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For
nearly thirty years John Symonds has been telling anyone who cares to listen
that between 1972 and 1980 he was a spy for the KGB. If you did not
instantly dismiss him as a pub bore who on another day may come up to you
and say he used to be Marilyn Monroe’s lover or the 5th, 6th or 7th Beatle,
you would go on to learn that he was far from a conventional spy. He was not
some grey pen-pusher in a government office, or a purloiner of bomb
blueprints from a top secret weapons research establishment, or indeed a
betrayer of any official secret whatever. On the contrary, John Symonds
never betrayed a single secret, unless saying that Scotland Yard was corrupt
from top to bottom was a secret. If he had gone to Moscow offering that
information as a basis for being welcomed as a defector from Britain, then
any Russian who had ever served in London would have rightly pointed out
that even a fool with his eyes half open in Soho during the 1960s and early
1970s could have told you that. Rampant corruption in the Yard was staring
any Londoner in the face during those years, from every porn shop, druggies’
pub and looted safety deposit box, as cops, robbers, pornographers and
narcotics traffickers conspired to turn English justice upside-down.
So
when John Symonds went on the run abroad in 1972, on pain of murder by some
of the Yard’s most senior detectives if ever he returned, he was taking the
only course open to him. As a former Royal Artillery officer, it was natural
that he should gravitate to mercenary service in Africa, in which role he
contracted several serious diseases - including hepatitis - and took up an
offer of free medical care in Bulgaria. The men who arranged this trip were
already aware of John’s burning passion to “avenge” those who had expected
him to go to jail on corruption charges without breathing a word in court of
the far worse systematic corruption that embraced almost all London’s CID.
Indeed, he had handed his new-found friends a dossier listing over 150
corrupt detectives. This so impressed these undercover agents for the Soviet
Bloc that they recommended him for recruitment by Moscow. And when he found
himself in a resort on the Black Sea, awaiting what turned out to be superb
medical care, sure enough, up came a senior KGB officer and took John under
his wing.
The
relationship was initially bumpy, as 'Nick' the KGB man battered the English
police detective with question after question, to force him to admit that he
was a double-agent, pretending to defect but working for British
intelligence all along. His suspicions were still rampant when suddenly John
Symonds pulled off an amazing espionage coup. A random pick-up turned out to
be the wife of a West German political official who was then so pre-occupied
with catching a spy in the office of chancellor Willi Brandt that he had
sent his wife off on holiday to the soviet satellite state of Bulgaria all
on her own. She fell in with the lusty English tourist, for three days and
nights they made passionate love, and she spilled out all her husband’s
secrets on the pillow.
The
result? A report straight back to Moscow, desperate efforts to pull out the
cornered spy from Chancellor Brandt’s innermost circle, and demands for more
and more pillow-talk courtesy of this Englishman’s amazing sexual powers. On
the basis of everything John found out, the spy at the court of King Willi
could easily have been saved, but the stubbornness of the East German agency
that was handling the spy meant that he was left in place as Brandt’s
right-hand man for so long that the West Germans captured him anyway. The
result was catastrophic for the Chancellor. He had to resign for placing
undue trust in so unworthy a ‘secretary’, and the spy himself, Gunther
Guillaume, was jailed for 13 years.
Moscow
was furious with the East German leadership for the way it had handled this
affair, but the KGB recognised its inordinate debt to the English Romeo,
John Symonds, who had tipped it off in the first place. In due course he was
lauded and banqueted in Moscow, given a commendation by KGB chief Yuri
Andropov, and fully welcomed into the fold as a roving undercover operative
for the Soviet Union.
But
what kind of operative? On his brief but stunning record so far, it had to
be as a Romeo Spy. And that is what he became. Indeed, he went on to perform
the role so successfully in so many countries, he became the most successful
Romeo Spy in the history of the KGB. For the next seven years, all over
Europe, Africa, Asia, the Far East and Australasia, he seduced western
embassy secretaries, ambassadors’ wives, and even the wives of CIA station
chiefs, as well as the daughters of super-rich industrialists whom the
Russians wished to suborn. In all it was a triumphant progress, but
exhausting. Indeed, when once asked during a BBC interview, how it was that
his handlers had once reported that he was losing his looks, John replied,
‘Of course I was losing my looks. Seducing over 100 women in the course of
duty would take it out of anyone. It was exhausting work, and most men I
know would have lost not just their looks. They would have ended up on a
stretcher or in a wheelchair’.
