LETTERS
Communist in the SOE
From Mr David Turner Sir: Sir Ian Fraser (Letters, 14 August) is somewhat mistaken when he says that James Klugmann, of the wartime Special Operations Executive, was 'an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist'. Norman John (`James') Klug- mann was quite openly a card-carrying member of the Communist party of Great Britain from 1933 until the day he died in 1977.
He was educated at Gresham's (where he knew Donald Maclean) and Cambridge (where he was a contemporary of Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross; he also knew Anthony Blunt). In 1935 he gave up postgraduate research to become the sec- retary of the Communist-led Rassemble- ment Mondial des Etudiants, a post he held until 1939. Evidence in the Soviet archives proves that during this time Klug- mann helped the NKVD to recruit Cairn- cross.
Klugmann was conscripted into the Royal Army Service Corps as a private and later transferred to the Intelligence Corps. By 1942 he was a corporal in the Cairo headquarters of SOE; by June 1943 he was a captain; by October 1943 he was a major; and by June 1944 he was a lieutenant- colonel. During 1945-6 he worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia. The precipi- tous upward curve of Klugmann's career was partly due to the fact that, true to his name, he was a 'Huger [clever] Mann' (he was fluent in French, German and Serbo- Croat). However, M.R.D. Foot records that the turning point in Klugmann's progress was when, as an NCO, he took a cup of tea to Brigadier Terence Airey, who recognised him as a fellow Old Boy of Gresham's. It also helped that Klugmann's MI5 file had gone up in smoke during an air raid in September 1940.
The accusation made by Sir Ian Fraser and by Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia (`King's move', 31 July) that Klugmann tampered with SOE reports to push Britain into supporting Tito instead of the royalist Mihailovic has been around for many years, confirmed by SOE records released into the Public Record Office. However, it seems most unlikely that Klug- mann singlehandedly changed British poli- cY. There were others lobbying hard for support to be switched to Tito, most notably Sir William Deakin and the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who can hardly be accused of having been communist moles. Whether his conduct was reprehensible is a moot point given that Mihailovic's Chetniks are clearly among the political ancestors of today's Serbian ethnic cleansers.
What Klugmann really deserves to be condemned for is his authorship in 1951 of a mendacious piece of tripe entitled From Trotsky to Tito, in which he denounced his erstwhile hero Tito as an agent of the West:
At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top- secret level, must have received information . .. that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Commu- nist party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo ele- ments, Trotskyites, who could be 'trusted' (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to . . . carry out an Anglo- American imperialist policy. This was the basis of the change of British policy from Mihailovic to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out . . . with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism . . has become notorious throughout the world.
He knew all this to be lies; but, being a dutiful communist functionary, he appar- ently felt obligated to perjure himself. Leg- end has it that, long after Moscow and Bel- grade had patched up their differences, Klugmann was still haunting second-hand bookshops in order to buy up and destroy copies of his embarrassing opus.
David Turner
Oak Lodge, Chestnut Street, Borden, Kent
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