Barbara Castle primed for communist honey trap bid by ‘gentle Italian flower’
BARBARA CASTLE was targeted in a honey trap by a Communist spy she described as a “gentle Italian flower”, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The Labour firebrand was wined and dined by Renato Proni, who under the code name Andrej had pledged allegiance to the Czechoslovakian secret police and who boasted in Prague that he thought he could seduce her.
It is not believed that Baroness Castle succumbed to his advances, but the pair became “very close” and the relationship was frowned upon by others, intelligence documents unearthed by this newspaper reveal.
The married MP, who went on to hold a succession of Cabinet posts under Harold Wilson and was targeted because of her connections, is the latest in a series of senior Labour figures revealed to have had contact with spies from the Soviet bloc.
Among them are Jeremy Corbyn, the current party leader, who met with an agent of the Statni Bezpecnost (STB), the Czechoslovakian secret police, in the late Eighties and Geoffrey Robinson, the paymaster general under Tony Blair, who met an agent in the late Sixties. Both men have strenuously denied that they passed on any confidential information. Michael Foot has also been accused by a KGB defector of being an “agent of influence” for the Russians, code name Boot.
Documents in the archives of the STB, seen by The Telegraph, also reveal that Czech agents met with Stan Orme, later a Cabinet minister, and Alf Lomas, who became the party’s leader in the European Parliament.
In the file relating to Lady Castle – given the code name Monika – there is a memorandum that details her contact with Proni in the early Fifties, which was distributed among a number of intelligence agents. Summarising what they had been told by Proni, the documents note that they had discussed Italian socialism and Marxism and she had already visited the Soviet Union on two occasions.
Proni “argues that her enemy is capitalism and not communism”, it says.
Their relationship is both official in parliament, the files say, “and of more friendly nature – in cafés and also in her hotel rooms, where she stayed during this year’s campaign in Blackburn, where Andrej visited her”.
But it warned that this meant “a lot for rapprochement” for them.
“Andrej drove her to election meetings, discussed with her a lot and they got very close, saying that she introduced him to her friends very cordially, calling him a ‘gentle Italian flower’,” the Czech agents say.
She is said to have discussed that she likes “dancing and wine” but doesn’t “enjoy her husband much”.
Edward Castle was at the time the editor of Picture Post and Lady Castle confided in Proni that they rarely saw each other at home and he was always using their new car, a Ford Consul.
The Italian spy had been ordered to start an intimate relationship with her and she was “cordial” with him, it says. The memorandum is not dated, but noted that she had been elected three times and that Proni had been instructed to “consolidate” his relationship with her at the conference in Margate. This would suggest it was written around 1953, when Clement Attlee held his party’s annual conference in the town at the end of September.
It describes her as a “Left-leaning” Bevanite and a member of the National Executive Committee who was well informed about foreign policy.
Lady Castle, who had married Baron Castle in 1944, had worked for Sir Stafford Cripps and was then working for Harold Wilson, it noted.
The document states: “As her fast progress shows and based on the testimony of Andrej, she is a self-confident and ambitious woman, who confided in him with the intention of getting a leading position in the Foreign Office in case of victory of the Labour party.”
Her financial situation is also poured over, and she supplements her salary of £30 a week with newspaper articles that Proni also asks him to write for her at £15 a piece.
Proni had signed a pledge vowing to co-operate with the Communist state spooks and to “expose plans and intentions of the imperialists”.
Svetlana Ptacnikova, the director of the STB archive, told The Telegraph she had seen no evidence that Lady Castle, who died in 2002, spied for the Czechs and she may not have known that Proni was a spy.
‘They got very close ... she introduced him to her friends very cordially’