When
eventually John fell out with Moscow - disillusioned by a change of handlers
and some dumb decision-making by the new KGB regime that came in with
Andropov’s successor - he took the tough decision to flee his home base in
Sofia, leave his devoted but unknowing girlfriend in Sofia, and return to
England to face the corruption charges which he had fled eight years before.
He was locked up in Brixton prison for a year before being convicted on only
one of the charges drawn up against him back in 1972, yet even this one
charge - of corruptly receiving £50 from a petty criminal in a car - he
continues to deny to this day.
John
Symonds believes that he had to be convicted, on no matter how trivial a
charge, for reasons of state. And that was because his allegations of
chronic and endemic corruption throughout Scotland Yard were just too much
for the British Establishment to swallow. There was another reason: many of
the officers whom he had first named as corrupt back in 1970 when he first
drew up his dossier had risen to high rank by 1980 and continued to rise
right up till the late 1990s when most finally retired. If what John said
was to be believed, then the Yard was still riddled with corruption over
twenty years after he had first been named as corrupt, in an expose in
The Times newspaper in November 1969. It was John Symonds who, in tapes
secretly recorded by Times reporters, had coined the phrase ‘The
little Firm within the Firm’ to describe the corrupt nexus of Freemason
police detectives that controlled crime in the capital at the time. The fact
that neither the Home Office nor anyone else had done anything to follow up
his claims and investigate the officers named in his original (1970)
'dossier', handed over to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner by his
original lawyer (Victor Lissack) meant that it was another seven years
before just twelve of them went to jail and that over 100 more continued to
serve in ever higher ranks for decades to come.
Emerging from jail in 1981, John continued to press his corruption claims,
which were continually ignored as the fantastical rantings of a bitter and
crazy man. The same was said about his repeated claims to have worked for
the KGB. No sooner had he been locked up to await trial on that single
corruption charge in 1980, than through his lawyer, he approached the
British Security Services, both MI5 and MI6, to tell them all he knew about
the KGB network of spies, agents, safe houses and hotels, drops and local
contacts in all the forty countries he had ever worked in. He was a walking
encyclopedia of information on this vast network. Indeed he would have been
far more useful than almost any Russian defector welcomed into this country
by Britain’s spooks, because he had travelled far more widely and met far
more Soviet agents of all nationalities in far more countries, than the
average KGB apparatchik who serves in just a few Russian embassies for
one-third of his career at most, and is stuck in a dingy office in the
Lubyanka for the other two-thirds. Who do they know, in such a rigid
structure, except for the man in the next office and the security guard on
the door?
Totally ignored by Britain’s security services, with all his offers of help
spurned, towards the end of 1983 John Symonds got the chance to lay out the
broad sweep of his work for the KGB in a statement taken under immunity from
prosecution by officers of the Hertfordshire Constabulary. The immunity,
signed by the Attorney General, the Home Secretary and the Director of
Public Prosecutions, allowed him to lay out the extraordinary but only too
true saga of how a Scotland Yard detective had become the KGB’s most
successful Romeo Spy. When the sheer breadth of the revelations began to
fatigue the Hertfordshire officers who were taking it all down, John stated
clearly that he would be willing to meet the Intelligence Services at any
time to go into even further detail. The statement, totalling 263 pages,
also went into the fine detail of many of the police corruption allegations
which he had steadfastly maintained for well over a decade.
