sign in sign up
<<
Home , Arthur Wynn, Christine Keeler, Profumo affair, Stephen Ward, Yevgeny Ivanov (spy)

INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_1

www.telegraph.co.uk

Diplomat unmasked as a Soviet spy played role in Profumo scandal when working at

David Floyd Credit: Telegraph Media Group

A British diplomat unmasked as a Soviet spy was linked to the Profumo scandal during his time as communist affairs correspondent on The Daily Telegraph.

David Floyd confessed to spying for the while working as a translator at the British military mission and embassy in , according to newly released Foreign Office documents unearthed.

Floyd’s son, Sir Christopher Floyd, who is one of the country’s highest ranking judges as a Lord Justice of Appeal, has told of his shock at learning his father worked for the Kremlin.

1 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_1

Floyd, who died aged 83 in 1997, went on to become a senior reporter with the Telegraph and attended a pivotal lunch in 1961 at the Garrick Club in at which Captain , a Soviet naval attache, met , the osteopath and artist. Ward introduced both Ivanov and , the Secretary of State for War, to . Both men had affairs with Keeler, the ensuing scandal forcing Profumo’s resignation and rocking the Conservative government of the day.

Floyd’s outing as a Soviet spy may now force a reappraisal of the significance of his lunch with Ward and Ivanov at the outset of the Profumo scandal.

Jeff Hulbert, a historian who obtained the Foreign Office documents through a series of freedom of information requests, said: “The usual interpretation of Floyd’s presence at the lunch was as a makeweight. But he was certainly there at the creation of the Profumo scandal but who knows his true significance.”

Mr Hulbert, author of a book on the Cambridge spy , obtained almost 300 pages of documents on Floyd, known as ‘Pink Floyd’ and described in his obituary as “one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgeable Kremlinologists”. The files, from 1950 and 1951, reveal that Floyd had confessed to being a spy during his stint in Moscow between 1944 and 1947 but that the Foreign office covered up the scandal, choosing not to prosecute him.

2 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_1

The embarrassment was all the greater because Floyd had been a prominent student Communist agitator while at oxford University. Floyd, the son of a railway worker from Swindon, had become secretary of the Oxford University branch of the Communist party and later became fluent in Russian. Floyd was also suspected of leaking information while working at the British embassies in Prague and Belgrade although he denied that. In one file, prosecutors concluded there was “insufficient evidence”. Floyd was sacked following his confession in 1951 but was subsequently hired within a year by the daily telegraph, whose editor Sir would later arrange the Garrick Club lunch at which Floyd, Ward and Ivanov were all present.

Intriguingly, Coote’s deputy editor worked for MI6. It has been reported that Coote had also worked for the intelligence agency. Sir Christopher Floyd, 66, told , which confronted him with the revelation about his father: “It is very shocking for me to hear this.” He declined to comment further.

Mr Hulbert said that the role of Floyd - both as a spy in the late 1940s and early 50s and in the - needed greater examination. Mr Hulbert said that most of the documents he obtained contained large passages heavily blacked out and censored, suggesting the case remains sensitive. “There needs to be more disclosures,” Mr Hulbert told the Telegraph.

3 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

Thetimes.co.uk

David Floyd: the traitor who was forgiven and forgotten

Brian Redgewell

David Floyd had been an avowed student communist yet still landed a job at three British embassies during the — and another at The Daily Telegraph as the Foreign Office covered up his spying

In the margins of a top secret Foreign Office document dated July 19, 1951, Britain’s then foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, scribbled a despairing note: “Why must we employ such doubtfuls?” It was only a few weeks after the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and had disappeared, turning up later in Moscow. Now the Foreign Office had learnt another of its young diplomats whose compromising past had been overlooked had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. This time it

1 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

was an Oxford graduate who admitted passing secrets to Russian intelligence agents when he worked in Moscow at the UK military mission and the British embassy from 1944 to 1947. The diplomat’s name was David Floyd and, if the fate that befell Burgess and Maclean is any guide, his career should have been ruined and his future in Britain destroyed. He might have gone to jail. Instead, he landed in a comfortable new job at The Daily Telegraph — which he kept for almost 30 years. Diplomatic disgrace led to an improbable resurrection for Floyd, a railwayman’s son from Swindon who as a student had become secretary of the Oxford University branch of the Communist Party, married a fellow communist and later become fluent in Russian. Formerly classified documents released last week under freedom of information laws expose for the first time the extraordinary story of a fire-breathing student radical whose communist sympathies and anti-war protests once landed him in prison yet proved no barrier to employment in sensitive embassy posts in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade. Even when Floyd embarked on a torrid affair in Moscow with a Russian actress named Lidia Marienbach, putting paid to his first marriage, there were remarks about his shaky morals but no serious concerns about security. He was posted to Prague, where he met a young Czech woman, Hajka, and married her in London in June 1948. Soon afterwards, they moved to Belgrade. The documents provide a detailed account of Floyd’s short-lived Foreign Office career, the desperate efforts by

