LETTERS Do we trust in Gott?
Sir: It comes as no surprise to me that Guardian journalist Richard Gott was enjoying the largesse of the KGB (`How the KGB ran the Guardian's features editor', 10 December). His resignation was the act of a gentleman, albeit years too late.
The Soviet Union's London-based 'jour- nalists' were very active in the 1970s trying to suborn Fleet Street's top writers, includ- ing industrial correspondents. Indeed, that is why I am such a good chess player today. The vodka I can do without. It always amazed me that so many Russian embassy 'press officers' saw the need to drink with us running dogs of the capital- ist press in Fleet Street's Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
I know of three senior industrial corre- spondents who enjoyed all-expenses-paid trips to the USSR during spells of industrial militancy in Britain. Their articles, needless to say, were always pro-striker and anti- employer. Lunches and heavy drinking ses- sions into the late hours at the Russian embassy became a regular event for the cho- sen few. All you had to do was be 'well in' with this journalistic elite, or be a drinking partner of the communist Morning Star's then industrial editor, Michael Costello, who was raised and educated in Moscow.
New industrial correspondents were left in no doubt that, unless they bowed in sup- plication to the industrial group's ruling left-wing intelligentsia, they would be out in the cold. I chose to freeze to death.
It got so bad that the only way I could achieve an audience with the then York- shire NUM President Arthur Scargill was to beg at the feet of one of his Fleet Street's apparatchiks. This Scargill sycophant — he has since seen the light — then needed the blessing of the man who 'ran' him at Com- munist Party headquarters. After this 'posi- tive vetting' I was finally ushered into the Barnsley presence of the Great One. Scargill had even used the Communist Party to `head-hunt' an editor for the Yorkshire Miner (confirmation: Maurice Jones, ex-edi- tor of the Yorkshire Miner and later Scargill- appointed editor of the National Miner).
One of these apparatchiks was having an affair with the wife of a famous Labour Cabinet minister, an affair so indiscreet that she regularly joined her paramour for drinks at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. (This must have given MI5 apoplexy.) Even the Workers' Revolutionary Party tried to recruit me at one point. Their recruiting sergeant told me that — come the revolution — people like me would be looked after by the 'new order'. I was less than impressed but I ordered the Newsline, the party's official organ of veracity, to keep him happy and in touch with the Trots.
Is it any wonder that the British security services tried to redress the balance by recruiting agents of their own? Tory grandee James Prior was given the task of lunching and dining industrial corre- spondents to fend off the 'red menace' within the ranks of the industrial corps.
Guardian journalist Seumas Milne's spy odyssey The Enemy Within says, in a flight of fantasy, that 75 per cent of Fleet Street's industrial correspondents were agents for MI5 or the Special Branch. I can guess at two volunteers — one used to be in military intelligence — but both were too right-wing, drunk and stupid to be of any real use to MI5 chief Stella Rimington.
Mr Milne should start researching the backgrounds of his own colleagues at the Guardian before condemning journalists like myself as agents of the state. He assumes because he cannot get any real exclusives himself that other journalists must be spoon- fed by the intelligence services.
How is it that Milne's 'highly-placed' securi- ty services contacts failed to tell him about Richard Gott? It would have made a nice paragraph for his book, which I have placed on my shelf next to Alice in Wonderland.
Terry Pattinson •
Former industrial editor of the Daily Mirror, 28 Moorfields Close, Green Lane, Staines
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