The KGB planned to groom Michael Straight to become President of the United States.

In 1932 Theodore Maly, a NKVD agent, arrived in London. Two years later he was joined by Arnold Deutsch. Senior MI5 agent, Peter Wright, pointed out that Maly and Deutsch were part of a team of agents based in Europe that included Alexander Orlov, Ignaz Reiss, Richard Sorge, Walter Krivitsky and Leopard Trepper, who were committed to the idea of world revolution: "They were often not Russians at all, although they held Russian citizenship. They were Trotskyist Communists who believed in international Communism and the Comintern. They worked undercover, often at great personal risk, and traveled throughout the world in search of potential recruits. They were the best recruiters and controllers the Russian Intelligence Service ever had. They all knew each other, and between them they recruited and built high-grade spy rings."

The first spy recruited was Kim Philby. Deutsch reported back to his superiors in Moscow that Philby was an excellent agent. "His father... is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son. He repressed all his son's desires. That is why he is a very timid and irresolute person. He has a bit of a stammer and this increases his diffidence... However, he handles our money very carefully. He enjoys great love and respect for his seriousness and honesty. He was ready, without questioning, to do anything for us and has shown all his seriousness and diligence working for us."

The main objective of this conspiracy was to recruit people who had the potential to reach positions of power in politics or the intelligence services. Arnold Deutsch asked Philby to recommended some of his Cambridge University contemporaries as potential agents. Philby suggested Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. By the end of 1934, with Philby's help, Deutsch had recruited both of them, telling them, like he had with Philby, to distance themselves from communist friends. Philby and Burgess actually joined right-wing political organizations such Anglo-German Fellowship. Deutsch and Maly knew that is was in these organizations where British intelligence recruited agents. Deutsch later recruited Anthony Blunt.

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The Allied Plot to Kill Lenin

A lot of energy is used by researchers to persuade the authorities to release classified documents concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Is it possible that the CIA and the FBI hold documents that will provide evidence that will reveal the real killers of Kennedy? If they had existed, which I think is unlikely, would they not have been destroyed? 

I have recently been investigating a case where the British, French and American intelligence agencies joined together in a conspiracy to assassinate Lenin in August 1918. It is nearly 100 years ago that this event took place and although we know virtually the whole story now, it is not because of the release of official documents. 

In 1993 Gordon Brook-Shepherd decided that he would investigate the case. The former intelligence officer worked as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph and was in a good position to discover what had happened as he was trusted by the British establishment. After all, all the people concerned were long dead and the basic outline of the conspiracy had been revealed in 1931 when the wife of one of the agents involved in the conspiracy published an account based on the diaries of her husband, Sidney Reilly, who had been executed in 1925 by the Russian Secret Police (Cheka) for his part in the assassination attempt. In the next couple of years, two other British agents involved in the plot, Robert Bruce Lockhart and George Alexander Hill, published their accounts of the conspiracy. However, the British government refused to release MI6 files that would have confirmed the story. 

Brook-Shepherd had a meeting with an unnamed government minister, who had been a close friend for many years. He later recalled that "over several lengthy sessions, I was briefed on everything that had survived in our closed archives on the subject I was dealing with". Eventually he was allowed to see the official documents held by the British intelligence services. He became suspicious when he could not find one reference to Ernest Boyce, the MI6 station chief in Moscow in the summer of 1918 when the conspiracy took place. Brook-Shepherd writes about finding a file headed "Anti-Bolshevik Activities in Russia" but when opened he found it to be completely empty. He eventually reached the conclusion that every document relating to the assassination plot had been destroyed.

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