The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media in an extraordinary attack on its attempts to “weaponise information” in order to sow discord in the West, but Whitehall has been strangely quiet about past attempts by Britain’s own Intelligence Services to meddle in UK and Irish elections. 42 years ago this March the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, abruptly resigned from office during a whispering campaign orchestrated by elements within the British Intelligence Services alleging that he was a Soviet agent. It is highly ironic, therefore, that during the past few weeks the British media have been dominated by the ‘fake news’ story that the current Leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was an agent of the Soviet-controlled Czech Intelligence agency, the Statni Bezpecnost (ŠtB). Established in 1945, the StB was also closely linked with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The media campaign against Corbyn relies entirely on claims made by a former StB officer Jan Sarkocy, who served as a diplomat in Britain under the cover name ‘Jan Dymic during the 1980s’. Despite the media frenzy, the current director of the Czech Security Forces Archive, Svetlana Ptacnikova, issued a formal statement making it clear that Corbyn was neither registered by the ŠtB as a collaborator, nor does his alleged collaboration stem from anything in the archive. She said: “The files we have on him are kept in a folder that starts with the identification number one. Secret collaborators were allocated folders that start with the number four… He stayed in that basic category – and in fact he was still described as that, as a person of interest – in the final report issued by the ŠtB agent shortly before he [Sarkocy] was expelled from the UK in 1989”. A Czech Republic Defence Ministry official, Radek Schovánek, who currently has responsibility for examining the old ŠtB files, has also gone on record saying that the allegations against Corbyn are unfounded, as were the claims that Sarkocy signed up other members of the Labour leadership. It is almost certain that a number of MPs from all the British political parties were “persons of interest” to Czech Intelligence at that time. It is a bit like saying that some MPs are persons interest to the press! The current story bears all the hallmarks of a similar disinformation exercise run by British Intelligence in the 1960s. In 1968, another Czech Intelligence officer, Josef Frolik, defected to the CIA and provided the CIA and British Intelligence with questionable revelations about operations run by the ŠtB in the West. These included the alleged recruitment, or attempted recruitment, of British members of Parliament and Labour Party leaders. In his book: ‘The Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent’ Frolik claimed that there was a plot to blackmail Edward Heath over his sexual activities. According to Frolík, another ŠtB officer, Jan Mrázek, working out of the Czechoslovakian embassy in London, had devised a plan in the mid-1960s, which aimed to expose Heath to homosexual blackmail. Frolik claimed that Mrázek had prepared a homosexual honeytrap for Heath, in the form of a personal invitation from a handsome (and sexually versatile) young Czech organist, to visit and play the famous organ of the Church of St James in Prague. But Frolik claimed that Heath was tipped off by MI5 at the last moment, and cancelled the visit. Despite these claims, the ŠtB’s archives have no record of any plot to trap Heath, nor do they contain any files on Heath. Thefakeallegation is interesting because it not only drew attention to Edward Heath’s alleged sexual orientation, but also portrayed MI5 in a good light. The strong rebuttals issued by the Current Czech Republic authorities have not stopped right-wing elements of the British press from promoting the campaign of disinformation against Corbyn. So what is behind this fake news? To understand this, it is important to look at the events in the lead up to the 1974 General Election and to an uncanny similarity between the Corbyn smear and one used against Harold Wilson. It may now seem incredible to many people, but 30 years ago there really was an attempt to undermine the Government led by Wilson. One of the prime witnesses in support of that claim is a former Assistant Director of MI5, Peter Wright, who in his bestselling memoires, ‘Spycatcher’, explains how some of his colleagues set about undermining Wilson at the election in February 1974: “In the run-up to the election which, given the level of instability in Parliament, must be due within a matter of months, MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about leading Labour Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic pressmen. Using our contacts in the press and among union officials, word of the material contained in MI5 files and the fact that Wilson was considered a security risk would be passed around. “Soundings in the office had already been taken, and up to thirty officers had given their approval to the scheme. Facsimile copies of some files were to be made and distributed to overseas newspapers, and the matter was to be raised in Parliament for maximum effect. It was a carbon copy of the Zinoviev letter, which had done so much to destroy the first Ramsay MacDonald Government in 1928”. The Zinoviev letter was a controversial forged document published by the Daily Mail newspaper four days before the general election in 1924. It purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, ordering it to engage in all sorts of seditious activities. Current scholarship sug- gests it probably originated in a Russian monarchist group. In May 1976 Wright’s allegations about the plot were confirmed personally to two BBC reporters, Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose, by Harold Wilson. He told them that the then head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield,
