A Cold War Traitor in Britain: Labour Member of Parliament Tom Driberg

Tom Driberg and Guy Burgess in Moscow, 1956

Tom Driberg was a journalist who served as a British Member of Parliament (MP) almost continuously from 1942 to 1974, with a small gap from 1955 to 1959. For twenty years before being elected to the House of Commons, Driberg had been a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. After leaving the Communist Party, he joined the Labour Party in 1945. From 1956 to 1968, Driberg was a formally recruited KGB agent. Driberg’s life in general elucidates numerous social and political trends in twentieth-century Britain and the wider West, and his treasonous work for the Soviets is an interesting window onto the influence the Soviet Union exerted over sections of the Western Left during the long Cold War.

EARLY LIFE IN SERVICE TO THE SOVIET UNION

Thomas Driberg was born on 22 May 1905 in Sussex, the late-life youngest child of a middle-class family. Driberg’s father, a former civil servant and police chief in India, was 65 at the time of Driberg’s birth. In 1920, Driberg joined the newly founded Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), an entity entirely under the control of Soviet intelligence. After leaving Oxford University without a degree in 1927, Driberg became a gossip columnist for The Daily Express in 1933, at age 28. There is a glaring contradiction in Driberg, a revolutionary socialist, working for the Express, the largest-circulation newspaper in the world at the time, owned by the Conservative peer Lord Beaverbrook. The question is whom Driberg was deceiving.

Driberg departed from the CPGB in early 1941 and seems to have been expelled. Some have argued that this was because his comrades discovered he was an MI5 infiltrator, and point to Driberg working at the Express as evidence his loyalties were with the British establishment.¹ The sourcing for these claims is extremely thin, though it has not stopped them being widely repeated. It is conceivable, indeed quite likely, that some of Driberg’s comrades in the CPGB believed he was a British intelligence agent, which is where these stories seem to come from.

In the 1930s, the Communist movement’s perceived “anti-fascism” drew in many ideological recruits. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, under which Hitler and Stalin initiated the Second World War the next month, had been a shock to many of these recruits. In tandem with the turmoil in Moscow Centre because of Yezhovshchina, morale and simple communications deteriorated in the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Nonetheless, many Soviet agents were so thoroughly indoctrinated they were capable of the necessary doublethink to maintain their loyalty to the myth-image of the Soviet workers’ paradise leading humanity into a Progressive future.² There were exceptions and Driberg was—it must be said in his favour—one of them. Driberg denounced the Pact and supported Britain going to war with the then-Soviet-allied Nazi Germany.

A measure of the sheer mania that overtook the Centre in this period is that for a year, starting in February 1940, the KGB’s predecessor cut contact with the Magnificent Five (Velikolepnaya Pyaterka)—the Cambridge spy ring that has a good claim to be the Soviets’ most successful intelligence operation—because they suspected their loyalties.³ Even after things calmed down a bit at the Centre, with the deceleration of the purges and Stalin finally ridding himself of the great heretic Leon Trotsky in August 1940, Soviet intelligence remained prey to conspiracy theories. In June 1941, Hitler turned on Stalin, invading the Soviet Union. The resulting geopolitical shift brought Britain and the United States into alliance with the Nazis’ former Soviet accomplice in a manner so naively trusting that in 1943 Stalin disbanded the subversive COMINTERN, since no Communist government in either country would have been as useful to the Soviets as the governments in place.⁴ Yet the Centre cut the Magnificent Five off again in October 1943, having concluded, after a thorough study, that it was clear the Five were British double-agents feeding Moscow disinformation. Contact was only restored in June 1944, just as one of the Five, Kim Philby (codenamed SYNOK or “Sonny”), was appointed head of the nascent SIS/MI6 counter-intelligence division dealing with Soviet espionage and Communist subversion—the definition of victory in spy-war terms.⁵

Put simply, a Soviet espionage system capable of twice adducing enough “evidence” to convince itself that the Magnificent Five were really working for Britain—agents so loyal they continued their work stealing high-quality secret documents and even recruited new sub-agents while out of contact with the Centre—would have no trouble building their case that a public opponent of the Pact like Driberg was MI5’s man. It obviously does not make it true. Stories relying on the memories and convictions of Communists in this period do not constitute “evidence” in any serious sense.⁶

THE WAR, PARLIAMENT, AND JOURNALISM

Driberg was in America during the attack on Pearl Harbour and shortly after his return to Britain in March 1942 became an MP for the first time as an independent. Driberg spoke and voted as a “loyal opposition” to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, criticising tactical aspects of how the war was being waged—and trying to get the ban lifted on the Communist Daily Worker newspaper—but otherwise supporting the government. Fired from the Express in 1943, Driberg continued working as a journalist, reporting on Operation OVERLORD—the Allies’ amphibious invasion of Nazi-ruled France in June 1944—and being part of the Parliamentary delegation to the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. At the time, the concern in Western capitals was that the revelations about the Holocaust were literally unbelievable: prominent figures went to survey the camps so they could report that they had seen with their own eyes what the Nazis had done in trying to exterminate the Jewish people.

