Ex Daily Telegraph journalist spied for Communist Russia

It truly is claimed younger colleagues provided David Floyd the moniker 'Pink', because he was the newspaper's communist affairs correspondent, without realising this individual had once spied for Soviet Russia

An ex girlfriend or boyfriend Daily Telegraph journalist spied for Communist Russia, it is often alleged.

David Floyd put in practically 30 years as the right-wing newspaper's communism affairs correspondent.

But it is now claimed that before joining the Telegraph in the early 1952s, Floyd had passed information to the Soviets while working in Moscow as a diplomat between 1944 and 1947.

The facts come days after Time leader Jeremy Corbyn arrested the Telegraph and other newspapers of "going a little bit James Bond" in the way it was reporting the accusations he previously met a Czech spy in the 1980s.

Writing in The Sunday Times, the vem som st?r Jeff Hulbert, who revealed secret Foreign Office documents about the Floyd circumstance, said there seemed to have been a cover-up after the Oxford graduate student confessed to spying in 1951.

Despite having a clear confession, the Overseer of Public Prosecutions is said to have reported that the evidence was "clearly insufficient" to support a criminal case.

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Instead, Mr Hulbert reports, within a yr of Floyd returning from a diplomatic posting to Belgrade in disgrace, this individual had been given the communist affairs correspondent job by The Daily Telegraph's deputy editor Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for MI6 through the Second World Conflict.

Mr Hulbert suggested that the British could have desired to hush everything up because weeks before Floyd confessed, the "Cambridge spies" Guy Burgess and Jesse Maclean had fled to the Soviet Union.

The defections had left the intelligence agencies "highly disturbed" and demanding the English "clean house".

Revealing another British turncoat, this time an Oxford graduate, might have been viewed as uncomfortable and damaging to the "special relationship".

Floyd's court case, Mr Hulbert said, was potentially all the more embarrassing because the English seem to be to have directed him to Moscow without having bothered to doctor him properly.

Had they checked, they would have uncovered that as students in the 1930s having been secretary of the Oxford University branch of the Communist Party.

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When at Oxford, Mr Hulbert said, Floyd met Arthur Wynn, who would carry on to have a known civil service career but would be unmasked, after his death, as KGB "Agent Scott", the man who recruited Oxford students as Soviet spies.

Floyd married Joan Dabbs, a fellow Oxford communist, in 1939, but having recently been still sent to Moscow in 1944 as a translator for the wartime British military mission to the Russian capital. Afterwards Floyd, a fluent Russian speaker, worked at the British embassy.

When his spying was finally diagnosed, Britain's then Foreign Admin Herbert Morrison is said to have scribbled in despair across one key memo: "Why must we employ such doubtfuls? inch

Mr Hulbert reported that it was only in 1950 that the Overseas Office realised it got never done background records searches on Floyd, who had recently been hired on a momentary most basic.

The key files reportedly show this happened after the alarm grew up by chance when an Oxford graduate working in the Ministry of Defence recognized Floyd and remembered this individual had been a pupil communist.

Floyd, right now centered in Belgrade in what was then communist Yugoslavia, was investigated, but, perhaps incredibly, cleared.

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His scholar radicalism was reportedly ignored as "youthful indiscretion". Mister Hulbert said one older colleague assured others that Floyd was "a simple individual who could not possibly conceal a double commitment. "

Mister Hulbert added it has not been totally clear why Floyd then confessed about a year later to moving what he insisted acquired been "very low-grade" secrets to the Russians between 1944 and 1947.

1 likelihood has been that in the hue and cry following the Burgess and Maclean defections, Floyd feared that Russian brokers - who had contacted him in Belgrade - might abduct him and take him to the "safety" of Moscow.

The historian quoted a "top secret" Foreign Office overview as saying: "Mr Floyd claims that he has turned King's evidence because he had come to the conclusion that having been unfitted to stay in the other service and it was your honest thing to do.

"He is influenced by the Maclean and Burgess episode. Addititionally there is an indicator that he was terrified that the Russians might kidnap him. "

The documents also say Floyd may have become frustrated with communism and "sincerely repentant". He is said to have given a statement declaring: "I wanted to make a 'clean breast' of the affair so that I might eventually commence life anew with a definite conscience. "

In this, the British look to have been willing to help him, somewhat than prosecute him.

Inspite of declaring himself "greatly distressed" to learn of Floyd's spying, Sir Charles Peake, the ambassador in Belgrade, reportedly lent his careless subordinate the use of his country cottage while he sorted himself away.

Around the same time, Mr Hulbert reports, a Foreign Office memo known: "He is already in touch with MI5, who want to find him work. "

Within a year of returning to Britain in disgrace, Floyd was working for the Telegraph where the editor tool, Colin Coote, was, like his deputy Muggeridge, a former MI6 man.

In his Sunday Times article, Mr Hulbert, who have written a biography of Person Burgess, speculates: "Did the Telegraph, wittingly or not, provide Floyd with the perfect cover to continue spying, this time as a double agent appreciated to work for Great britain in return for his freedom?

"Was some kind of deal struck by the security services to keep Floyd out of jail? Or was Floyd more cunning than anyone realised and still doing work for Moscow, now as a triple agent? "

The files seen by the historian remain heavily redacted.

One former colleague referred to Floyd to Mr Hulbert as "a very strange fellow who created this aura of inscrutability and mystery. "

His spying for the Soviets was never made public during his lifetime, and when Floyd died aged 83 in 1997, his obit hailed him as "one of Fleet Street's most knowledgeable Kremlinologists".

His boy Sir Christopher Floyd, sixty six, now a lord proper rights of appeal, told The Sunday Times he found the allegations about his father "very shocking", but declined to comment further.

Among Floyd's scoops was revealing, almost 50 years ago, that the secret agent Kim Philby was working as an adviser to the KGB's British office after escaping to Moscow.

The Sunday Times also reports that Floyd was at a Garrick Golf club lunch working in greater london where his editor, Coote, introduced the Soviet náutico attach? Captain Yevgeny Ivanov to society osteopath Sophie Ward.

Ivanov would go to sleep with Ward's friend Christine Keeler, as would John Profumo, Britain's secretary of state for war. Coote appears to have thought Ivanov would be an useful journalistic contact for Floyd.

In 1978 Floyd was also mentioned in a Guard report alleging that the Information Research Department (IRD) of the Foreign Workplace had secretly doubled as an anti-communist propaganda product for 30 years.

Devoid of suggesting Floyd knew of the department's covert intrusions, the Guardian noted this individual had been commissioned by IRD to write a booklet about China.

Maybe ironically given Floyd's top secret past, the Guardian also reported that the IRD was being shut down because a Labour overseas secretary, Tony Crosland, acquired "objected to its links with certain right-wing press. "

By this time Floyd had established a reputation as something of an implacable foe of communism.

It was in comparison with what he reported on, rather than his own political leanings, that young journalists are said to have given him the nickname "Pink" Floyd.