2 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

the British government to keep a lid on yet another potentially humiliating spy scandal, and, perhaps most bewildering of all, Floyd’s re-emergence within months of his diplomatic downfall as the communist affairs correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. He was the spy whose story has never been told — and a journalist whose best story may have been his own. On his death in 1997 aged 83, Floyd was described by as “one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgable Kremlinologists — although he disliked the title”. In Britain he was sought out by many Soviet defectors — among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize- winning author — who valued his knowledge, contacts and language skills. The Telegraph’s obituary called him “a valued member of the staff” known to younger colleagues as “Pink” Floyd on account of his communist beat. One former co-worker yesterday described him as “a very odd fellow who created this aura of inscrutability and mystery. He could be very irritating.” The obituary noted briefly that Floyd “flirted with communism” at Oxford but made no mention of his communist first wife, his brushes with the law or the explosive manner of his Foreign Office departure. From the Foreign Office’s Floyd files — still heavily censored almost 70 years later — it is hard to gauge exactly what damage he did to British interests. Floyd is quoted as insisting that he passed on only “very low-grade” material — even though it later became clear he was part of the Moscow embassy’s Russian secretariat, with access to a wide range of confidential papers.

3 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

Roger Allen, who was then first secretary at the British embassy in Moscow, reported to his superiors that Floyd “would probably have had no difficulty in getting hold of almost any file, with a few exceptions, on legitimate grounds”. Floyd denied spying in Prague and Belgrade, although embassies in the Czech and former Yugoslavian capitals reported leaks of sensitive information while he was there. Yet there is much more to Floyd’s story than Cold War spycraft. Some of the most remarkable documents describe to near-comic effect the hapless reactions of stunned Foreign Office grandees, still reeling from the Burgess/Maclean fiasco, upon learning that they had placed in their Moscow embassy the former secretary of the Communist Party at Oxford. “Looks as if Mr F should have been removed years ago,” lamented Morrison, the foreign secretary, in another scribbled memo. The Foreign Office promptly embarked on a surprisingly successful mission to keep the affair out of the newspapers. After the cock-up came the cover-up. Born in July 1914, Floyd went to school in Swindon before winning a place at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Like many other students at the time, he was drawn to the writings of Marx and Lenin. In 1933 he was arrested after an anti-war protest at a cinema showing a war film. When the magistrate offered him the choice of a £5 fine or seven days in prison, he chose jail. While the Cambridge spies drifted seemingly effortlessly from public school to university and then to high-flying jobs, Floyd worked variously as a milkman and for a department store. In 1939 he married a fellow Oxford

4 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

communist, Joan Dabbs, with whom he had a son in 1944. It was at Oxford that Floyd met Arthur Wynn, who was exposed much later as a KGB agent on a mission to recruit Oxford students. Wynn and his wife, Peggy, also a communist, became close friends with Floyd and Dabbs. Floyd joined the RAF during the Second World War but failed an eye test. His language skills earned him a position as a translator at the UK military mission in Moscow in 1944, and after the war ended he was offered a temporary job at the British embassy. Yet it was not until 1950, when he was based in Belgrade, that the Foreign Office realised it had never performed background security checks on Floyd, who had failed exams to join its permanent diplomatic elite and was still employed on a temporary basis. It was an official at the Ministry of Defence who first raised the alarm about Floyd. The official recognised him from his Oxford days and warned colleagues he “was certain that Floyd was a communist at that time”. A Foreign Office memo dated March 7, 1950, ordered a security check and somewhat belatedly added: “We should be absolutely certain that there is no trace in his early record of tendencies towards communism.” The inquiry uncovered his student radicalism but the findings failed to concern his bosses. The head of personnel declared that Floyd had spent “six years in the service of HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] entirely behind the Iron Curtain and has served us faithfully and well. The only evidence against him is of youthful indiscretion.”