Driberg joined the Labour Party shortly before its surprise landslide victory over Churchill’s Tories in July 1945 and was promoted to the National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour’s governing body, in 1949.

The British and American strategy in the Second World War had cleared the way for the triumph of Communism on most of the Eurasian landmass, from the Fulda Gap to Peking,⁷ and in June 1950 Stalin tried to round out his victory by adding South Korea. Fourteen months after its creation, NATO would be called into action, under the leadership of the United States and the flag of the United Nations, to finally make a meaningful attempt to resist the onslaught of Soviet Communism. Driberg was totally opposed to any British involvement in stemming the tide of Communism in Korea.⁸ Driberg went to the Korean Peninsula in August 1950 as a journalist and in his coverage tried to balance not attacking British troops with advocating for their defeat.

In June 1951, Driberg married Ena Binfield. Driberg’s announcement of this plan four months earlier had startled his friends since he was, as far as the era permitted, an open homosexual. (There is a Churchill story attached to this, which might even be true. Churchill, well-aware of Driberg’s proclivities and regarding Binfield as a plain woman, is supposed to have said, when brought news of the engagement: “Buggers can’t be choosers”.⁹)

Driberg’s (incomplete) memoir, published posthumously in 1977, was entitled, “Ruling Passions”, and two such passions can be seen in this episode of his doomed marriage. The most obvious is his homosexuality. A lot of the interest in Driberg’s life has focused on this aspect—in scandalised tones nearer the time, and in more sympathetic tones recently. And this is perfectly reasonable, though the emphasis of some of the more recent writing—which often makes some reference to him living in a world where homosexuality was illegal until 1967—is slightly wrong. In Driberg’s social milieu, he was never in any serious danger from the anti-sodomy law per se. What endangered Driberg was his insatiable pursuit of casual sex in public toilets and other places, behaviour that remains illegal (theoretically) even in this most tolerant age. For Driberg, the risk-taking was part of the thrill.

The other “ruling passion” on display was Driberg’s religiosity, specifically his adherence to High Church Anglicanism or Anglo-Catholicism. His luckless wife had entered the marriage—which also featured Driberg’s third passion, socialism (she was marched down the aisle to “The Red Flag” anthem of the Labour Party)—knowing Driberg was homosexual, but thinking that together they could better advance their social and political goals, and that she could curb the excesses of Driberg’s sexual life and get some control over his financial irresponsibility (she was wrong about that).¹⁰ Nonetheless, Driberg insisted that Binfield, a secular Jew, be baptised into the Church of England, and they did not divorce when the arrangement effectively broke down in the early 1960s.

Driberg being Christian in this era was not so unusual, even on the far-Left: British socialism, as has often been said, owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. But it does not seem accidental that Driberg should have found his way to Anglo-Catholicism. The trend, called the “Oxford Movement” when it emerged in the 1830s as British Roman Catholics were finding a secure footing in the social fabric, has always had a pronounced homosexual subculture. The premise of the movement—a reaction against the Whiggish liberalism that dominated the political system and the Church—and some of its doctrines, particularly the return to celibate clergy, structurally created an environment that was something of a haven for homosexuals: single males who were not expected to marry and at some level were comfortable with their status as outsiders to the societal mainstream, while offering them a path to social advancement. The liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council increased the spiritual isolation of Anglo-Catholics, and they were—like all Christians—buffeted by the social revolution since the 1960s, but the current has remained a notably vibrant one within a generally desiccated Church.¹¹

Driberg retained his seat in the October 1951 snap Election that was otherwise a disaster for Labour: Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s plan to increase his narrow majority failed and Churchill was brought back to office. Driberg left Parliament in the May 1955 General Election, with an intention to begin focusing on his writing, starting with a biography of Lord Beaverbrook. The project went sour: Beaverbrook, initially cooperative, decided he did not like the tone Driberg was taking, and Driberg’s attempts to appease Beaverbrook resulted in a book that pleased nobody and failed commercially.