To his
astonishment, no representative of Britain’s security services, not even of
Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, ever took up his offer to reveal all, and so
blow the cover of hundreds of KGB agents all over the world. The entire
statement, given under immunity so that John could be as frank and open as
possible, was shelved and ignored. Meantime all those agents whom he could
have revealed remained active throughout four continents. Furious at such
treachery of Britain’s interests by the very agencies which were meant to be
protecting them, John took his story to the press. In 1985 the Daily
Express splashed a front-page feature, and in 1987 the News on Sunday
(soon to be defunct), also ran an article. With such attention-grabbing
treatment, John should surely now have been summoned to spook headquarters
or the Ministry of Defence for a full de-briefing. But no, on both
occasions, his utterances were greeted with stony silence, except for a
dismissive comment printed in the Express, to the effect that John’s story
‘all sounds a bit fantastical to us, so you can make what you want of that!’
Disgruntled and dejected at being treated for so many years like a mad wolf
baying at the moon, John left Britain for Portugal where he spent his late
middle age years in various odd job activities and looking after an elderly
companion with whom he maintained a long platonic friendship. Occasionally
he would return to London to appear on radical television programmes about
police corruption, but none about his KGB years. Despite the efforts of some
of the many journalists and producers, no publisher or television network
wanted to touch that story. Some publishers obliquely indicated that they
had been lent on by some rear-admiral whose job it is to heavy the book
trade with warnings about not endangering western agents who may still be in
the field. He also spreads an air of weary scepticism whenever Symonds’s
name is mentioned, as if to say, ‘Oh dear, not that fantasist again’. The
mere waft of his wand appears to be so dismissive that most publishers are
likely to back off from any spy-book project which does not have the
implicit or explicit backing of the security services themselves.
And so
it was, that in September 1999 a book came out with the Imprimatur of MI6
and MI5 stamped all over it. It was entitled The Mitrokhin Archive,
in honour of the KGB defector who had copied down extracts from hundreds of
files which he had been entrusted to weed or destroy, so as to make space
back at the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters for other uses. The book purported
to be a definitive expose of hundreds of western spies who had never
previously been revealed. Written in a dry archival tone by the security
services’ nominated historian, Christopher Andrew, this 1,000 page tome
turned out to be a fairly routine history of the KGB, enlivened with a few
purportedly juicy revelations about Britons who had betrayed their country,
out of idealism, money or mental illness. Most of it was far from
revelatory, mere regurgitations of hoary old stories about long dead
burnt-out politicians such as Tom Driberg and Raymond Fletcher and several
academics who had spent their entire teaching careers wearing the hammer and
sickle on their sleeves.
But
there were two sensational ‘new’ spies named. One was an 83 year old woman
named Melita Norwood, who had spent some forty years passing obscure
scientific papers to Russia filched while working as a secretary at the Tube
Alloys Metals Institute. When the book was serialised in The Times
she was duly besieged and interrogated by scores of reporters, who somewhat
sheepishly had to report that she too had never concealed her political
allegiances and still loyally distributed the communist Morning Star
newspaper around the neighbouring streets. Also it emerged that she had lost
her top security clearance back in 1950, so there was little that she could
have passed to the Russians since then which would have been of the
slightest use to them or anyone else.
The
other new spy "exposed" in The Mitrokhin Archive was none other than
John Symonds, ex-Scotland Yard detective turned KGB agent. His story was
headlined in The Times, but a spoiler article in The Sunday
Telegraph the previous day had the even more preposterous title,
‘Scotland Yard detective exposed as a KGB Spy’. What appalling arrogance for
either the book or these newspapers to claim that they were exposing John
Symonds as a spy, when he had been exposing himself as a KGB spy for almost
twenty years. The folly stemmed from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s apparent
ignorance of every attempt - public and private, to newspapers, the police
and to the very agencies which had now sponsored The Mitrokhin Archive
- which John Symonds had made to bring his story to public attention and to
persuade the secret services to take action against the KGB’s international
espionage apparatus. Even the makers of a subsequent BBC television
programme, in which John appeared in a three-minute cameo, had come on to
him very heavy as if to expose him for the first time, only to sink
crestfallen when John pulled out his cuttings from the Express and
the News on Sunday from 1985 and 1987 respectively, telling all and
more than either that programme or The Mitrokhin Archive now
purported to expose for the first time.