5 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

A senior colleague in Prague wrote that Floyd was “a simple person who could not possibly conceal a double loyalty during all this time”. By August 1950 the FO had concluded: “The case against Floyd is a little thin.” Yet within a year there were red faces all round. “I am greatly distressed,” wrote Floyd’s ambassador in Belgrade upon learning of his confession. Sir Charles Peake wrote to London: “His political drafts and minutes have always shown good judgment and have been free from any undue left-wing bias.” Peake wrote again a fortnight later: “For the last week, my life has been something of a nightmare. I thought him full of good stuff, with an excellent mind, but crude and uneducated in many ways.” Allen, the Moscow diplomat, wrote he had found Floyd “a cheerful and on the whole sensible individual, although in his private affairs a little slapdash . . . I find it almost impossible to believe that he was an ideologically orthodox communist”. Exactly why Floyd confessed remains a mystery. He came forward voluntarily a few weeks after Burgess and Maclean disappeared but his activities were seemingly unrelated to the Cambridge spy ring that included and . The Foreign Office’s “top secret” summary of the case offers several possible explanations. “Mr Floyd claims that he has turned King’s evidence [provided information to reduce any punishment] because he had come to the conclusion that he was unfitted to remain in the foreign service and it was the honest thing to do,” the summary says. “He has also been influenced by the Maclean and Burgess episode. There is also an

6 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

indication that he was frightened that the Russians might kidnap him.” Floyd told his interrogators that Russian agents had approached him in Belgrade but claimed he had “repulsed” them. He then added in a statement: “I wished to make a ‘clean breast’ of the affair so that I might eventually begin life anew with a clear conscience.” There were suggestions he may have become disenchanted with Soviet-style communism after the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia and was more impressed with Josip Tito, the Yugoslavian communist who broke with Stalin in 1948. Much of which makes the final act of the Floyd saga somewhat bewildering. He had voluntarily confessed to spying, yet it took the director of public prosecutions less than a month to conclude that the evidence was “clearly insufficient” to support criminal charges. The legal opinion justifying this decision remains secret. But the outcome proved a relief for Foreign Office chiefs, who appeared more concerned with keeping the scandal out of the newspapers than bringing Floyd to justice. At least one paper had got Floyd’s name but fear of a libel suit seems to have kept the press at bay. When Floyd confessed during a business visit to London, his passport was taken away. But he was allowed to return to Belgrade to sort out his affairs and collect his wife, then pregnant, despite the risk that he might defect. His return to the UK earned him back his passport and helped keep Fleet Street off the scent. One Foreign Office memo noted soon afterwards: “He is already in touch with MI5, who want to find him a job.” His former ambassador, Peake, lent him his country

7 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

cottage while he got back on his feet. In December 1951 his wife gave birth to a son, who is now Sir Christopher Floyd, a lord justice of appeal.

Why was everyone so nice to a self-confessed Russian spy? A possible explanation is that Britain’s American allies had been appalled by the Burgess/Maclean affair, and another public spy scandal might have jeopardised the special relationship between Washington and London. The draft of a Foreign Office memo intended to reassure ambassadors who may have picked up gossip about the case offered alternative reasons: “There is no evidence of [Floyd] having received any material reward from the Russians . . . We believe him now to be sincerely repentant and we consider that his action in confessing did him credit.” The draft concluded: “Would you please destroy this letter as soon as you have read it?” While the avoidance of public embarrassment was plainly an imperative, the question also arises of whether the British intelligence services found a continuing use for Floyd — perhaps by turning him into a for use against the Russians. Within a year of his return to Britain in disgrace, Floyd was hired as communist affairs correspondent by Malcolm Muggeridge, then the deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph. Muggeridge was an old Moscow hand (he was briefly a correspondent there for the Manchester Guardian) and had been an MI6 intelligence agent during the war. The Telegraph’s then editor, Colin Coote, had also worked for MI6. Did the Telegraph, wittingly or not, provide Floyd with the perfect cover to carry on spying, this time as a double

8 INFOSOURCES.INFO-22/3/2018-343_2

agent obliged to work for Britain in return for his freedom? Was some kind of deal struck by the security services to keep Floyd out of jail? Or was Floyd more cunning than anyone realised and still working for Moscow, now as a triple agent? Perhaps the clearest indication that parts of the Floyd story remain untold comes from the last of the 300 or so documents released by the Foreign Office last week. The final page, dated December 1951, is a Foreign Office security department response to a query from Denis Wright, a senior civil servant who was clearly not familiar with the case. “I told him that Mr Floyd had resigned from the foreign service in the normal way,” wrote Lord Talbot of Malahide, then deputy head of the security department. “Mr Wright appeared satisfied but I have little doubt he suspects that I did not tell him the whole story.” Almost 70 years later, we still can’t be sure the whole story has been told.

9