Eye Spy - May 2018

16 EYE SPY INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE 115 2018

11 December 1967. Sud Aviation Workshops (Saint-Martin-du-Touch). John

Stonehouse is pictured with various dignitaries at the official presentation of the

French prototype of Concorde, including Maurice Papon, President of Sud Aviation

John Stonehouse

LEFT: Arrival of officials in the hangar

for the inauguration of the prototype.

L-R: Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn

(English Minister of Technology), Jean

Shamant (Minister of Transport) and

John Stonehouse

Vasili Mitrokhin

for the SVR

(Foreign Intelli-

gence Service)

who came to

Britain in 1992,

bringing with him

huge amounts of

intelligence. He

would go on to co-

author The

Mitrokhin Archive:

The KGB in Europe

and the West, with Christopher Andrew.

Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse - a target of

much MI5 surveillance during the early years

of the Cold War is also a key figure forever

referenced in spylore. In 1979, Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher released information that

suggested he had been an StB agent since

1962. At the time he was already in prison for
      fraud and legal chiefs decided there was
      “insufficient evidence” to bring a new trial.
      When the original stories started to surface
      about Stonehouse, then Prime Minister Harold
      Wilson (himself an unsuccessful target of the
      StB, KGB codename OLDING) denied that
      Stonehouse ever spied for the StB.
      Stonehouse too rejected the claim, but his
      engagement with the USSR is documented in
      the 2009 official history of MI5: The Defence
      of the Realm, by Christopher Andrew.

For the record, Stonehouse will forever be

remembered for faking his own death in

November 1974, after leaving his clothes on a

beach in Miami, Florida. Investigators

presumed he had drowned or was killed by a

shark. Either way, obituaries started to appear

• this as he cover tly wended his way to
  Australia using false identities where he hoped
  to star t a new life with his mistress and
  secretary. He was arrested in December 1974,
  just four weeks after disappearing.

Czechoslovakian-born Sir Barnett Stross is

another politician who allegedly supplied the

StB with materials on UK domestic and foreign

policies of the Labour Party. Some intelligence

historians believe such information could just

as easily have been acquired by simply writing

to Transport House - headquarters of the

© ANDRÉ CROS FONDS, PRESERVED BY THE MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES OF THE CITY OF TOUL

OUSE

© ANDRÉ CROS FONDS, PRESERVED BY THE MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES OF THE CITY OF TOULOUSE