The Brotherhood (36 page)

I have obtained a copy of a secret memorandum written by a British diplomat who worked with MI6 for nearly twenty years during the Cold War, largely in South-East Asia. A First Secretary in the Diplomatic Service, this officer had a secret service training, chaired several subcommittees of the Joint Intelligence Committee QIC) and worked closely with the legendary former head of MI6, Sir

Maurice Oldfield. He is a specialist in the methods of secret societies and an expert on China, in which he has travelled widely.

The document is fourteen pages long and is typed on ordinary plain A4 paper with a manual typewriter. It is dated 4 June 1981, a time when there was much undercover activity by MI6, the CIA and Israel's Mossad focused on P2. For reasons of security I shall refer to the author of the document by a codename: 'Chinaman'.

By way of background he states:

...
as a result notably of the loss of the war in Vietnam, and the economic problems of the non-Communist countries which have been exacerbated by the cost of oil, the Soviet Union - despite grave and presently growing problems of its own - has embarked on a further phase in its major concerted effort to exploit to its own advantage the weakness and confusions in the non-Communist world by all means short of war. It can be argued that the Soviet leadership itself has come to regard the Cold War as a race to determine who buries whom - accepting that
both
sides, not just the 'capitalist' side, suffer severe internal 'contradictions' and vulnerable areas.

Writing on information received up to 4 June 1981, Chinaman was unable then to state with certainty that the KGB had been behind P2, but merely confirmed that 'the affair has so far been to the considerable advantage of the Soviet Union and of the Communists, which alone of the political parties has no known members among the listed names published by order of the [Italian] Prime Minister'.

Since then I have had many long meetings with him and developments have persuaded him that the original strong suspicion that the KGB was responsible for P2 is now inescapable.

Freemasonry has been a factor in Russian political thinking since long before the establishment of the Soviet state.

The February 1917 Revolution was provoked by Freemasons and was operated from the few masonic Lodges left after decades of persecution from Tsarist Secret Police. Alexander Kerensky, Justice Minister in the provisional government of Prince Georgi Yevgenievich Lvov, was a Freemason. After the Petrograd uprising in July 1917 which led to the resignation of Lvov, Kerensky took over as Prime Minister and appointed exclusively Masons to the government. When, chiefly because of Kerensky's inability to control the economy and his refusal to withdraw from the European war, the Bolsheviks took over the country in October, Kerensky and most of the Masons involved in the earlier revolution fled to France, where they established Lodges under the aegis of the Grand Orient of France.

As soon as the Bolshevik State was declared, Freemasonry was proscribed. This anti-masonic stand was enshrined in a resolution of the fourth Congress of the Communist International:

It is absolutely necessary that the leading elements of the Party should close all channels which lead to the middle classes and should therefore bring about a definite breach with Freemasonry. The chasm which divides the proletariat from the middle classes must be clearly brought to the consciousness of the Communist Party. A small fraction of the leading elements of the Party wished to bridge this chasm and to avail themselves of the masonic Lodges. Freemasonry is a most dishonest and infamous swindle of the proletariat by the radically inclined section of the middle classes. We regard it as our duty to oppose it to the uttermost.*

^*
Quoted by Eugen Lenhoff,
The Freemasons
,
1934.

Freemasonry was thoroughly investigated by the CHEKA, the first Soviet intelligence organization, as a matter of priority. This enquiry led to the formal outlawing of the Brotherhood in 1922. It is known that in its successive incarnations as GPU, NKVD, GUKR ('Smersh'), KGB and the rest, the Soviet espionage machine has made a priority of infiltrating every kind of organization in every country of the world. Its prime target, in every country where it existed, was inevitably Freemasonry. 'Any organization, and in particular any secretive organization,' says Chinaman, 'must come to the notice of the KGB, whatever its political, social, spiritual, criminal or subversive aims.'