Indeed
the entire five pages devoted to John Symonds in The Mitrokhin Archive
is a botched and over-sold farrago. Not only did it fail to reveal anything
about John which he had not either revealed in the press or had been trying
to reveal in book form ever since the 1980s, it turned out on close scrutiny
to be based on nothing more than his KGB personnel file. It gave the bare
bones of what was in that file - his medical reports, physical and
psychological, some of his passport and travel details, brief notes of
reports written by John himself explaining why he had ‘made an excuse and
left’ when confronted by women he was assigned to sleep with but who turned
out to be either too sad or too plain for even this relentless Lothario to
summon his powers to seduce.
In
short, far from exposing John Symonds, The Mitrokhin Archive provided
nothing more than a kind of appointments diary of his eight years with the
KGB. It gave no account of his astonishing achievements, his espionage
coups, his acquisition of dozens of passports for future use by a younger
generation of Moscow agents, or indeed his phenomenal strike rate as the
KGB’s Romeo seducer par excellence.
No
matter. In this book John Symonds tells everything that is in the many
Moscow 'Work-files' on him that the lowly clerk Mitrokhin was never allowed
to see, and he tells far more, that not even Moscow knew about. It’s a
staggering tale not just of espionage but of countless seductions above and
beyond the call of duty - women who fell his way when he was working as a
mercenary in West Africa, as a great white hunter and game warden in
Tanzania, as a businessman in other African countries and a rich traveller
and flaneur in Delhi and all over India, and further extraordinary nights of
passion in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and across New Zealand and Australia.
In
part it is also the story of John’s inner life, tortured and twisted by his
time in the endlessly corrupt Metropolitan Police of his day. This also
explains his continuing crusade to explain how the government’s failure to
deal with that corruption root and branch in the 1960s and 1970s has
resulted in the acrid pall of corruption that still hangs over Scotland Yard
to this day.
So why
was John Symonds dismissed as a fantasist for almost thirty years, whether
he was revealing the truth about the Metropolitan Police or about his time
with the KGB? On one level, his shunning by Britain’s security services may
be explained as follows. What if John’s offer to assist MI5 and MI6 was
seriously considered by those agencies in 1980 or at any point thereafter,
who would they have turned to, in order to decide whether he was likely to
be telling the truth? Why, Scotland Yard of course! And what would Scotland
Yard’s highest-ranking officers have told them? Words to this effect: ‘Oh,
you don’t want to believe a word that man says. He’s a fantasist. After all,
he’s been saying we’re all corrupt in here ever since 1969, so he must be a
fantasist!’ To which most spooks, sipping their tea or their gin and tonics,
would have responded with something like, ‘Yes, I suppose that makes sense’
and proceeded to ignore the most valuable KGB defector that had ever put
himself on offer.
Of
course, the reason why all those top Yard officers would have rubbished
Symonds all these years and dismissed him as a fantasist is precisely
because he has been telling the truth. Some of the men who have rubbished
him were among the 150 or so people he had named as long ago as 1970 in his
original corruption dossier. Then they were mere detective constables or
sergeants. In the 1980s and 1990s they were occupying the top jobs, and some
were even getting knighthoods and peerages, apart from the fortunes they had
amassed along the way.
One
more thought about The Mitrokhin Archive. According to the ‘legend’
recounted in the book itself, Mitrokhin defected in 1992, with his three
trunkloads of copied KGB personnel files secreted out by British MI6 agents
around the same time. In 1996 Christopher Andrew was approached to write the
book, and thereby enable Mitrokhin to gain some financial benefit from this,
his little nest egg of stolen property. Three years later, the book itself
appeared.
This
chronology means that for seven years prior to publication the security
services failed to make any approach to John Symonds, even though they knew
full well that everything he had been saying ever since 1980 was not the
blatherings of a fantasist but the truth. Their inactivity is inexcusable; a
severe indictment of agencies whose third-rate performance has been
tolerated for so long only because it is shielded and concealed from public
scrutiny by the cloak of state security which they and their political
defenders perpetually invoke whenever yet another intelligence scandal is
exposed. This means we never have any opportunity to assess the performance
of these agencies, to estimate if we get value for money for these sprawling
civil service departments, or good use per square metre from their occupancy
of the Tesco-supermarket style palace on the banks of the Thames.
