LETTERS KGB stakes
Sir: Someone surely should open a betting book on who is/was, or who isn't/wasn't a KGB agent. Over the next five years, maybe ten, we might all have quite a lot of fun out of this, though some may be in for some discomfiture.
Frank Johnson amiably and admirably objectively raises the name of the late Capt. Henry Kerby, MP, as having been named as a KGB agent (Diary, 22 Novem- ber). The lunatic Right, of course, have produced much more senior MPs, even ministers, as of this ilk. Curiously, I can vouch for the fact that these allegations came originally from the Tory 'Wets', and Kerby himself told me he had been de- nounced as a KGB man by one such person to the Conservative Chief Whip. It was a story he loved to tell against himself. Henry Kerby was one of those people with whom one could stay up all night talking and drinking and still remain sober. I once left him at 5.15 a.m. and went straight to the office without any sleep. This is a tribute to his powet to retain one's interest for so long rather than to my capacity for surviving to such an hour. George Wigg told me that he owed quite a lot to Kerby. It was in a period when Kerby had no faith whatsoever in the Heath government and, though on the Right, had friends in the Opposition. Intelligence on what was happening in Rhodesia in those days, when sanctions were first imposed, was so bad in the early days of Wilson's government that Wigg organised his own private team to get the right answers. In the end correct intelligence was effectively and cheaply obtained from two men, Ker- by and a reliable right-wing White Russian who was totally hostile to the Soviet government. This was an improbable team to be employed by a Labour government, but at least it provided the right answers. I regard George Wigg as being the best intelligence liaison officer any prime minis- ter had since Baldwin relied on J. C. C. Davidson. Wigg turned to right-wing allies just as Davidson employed a pro-Soviet man to report back on Mrs Ernest Simpson and her visits to the German Embassy in London. But I fear that Wigg's intelligence was not followed up in the era that followed when Lord Carrington entered the Rhodesian scene with all the lack of know-how one would normally associate with a somewhat below par Labour occu- pant of the FCO.
Kerby, of course, was hated by the FCO: `those Foreign Office boys rogering their own rectums' was how he pungently de- scribed some of them. Similarly, poor old George Wigg was denigrated by some of Wilson's closest colleagues. Yet it was Wigg who saved MI5 from getting into a worse shambles than it already was when he vetoed the plan to put yet another policeman at its head.
How many other candidates for KGB agents to submit to the bookies today? Well, you can count me as one, as Colonel Mikhail Goleniewski, the Polish defector who claims to be the Tsarevitch, has actually gone into print as naming me as such. But I doubt if there are many such candidates in the present Tory Party. There are so few right-wingers whom the `Wets' could name, and the `Wets' remain so frightened of their own shadows and their own constituents that they would never take any such risks. Maybe a look at George Wigg's private papers, when they are released for inspection in the early 1990s, will tell us a lot, just as Lord Davidson's papers in the House of Lords tell us a lot we didn't know before.
Richard Deacon (Donald McCormick)
8 Barry Court, 36 Southend Road, Beckenham, Kent
Previous page
