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Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): Ha!
Mr. Straw: The right hon. Gentleman scoffs. However, in September, the shadow Home Secretary proposed that I should come to the House and reveal all the names of those who were traitors living freely who had not been prosecuted--not those who had been prosecuted--unless there were clear security reasons for not doing so. To do that would be wholly improper, and would amount to conviction by denunciation. Moreover, I tell the shadow Home Secretary--who has made a great virtue of the fact that she would never say anything in the House that she would not say outside it--that if anyone, from the Home Secretary downwards, were to go outside the House and utter a list of those who were to be denounced as traitors without any evidence to convict them in a court of law, he or she would be subject to huge damages for defamation in our courts, and quite rightly so.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): May I endorse, on behalf of Liberal Democrat Members, something that the Home Secretary said in his statement--that Mr. Mitrokhin was a very courageous man, who, over many years, did what he did because he was increasingly disgusted by what, from his unique vantage point, he saw going on in that evil regime? That fact should not be forgotten in these discussions. Does the Home Secretary also recognise that, were the ISC a Select Committee, it would have to be given the same additional power that the committee has explicitly asked him for--namely, of seeing advice to Ministers, which is central to the matter of what Ministers knew and when they knew it?
Mr. Straw: I entirely endorse what the right hon. Gentleman says about Mr. Mitrokhin's courage. It required huge courage to do what he did. I do not doubt that a great many other people working in the KGB during that long period were pretty disgusted with the work that they were asked to engage in, but very few of them had the courage and tenacity to work, as Mr. Mitrokhin did, to record a huge amount of what was passing across his desk and then to make himself known to intelligence agents in Moscow and have himself and his family brought out at considerable risk. I pay tribute again to his courage and acknowledge the benefits that the whole of the west has received as a result of his disclosures.
As I told the right hon. Member for Bridgwater, I fully understand the point about advice to Ministers and have great sympathy with it. I hope to give the committee an answer that is satisfactory to it as soon as possible. I am sure that if I give the committee an unsatisfactory answer we shall hear all about it.
Mr. Kevin Barron (Rother Valley):
The Intelligence and Security Committee--on which I serve--will be breaking new ground by taking on the investigation, as will Parliament. As I understand it, such issues of national security have normally been dealt with by the security commissioners, who have met in secret from time to time and have been able to have all papers in front of them so that they can see everything that has taken place and report whatever is relevant. Without access to all the relevant papers, I do not know how Parliament or my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary can ask our committee to do justice to such an inquiry.
Mr. Straw:
Of course I understand that point. Were we to offer a paraphrase and memorandum of advice to Ministers rather than the plain text, questions would inevitably be raised about what we had to hide. I am sure that the same applies to Ministers in the previous Administration. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and I have nothing to hide. The gravamen of the memorandums has already been made public. However, I understand my hon. Friend's point and I shall do my best to ensure that there is a positive response to the committee.
Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East):
Is there not a slight contradiction in the Home Secretary paying tribute to the courage and tenacity of Mr. Mitrokhin in one breath and his hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Gapes) then saying that Mr. Mitrokhin's mere handwritten notes of what he saw in the files are not to be believed? Will the Home Secretary join me in acknowledging not only the bravery of Mr. Mitrokhin, but the resourcefulness of the Secret Intelligence Service in having recognised the value of what he was offering and having safely removed it and him from the Soviet Union?
Does the Home Secretary accept that handwritten notes are not the only factor in deciding whether the lady spy should be prosecuted, because she was mentioned in the Venona intercepts in telegram 1413 from Moscow to London on 16 September 1945? Will he answer the point put to him by my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary: is it not clear that at least one senior elected member of the national council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Professor Vic Allen, was a Stasi agent? His name has been widely published and he has not resorted to the libel action that he would have undertaken were he innocent.
Is there not a danger that the Government will seem to have a special interest in covering up issues of subversion in CND, given that 133 Labour Members of Parliament were members of parliamentary Labour CND at its height, including the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary?
Finally, does the Home Secretary now acknowledge that MI5 was right to keep an eye on CND in the 1980s, because at least one Stasi spy was operating within it? Was not the only failure of MI5 that it did not spot him when everybody knew that Vic Allen was a Stalinist?
Mr. Straw:
There is no contradiction in information being contained in the Mitrokhin archive which may assert one thing and a decision then being made not to prosecute. The Mitrokhin archive contains a summary--in some cases a complete, if secondary, account--of what was in the archives that may or may not have been accurate, and that must be assessed.
It is well known that, in some cases, KGB agents and informers were more concerned with justifying their expense accounts than with providing accurate information. Such works of fiction could not in any sense form the basis of a prosecution, still less a denunciation.
Of course I applaud the resourcefulness of the Secret Intelligence Service. Without that resourcefulness--and without the courage of the SIS and its agents--the Mitrokhin archive would not have been made public.
I was asked about the alleged naming of Mrs. Norwood in the Venona book, published earlier this year under the pseudonym Nigel West--better known to this House as Rupert Allason, the former Member of Parliament for Torbay. As a result of information in that book, and in another called "The Haunted Wood"--both of which had fairly small sales, I believe--BBC researchers, working alongside those who were putting together what became the Mitrokhin archive book, worked out who Mrs. Norwood was.
The hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) referred to CND. I am not privy, by definition, to the decisions made by previous Administrations--Labour and Conservative--in respect of work covering subversion by the security services. However, I understand that it was never the practice of the security services to study a trade union or an organisation. Their concern was to study people who they believed represented a threat to national security, whether or not they were in particular organisations.
As for Mr. Vic Allen, I am astonished that people are now getting excited about him. I happened to be at Leeds university at the same time as Mr. Vic Allen, who was, I believe, a lecturer. It was obvious beyond peradventure that he was an apologist for the East German regime and all its works, and we did not need the Stasi to tell us that 30 years later.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North):
The hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) knows about spying because he spied on the Labour party in the 1970s during the Reg Prentice affair.
As far as Mrs. Norwood is concerned, would not the most appropriate punishment for her--since she has reiterated her commitment to communism--be to invite her to live in one of the four remaining communist countries so that she could see the wonders of the system on whose behalf she was willing to spy against her own country and our democracy?
Should not we be very careful indeed about certain names, bearing in mind the fact that only four years ago Michael Foot was described as a Soviet spy? Michael Foot has been a lifelong anti-communist and resigned
from Tribune when it went through a brief period of fellow travelling just before the second world war. So ludicrous was the claim against him that the matter was settled out of court and he received, as I understand it, substantial damages. Is not that a lesson, showing that while we should certainly expose genuine spies--whether they spied for Nazi Germany or for the Soviet Union--we should be very careful indeed not to have a witch hunt against people such as Michael Foot who have exposed communism and its tyranny at every opportunity?
Mr. Straw:
I entirely agree. The shadow Home Secretary wrote a piece in the Sunday Express on 25 July, headlined "MPs' privilege not a coward's charter". We would all agree with that. It is crucial that we should not abuse our privilege to make unsubstantiated allegations against individuals, against which they can have no redress in court. I am glad that the allegations against Michael Foot were made outside the House and were the subject of a successful action for defamation. Whether the allegations come from the left or the right, resorting to smears--unsubstantiated allegations against individuals--simply demeans our political debate.
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