Ghosts Of The Cold War Return To Haunt British Left-Wingers

Five years after the Berlin wall came down, ghosts from the cold war are haunting a stormy public debate here: Did left-wing writers and other opinion makers in Britain accept money or favors from Soviet intelligence agents seeking to advance the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts?

The question emerged suddenly last month, when Richard Gott, the literary editor of The Guardian, one of Britain’s most highly regarded newspapers, resigned in the face of published allegations in a conservative magazine that he was one of as many as two dozen “agents of influence” recruited by the KGB during the 1970s and 1980s among left-wing circles in Britain.

In a public letter of resignation, Gott, 56, denied receiving regular cash payments from his Soviet contacts, as The Spectator, a weekly magazine, asserted. But he acknowledged that he did take money from a Soviet Embassy contact to pay for travel expenses to visit Vienna, Nicosia and Athens to meet a Soviet official sent from Moscow.

In a country that is volubly obsessed with the specter of betrayal - embodied in the treachery of Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s by Moscow and the core of a Soviet spy ring inside British intelligence after World War II - there is an almost a visceral reaction here to the notion that the Soviets might have managed once again to win the indulgence, if not the loyalty, of members of Britain’s intellectual elite.

But unlike Philby, Burgess, Maclean or Blunt, Gott was an avowedly left-wing journalist who presumably never had access to government secrets.

“In the first few days, after the story broke and I watched all these cameras outside my house, I wanted to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m not Anthony Blunt,”’ Gott said. “This has all been a very peculiar phenomenon to me, as though the cold war were still going.”

Still, the notion that Gott might be one of just several people who had enjoyed Soviet favors has consumed editorial writers and intellectuals in a feverish debate, filling newspaper letters’ columns, pitting conservatives against left-wingers and reviving nearly forgotten arguments about the political morality of the cold war.

Gott himself acknowledges that he is guilty only of “culpable stupidity” for failing to tell his editors at The Guardian that he took money to pay for travel expenses from the Soviets, especially after the trips were discovered by British intelligence. Otherwise, he said it was all a “harmless saga,” and at the time, seemed like a “enjoyable joke.”

Nonetheless, said Rupert Allason, a Conservative Member of Parliament, the Gott story has “touched a very raw nerve in the British psyche.

“There is an enduring fascination with the idea of the colorful British traitor,” said Allason. “How can someone with … all the benefits of good breeding, support a wholly totalitarian regime?”

For the most part, Britain’s more conservative politicians and newspapers have excoriated Gott and The Guardian, the most left-leaning of Britain’s major dailies. The Times of London said the Gott affair “is about much more than newspaper ethics.

“It is also about our collective memory of the cold war and the importance of that long struggle,” the newspaper wrote. “It is about the risks of intellectual frivolity and moral equivocation in the face of deep political evil.”

Emboldened by the revelations against Gott, some Conservative Members of Parliament and newspaper editorial writers are now demanding the government publicly reveal the identity of any other so-called agents of influence known to British intelligence.

But to his sympathizers, Gott is depicted less the villain of a cold war morality play than the unwitting character in a tragicomedy: a well-bred graduate of Oxford who never made any secret of his sympathy of even the most unpopular left-wing causes, including his defense of, Pol Pot, the brutal Cambodian dictator.

In a column in The Observer, a Sunday newspaper now owned by The Guardian, Phillip Knightley, a British writer on intelligence matters, dismissed the furor as a “witch hunt” by right-wingers who want “those on the Left who are still around to kneel and confess they were conned, used and manipulated and were thus guilty of something, preferably treason but at least naivete.”