CAREER AS A KGB AGENT

Driberg’s profligacy was nearly on the scale of his promiscuity and his financial woes by early 1956 are part of the context for his recruitment as a Soviet spy. The KGB files record Driberg’s “ideological affinity” as a factor that led to his recruitment,¹² and there is little reason to doubt it. Driberg had served for more than two decades in Stalin’s intelligence apparat and returning to the fold in 1956 after a fifteen-year interval was no great strain for him: he was not resentfully acting under immense pressure as he furthered Soviet active measures. Driberg basically shared the Soviets’ ideological outlook, which meant that, even when he was not acting on direct instructions, he would by instinct take the path that furthered Soviet ambitions. This, of course, made Driberg a much better agent for the Soviets.

That said, Driberg’s actual recruitment as a spy shows the human complexities that usually go into these events: a mix of ideological devotion, trickery (sometimes self-trickery), and avarice. Driberg’s formal recruitment took place in August 1956, when he was technically not an MP, albeit still an active member of Labour’s NEC, and was done through blackmail during a trip Driberg made to Moscow as a journalist to interview Guy Burgess, one of the Magnificent Five, a former journalist at the BBC, SIS intelligence officer, and diplomat, who had defected to Moscow in May 1951, as MI5 closed in, along with another of the Five, Donald Maclean, a senior civil servant in the diplomatic corps. The KGB’s “honeypot” operations and use of “swallows” (male and female) against officials at the Embassies in Moscow are now part of the folklore, and these operations were, indeed, a major part of the KGB’s practice towards foreign diplomats and other residents at the Embassies.¹³ In Driberg’s case, there was little need to set up a complex sting: Driberg essentially drew his own chalk outline and lay in it. Driberg quickly discovered that the public lavatory behind the Metropole Hotel was a thriving “cruising” ground and the KGB just as quickly discovered Driberg’s presence there. An employee of the Second Chief Directorate was swiftly entered into Driberg’s line-up of conquests, and the KGB presented Driberg with the “compromising material” (kompromat). Driberg was recruited as an agent with the codename LEPAGE.¹⁴

The first task the Centre set for Driberg was producing a biography of Burgess. Driberg had known Burgess before Burgess’ defection, meeting him during the war. The two shared interests in excessive alcohol consumption and younger men.¹⁵ Burgess had an appetite for reckless homosexual promiscuity to rival Driberg’s. Just one example. Setting about burying his Communist record at university, Burgess got himself employed in 1935 as personal assistant to the sternly Right-wing Tory MP Captain John Macnamara, the last sitting MP to be killed while serving in combat, cut down in 1944 in Italy. In October 1935, Burgess went with Macnamara on a “fact-finding mission” to Germany, thirty-one months after the Nazi takeover. Burgess spent the entire time sleeping his way through the (considerable number of) homosexuals in the Hitler Youth. Added to this was Burgess’ chronic dependence on alcohol, which more than once led to him confessing he was a spy to relatives and friends. The Soviets did not exactly approve of this—there was a lot going on in the Centre giving Burgess the codename MÄDCHEN (“Little Girl”)—but this was in the period before the Bolsheviks completely destroyed the old world in Russia. The purges and the war and the simple passage of time left the Bolsheviks in control by the late 1940s and early 1950s in a totalising way they had not been before: barely anybody was left who could remember a time before Communism, let alone retained habits like independent-minded initiative from a period when Russians were educated rather than indoctrinated. A stifling uniformity of thought and a hyper-centralisation took hold. In the special services, nobody dared take a decision without prior approval from the Centre lest they be called home and shot (or sent to the GULAG, if they were lucky). Arnold Deutsch, however, the recruiter and first handler of the Five, probably the most talented Illegal the Soviet Union ever had, was working when there were still embers of the cultural capital left over from Imperial Government remaining. Deutsch was able to recognise—and had the space to act upon his recognition—that the very outrageousness of Burgess’ conduct was his best cover, an asset not a liability. Who would believe any intelligence service would recruit Burgess as a spy? For sixteen years, nobody did.¹⁶

