Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 October 1999
No sooner than it arrived, the spy mania that gripped the British media last month after the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive and the start of the BBC 2 series The Spying Game has disappeared into the ether.
After the Times blew the gaffe on Melita Norwood, the Stalinist granny who is alleged to have handed crucial British atomic secrets to her superiors in the KGB, every journalist in town wanted to jump on the bandwagon.
Allegation was piled upon allegation. Vic Allen, the creepy Stalinist academic who led the pro-Soviet faction in CND in the early eighties, was accused of grassing up fellow peace campaigners to the East German secret police. Other academics were alleged to have been recruited by the East Germans in the seventies and eighties.
More incredibly, the Labour MPs Tom Driberg and Ray Fletcher were reported to have been working for the KGB. So too – and here we are entering the realm of pernicious libel – were the former editor of this newspaper, Dick Clements, and, by implication, the former general secretary of CND, Bruce Kent.
But just as it seemed that the story was snowballing out of control, everyone lost interest. And a good thing too, you might think.
As plenty of people have pointed out, too many of the stories splashed all over the front pages last month were at best trivial or predictable (if true) and at worst of such dubious provenance as to make it almost certain that they were politically motivated smears.
In any case, 10 years after the Berlin Wall came down, there seems to be little point in reviving the paranoia of the cold war – particularly, in the minds of most editors, if there's a chance that m'learned friends might be called upon to fight libel actions by those wrongly accused of spying or informing for the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
Yet it would be a mistake to be too dismissive of the work behind the recent spate of allegations. The Mitrokhin Archive has undoubtedly been over-hyped.
As historical source material, its selections from the KGB files secreted away by Vasili Mitrokhin are tainted. Not only are intelligence and secret police files notoriously unreliable by their very nature (if only for the simple reason that the reports they contain were written by people with a vested interest in exaggerating their own successes); this lot has been filtered by British spooks to make sure nothing they want revealed will come out.
Nevertheless, with all due qualifications, there is much in the book that is new and important, in particular on the KGB's reliance on Western communist parties and its role in Eastern Europe as the Soviet system entered its death throes. (On Britain, incidentally, contrary to the impression given by the newspapers, the picture Mitrokhin and his co-author Christopher Andrew paint of the KGB's operations is largely one of incompetence and failure.)
Much the same is true of the work done by journalist David Rose for The Spying Game.
Although the series is open to criticism for exaggeration – for example of the importance of Vic Allen in CND – and for taking at face value the accounts given by spooks on both sides of their own influence on events, Rose has unveiled a lot of important material.
As one-time deputy editor of END Journal, the magazine of the European Nuclear Disarmament group, I am particularly struck what The Spying Game has revealed about the exhaustive information-gathering by communist states' intelligence agencies on everyone from the west involved in contact with dissident groups in the east.
END was set up in 1980 by Edward Thompson, Ken Coates and others to campaign for nuclear disarmament by both sides in the cold war, making a point of its opposition to Soviet nuclear arms and of its support for independent movements in the east to oppose them. Throughout the eighties, its activists visited Soviet bloc states, engaging dissidents in a dialogue about building a democratic demilitarised Europe.
We always knew we were kept under surveillance when we were over there, and most of us worked on the assumption that there were people in Britain who were prepared to pass on information about us to the eastern authorities.
But the people we mistrusted most were the dwindling band of British Stalinists – the Vic Aliens and Arthur Scargills – and the spooks employed by Soviet bloc embassies in London.
The more naive of us, myself included, did not imagine that there was a Stasi agent in the heart of our organisation who was passing even minor internal documents to headquarters in East Berlin.
Now, however, thanks to Rose's efforts, we know there was one. Precisely what happened to our friends and contacts as a direct result of that person's activities is impossible to tell for sure. But you don't have to succumb to the prevailing hysteria to wonder whether it might not have been extremely unpleasant.
