That day, January 20, Brigadier Bertie Capstick called John Preston at Gordon. The bluff geniality was gone from his voice. “Johnny, remember what we were talking about the other day? If anything cropped up ...? Well, it has. And it’s not the Christmas fund. It’s big, Johnny. Someone has mailed me something in the post. ... No, not a bomb, though it might turn out worse. It looks as if we have a leak here, Johnny. And he has to be very, very high. That means it comes under your department. I think you’d better come down and take a look.”
That morning also, in the owner’s absence, but by appointment and letting themselves in with provided keys, two workmen arrived at an eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House. During the day they chipped the damaged Hamber safe out of the masonry of the wall and replaced it with an identical model. By nightfall they had redecorated that wall as it had been before. Then they left.
Chapter 4
Moscow
Wednesday, January 7, 1987
FROM: H. A. R. Philby
TO: The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Permit me to begin, Comrade General Secretary, with the briefest description of the background of the British Labour Party and of its steady penetration and successful eventual domination by the Hard Left over the past fourteen years.
The Party was originally founded by the trade union movement as the political arm of the recently organized British working class. From the outset it espoused the cause of moderate bourgeois socialism—of reform rather than revolution. The home of the true Marxist-Leninist was then in the Communist Party.
Even though the bedrock of Marxism-Leninism in Britain has always been in the trade union movement, true believers were excluded from the Labour Party itself. From the 1930s onward, a few of our pro-Soviet Hard Left friends in Britain managed to infiltrate the Parry by subterfuge, but they had, once inside it, to maintain an extremely low profile. Other friends of Moscow, perceived as they sought to enter the Labour Party, were refused admission or, if spotted inside the Party, were expelled.
The reason our true friends in Britain were for so many years excluded from the mass-support Labour Party can be described in two words: “proscribed list.”
This was a list of banned organizations; it prohibited all fraternal contact between the Labour Party and those much-smaller groups inhabited by the true revolutionary socialists—that is, the Marxist-Leninists. Further, no member of a Hard Left group was permitted membership in the Labour Party under the terms of the proscribed list, which were staunchly maintained by successive Labour Party leaders for fifty years.
As the Labour Party was the only mass-support party of the Left with a hope of acceding to government of Britain, infiltration and domination of it by our friends, following the classic Leninist teaching of “entryism,” was for all those years an elusive dream. Nevertheless, our friends within the Party, few though they were, worked tirelessly and covertly; in 1973 their efforts were finally crowned with success.
In that year, when the Party was under the weak and vacillating leadership of Harold Wilson, they achieved a wafer-thin majority on the all-important Party National Executive Committee, and used it to pass a resolution abolishing the proscribed list. The outcome was beyond their dreams.
With the floodgates open, shoals of Hard Left young activists of the post-1945 generation swarmed into the Labour Party and were at once able to offer themselves for office at every level of the Party organization.
The road to entryism, influence, and eventual takeover was open, and that takeover has now been achieved.
Since 1973 the absolutely vital National Executive Committee has seldom been out of the hands of a Hard Left majority, and it has been through the skillful use of this tool that the constitution of the Party and its composition at the higher levels have been changed out of all recognition.
A brief word of digression, Comrade General Secretary, to explain precisely whom I mean by “our friends” within the British Labour Party and trade union movement. They fall into two categories: the deliberate and the unwilling. With the first category I am referring to people not of the so-called Soft Left or of the Trotskyite aberration, both of whom abhor Moscow, albeit for different reasons. I refer to those of the Hard Left with, at their core, the Ultra-Hard Left. These are dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninists, who would not appreciate being called Communists since this implies membership in the quite useless British Communist Party. They are, nevertheless, staunch friends of Moscow and in nine cases out often will act in accordance with Moscow’s wishes, even though those wishes may remain unexpressed and even though the person concerned would stoutly claim he was acting for “conscientious” or “British” reasons.
The second group of friends inside, and now dominating, the British Labour Party can be characterized as follows: those persons with a deep political and emotional commitment to a form of socialism so far left as to qualify as Marxism-Leninism; persons who will, in any given set of circumstances or in any contingency, almost invariably react quite spontaneously in a manner completely parallel to, or convergent with, the desires of Soviet foreign policy vis-a-vis Britain and/or the Western Alliance; persons who need no briefing or instructions whatsoever, and who would probably be offended if such were proposed; persons who, wittingly or unwittingly, whether impelled by personal conviction, a warped patriotism, a desire to destroy, a craving for self-advancement, a fear of intimidatory pressure, a sense of their own self-importance, or a desire to move with the herd, will conduct themselves in a manner that suits our Soviet interests perfectly. They all constitute agents of influence to our benefit.
They all, of course, claim to be seekers after democracy. Happily, the overwhelming majority of Britishers today still understand by the word
Thus, from 1973 onward, our Marxist-Leninist friends in the Labour Party were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the struggle to capture the Party covertly, a program made possible only by the abolition of the proscribed list. This is how it was done.
The Labour Party has always stood like a tripod on three legs: the trade unions, the constituency Labour parties (one each in the constituencies that make up the British electoral pattern), and the Parliamentary Labour Party, the group of Labour MPs who were elected at the previous general election. The Party leader is always drawn from among these.
The trade unions are the most powerful of the three and exercise this power in two ways. One, they are the Party’s paymasters, funding the coffers from political levies deducted from millions of workers’ pay packets. Two, at Party conferences they dispose of huge “block votes,”
cast by the Union National Executive on behalf of millions of uncanvassed members. These block votes can ensure the passage of any resolution and elect up to a third of the Party’s all-important National Executive Committee.
These vote-casting union executive committees are absolutely vital; they comprise the full-time union activists and officials who decide union policy. They stand at the peak of the pyramid of which the middle ranks are the area officials and the lower ranks are the branch officials. Thus the effective takeover by Hard Left activists of great swaths of trade union officialdom was clearly essential, and has in fact been achieved.
The great ally of our friends in this task has always been the apathy of the largely moderate rank-and-file union members, who cannot be bothered to attend union branch meetings. Thus the activists, who attend everything, have been able to take over thousands of branches, hundreds of areas, and the cream of the executive committees. At present the biggest ten of the eighty unions affiliated to the Labour Party control half the union
