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Saturday 26 May 2012

Reaching through the Iron Curtain

In the pages of the Kremlin’s secret diary, Pavel Stroilov discovers what Labour’s Soviet sympathisers said when they thought no one was listening

ALEC KITSON AND THE KGB

Politicians like Foot or Kinnock, however, did not have the closest connections with the USSR. In those years, the Labour party was effectively controlled by its affiliated trade unions — and that is where the KGB and the International Department aimed to infiltrate. Today, we know that the union leader Jack Jones, once regarded as the most powerful man in Britain, was a KGB agent for most of his life. He was exposed by his last case officer, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky — the most famous MI6 agent in the KGB. Jones’s trade union — Transport and General Workers (T&G) — was the most powerful one in the Labour party. Its block vote covered 18 per cent of the total at annual conferences, and it effectively controlled dozens of safe Labour seats in parliament. Furthermore, T&G was notoriously undemocratic, with the General Secretary enjoying almost dictatorial power, and its political activity controlled by Jones’s unelected deputy, Alec Kitson. On 5 April 1980, soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Chernyaev saw Kitson in Moscow:

I had prepared all thinkable arguments concerning Afghanistan, but he did not wish to hear them. ‘I don’t need to be persuaded,’ he said, ‘I understand everything without it, but I am “marked”. As “a Soviet agent” and “a traitor”, I simply won’t be listened to. As for you, none of you are ever there to be heard. The embassy is doing nothing. And if there are any Soviet visitors, they are only interested in buying another pair of trousers.’

He was quite drunk already, after seeing Soviet trade unionists. That is why he was violent and rude. There was a ‘fuck’ in about every sentence. I was ironic, joked, tried to insert the prepared arguments. As he was getting soberer, it became possible to get some particular things out of him. So, what we have agreed:

(a) We will send some clever guys to the Scottish Trade Union Congress. There will be an audience arranged for them and they will be able to deliver the Soviet point of view;

(b) He will try to gather trade union functionaries in London, and the same guys will carry out a ‘discussion’ with them;

(c) I will write a private letter to Jenny Little (the secretary of Labour NEC’s International Committee, ‘a pretty bitch, but can do business, and in love with you,’ — Kitson’s words), suggesting an unofficial discussion, either in London or in Moscow, at our level, i.e. the one of party apparatchiks.

By the way, Jenny Little appears in the diary time and again as quite a romantic figure. On 19 November 1977, Chernyaev describes his meeting with Kitson and Little in the Soviet embassy in London: ‘Jenny got drunk, cried, and kept trying to force a kiss on me. It took quite a time to pack them off.’

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