Notebook

Ej While left-wing journals—doubtless innocently—have been helping assassination squads to identify CIA agents throughout the world, attention has been diverted from what the other side are up to over here. In fact, just four years and five months after the Conservative Government expelled 105 Soviet KGB and GRU (military intelligence) officers from Britain, the Russian spy network is back at full strength. There are nearly 200 Soviet-controlled spies known to be operating in this country. Many enjoy a tenuous 'cover' as trade delegates, journalists, marine specialists, tourist office spokesmen, or even bank officials. But the hard corps, who are known to Sir Michael Hanley, the DirectorGeneral of MI5, as the 'Red Army', are based at the London embassies of the Soviet Union and her satellites. The KGB's British headquarters is at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. The consular section nearby is staffed exclusively by KGB men, and others are to be found at the Soviet trade delegation offices in Highgate.

British officials take a particular interest in a number of names, such as counsellor Vladimir Kotliar and the two deputy trade representatives, Vladimir Pavlov and Valentin Matitson. Ten of the Soviet embassy's eighteen second and third secretaries and attaches are also KGB officers. The six assistant Service attaches are all members of the GRU, the intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Staff. The once flourishing spy centre at the Czechoslovak embassy in London is no longer totally trusted by the KGB, but the military and air attaches there, one Colonel Miroslav Merhaut and Major Gustav Opremcak, are still being very helpful.

The East German espionage service, Which is controlled by a former Gestapo officer, is assisted by Gunter Wille, first secretary for consular affairs, Hans Nobel, the Commercial Counsellor, and Roland Haufe, a commercial attaché.

Hungary's military and air attaché in London, Lieutenant-Colonel Karoly Meszaros, Submits regular reports to his Military masters in Budapest. They, in turn, are controlled by locally based staff officers of the GRU.

One could go on about the Polish and Rumanian embassies, but the most interesting KGB recruits are perhaps the Cuban diplomats. Castro's 'intelligence service' was handed over to the Soviet espionage Machine in the summer of 1966. And it was the KGB's best buy for years. Cubans in London and Paris have helped run arms

shipments to the IRA—and " supplied passports to Palestinian guerrilla factions. Its seventeen diplomats are under constant surveillance.

0 After all the hard work they put in, British officials in Washington were entitled to be pleased about the unexpectedly generous decision by Transport Commissioner Coleman allowing Concorde to land for a trial sixteen months period at both Kennedy and Dulles airports. Others (and these include some of the cannier embassy people) are not cheering yet. They are hoping that Mr Peter Shore has read all the small print of the Coleman decision and is guarding against the real possibility that Concorde may not pass its American examination—in which case the result would be even worse than a flat turndown at this earlier stage.

This gloomier view is suggested by the realisation that, politically, Mr Coleman could have done nothing other than he did. An attempt to strangle Concorde at birth would have given enormous moral leverage to its supporters. As it is, the plane has been given enough rope to hang itself. This was the expression used by the head of the World Bank, Mr Robert McNamara, the other day. It was McNamara who, as Defence Secretary in 1971, was largely influential in the decision to stop all further work on an American SST. The decision was right. Not so much for the environmental reasons which seem to move most Concorde opponents, but for two main reasons. First, he believes that civil aircraft should not receive vast government subsidies to make them competitive: and, he is outraged by the enormous waste of fuel—three times higher in Concorde per passenger mile than in modern jets.

"To think," McNamara was saying, "that on the day Coleman announced his Concorde decision the state of California ,banned the heating of swimming pools to conserve fuel!"

Mr James Goldsmith, chairman of Slater Walker, is a powerful, rich and clever man who is suing Private Eye for libel in connection with three recent articles. What is unusual about this is that he has decided to go for the lot—some forty writs issued, not only against the publishers, printers and editors of the magazine but also against the main distributors plus various wholesalers and other agents who sell Private Eye. And he has also chosen to start proceedings—very rare indeed, nowadays— for criminal libel.

Is it really possible, many will ask, to get damages from the newsagent who sells a copy of a magazine, surely no more than a 'technical' publisher in respect of an alleged libel? Yes, it is possible, unless the distributor can establish the defence of innocent dissemination. And a person may take criminal proceedings against another for libel—with leave of a judge where a newspaper is involved—if the words might have a tendency to 'disturb the public peace'.

So Mr Goldsmith has done no more than take the legal courses open to him, and, some will say, 'quite right—time that rag was taught a sharp lesson'. That is not the point. The damages awarded to a defamed person in a civil action are intended to compensate him for the injury to his reputation. They are not given—except in special cases of no application herein order to punish the defendants. (No comment of course is made on the issues raised by Mr Goldsmith's actions: it may be that he is entitled to a large measure of compensation. And if the criminal proceedings are successfully pursued, prison sentences could be handed out.) But if all these actions are continued their effect will be not only to compensate Mr Goldsmith—if he is the successful party—but to inflict long-term punishment on Private Eye because their ability to distribute and sell the magazine will suffer, perhaps very seriously. Already some wholesalers have decided not to continue taking Private Eye, and other agents may take the view, understandably, that, whatever the outcome of the present actions, they cannot in future afford to risk libel actions against them.

Such a result—no doubt unintended— would amount to a form of censorship and would constitute a threat to freedom of expression which goes far beyond the restrictions on that freedom quite properly imposed by our libel laws. Those laws provide that published words are defamatory if—in the dictum of Lord Atkin forty years ago—they 'tend to lower the plaintiff in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally'. This the words published of Mr Goldsmith in Private Eye may do fit is not a matter for us to judge). But would right-thinking members of society generally wish to curb Private Eye's future right to freedom of expression and continued publication? The answer must be no, and Mr Goldsmith should now forgo what are admittedly his legal rights to sue all the distributors of the magazine.

0 With this issue, The Spectator undergoes a change of appearance. We assume a new garb—one of a good many in 148 years.

The Spectator was founded in 1828 by a Scottish printer turned journalist, Robert Stephen Rintoul. That was the year in which the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister. In the United States, it was a presidential election year, like the present : Andrew Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams. In France, Alexandre Dumas pere published Les Trois Mousquetaires, and in Scotland Walter Scott The Fair Maid of Perth. Tolstoy, Ibsen, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jules Verne were born.

Although 148 years of unbroken publication is not unknown, it is not commonplace. We intend to continue for a similar span.