[THEME MUSIC]
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GILL BENNETT: Thanks very much
and thanks for inviting me.
I should say I'm no longer
the chief historian,
although I still do some
work with the Foreign Office.
But that is a bit
relevant so I'm just
going to say a little
bit about where
I'm coming from on
this before I talk
about the subject of the book.
The Foreign Office these days
is the only major department
of state that employs a cadre
of professional historians
within it.
Other departments
used to have them,
but they don't have them
anymore, some of which
they're sorry about.
And the historians
have two main roles.
One is to publish a
series of books which
are the official history
of British foreign policy,
but the other is something
called historical advice
to ministers and
senior officials.
Now, that can be
absolutely anything.
It can be a very small
thing, like a minister
wanting a joke for a speech--
not very often.
They're not usually
very funny, or else they
think they can make their own
jokes, which is very dangerous.
But it can be major
pieces of research.
And really the principal
role of the historians
is that when there is a
current policy issue that
has some kind of historical
controversy behind it--
and there are an
awful lot of those,
as you will appreciate-- that's
when the historians come in.
Now, I joined the Foreign Office
a very, very, very long time
ago.
And even when I joined,
the Zinoviev Letter
was already one of those
things that kept coming back
and kept coming back.
And because it's one of those
things that a lot of people
have heard of but very few
people know what it is,
I'm going to just say a little
bit about it in a moment.
To just finish my own sort
of little biographical bit,
while I was working
as chief historian,
I got more and more drawn
into intelligence history.
And that's now really
what I specialize in,
various aspects of it.
So obviously, Zinoviev
is an intelligence story,
though these days
it's better known
as what they call a classic
case of disinformation, which
is something that I hope is
of interest to all of you
here in the sort of
business you are in.
So let me say a little bit
about the Letter itself.
Now, this document was a
letter supposedly written
by a man called
Grigory Zinoviev, who
was the head of the
Bolshevik propaganda
organization in Soviet Russia
after the Revolution in 1917.
And it was written to the
British Communist Party,
basically telling them
to up their game a bit
in kind of agitation,
and to lobby
on behalf of a treaty
which had been negotiated,
which would mean a
loan for Soviet Union.
We don't need to go into
too much detail here.
But the point about
this letter, Zinoviev
was always sending letters
to Communist parties
all over the world,
exhorting them
to greater revolutionary fervor.
So there's nothing particularly
special about that.
What makes this Zinoviev letter
special is when it arrived,
which is in 1924.
Now, 1924 saw the first ever
Labour government in London.
It took office in January 1924.
One of the first
things it did was
to recognize the Soviet Union de
jure, as supposed to de facto,
so it was a big deal
for the Soviet Union
to have official recognition.
And then the government,
among other things,
was involved in negotiating
these treaties with Russia,
which by the summer of 1924
had been signed in draft
but had not yet gone
through Parliament.
Now, the traditional ruling
parties of Britain at the time,
the Conservatives and the
Liberals on the other side,
they both thought it would be
a good idea to let Labour take
office for a while and
basically butter things up--
perhaps I shouldn't say that on
YouTube, but I'm sure I can--
so that they could show that
they were unfit to govern.
Actually, they'd done far
better than anybody expected.
And by the summer of 1924,
both the other parties
were getting a bit restive.
They were thinking it was
about time to get rid of them.
And there was a scandal
which involved a threat
to prosecute a certain writer,
and then they withdrew it.
I mean, we won't
go into all that,
but we can talk
about it afterwards.
But essentially, during
the summer of 1924,
the evidence suggests that
the Russians were not sending
inflammatory letters because
they didn't want the Labour
government to fall.
However, the Labour government
did resign in October,
the beginning of October,
1924, over a vote--
losing a vote of no confidence.
So you're going to have
a general election.
It's at this point that
the Letter arrives.
Now, I should point out that
one of the disinformation
factors in this whole story
is that nobody has ever
seen what you might call an
original of this document.
There's no letter
in any paper form.
