Harold Wilson plot allegations
Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn is said to have told Alec MacDonald, who set up safe houses where Golitsyn could live, that former Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB in order to have the pro-American Gaitskell replaced as party leader by Harold Wilson. [1] David Leigh, however, claims that Golitsyn was guessing.
Former MI5 officer Peter Wright claimed in his memoirs Spycatcher that he had been told that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Wright states that after Wilson was elected Prime Minister in 1964 the CIA's head of the Counterintelligence Division, James Angleton, had told him that he had heard from a source (who he did not name) that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Angleton said he would give further information if MI5 would guarantee to keep the allegations from 'political circles'.[2] The management of MI5, according to Wright, refused to accept Angleton's restrictions on the use of his information and so Angleton did not tell them anything more.
According to Wright by the end of the 1960s MI5 had received information that the Labour Party had 'almost certainly' been penetrated by the Soviets. Two Czechoslovakian defectors, 'Frolik' and 'August', had fled to the West and named a list of Labour MPs and trade unionists as Soviet agents. [3]
Wright also claimed that he was confronted by two of his colleagues and that they said to him: "Wilson's a bloody menance and it's about time the public knew the truth", and "We'll have him out, this time we'll have him out". [4] Wright alledged that there was a plan to leak damaging information about Wilson and that this had been approved by 'up to thirty officers'. [5] As the 1974 election approached, the plan went, MI5 would leak selective details of the intelligence about Labour leaders, and especially Wilson, to 'sympathetic' journalists. According to Wright MI5 would use their contacts in the press and the trade unions to spread around the idea that Wilson was considered a security risk. The matter was to be raised in Parliament for 'maximum effect'. [6] However Wright declined to let them see the files on Wilson and the plan was never carried out but does claim it was a 'carbon copy' of the Zinoviev Letter which had helped destabilise the first Labour Government in 1924.