The Labour Party, the Soviets, and Britain’s Worst Unknown Spy Scandal
The Soviet Union’s triumph in the Second World War—enslaving the eastern half of Europe conquered from its former Nazi allies—finally awakened the West to the Cold War waged against it since global Communism acquired Moscow as its headquarters in 1917. The simultaneous realisation was how far behind the West already was. Soviet aggression was ongoing internationally—from Greece and Iran to China and Korea and soon as far afield as Guatemala—and there was massive subversion within the Free Bloc. The Red Army had been halted in Berlin, but Moscow-run “fraternal” Communist Parties had ministers in four Western European governments into the late 1940s and the Anglosphere States had to reckon with their folly in believing until so recently that the Soviets were an ally.
American and British resources rescued the Soviets from Stalin’s nearly fatal miscalculation in jointly starting a world war with Hitler—and enabled the Soviet conquest of the East. But this generosity at no point changed the Soviet approach to the United States and the British Empire. On the contrary, the Soviets exploited the new trust and openness of these capitalist powers to escalate subversive activities intended to destroy them. Soviet spies had infiltrated America and Britain, including the Dominions,1 on a vast scale.
The severity was such in the U.S. that had President Franklin D. Roosevelt not replaced the fellow-travelling Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his Vice President in July 1944, when FDR died months later the Soviets would have had two agents in the American Cabinet.2 The American reaction was stern and far-reaching, as it had been to the original outbreak of domestic Communist revolutionary contagion after the First World War and to the internal menace from the Axis. For all the yelps about “McCarthyism”, the combination of bureaucratic-security measures, legal repression, and the public ideological assault on Communism crippled the Soviet apparat in the U.S. by the early 1950s, making the U.S. enduring more resistant to Communism for the duration of the long struggle against its bid for world domination.
In Britain, by contrast, there was a much less serious effort to comb spies out of the State and a much weaker effort to correct public opinion in Britain about the Soviets. The failure to undo—or even understand—the scope of the damage in the late 1940s had a long-lasting impact in making Britain more vulnerable to Soviet subversion. An important part of the explanation is that the British intelligence system had already been captured by the Soviets. Kim Philby—the most infamous of “the Magnificent Five”, as the Soviets called the Cambridge spies—had been appointed head of counter-intelligence at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) in 1944, able to protect Soviet assets within the British system, betray British assets in the Soviet system, and sabotage anti-Soviet measures domestically and abroad. Another factor was political.
A Labour government came to power in Britain in mid-1945 with a conciliatory belief “Left can speak to Left”. To the great credit of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he quickly realised this was false and fully integrated Britain into the effort to stem the Communist onslaught, but he was not comfortable rhetorically treating Communism as he had Nazism, partly because he had to manage a party with an openly pro-Soviet wing—Labour MPs like Konni Zilliacus and John Platts-Mills—who moved in a much wider milieu of Soviet sympathisers and anti-Americans. The Soviets rapidly understood the potential of this dynamic.
Before the war, the Soviets had instructed their most valuable agents—like the Magnificent Five—to distance themselves from the Communist Party and its fronts; to play the part of Establishment gentlemen. With the Five’s demise in 1951, and Labour entrenching as the second British party—tied to trades unions and student movements where Communism flourished—the Soviets turned their focus to this more natural route to influence, where its agents could be their radical selves without arousing suspicion or sanction.
Writing a little while ago about Tom Driberg, a Labour MP from the 1940s and senior party official into the 1960s who was a Soviet spy for most of that time—among other things, he participated in Soviet active measures to exculpate Guy Burgess, one of the Five and by then a defector—I pointed out:
Driberg is a representative case study of the constant influence the Soviets exerted over the Left-wing of the Labour Party … 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). … 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. … 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.
This continued all the way to the end. There are some notorious cases. Jeremy Corbyn is one: he was able to become a Labour MP while being a public supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other terrorists in the Soviet orbit. The subsequent revelation Corbyn had been a Communist spy in the 1980s, regularly passing political intelligence to Moscow through the Czechoslovak extension of the KGB, the State Security (StB), did not prevent him becoming Labour leader from 2015 to 2020.
There is, however, a much less well-known and far more scandalous Soviet espionage case in Labour’s history. Indeed, it is one of the worst compromises in British history and in the West during the Cold War. Worse than the Profumo affair or the spy in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and worse than Soviet agents nearly being brought into the American Cabinet, for in Britain a traitor actually made it into the Cabinet of a Labour government.
