MI5's OFFICIAL HISTORY A CASE OF DAMAGE LIMITATION (CONTINUED)

Of course I have a vested interest in challengiing the view of MI5's history offered by Christopher Andrew. Not least, this is because I've written a novel about the plots against Harold Wilson's government (HOLLYWOOD BOWL) that focuses specifically on the CECIL KING COUP PLOT of 1968 - and which I'm currentl adapting as a TV long form drama.

But there is also a convergence between this fictional work and my own personal history, both as a former Army Intelligence Soldier (who was once briefly tipped for a job in MI5) and then as a left activist. These days, (and in response to the commentary on BBC Radio 4 this morning) I am well aware that superficial credence was lent to the ridiculous claim that Harold Wilson was an agent of Warsaw Pact intelligence (specifically of the Bulgarians) by KGB defector GOLYTSIN, who basically told his CIA interrogators in Maryland (James Jesus Angleton among them) everything he wanted to hear. Angleton, who used Golytsin's wish-fulfillment to secure his own rise in the CIA ranks, passed these fictions about Wilson to fellow Right-winger, Peter Wright, in MI5's K-Branch. Wright then fed the same information to Chapman Pincher of THE DAILY EXPRESS as part of his intrgue, both against Wilson and the then MI5 Director General Sir Roger Hollis.

Meanwhile (and much to the frustration both of Angleton and Wright, MI5 refused to expose Soviet funding of the Communist Party's MORNING STAR newspaper - even though they had firm evidence that such funding existed. This is because they recognised, even then, that a Right wing Communist Party that had broken strikes in the 1940s and supported Churchill's bid for the premiership in 1945 (being expelled from the Labour Party in 1946, accordingly) was "not" (to quite Herbert Morrison at the time) "a party of the left in any shape or form." The Stalinised Communist Party of Great Britain, whose theorists later contributed to the rise of New Labour, played no role in the resurgent class struggle of the 1970s other than to oppose it. Meanwhile, thanks to K-Branch's recruitment of Oleg Godiefsky, KGB operations in Britain were rendered impotent from about 1970.