Image: Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street United Kingdom Open Government Licence v3.0
The Daily Mail has now revealed that Keir Starmer was listed in communist spy files after joining a Czechoslovak project camp at the height of the Cold War.
The then 23-year-old was selected alongside 16 other people from around the world, most of them students, to restore a memorial to the victims of a Nazi reprisal behind the Iron Curtain in 1986.
The operation was of course supervised by the Czech secret service StB and was intended to get to know the guests, create files and make recommendations as to who should be recruited by a communist secret service in the future.
Sir Keir’s full name, date and place of birth, passport number and family address are listed in a dossier discovered by the Daily Mail in the “Main Directorate of Foreign Intelligence – Operational Files” section of the archives of the old Czechoslovak secret police.
His visa application, including a passport photograph and handwritten personal details, is kept in a separate section of the archives.
As well as the current Labour leader, other young people from the US, West Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands and France joined the Czech project. Among them was one who went on to work in a senior role at the European Commission and another who became a partner in a law firm in the City of London.
Sir Keir had just graduated from Oxford University with a law degree and was about to start his legal training. According to the stamps on the visa, he arrived for the two-week camp in the Czech-German border town of Cheb on August 16, 1986.
The group was based in Lidice, a village 12 miles outside Prague that the Nazis destroyed in 1942, killing more than 300 civilians, in revenge for the assassination of SS chief and Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters. Operation Anthropoid went down in history.
Lisbet Praem, a young police officer working in Denmark at the time, who also attended the camp, told the Mail that the group lived in military tents with “primitive” furnishings.
“[Keir] looked after everyone very well. He was definitely a hard-working guy and always looked for the best solutions for everyone and had fun too.”
They were aware that the communist authorities would keep a close eye on them, Ms Praem added.
“We also thought that if you can build links between all nations, you can avoid another war.”
Ms Praem stayed in touch with Sir Keir for a few years but eventually lost track of him.
Scenarios
Was it naivety that had motivated Starmer? Even if you know from the start that you will be under surveillance in the Eastern bloc, such a trip is still far too risky. And it could have unpleasant consequences if you want to advance in your career. It’s not that long ago that the big spy scandals like the one involving Kim Philby happened.
It’s possible that Starmer had some kind of loose relationship with British intelligence at Oxford and that the visit to the Eastern Bloc had been approved, as long as he reported back afterwards. But even that would not make him trustworthy.
Britain is notoriously infiltrated by Russian intelligence services and the aristocracy had its own extremely secret relationship with the USSR. Espionage and collaborators can work to promote someone’s career and slow down others.
Stasi files clearly show that people wanted to influence who rose up in the German SPD. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the GDR several times as a Young Socialist and was treated like a state guest and observed by the Stasi.
Corbyn and the StB
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, first appeared in Czech state security files in August 1977 after touring Czechoslovakia on a motorcycle holiday. His colleague Diane Abbott, who accompanied him on a similar holiday in East Germany, was not on that trip.
Corbyn was one of only four MPs to sign a parliamentary motion in December 1989 congratulating striking workers in Czechoslovakia “against the corruption and mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy”.
Labour activists also claim that Corbyn’s sympathies lay with dissident movements.
Jan Kavan, a former Czech foreign minister and deputy prime minister who was a student leader during the Prague Spring and a leading dissident in British exile from 1969 to 1989, considers Corbyn a friend.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the StB managed to recruit two Labour MPs – John Stonehouse and William Owen – and a Tory MP, Raymond Mawby. The relationship lasted a decade, in Owen’s case almost 15 years.
All three MPs were fully recruited StB agents, their file category marked “Agent” or “A”. Their files contain thousands of pages of documents. These include strategies for recruitment and development, minutes of meetings with agents, assessments of their performance and task plans, as well as details of communications and counter-surveillance. At first Mawby and Owen believed they were passing information to the Prague Foreign Office. But gradually they were made explicitly aware that they were in fact working with Communist intelligence.
Remarkably, the files show that MI5 knew about Stonehouse and Mawby’s repeated contacts with Czechoslovak “diplomats”.
Meanwhile, Conservative MPs called on Corbyn to release his Stasi file, compiled by the East German secret police. The Stasi Records Agency in Germany said it had found no documents on Corbyn. This applies to all files that cannot be made public for privacy reasons.
Labour
After the usual elite universities, Starmer was given a peerage and special status as legal adviser to the Crown. He always played the ignorant one to the people, unable to properly explain why the aristocracy treated him so privilegedly.
The entire Labour party is the project of empire.
Ramsay MacDonald was one of the three main founders of the Labour Party in 1900, along with Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson.
MacDonald was a member of the Fabian Society for some time and gave lectures on its behalf at the London School of Economics and elsewhere. He became the first Labour Prime Minister in January 1924 after King George V invited him to form a minority government. MacDonald married a woman descended from Lord Kelvin of the Privy Council,
Lord Haldane was appointed Lord Chancellor and Philip Snowden Chancellor of the Exchequer. Haldane was a member of the Privy Council and decorated with the highest decorations of the Empire. He was associated with the most important Fabian figures.
Viscount Philip Snowden was also on the Privy Council and distinguished his elitist-controlled socialism from Bolshevism.
Harold Wilson and the Soviets
Influential figures sought the support of Lord Louis Mountbatten (House of Hesse) for a kind of soft coup against Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
James Angleton of the CIA’s counter-intelligence division informed the British domestic intelligence service MI5 that Wilson was probably a Soviet agent. This information came from a source (Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn) whom Angleton refused to disclose. Defectors had accused several Labour MPs and trade unionists, including Joseph Kagan, a close friend of Wilson’s.
