BETRAYAL OF THE LEFT
New Times, November 1999
The recent outburst of spy mania needs to be taken with a large dose of salt, writes Paul Anderson. But we should resist the notion that Soviet intelligence agents in Britain were harmless saps
It almost goes without saying that you have to be highly sceptical about the recent spate of hysteria in the media about British subjects who acted – or are alleged to have acted – as agents and informers for Soviet bloc intelligence services during the latter stages of the cold war.
After the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin and the screening of David Rose’s BBC Two series The Spying Game, newspaper editors fell over one another in the rush to publish juicy tales of intrigue and deception, taking little care to ensure the veracity of their sources.
Some of the claims that appeared are outrageous smears – in particular the suggestions that Dick Clements and Bruce Kent were “agents of influence”.
Clements, as editor of Tribune from 1959 to 1982, certainly had contacts among Soviet bloc embassy staff whom he knew were intelligence officers – just like scores of other journalists, myself included. (My contact at the Czech embassy, Jan Sarkocy, was thrown out of the country for espionage in 1989.) He also encouraged Soviet bloc press agencies to advertise in his cash-strapped paper. We did the same when I was Tribune’s reviews editor in the late 1980s.
But the idea that he was an “agent of influence”, as claimed by the Sunday Times, is preposterous. Journalists are public figures by definition. Their “influence” comes down to what they write or, as editors, publish by other writers. And Clements is, and always has been, a democratic socialist with libertarian leanings.