and finally...
Tinker, tailor, journalist, spy
Chris Proctor wants to add 007 to his NUJ press card I
’m having an argument with the NUJ about my press card. Currently, it says I’m a ‘writer’. I want it
amended to read ‘spy’ but membership say this is not permissible. Their argument is that the union doesn’t recruit spies. My case is that most industrial journalists were spies until the Berlin Wall came down. Until the end of the Cold War, the TUC and Labour Party conferences had more Soviet bloc attachés than agenda papers. They all wore suits with shoulders so enormous that two couldn’t fit in a lift at the same time. Not strong on epigrams or knock-knock jokes, they were serious and polite folk who always seemed a bit apologetic to be there. We’d all say hello and, lacking obvious chit-chat material, discuss the intricacies of the health and safety report. Did this make us spies? So it would seem. Last month, the Sunday Times shock-horrored that the late Geoffrey Goodman had been a Czech spy in the 1960s. Goodman was the grand master of industrial journalists: he’d done it all and knew everyone. He’d falsified his birth certificate to join the RAF and fly fighter planes in the war. He’d been a mate of Harold Wilson. He’d worked for the Daily Herald and become assistant editor of the Mirror, which he left in 1986 to co-found the British Journalism Review. Splendid man. Not according to the Sunday Times.
He was a spy. A traitor. An inhabitant of the demimonde of secrets and subterfuge. Cloak and dagger man. Czech agent. So, what did he do?
Exactly the same as the rest of us as far as I can see. I compared his record with my own. Goodman had no access to secret documents. Check. He wasn’t given security clearance by our own spooks. Czech. He was once a member of the Communist Party. Check. He spoke to people employed by eastern European embassies. Czech. He gossiped about politics with them. Check. If he’s a spy, I’m a spy. Why won’t
the NUJ accept this? I want help drafting invoices to every former Soviet bloc embassy. Until the Times article, I had no idea that passing on well-worn, unclassified, public- domain information made me an intelligence agent. As it does, I’ve got legitimate claims. The Cubans owe me a couple of bob.
With other solidarity campaign supporters, I have often been to cocktail receptions at the ambassador’s house. At one, an employee approached me and, after exchanging the password (‘Would you like a mojito?’ ‘Yes please’), she interrogated me about the then leader of the Labour Party. ‘What do you think of Jeremy Corbyn?’ I confirmed that Corbyn was a member of parliament and a bit of a leftie. If I’d known this was technically, or Times-ishly, spying, I’d have added: “That will be a fiver.” But I had no idea of the murky Goodman-ish path I was treading by divulging the Corbyn information. In fact, unwittingly, I ‘super-Goodman-ed’. For I was dealing in hard facts. Not him.
It appears, from the Times probe, that Goodman (aka Agent Gustav)
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would meet Czechs and ‘deliver political gossip over lunch’. I admire the verb ‘deliver’ in this context. It gives the occasion a menacing and sinister atmosphere. Much better than ‘gossiped about politics’. I had no idea that gossiping about politics – and especially politicians – over lunch constituted espionage. I thought it was what you did. Apparently it’s legally treachery if there’s a foreigner in the vicinity. Let me give you an example. If, sitting with Bodger and Carruthers in the 1980s, I had revealed that Archie Hamilton was one of the All-Party Parliamentary Bridge Group, I would be asked to pass the salt, pick up the bill and keep my banalities to myself. Had I made the same observation in the company of a person of eastern European extraction, I’d have found myself up before the beak. Twenty years of hard labour. And do you know where super-
TUC and Labour Party conferences had more Soviet bloc attachés than agenda papers They all wore suits with shoulders so enormous that two couldn’t fit in a lift
sleuthing Goodman rendezvoused with his broad-shouldered, ill-fitting- suited and staggeringly obvious ‘contacts’? In which remote bistro he shrouded his nefarious trysts? In what safe houses he spooked? According to my Sunday source,
the secret meetings took place in the public bar of the Charing Cross Hotel just off Trafalgar Square as well as L’Etoile restaurant, which was moments away from Gossip Central, aka the Gay Hussar. And – his own house. If he was a spy, he wasn’t very good
at it. That’s why I’ll be charging inflated retrospective fees when the NUJ finally gets on the case.
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