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
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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 The Daily Telegraph 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 Soviet Union while working as a translator at the British military mission and embassy in Moscow, 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 London at which Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache, met Stephen Ward, the osteopath and artist. Ward introduced both Ivanov and John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, to Christine Keeler. 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 Guy Burgess, 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 Colin Coote would later arrange the Garrick Club lunch at which Floyd, Ward and Ivanov were all present. Intriguingly, Coote’s deputy editor Malcolm Muggeridge worked for MI6. It has been reported that Coote had also worked for the intelligence agency. Sir Christopher Floyd, 66, told the Sunday Times, 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 Profumo affair - 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 Cold War — 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 Donald Maclean 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 The Guardian 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.