Driberg quickly wrote his short book about Burgess, about 120 pages, over six weeks or so, and returned for a month-long visit to Moscow in late October 1956, ostensibly to let Burgess proof read the text for factual accuracy and typographical errors. In fact, it allowed Burgess’ (and Driberg’s) superiors at the KGB to vet the manuscript thoroughly, which they did. Amusingly, the main thing that had to be taken out was any reference to Burgess being an alcoholic. Burgess almost invariably got “a bit sozzled on vodka” during his daily meetings with Driberg, as Driberg himself documented in his memoir, and Burgess finally drank himself to death in 1963, aged 52. The official Moscow line down to the end, though, was that the health benefits of living in a socialist country included giving up on the need for alcohol that helped people get through the torment of existence in the West.¹⁷

Driberg’s book, entitled, Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, denied Burgess had ever been a Soviet spy, presenting Burgess as an idealistic socialist who had worked for East-West peace and been the victim of sensationalist British media coverage that was equivalent to “the McCarthy witch hunt” in the United States. In the book, Driberg carefully tried to distance himself from supporting “the decision that Burgess and Maclean took” on the grounds that socialists should work for socialism in their own countries, “in Britain, specifically, through the Labour Party”. The effect was somewhat ruined by Driberg’s caveat that “this is a matter on which opinions differ”: the Soviets could not allow an unambiguous condemnation of the Magnificent Five.¹⁸

The whole active measure would suffer from a similar inability of the Soviets to be other than what they were: the book was published in November 1956, right as the Red Army massacred Budapest. For the Soviets, this meant Driberg’s hagiography was blunted in its propaganda effect. For Driberg, however, the book did more or less what he wanted it to: provided him with more money than anything else he had written or would write, not only in book sales but in the (then-staggering) sum of £5,000 The Daily Mail paid him to serialise it. From being hounded by his bank manager earlier in 1956, by the end of the year Driberg was able to settle his debts.¹⁹

Driberg became Labour Party chairman in 1957, holding the post until 1958, and returned to Parliament in October 1959 during a General Election that gave the Tories their third consecutive victory. Since Driberg was also on the NEC, the Soviets seem to have had a somewhat exaggerated sense of his power and influence. Nonetheless, Moscow was not disappointed. Driberg was well-placed to provide political intelligence on the evolution of the Labour Party, the dynamics within the Party, and the identities and foibles of its leading members. Driberg’s information was so highly valued it was regularly passed by the KGB to the Politburo. In terms of pushing these dynamics on the Soviets’ behalf, the task that was probably of primary importance to Moscow was Driberg furthering the cause of British unilateral nuclear disarmament within Labour ranks and generally attacking Britain’s involvement in NATO. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was formed in November 1957, with Driberg as one of its leading spokesmen. Another hobbyhorse of Driberg’s was denouncing the American effort to prevent the Sovietization of South Vietnam and ensuring Britain played no part in resisting the Communist tide in Indochina. It should be said that on nuclear weapons and Vietnam, Driberg needed little prompting from Moscow Centre: he was personally convinced the Soviets should be given what they wanted,²⁰ as he had been over Korea.

Unrelated to espionage, but of historical importance: in the early 1960s, Driberg used what space he had left as a “journalist” to further the presentation of the Kray twins, Reginald and Ronald (born 24 October 1933), already a decade into their criminal careers, as charming rogues and lovable, rags-to-riches rebels, rather than the psychopathic murderers they actually were. Driberg’s connection was with “Ronnie”, the more ruthless of the two brothers and an even more open homosexual than Driberg. In 1963, Driberg introduced Ronald to his friend Robert Boothby, a Conservative MP ennobled as Baron Boothby in 1958 and thereafter among the most prominent politicians in the country, regularly representing the Tories on television. The attraction for Driberg and Boothby was that Ronald was constantly surrounded by young men “hunted” from the various clubs and pubs the Krays either owned or shook down.²¹ Boothby, as a masochist, was well-suited to Ronald Kray, a very determined sadist, though whether the two had a direct sexual relationship remains disputed.²² Ronald’s overt homosexuality, especially in the context of the gangster underworld, brought considerable admiration within the counter-cultural scene, and helped shape favourable media coverage of the Krays from that quarter. The rest of the press was kept in line by intimidation, not all of it physical. In July 1964, The Sunday Mirror reported on Boothby’s “relationship” with Ronald and made reference to (non-explicit) pictures the paper had acquired of the duo together, as well as other members of the Kray “Firm” like “Mad” Teddy Smith, one of Driberg’s “partners”. Arnold Goodman, the personal solicitor of Labour leader Harold Wilson, known as Wilson’s “Mr. Fixit”, helped the Krays sue the paper for libel. The story was revoked, an apology was printed, the editor was fired, and Boothby was paid an out-of-court settlement worth £40,000 (nearly £1 million in today’s money), most of which seems to have been given to Ronald.²³ The Boothby and Driberg connections to the Kray gang were instrumental in allowing the pair’s reign of terror to last another four years (they were finally arrested in May 1968). The Tories, still reeling from the “Profumo affair”, were concerned that by going after the Krays they would create another public scandal highlighting the criminal financial connections between Boothby and the brothers, while Labour had little desire to draw any more attention than Driberg already had to homosexuality in their ranks. For once, the Tory scandal was about money and the Labour scandal about sex.