The only text we
really have is a text
that was sent in a telegram
from the Secret Intelligence
Services station
in Riga, in Latvia,
to the Secret Intelligence
headquarters in London
at the beginning
of October 1924.
And although a lot
of people afterwards
claimed to have
alternative text,
the evidence all indicates that
they are all re-translations
of that original telegram.
This is a complicated story.
We don't need to
have all the details.
But the point is, when it
arrived, the government
resigns and the--
Ramsay MacDonald,
the prime minister,
asked the king to dissolve
Parliament and call
an election.
So he called an election
on the 8th of October 1924.
On the 9th of
October, this telegram
comes in to the
Secret Intelligence
Service, which is what you
now might think of as MI6.
It was called at that time.
MI6 is a Second World
War termination,
but it's SIS is what it was.
In the usual way of these
things, any kind of report
like that, it was topped.
It was what entailed,
it was the things
that could identify it as
an intelligence report were
removed from it.
And then it was circulated
to the Foreign Office
and to certain other
Whitehall departments.
At the same time, rumors
began circulating in London
that there was some kind of
inflammatory document around.
Nobody quite knew what it was.
Certain people started claiming
they got it, even though they
didn't have it.
But essentially,
one way or another,
it was leaked to the press--
to the right-wing press in
particular and to Conservative
Central Office--
so that during the
general election campaign,
the whole Letter became a big
Labour-bashing instrument.
And the reason for that was
that the right-wing interests
claimed that the Letter
showed clearly that Labour was
enthralled to the Reds in Moscow
and that they could not be
trusted therefore.
Now, so all through
the campaign there
are rumors about this
Letter, and it was eventually
published by "The Daily Mail"--
who else, one might say--
on the 25th of October.
The election was taking
place on the 29th.
Now, there are all sorts
of complicating factors
in this, one of which
is the official response
to the Letter.
As I said, Zinoviev sent
lots of documents like this.
And at first, nobody seemed to
pay too much attention to it.
They didn't think it was
different to anything else.
But then they started to worry
about it in the Foreign Office
because, partly, of there being
a general election campaign,
and because they felt
it was so outrageous
there had to be some kind
of official response.
Because if the letter were to
be leaked and spread around,
and it looked as if they
hadn't done anything about it,
that would reflect badly.
So a response was drafted
in the Foreign Office.
And the draft-- sorry.
Follow me on this because
this bit of it is important,
though it's slightly obscure.
The draft note of protest
from Britain to Soviet Russia
was sent from the Foreign
Office to Ramsay MacDonald,
who was both foreign
secretary and prime minister
at this point.
He's in Wales campaigning
for the general election,
so he's not in London.
He's actually by himself.
It's not like it is today.
He was on his own
with just a typist--
no advisors, no
secretaries, no nothing.
He gets the draft.
He amends it quite extensively.
And he sends it back
to the Foreign Office.
At this point, the
permanent undersecretary,
which is the top official
in the Foreign Office,
decides that the amended version
must be what MacDonald really
wants to send.
And he gives that
version to the press,
and he also gives the text
of the Zinoviev Letter
to the press so
that they are both
published on that
fateful 25th of October.
Now, MacDonald claimed
that he had not at all
intended that his
amended draft should
be sent out and published.
He wanted it to come back
again so that he could sign off
on the revision.
This has never been
satisfactorily solved
because later on there
are some documents missing
from the file--
a good old story,
a mystery story--
so that it's impossible
to be absolutely sure.
But whatever happened,
it's not actually
the content of
this document, it's
what was done with it
which makes it important
and which qualifies it as
a disinformation document.
Now, the difficulty
is, you could say OK,
it's disinformation,
but by whom,
against whom, and for
what purpose is much more
difficult to gauge because it
very soon began to be suspected
that this document
was not actually
from Zinoviev at all,
that it had been forged.
Some people said that
the Labour Party,
having lost the election--
although this didn't lose
the election for them--
but they lost the election.
They then accused the--
well, everybody, really--
the Conservative Party,
the Civil Service, the
Intelligence Services,
everybody they regarded
as the establishment--
they accused them of concocting
this document in order
to damage Labour's
prospects in the campaign.