But
can their failure ever to interview or interrogate John Symonds for nearly
thirty years really be put down to nothing more than inertia, incompetence,
apathy or sloth? Or is there some other explanation? During his years
working for the KGB, John Symonds worked his revenge on several of the
detectives who, far more corrupt than he had ever been and far richer as a
result, had made sure he was charged and then took part in the conspiracy to
chase him into exile on pain of murder.
John
told the KGB that these men were so corrupt and so greedy, that, having sold
the integrity of their constable’s oath to pornographers, drug-traffickers,
armed robbers, and even cop-killers, they would have no compunction in
taking money from the KGB too. Instructed by their former chief and future
President of the USSR, Yuri Andropov, to penetrate all cadres of capitalist
society - including the police - John’s KGB handlers then proceeded to take
up his suggestions and appear to have acquired the costly services of
several Scotland Yard officers who rose effortlessly through its hierarchy.
Even more alarming, other officers, equally venal, entered the Special
Branch, that part of any British police force which liaises directly with
the security services. While much despised by policemen in other branches,
SB officers would make ideal targets for subversion, especially if they have
already been named by John Symonds to the KGB as ready to take money from
anybody. Worse still, also named by John Symonds in his original dossier and
in his vast debriefing interviews with the KGB, were officers who, on
retiring from the Metropolitan Police, took jobs in the Ministry of Defence.
In this new career - and nowadays most policemen retire in their late
forties so they have at least fifteen years of active work ahead of them -
these men are not working as dog handlers on perimeter fences at Aldermaston
or patrolling disused airfields in Norfolk. They have the immense
responsibility of vetting all MOD employees, from those dog handlers all the
way up to the top jobs in the Ministry itself, even in MI5 too.
So
consider this. If the KGB did target all John Symonds’s recommended ‘bent
cops’, then it is more than likely that some of these have facilitated the
entry of other agents right into the very heart of Britain’s security
services. Would this explain why no-one in the security services has ever
bothered to even interview John Symonds, let alone investigate his claims?
Has someone been infiltrated into the very department which should have
followed up his claims been blocking any such move, as far back as 1980 when
John ‘came across’ and indeed ever since? Why has the House of Commons
Defence and Security Committee failed to take up his offer to assist them in
their inquiries into the lapses in security thrown up - albeit unwittingly -
by the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive? Could it be that, even
now, people in the security services are dismissing him as a fantasist? If
so, they should be investigated themselves, for they are continuing to
betray this country in far more damaging ways that the contrite John Symonds
has ever done.
In
amongst all John’s fascinating revelations of police corruption, espionage,
life as a soldier of fortune in West Africa and one torrid affair after
another as a Romeo Spy, there is an astonishing love story. When he was
‘exposed’ in September 1999, an article appeared in The Sun describing him
as a pathetic wreck of a man, playing dominoes with a load of geriatrics and
living in an old folks’ home in Tottenham, north London. Far away in Sofia
this newspaper was picked up by the woman whom he had left behind back in
1980, when he decided to flee his KGB minders and defect back to Britain.
This woman, Nelly, wrote him a letter of such undying love and commitment,
revealing that she had never given up hope that one day they would be
re-united, that John was moved to renew their relationship. They had lived
together in Sofia for five years, except for those long tours of duty which
took John off on Romeo Spy duties to India, the Far East and Australasia.
It
seems that Nelly has forgiven John all, not only all his infidelities on
behalf of international communism but also his long years of silence between
1983 (when they had last been in touch) and 1999. John now resolved to pick
up his life with the long-suffering Nelly. Whether he deserves the love of
such a good woman is up to the reader to consider. But throughout John’s
life, what he has deserved is never what he gets. In some respects he has
‘got off light’. In other respects he has suffered terrible wrongs. But who
can deny him a little happiness in his twilight years?
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