Lord Boothby, Ronald Kray, Leslie Holt || image source

Driberg was not given a Cabinet position when Wilson’s Labour Party won the October 1964 General Election, being reduced to leading (with Ian Mikardo) the “Tribune Group” of dissenting ultra-Leftist backbench MPs.²⁴ There was an embarrassment of reasons—the Krays’ fiasco months earlier, Driberg’s perennially wayward private life, his CND agitation—why Driberg might have been excluded from Wilson’s Cabinet. Still, there is a question over whether Wilson knew Driberg was a traitor. If Wilson did not at that time in the mid-1960s, he knew by the end of the decade, when he was still in office as Prime Minister. In 1969, Josef Frolík defected from Czechoslovakia to the United States and informed the CIA—who, of course, passed it on to Britain—that the Czech secret police, the StB, had briefly recruited Driberg as a paid agent, only to be told by their KGB masters to back off because Driberg was “their man”.²⁵

Driberg began distancing himself from the KGB in the late 1960s, trying to have them cease the clandestine meetings and meet only in overt settings with Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers under official cover, but the KGB persisted in their demands. In 1968, Driberg cut contact with the KGB entirely, quite possibly due to his failing health. Driberg had a heart attack on a visit to Cyprus in January 1968, potentially triggered by sexually “overdoing it”, not that it stopped him “inviting Cypriot youths into his hospital bed”. A year later, Driberg went blind in one eye.²⁶

Falling back on his faith, Driberg asked Wilson to let him retire and be appointed Ambassador to the Vatican: Wilson refused on the stated grounds that Driberg was older than the retirement age for Foreign Office diplomats. It is difficult to believe that Wilson’s knowledge by this time that Driberg had been a Soviet agent did not have some influence over his decision. Labour was unable to provide a replacement for Driberg’s seat in the June 1970 Election, so he had to postpone his retirement. In 1972, Driberg was removed from the NEC and he finally resigned after the February 1974 Election, being “kicked upstairs” to the House of Lords as Baron Bradwell. Driberg died on 12 August 1976, aged 71.

THE WIDER STORY

Driberg is a representative case study of the constant influence the Soviets exerted over the Left-wing of the Labour Party and other Left-wing movements. The fundamental problem is that a large part of the Western Left has always suffered from the “popular front” delusion summarised in the phrase “pas d’ennemis à gauche” ([there are] no [true] enemies to the Left). This struggle on the Left to firmly firewall itself against internal extremists persistently damaged its cause during the Cold War. The inability within the mainstream Left to ever quite draw a line beyond which it was impermissible to stray—to always imagine that the “excesses” of the comrades, tactically misguided as they might be, came from a good place—made the formation of a stable anti-Communist Left difficult. The issue went right back to the Bolshevik coup in 1917: the liberals’ and socialists’ own actions rendered them defenceless when Lenin came for them. The pattern repeated in Spain in the 1930s: having allowed the Soviets to take over the Republican cause, when some on the Left did, at the last, try to reassert themselves, they were in no position to do so. The Left was fighting itself as General Franco marched into Madrid.²⁷ Operating in this broader environment of confusion and naiveté, Driberg did not really stand out and certainly never came close to running over any tripwires that would have him ostracised.

Labour opposed rearmament after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany because they—influenced by Moscow’s perceptions—thought these weapons would be used against the Soviet Union, and the best that can be said about Labour and the wider Left’s silence during the Great Terror later in the 1930s is that it was cynical domestic politicking, intended to avoid tainting their own push for socialism by bringing attention to the effects of actually existing socialism, and after that to prevent a rift in the anti-Nazi coalition.