But the question is, who
did actually forge it?
And we still absolutely don't
have a definitive answer,
though there are lots
of possible candidates.
Indeed, it could
conceivably have
been concocted in this country,
though that is less likely,
I think.
But there are very many
different constituencies,
all of whom had an
interest in causing trouble
in the British
political establishment,
or indeed causing
trouble in Moscow.
Because it is possible that even
if Zinoviev didn't write it,
it might have been
forged as part
of an intra-Bolshevik power
struggle, because at this point
we know that Stalin was
trying to discredit Zinoviev,
who was one of his rivals.
And so there's a possibility
that it was actually done
to disrupt Bolshevik politics.
It may have been forged by
what we call White Russian
interests.
That is, the people who
weren't against the Bolsheviks,
but who were Russians,
a lot of whom
were in exile in
Germany or in France
and in the Baltic
states, busily intriguing
and trying to get rid of the
Bolshevik regime in Russia.
And then, of course, you've
got the whole convoluted state
of British politics as well.
So everybody was
accusing everybody else
without ever being able to
quite get to the bottom of it.
But it became known as a
political dirty-tricks example
that was raised in
successive elections
time after time,
when, in fact, there
isn't a decade since the 1920s
when the Zinoviev Letter has
not been raised in the
media, or in politics,
or in the course of an election.
In 2017, during the
election campaign 2017,
you may remember
there were also kinds
of things in the press
about how some remarks made
by European Commission officials
might have been deliberately
placed in order to interfere
with the electoral process.
I mean, it was just
like the Zinoviev Letter
there, so it's one of those
things that people bring up.
The real truth of
it is very difficult
to ascertain because, you know,
it is a very long time ago.
Now, I came into this story--
well, as I said, when I
joined the Foreign Office,
it was already one of
those controversies
that never quite went to bed.
But then in the 1990s, when the
Labour government came in, when
the Blair government came in, it
came up again with a vengeance.
And in 1998 a book
was published.
This book was written
by Nigel West, which
is the pen name of a former
Tory MP, Rupert Allason,
and a former KGB colonel
called Oleg Tsaryov.
This book was called
"The Crown Jewels."
And "the crown jewels" was the
codename for information given
to the Russians by the
so-called Cambridge spies,
you know, Philby, Burgess, and
Maclean, and Blunt, and so on.
And this book purported to
have all sorts of stories
about British history based
on that information that
was held in Russia, having
been transmitted by traitors.
There was a chapter in this
book on the Zinoviev Letter
which said it had
definitely been written
by a man called Pokrovsky--
Ivan Pokrovsky-- who was
a former tsarist officer.
The book caused quite
a stir in this country.
There were questions in
Parliament on the lines of,
why do we have to
read about our history
on the basis of what traitors
have given to Russia?
And the foreign secretary,
who was then Robin Cook,
at first, he was
absolutely astonished
that anybody could get
exercised about something
that had happened in 1924.
But then he soon realized
that in the Labour Party,
the Zinoviev Letter was
still very much a sore point
and a hot issue.
And so he ordered
an investigation.
Now, the complicating
factor, of course,
is that the real
evidence on all this
lies in the archives of the
UK's intelligence agencies,
and in particularly
in SIS archives, which
are not open to the public.
And this is how I came
into it because he stood up
in the House of Commons.
Over my career, there have
been a number of occasions
when a minister has stood
up in Parliament and said,
I have ordered a
full investigation
for my historians.
They never tell you
this beforehand.
You just find out afterwards.
However, he said precisely this.
And so my role was-- because
I have privileged access
to these archives-- was to
go in and to try and find out
the truth.
He still didn't really
believe that anybody
could be terribly
exercised about something
that happened so long ago.
But he was soon
disabused of that.
And when the official report
at the end of my investigation
was published in
1999, there were
a lot of messages that came
into the Foreign Office
saying that their relations,
or somebody had been involved
in it, or they always knew.
There was one particular
guy who was a very--
if you do read
this book, there's
a very strange guy
called Donald im
Thurn, who, despite
his name, was actually
a British Conservative.
