mr Wynne-Parker.
There was no connection between the society and his position in the Royal Household, he added.
Andrew Foxall, director of the Russia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, said IOPS appeared to be a ‘Russian influence operation’.
He said: ‘This is one of the clearest cases I have seen of a Russian influence operation reaching the highest levels of British society.’
The dinner of the new British branch of the IOPS was held last month at the Cavalry and Guards Club in Mayfair, central London.
Guests including Moscow’s ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, dined on a menu of beetrootmarinated salmon, rump of lamb and a stem ginger cake with mango syrup, and a message of support from Mr Stepashin was read out.
Mr Yakovenko’s embassy was highly critical of Britain’s response to the novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury, Wiltshire, last year, when this country expelled 23 diplomats identified as undeclared intelligence officers.
Politicians yesterday called for an investigation into claims that Mr Yakovenko was expelled from the US in the 1980s following allegations that 100 diplomats at the Soviet Union’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York posed a threat to national security.
Arron Banks, a Leave donor, held three meetings with Mr Yakovenko in 2015 and 2016.
He has denied that any of the millions he spent on the Brexit campaign came from Russia.
‘Loyal subjects of the Queen’