The Labour leadership in the 1940s, having come into office believing it could avoid confrontation with the Soviet Union because “Left can deal with Left”, greatly to its credit quickly realised this was false. The patriotic reformers around Attlee got to work on Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and made Britain a founding member of NATO, fulfilling Alliance obligations from Berlin to Korea. All along, however, there was a significant faction of the Labour Party that saw Soviet expansionism as a lesser threat to world peace than American resistance to it. In the 1960s, this took the form of activism in the “peace” movement—where Soviet funding and manipulation was extensive—to advocate Western inaction against Soviet aggression in Vietnam.²⁸ The “peace” cause of the 1980s, unilateral Western nuclear disarmament, which became effectively Labour’s official position in 1983, was likewise heavily subsidised and directed by the Soviets. Driberg’s involvement as a signed-up KGB agent in the founding of the CND was not an aberration. The July 1982 mass demonstration in London organised by the CND against the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles to counter the Soviet SS-20s, one of the great CND “achievements”, was laced with KGB agents.²⁹ To function, the CND relied on Soviet funds, passed to it by the KGB-controlled CPGB, and worked closely with other Soviet front-groups like the World Peace Council.

As with the Soviets’ international terrorism network, where possible the KGB dealt with agents at one step remove, through its “fraternal Parties” around the world and its clone agencies in the Captive Nations. The StB might have been told to back off Driberg, but they jointly ran Labour MP Raymond Fletcher, another journalist, as an agent with the KGB from 1962 to 1964, codenamed PETER. The Czechs alone continued to handle Fletcher after that. MI5 seems to have become aware of Fletcher’s treachery—and made Fletcher aware that they were aware—causing a break in contact with the Soviet Bloc sometime in the late 1960s. Fletcher continued as an MP until 1983 and died in 1991.³⁰ Another StB spy, a “confidential contact” rather than a full-blown agent, was Jeremy Corbyn.

The Soviet espionage offensive against the West took many forms. Driberg’s membership in the CPGB in the 1920s and 1930s could not be concealed, and in any case his role was as a public advocate for Soviet political positions. This made him different from the Cambridge spies, whose recruiter, Arnold Deutsch, encouraged them to break with their university Communism, to present as conformists believing in the ideas of the British establishment, the better to infiltrate it, which they did, with enormous success. Deutsch himself, an Austrian by birth, had been recruited at university in Vienna and instructed to lean into the faith of his parents to dispel any suspicion of Communist leanings, presenting as an observant Jew.³¹ In the early 1940s, on Moscow’s instructions, learning from the example of the Magnificent Five, the CPGB instituted a practice of telling the most promising Communist recruits not to subscribe (or to unsubscribe) from The Daily Worker and not to join the CPGB. Instead, Communist believers were told to avoid any overt associations with the Left and focus on getting Firsts in their degrees that would enable them to secure high positions in the British state. The mystery remains how many took this advice—and where they are now.

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REFERENCES

1. See, for example: R. C. S. Trahair (2004), Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations, p. 64.

2. Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew (1999), The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, pp. 84-85.

3. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 85-91.

4. Sean McMeekin (2021), Stalin’s War, p. 490.

5. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 119-125

6. An oft-repeated story in books dealing with this is that it was Anthony Blunt, one of the Magnificent Five, who “exposed” Driberg as an MI5 agent. See, for example: Kevin Quinlan (2014), The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s, p. 106. It could even be true that Blunt believed it and his report of it to the Centre is what led to the order for the CPGB to expel Driberg. It does not make it true that Driberg worked for MI5.

7. Stalin’s War, pp. 662-65.

8. Robin Renwick (1996), Fighting With Allies: America and Britain in Peace and War, chapter sixteen.

9. Andy Hughes (2013), A History of Political Scandals: Sex, Sleaze and Spin, p. 21.

10. Francis Wheen (1990), Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions, p. 246.

11. Diarmaid MacCulloch (2013), Silence: A Christian History, pp. 184-90.

12. The Sword and the Shield, p. 401.

13. The Sword and the Shield, p. 407.

14. The Sword and the Shield, p. 401.

15. The Sword and the Shield, p. 400.

16. The Sword and the Shield, p. 61.

17. The Sword and the Shield, p. 402.

18. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 401-02.

19. Ibid.

20. The Sword and the Shield, p. 402-03.

21. John Pearson (1972), The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins.

22. John Pearson (2010), Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins, pp. 136-37.

23. Pearson, Notorious, pp. 137-38.

24. The Sword and the Shield, p. 403.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. George Hills (1967), Franco: The Man and His Nation, p. 323-24.

28. Stanislav Lunev (1998), Through the Eyes of the Enemy, p. 78.

29. The Sword and the Shield, p. 434.

30. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 403-04.

31. The Sword and the Shield, pp. 56-61.