His son got in touch with me
after the report was published
to say, my father
would never have been
involved in anything like this.
His grandson, who was
living in Italy at the time,
sent me a fax, saying, I
always knew my grandfather
was involved in this.
So--
[LAUGHTER]
So even Robin Cook was
convinced that you can't quite
put the Zinoviev Letter to bed.
Now, we didn't manage to get
to the bottom of everything,
but I did go to Moscow as part
of this investigation, which
was very interesting.
This was actually in a
fairly briefish period
between the end of
the Cold War, when
things didn't go quite so
well, when, actually, relations
with Russia were pretty good.
They cooperated in
our investigations,
and they were very
helpful to me.
And so it was all
absolutely fine at the time.
Because they have
an interest, too.
And ever since I did
this, I keep an alert
on my name on Google--
I know you'll be glad to know--
not just to be
vainglorious, I assure you,
because you get particularly
Russian websites saying,
Gill Bennett has
said X or Y. I mean,
I never have, and there's
nothing I can do about it.
But I like to know
that somebody said it,
if you see what I mean,
because you never know when
you're going to be ambushed.
It's just kind of the fixer.
And it's partly to do with
this particular story, which
remains inflammatory nearly
a hundred years later.
There were definite accusations
that the British intelligence
community were involved
in this whole thing
and that indeed they
concocted the Letter.
I think the idea of them
concocting the Letter
is unlikely.
I think it entirely
possible that some members
of the SIS, including a man
called Desmond Morton, whom
I also wrote a book about,
who was a very, very
secret squirrel, that he
knew this letter was forged.
And he and certain other people
in the intelligence community
who absolutely had no time for
the Labour Party smoothed it
on its way into the public
domain, shall we say,
and were not displeased
at the way it was used.
But it is certainly a
case of disinformation.
It was smearing the Labour
Party in a way that was unfair,
because actually they were
absolutely not enthralled.
They were very anti-Communist.
They were not
enthralled to Moscow.
But of course, even in
the 1920s-- and this
is actually one of the
contemporary lessons
of this episode today.
Everybody talks now about
disinformation, fake news,
whatever you want to
call it, going around
the world in seconds
because of the internet
and digital
communications generally.
Of course, that's true.
But even in the 1920s,
a story could get round
pretty damn quickly.
And it only had to be mentioned
in the press, and it had legs.
And those legs could
run an awful long way.
So there's no kind
of enormous change.
And how you might deal
with disinformation
is not that different.
The kind of techniques that
were developed at the time
to try-- how do
you counter this?
How do you look at stories
which you think might be false?
And there are techniques that
are used in the Intelligence
Services.
First of all, you
look at the source.
What do you think
the source was?
But also you try
to look at intent.
In a military parlance,
capability plus intent
equals threat.
Look at where you think
the story is coming from
and what interest whoever
it is you think it might be
might have.
And that does help, A, to try
and identify disinformation,
and B, to try and think how you
might be able to respond to it.
And actually, they certainly
didn't use those terms
in the 1920s, but
there were people who
were trying to do that then.
And I just want to mention one
particularly tricky character
in all this story
who illustrates
the kind of problems
that they were faced.
There is a man called
Vladimir Orlov.
Now, Orlov had the
distinction of having
worked in the tsarist
secret police,
in the Bolshevik
secret police, and then
for White Russian
organizations in exile.
He set up a forgery bureau
in Berlin in the 1920s.
He was given accommodation
and facilities
by German intelligence.
He was paid money by
French intelligence,
by SIS, by Red Russians,
and by White Russians.
And he and his colleagues
manufactured documents
to order.
It doesn't mean they were
all absolutely false,
but they were expert.
And so trying to find
out whether a document
like the Zinoviev Letter really
was true was almost impossible.
Because after all, you
know, Bolshevik Russia
is shrouded in-- it's
a very secret state.
They're not going to
tell you much about it.
