The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

17. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3. Driberg had joined the Communist Party while at public school but was expelled in 1941 when, according to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, the Party leadership “discovered that he was an agent of MI5, to which he had been recruited in the late 1930s” (Dictionary of National Biography, 1971-1980, p. 251). Though Driberg undoubtedly gave information to Maxwell Knight, a leading MI5 officer, much remains obscure about the relationship between them. According to Knight’s personal assistant, Joan Miller, he was a bisexual who, for a time, was “crazy” about Driberg. In her view, Driberg was only “a casual agent” who would “turn in a bit of stuff” when Knight put pressure on him. (Interview with Joan Miller, Sunday Times Magazine (October 18, 1981); Miller, One Girl’s War; Andrew, Secret Service, pp. 521-2.

18. Driberg, Ruling Passions, pp. 228-9.

19. Wheen, Tom Driberg, p. 309.

20. Vassall, Vassall; Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 442-4. Andropov considered Vassall one of the KGB’s most valuable agents.

21. Driberg, Ruling Passions, p. 235.

22. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3. Mitrokhin’s notes on Driberg’s file record that he was “recruited in Moscow… chiefly on the basis of compromising material which recorded his homosexual relations with an agent,” but give no further details of the “compromising material.”

23. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3.

24. Watkins’s comments are quoted in Wheen, Tom Driberg, p. 328.

25. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3.

26. Wheen, Tom Driberg, pp. 292-315. Francis Wheen’s very readable and entertaining biography of Driberg dismisses all suggestion that his book on Burgess was influenced in any way by the KGB. Though shocked by the “stench” from the “acrid piss” of stories planted in the press by MI5 and MI6 (Tom Driberg, p. 317), Mr. Wheen failed to detect any unwholesome aroma emitting from the vast array of KGB active measures. Despite the SCD’s addiction to compromise operations, it also does not occur to him that the KGB might have exploited Driberg’s sexual adventures in Moscow lavatories.

27. Driberg, Ruling Passions, p. 229.

28. Driberg, Guy Burgess.

29. According to Mitrokhin’s summary of Driberg’s KGB file, he was used for “the publication of KGB themes in the British press,” and “sent to the United States and other Western countries with a [KGB] brief”; vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3.

30. Wheen, Tom Driberg, p. 337.

31. Ziegler, Wilson, p. 313.

32. Wheen, Tom Driberg, pp. 353-4.

33. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 3.

34. Wheen, Tom Driberg, pp. 362-8, 400.

35. Ziegler, Wilson, p. 313.

36. Frolik also identified three other Labor MPs whom he claimed had been in the pay of the StB: Will Owen, John Stonehouse and agent GUSTAV (not so far reliably identified); Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 523-4.

37. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 2.

38. Fletcher, £60 a Second on Defence, pp. 132-3.

39. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 2.

40. Fletcher claimed that MI5 had shown his wife intercepted letters in 1969 showing that he had had an affair during a visit to Hungary. Dorril and Ramsay, Smear, p. 197.

41. Dick Crossmann was less impressed, telling his diary that Wilson had done “a magnificent job of blowing out his information” in order to pose as a Soviet expert. Ziegler, Wilson, pp. 89-94.

42. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 18.

43. Ziegler, Wilson, p. 91.

44. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 18.

45. Ziegler, Wilson, p. 94.

46. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 18.

47. Wise, Molehunt, pp. 97-9. Mangold, Cold Warrior, pp. 95-7.

48. Wright, Spycatcher. Wright later disowned most of his own conspiracy theory and said in a Panorama interview that there had been only one serious plotter (BBC1, October 13, 1988).

49. vol. 7, ch. 16, item 15. In view of the connection of the future Labor leader, Michael Foot, with Tribune and the allegations made against him by the Sunday Times in 1995, for which he received libel damages, it seems appropriate to add that Mitrokhin’s notes contain no reference to him.

50. Crankshaw, Putting up with the Russians, 1947-1984, p. xi.

51. Crankshaw, Russia by Daylight, p. 12.

52. Dictionary of National Biography, 1981-1985, p. 101.

53. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 42.

54. Crankshaw, Putting up with the Russians, p. 13.

55. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 42.

56. Crankshaw, Putting up with the Russians, p. 81.

57. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 42.

58. vol. 7, ch. 16, item 17.

59. Barron, KGB, pp. 343-5.

60. vol. 7, ch. 16, item 17. The KGB file on operation PROBA disproves suggestions that Courtney was the victim of a plot by MI5 rather than the KGB. Dorril and Ramsay, Smear, p. 107.