REVIEW
By Andy Brooks
The Poisoned Well: Sean Kelly; NCP pamphlet £2.00
COLD WAR propaganda and
Trotskyist dogma would have us believe that everyone arrested during the Soviet
purges of the 1930s was innocent. Western pundits would regularly portray the
Soviet secret service as an incompetent and brutal instrument of terror and in
the same breath charge it with organising legions of dupes in the western world
for espionage purposes or to ferment civil unrest.
At the same
time the public were fed with romantic tales of agents of imperialism like
Sidney Reilly, the “ace of spies” shot by Soviet intelligence in
1925 after an abortive attempt to overthrow the Soviet government, and the
fictional exploits of James Bond whose antics soon rivalled those of American
comic-book super-heroes. But a veil of
silence was drawn over the army of western government informers and agents
within the labour movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
Only after the
collapse of the Soviet Union did the ruling class feel
confident enough to boast about some of their real agents’ exploits. The
release of documents under the “thirty year rule” revealed that the radical
novelist George Orwell, the darling of the Trots, had been a police
informer. The BBC
ran a series called True Spies in
2002 which revealed that secret service agents bugged, burgled and bribed their
way into the heart of the unions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet the story
of the sinister role of intelligence agents within the communist movement has
still to be published. This pamphlet redresses the balance by summarising
attempts to sabotage the communist movement in America,
Britain and
other parts of Europe.
And it starts
by looking at the extraordinary career of Morris Childs, the American communist
trained at the Lenin School
in Moscow, who became deputy leader
of the Communist Party of the USA
and the go-between who arranged the transfer of secret Soviet subsidies to the US
party. From 1958 until 1980 Childs made 52 trips to Moscow.
Morris was trusted by leading members of the
Soviet party and became a close friend of Leonid Brezhnev. In 1975 the Soviet
leader presented Morris with the Order of the Red Flag in recognition of his
services to the international communist movement. What Brezhnev did not know
was that Morris had been working for the FBI from at least the beginning of the
1950s.
Well if you
want to know more order this pamphlet, which is a revised edition of two
articles that first appeared in the New
Worker in 2002, it can be obtained from:
NCP Lit,
PO
Box 73,
London SW11 2PQ
Please add 50p for postage and packing.
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