And Zinoviev's
own reaction to it
was, well, I didn't
actually write that one,
but if somebody had
put it in front of me,
I would have signed
it, which is not
terribly reassuring, really.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, Orlov, characters
like Orlov--
and he was not the only one--
make the whole
story pretty tricky
and make it difficult to really
get to the bottom of this.
And all through the decades
it comes up, as I said,
in general elections.
It came up during
Labour government,
Harold Wilson's two
governments, when, of course,
Harold Wilson already rather
paranoid about the activities
of the intelligence agencies.
In the background of Labour,
the Zinoviev Letter is very much
something to conjure with.
As I was just saying to one
of you beforehand, Jack Straw,
former foreign secretary with
whom I worked quite closely
when he was there, he
says Zinoviev Letter
is mother's milk to him.
His father, who had been a
plumber and who was a Labour
activist and a trade unionist,
his father had taught him about
Zinoviev Letter when he was a
little boy as a classic example
of the kind of things that the
establishment does to do Labour
down.
Well, he is not the only
one who takes that view.
Another factor that had--
I'll stop for a
moment for questions.
But another person I need
to bring into this story
is Kim Philby, whom I'm
sure you all know about.
Of course, he's one of
the Cambridge spies.
But there was a
major investigation
across Whitehall
investigation in the '60s
that was done as a direct result
of the defection of Philby.
Now, Philby, of course, had
been suspected in the '50s,
and indeed left SIS, but
he'd been exonerated.
He bluffed it out, essentially.
They couldn't get the evidence.
And SIS kept on
defending him and saying
they were sure he
was not a traitor
so that when he did
actually defect in 1963,
it was an enormous
shock, enormous shock
to the whole of the
intelligence establishment.
And they got together,
the different agencies.
And they said, look, if
this can have happened
and we didn't know, what
else might there be?
So they formed a committee
to try and go back
through the history of
operations of the Intelligence
Services to look at other
cases where there might
have been disinformation,
treachery that they had not
detected.
And one of the cases they looked
at was the Zinoviev Letter.
And they commissioned
a formidable lady
called Milicent Bagot, who
had just retired from MI5,
to run this
inter-departmental inquiry.
And she did very much what
I was to do 30 years later.
She went and looked in
all the intelligence
agency archives and so on.
But of course in the
1960s, you couldn't
admit that MI6 or MI5 or
GCHQ actually existed.
They were not yet on
a legislative footing.
They hadn't been avowed.
You weren't allowed
to talk about.
You weren't allowed
to release a document
that referred to any of
the agencies by name,
or that indeed referred
to their activities.
So everything that she
did was under wraps.
And indeed, her report
has never been published,
although I was lucky enough
to be able to draw on it
extensively when I came round.
Now, the [INAUDIBLE] I do
my investigation, of course,
the whole legislative
framework has changed.
And all the agencies were
on a legislative footing.
You were allowed to
know that they existed.
You were allowed even
to mention their heads.
And so it was much easier to
then be able to, in our report,
to talk about what SIS or
MI5 or anybody had been
doing in the years beforehand.
Now, it still hasn't gone away.
I was asked if I would like
to write a book about this
because it kept coming back.
I mean, we didn't put
it to bed in 1999.
It comes up again and again.
It came up in the
referendum campaign
when there was an article, for
example, criticizing the way
that "The Daily Mail" were
laying into David Cameron
during the EU
referendum campaign,
because of him obviously
campaigning, though perhaps not
very hard, for remaining.
This is just like what they
did to Ramsay MacDonald
over the Zinoviev Letter.
So it comes back.
When I actually started
looking for mentions of it,
I found they were everywhere.
And so it is literally the
conspiracy that never dies.
And although I've moved, I
hope, the debate on a bit,
in the end I do
think that Pokrovsky,
who was fingered
in the 1998 book,
is certainly a very
credible candidate.
But who asked him to
do it, I don't know.
And there are still any
number of candidates,
which means that
although I've been
able to bring a lot more
stuff out into the open,
it's not dead yet.
And the message
of the book really
is that good
conspiracies never die.
I've got to stop there
and take questions.
Is that OK?
[APPLAUSE]