There is abundant evidence not only that this has been true from the very beginning of the Soviet state, but that it is a continuing phenomenon, and that the Russian government is pouring ever more funds into the KGB coffers to expand this penetration and manipulation of foreign organizations. KGB defector Dr Vladimir Sakharov describes modern KGB operatives as the 'creme de la creme of Soviet society', top experts in the language, customs, religion and way of life of the country in which they operate.*

The exploitation of Freemasonry by the KGB is not restricted to Italy. I can reveal that senior officers of British Intelligence are concerned that the KGB has been using Freemasonry in England for decades to help place its

*
It has recently been revealed that the KGB runs its own religious centres for training appropriate agents to be sent to western and Third World countries. These centres are at Feodosia in the Crimea, Lvov in the Ukraine and at Constanza. In Lithuania there is a school for agents bound for Britain and other English-speaking countries. The Lithuanian centre is almost certain to be the centre of any training in the exploitation of English Freemasonry. Bulgarian defector Mikhail Gloechov has disclosed that Stalin had the centres set up as early as 1936.

agents in positions of responsibility and influence. The areas the KGB is most interested in penetrating are delineated by Chapman Pincher in his controversial study of Russia's infiltration of the West's secret defences,
Their Trade is Treachery:
'. . . when Soviet Intelligence secures a promising recruit, he or she is urged to get a job in MI5, the Secret Service, Government Communication Headquarters (the radio-interception organization),
The Times,
the BBC, the Foreign Office or the Home Office - in that order of preference'.

According to the evidence now available the undoubted 'jobs for the brethren' aspect of British Freemasonry has been used extensively by the KGB to penetrate the most sensitive areas of authority, most spectacularly illustrated in the years since 1945 by its placing of spies at the highest levels of both MIS and MI6. Even today, members of the security services privately admit that they have no idea of the extent of this penetration.

Although one senior and decorated MI6 officer, based in London, has been actively researching Freemasonry's influence in Britain since the Chinaman Report came into his hands, no investigation has so far been started by MI5, which as Britain's internal security service must conduct any
official
enquiry. MI6 is empowered to act only abroad.

Former KGB officers who have defected to the West confirm the endless patience the organization expends on gathering information on every aspect of life in Britain. Even the tiniest details are filed away at the great KGB headquarters building at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow, for possible use in its vast programme of destabilization in the West.

These facts are known, but what MI6 failed to appreciate before the Chinaman Report was the vital corollary to its knowledge that organizations, especially of a secretive nature,
Were
being used by the KGB: a fact so obvious it was never even considered - that the largest and most important organization of a secretive nature in Britain was Freemasonry.

The 'old boy network', the favouritism and the use of Masonry for professional and social advancement - all proscribed by the Constitutions but all nevertheless widespread, as this book has shown - are of obvious value to Englishmen recruited to spy for a foreign power.

I have spoken to five currently serving officers of MI6, two of them senior men but not of the highest stratum. Posed the question, 'If you were a KGB agent in England, given the nature of Freemasonry, what would you do?', four them agreed independently that becoming a Freemason would be an obvious priority. The fifth said, 'I haven't heard of this, but obviously if there hasn't already been an enquiry there should be now. I know of only two Masons in 6. Naturally, it's not often spoken of.'

This is an interesting point. As I learned from a former Home Secretary (the Home Secretary is responsible for MI5), it is forbidden for any member of either of the intelligence services to be a Freemason.

Pages three to four of the Chinaman document contain this:

I was required when I joined the Foreign Service and when I was given access to increasingly delicate material to 'sign the Official Secrets Act' and make declarations that I was not and never had been a member of certain listed extreme organizations of both left and right wing aims. But I was never required even orally to state whether I was or ever had been a member of any secret society whether of the Masonic type or not. This is less surprising given the social respectability of Freemasonry and the assumption by both members and non-members alike that it could not possibly come to represent in any way a threat to the established order.

This assumption is well illustrated by a comment made by

James Dewar, author of a book on Freemasonry entitled
The Open Secret,
when interviewed by the
Sunday Telegraph
in May 1981 at the height of the publicity about P2. He said, 'Any secret society has in it the seeds of menace. But it is very unlikely that a similar clique could operate here, as the movement is headed by so many people of obviously good repute . . .' And Judge D. H. Botha, who carried out an enquiry into Freemasonry in South Africa in 1964, had to rely largely on the evidence of four Freemasons. He entertained no doubts about their evidence as to what occurred at masonic meetings because of the 'exceptionally high esteem in which each of these persons is held in society and because of their obvious integrity'. Referring to this, Chinaman states:

This cannot be the view of any trained intelligence officer. It is of course inconceivable that, given the present composition of the British Grand Lodges and indeed other Lodges and chapters, the movement as a whole could possibly be suborned or persuaded to act consciously in any way to Soviet advantage. The dangers arise from numerous possibilities for covert exploitation of a movement which is almost conterminous with 'The Establishment' in common parlance: