Here are the facts on those Corbyn ‘spy’ claims

Intelligence and Security academic Dan Lomas provides all the evidence you need that The Sun's smears are just that: more lies from the hard right.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn met a Soviet Bloc intelligence officer in the late-1980s, a report in The Sun newspaper revealed.

Corbyn is reported to have warned a Czech agent about British Security Service (MI5) surveillance.

While it sounds like the stuff of spy novels, the reality is more mundane – and Corbyn was certainly not the only MP to fall foul of Eastern bloc spying methods.

The documents reveal that Czech StB thought Corbyn was ‘reserved and courteous’, occasionally ‘explosive’ on human rights, but often ‘calm and collected’. The reports noted that the Labour backbencher was ‘negative towards the USA, as well as the present policies of the Conservative Government’.

It said he took a ‘positive’ view of the Eastern Bloc and was supporting a Soviet-backed peace initiative. The documents also claimed that Corbyn was ‘well informed’ and knowledgeable on people in contact with anti-communist agencies.

Corbyn was initially approached by Tony Gilbert, the general secretary of the anti-colonial civil rights group Liberation, and another campaigner, Sandra Hodgson, before meeting the Czech officer in the House of Commons. The StB were keen to maintain contact and even assigned the future Labour leader the codename COB.

Labour has been quick to deny the reports and a spokesperson said: “Like other MPs, Jeremy has met diplomats from many countries. In the 1980s he met a Czech diplomat”. They added that Corbyn “had not offered any privileged information to this or any diplomat”.

Nothing new

The fact is that there is very little in this report that is revelatory. Corbyn’s views on the Thatcher government, US policy and Eastern Europe were known to many at the time. Contributions to Hansard and public speeches would have provided all this.

After one meeting in October 1987, the StB reported that the conversation had focused on national liberation movements and Western policy in the Gulf. But the information – as even The Sun reported – ‘could not be utilised’ as it was ‘limited to general nature’.

In other words, it was mere tittle-tattle or small talk. The intelligence was limited. As a backbencher on Labour’s fringe with little frontbench prospect, there wasn’t much information for Corbyn to give. “Owns dogs and fish,” the Stb reported back to Prague – hardly the crown jewels.

The Czechs may have wanted to cultivate Corbyn for information on the Labour Party and the Westminster bubble. The same report mentions that the StB officer met Corbyn in the Commons to “strengthen mutual recognition” and develop trust. But it would appear that contact was broken off shortly afterwards.

The tattle around this story sits on top of the fact that the ex-agent concerned claims to have personally organised the Live Aid concert in 1985, which he said was “funded by Czechoslovakia”, while Czech intelligence experts have called the claims about Corbyn a ‘lie’.

Spies, MPs and new recruits

In the 1960s, Czech defector Jozef Frolik revealed that three Labour MPs – John Stonehouse, Bernard Floud and Will Owen – had links to the StB. Stonehouse had been privy to sensitive information, but disappointed his handlers on the information he provided as a junior minister. Owen provided defence information and was known as ‘greedy bastard’ in StB circles thanks to his demands for money and all-expenses paid holidays.

In 2012, claims also emerged that Conservative MP Raymond Mawby had provided information to the Czechs for a decade, including sensitive information about parliamentary colleagues. Mawby had been enticed to spy for the StB during off-the-record discussions about politics and trade unions, before being asked to provide ‘documents from Parliament’.

The StB reported that it paid Mawby for his information, gradually ‘deepening the compromising of his position’. Mawby was vulnerable and loved gambling and money but provided little top secret information. Most was on internal Conservative Party politics, documents have since revealed. He eventually stood down in 1983 and died in 1990.

Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies were always on the lookout for new recruits. In 1975, the East German Stasi even tried to recruit Labour’s general secretary Ron Hayward – though he was likely unaware of the Stasi’s interest in him as a possible agent. “He likes chatting to women and is a heavy drinker”, reported the Stasi.

Hayward was approached during a visit to the East Germany city of Dresden and commented on the “pulsating life” and wanted to avoid talk of “ideological differences”. Instead he wanted to focus on “united labour and the SED” (Socialist Unity Party). The approach failed and the Stasi quickly forgot about Hayward.

One of the more prominent targets for Eastern Bloc recruitment was Labour’s Harold Wilson. In 1956, the KGB gave him the codename OLDING and opened an ‘agent development file’ in the hope of recruiting him. “The development did not come to fruition”, the KGB was forced to admit.

Trawling Eastern Bloc archives for names can also be problematic. Like their East German and KGB counterparts, the StB would embellish reports to justify meetings or show off growing influence. In the case of the KGB, the number and significance of contacts in the West were often exaggerated to impress the leadership and maintain funding.

So was Jeremy Corbyn a spy? Well the material proves very little other than the fact he met someone from the StB. Corbyn maintains he thought the individual was a diplomat – a cover regularly used by intelligence officers during the Cold War.

Does this make Corbyn stand out? Absolutely not. How many other politicians, civil servants, businessmen and women and ordinary travellers unknowingly met Eastern Bloc intelligence officials during the Cold War? The number is certainly high.

The now Labour leader may well have been someone the StB wanted to cultivate, but Corbyn provided little information that couldn’t have been obtained elsewhere. The story provides more on StB techniques and tradecraft than it does about 00-Corbyn.

Dan Lomas is Programme Leader of MA Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Salford.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo credit: Garry Knight.

5 Responses to “Here are the facts on those Corbyn ‘spy’ claims”

  1. Dave Roberts

    I must say that I never heard of the writer and have no idea other than his, or others, claims that he is an ” Intelligence and Security academic”. Whatever he is he has missed the most important point of this whole, still developing matter.

    When Corbyn admitted meeting this StB agent the then Czechoslovakia was and had been for two generations under the rule of a murderous and repressive communist regime. Although the writing was on the wall for the Warsaw Pact eastern bloc and it had only a few years to run thousands of people were in prison for offenses that didn’t exist in Britain and only a few years before the tea and biccies at the House of Commons for the same ” crimes” people were being hanged. Corbyn knew this.

    In spite of this knowledge he agreed to meet, on his own admission, at least three times with a man whom he must have know was an intelligence officer. Why? This is the real question here. It is clear beyond any kind of doubt that Corbyn was more concerned with denigrating the kind of system that allowed him to voice his beliefs while taking a huge salary in the process to than question and expose the repressive regime in Prague. He had no information to give, almost certainly wasn’t paid but excused mass murder, torture, the destruction of lives and as far as I know is still proud of the fact.

  2. Ady

    Dave Roberts
    Did you miss this bit from the StB archives that is mentioned in the article; “occasionally ‘explosive’ on human rights, but often ‘calm and collected’” so perhaps that was one of his motivations for meeting.

  3. Jimmy glesga

    British Lefties in the old days seemed to hold the Soviet Union and China in high esteem. They swallowed all the propoganda crap emminating from the Commies. When the truth was told the British left were in supposed shock at the atrocities committed against people in the Utopian States.
    So either the British Left were thick as shite or did know what was going on.

  4. Dave Roberts

    Ady.
    It’s always best to read what someone actually says as opposed to what you think or want them to say. If Corbyn was ” explosive on human rights” then his concept of what constitutes those things is very selective. Judging by his record they would exclude anyone who dissented from the Communist party line in any Soviet ruled country between 1917 and 1989 who, for reasons yet to be explained, seem to fall outside Corbyn’s definition of ” human”.

    After the Communist seizure of power in 1948 for a a half a century Czechoslovakia was ruled by a murderous police state that imprisoned and executed thousands of its own citizens. While Corbyn was meeting with Czech diplomats people like Vaclav Havel were in solitary confinement for writing plays critical of communism, something that you seem to support.

    If your comments weren’t so serious they could be dismissed as a joke, rather like yourself, unfortunately the Labour Party is full of apologists for mass murderers like Stalin and Trotsky and as the memories of those awful years recede people like yourself, who hate the kind of freedoms we have in this capitalist country, will point to the anti imperialist nature of the Warsaw Pact tyrants and stress the health care, creches and free holidays all the while ignoring the people who died on the gallows or rotted for years in prisons for crimes that don’t exist in this country.

    Jimmy glesga.

    Your points are of course always well made, succinct and to the point! I salute your indefatigability sir!

  5. patrick newman

    Roberts, you seem rather short on facts but expert in the invective. I don’t know your real politics but can you not see the bigger picture with the right-wing media drumming up a witch (wizard?) hunt against a radical opposition leader. They were wrong-footed in the last election but that did not stop them with the scurrilous “Apologists for Terror” article in the Daily Mail. Are you so naive or dimwitted to not ask Cui Bono?

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