Wilson, of course, insisted that nefarious people in MI5 simply wanted to smear him. MI5 director Sir Roger Hollis himself later came under serious suspicion of being a Soviet agent. Peter Wright, former deputy director of MI5, wrote about this at length in his book Spycatcher, which was banned in the UK by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Prime Minister Wilson had made trips to the USSR with his private secretary, Marcia Williams, Baroness Falkender. Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines said the pair first met at a dinner with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
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MI5, with the help of Angleton of the CIA, investigated the possibility that Wilson’s predecessor, Gaitskill, had been assassinated by Soviet intelligence. Wilson had once worked as a representative for an East-West trading company, and MI5 began tracking his Eastern European contacts and those of his secretary. Wilson next worked for Montague Meyer, timber importers who bought from behind the Iron Curtain. With and without his secretary, he had made 19 trips to the Soviet Union. Wilson used MI5 when he needed it to discredit his opponents, such as the seamen’s union in the 1966 strike. He even tried to make a policeman the new head of MI5.
Wilson was no longer Prime Minister in 1970, Edward Heath took over and appointed Victor Rothschild as the unofficial head of intelligence. Allegations later came to light against Heath, that he was a pedophile with a preference for boys. Rothschild even ran agents for MI6 in Iran and China, using the connections of his family bank. Wilson later returned to power.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000201540001-2.pdf
Louis Mountbatten was repeatedly contacted by influential people who wanted to get rid of Wilson and form a new interim government. The plan sounded like some kind of coup. Cecil King made a lot of noise in the conspiracy circle. After a heated secret meeting, Mountbatten refused to join such plans, saying he was too old. He had heard the suggestion that the Crown might intervene at some point in the future, and the “armed forces would then be important in this respect.” At these meetings, Mountbatten was advised to stay away from the public eye so that he could appear neutral and pragmatic later during the action. David Stirling, founder of the SAS, had already recruited aristocrats and former military officers for the cause. When the press got wind of this, an irrelevant public debate arose. MI5 was denounced as a tool of right-wing elites to drag Wilson through the mud. Mountbatten himself was increasingly suspected of cooperating with the USSR.
The Fabians
The British Fabian Society set the tone. The British colonial empire understood early on that classical colonial rule as in India could not continue forever, so they built up an artificial counter-movement against British colonial rule in good time and then staged the struggle for apparent independence.
The Fabian Society grew in many countries under British rule between 1930 and 1940, and many future leaders of these countries were influenced by the Fabians during their struggles for independence from the British. These leaders included the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Obafemi Awolowo, who later became Prime Minister of the defunct Western Region of Nigeria, and the founder of Pakistan, Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, had a political philosophy that was heavily influenced by the Fabian Society.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first Prime Minister of the supposedly independent country of India, even had a relationship with the wife of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of the colony of India. The Mountbattens’ correspondence remains secret due to concerns about Britain’s “national security”.
Fellowship of the New Life
The predecessor of the Fabian Society was the Fellowship of the New Life, which promoted ideas such as pacifism, vegetarianism and a simple, frugal lifestyle.
The co-founder, Havelock Ellis, researched human sexuality, psychedelic drugs and was an enthusiastic eugenicist; later he even became vice president of the Eugenics Society for population reduction and social hygiene. He himself was impotent for most of his life.
The co-founder, Edward Carpenter, was allowed to become the teacher of Prince George Frederick, later King George V.
The founder, Edward Pease, was related to the judge Sir Edward Fry, who was awarded the most elite British medals. He had a brother (knighted) whose gardens were regularly visited by the high nobility. Together with the Webbs, he founded the London School of Economics. Sidney Webb was the noble Baron Passfield, a member of the British Privy Council. He was both Secretary of State for the British Colonies and Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government in 1929. The Webbs ignored the growing evidence of Joseph Stalin’s atrocities and remained supporters of the Soviet Union until their deaths. Beatrice Webb was the Baroness Passfield
The Coefficients Club was also a kind of forerunner of the Fabians. Its members included powerful colonial administrators such as Leo Amery, who also worked as a secret agent. Edward Grey, the 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, even sat on the British Privy Council and was Deputy Lieutenant of the Crown. Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, also sat on the Privy Council and was involved with secret aspects of the Empire.
The Fabian Society was named after the Roman dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. To hold on to the Empire, the British needed to take full advantage of the trade opportunities secured by the war, said the 1900 policy document Fabianism and the Empire. The British armed forces should be kept in a high state of readiness to defend the Empire. The creation of a citizen army to replace the professional army was recommended. The Factory Acts should be amended so that younger people would have more time for “a combination of physical exercise, technical training, training in civil citizenship and field training for the use of modern weapons.
Later, many of the future leaders of the Third World were exposed to Fabian thinking, especially India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who later formulated economic policy for India along the lines of Fabian socialism. After pseudo-independence from Britain, Nehru’s Fabian ideas committed India to an economy in which the state owned, operated and controlled the means of production, especially key heavy industrial sectors such as steel, telecommunications, transport, power generation, mining and real estate development. This ensured continued control. He had a relationship with the wife of the last British Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. The latter swore in Nehru as the first Prime Minister of “free” India.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan was also heavily influenced by the Fabians. Lord Mountbatten orchestrated the British withdrawal from there too.
Britain also influenced the Arab Baathists. The adaptation of Fabian socialism to the Middle East led states there to control major industry, transport, banking, and domestic and foreign trade. The state would steer the course of economic development. Michel Aflaq, widely regarded as the founder of the Ba’athist movement, was a Fabian socialist. Aflaq’s ideas, along with those of Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Zaki al-Arsuzi, were implemented in the Arab world in the form of dictatorial regimes in Iraq and Syria. Salāmah Mūsā of Egypt, another prominent advocate of Arab socialism, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Fabian Society and a member since 1909.
