Raymond Mawby MP - Tory and Spy

 Raymod Mawby - Tory MP and Czech spy (Photo from BBC News)
The Independent  reports that a former Tory MP and junior minister spied for the Czech security service in the 1960s.

Raymond Mawby, who served as MP for Totnes from 1955 until he was deselected in 1983 and who died in 1990, was in its pay for a decade, Apparently Mawby was a gambler and began accepting "loans" while playing roulette and other games. He later went on to accept payments, usually for £100 a time, for information and was given the codename Laval.



Mawby supplied spies with a floorplan of the prime minister's Commons office, lists of parliamentary committees, information about colleagues and a supposedly confidential parliamentary investigation into a Conservative peer, He also promised to carry out tasks such as asking questions in Parliament according to the "needs" of the Czech security service according to documents written by a Czech handler in 1962 show.

When Mawby became  a junior minister in 1963 his handler feared the promotion could end their arrangement as it meant a salary increase of £2,000 a year, but the MP continued the arrangement.
As well as supplying information about the layout of the PM's parliamentary office, he provided details about its security arrangements. The relationship ended in November 1971.

So while Mawby was not a traitor (a traitor in law is someone convicted of treason and he would not have been so convicted) He did damage to his country by undertaking espionage for an enemy state. Even if his information was not particularly high level he would have been convicted under the Officia SecretsAct and would have expected a sentence of up to 14 years.

All of this is academic of course as he died over 20 years ago. I wonder how many other skeletons there are waiting to be let out of the closet.

Never trust a ballerina

The Guardian reports that a Russian ballerina who became a Nazi spy was responsible for one of the earliest allied defeats in the second world war after getting hold of the British campaign plan for Norway , according to historic security services files released today.

Marina Lee was said to have infiltrated General Auchinleck's headquarters at Tromso in 1940 The failure of the Norwegian campaign directly led to Neville Chamberlain's replacement by Winston Churchill as wartime prime minister.

MI5 learned of the claim in January 1942 from a captured German agent, Gerth van Wijk, who was working for the British inside Camp 020 detention centre in Surrey. He was told this "astonishing story'' from another captured agent called Von Finckenstein. Although corroborated by a second German detainee, KC Hansen, the file shows that MI5 was never able to establish the truth of the story despite pursuing its inquiries for a further six years.

Van Wijk said Von Finkenstein had told him the German General Eduard Dietl was almost defeated at Narvik and contemplated crossing the Swedish frontier to be interned with the rest of his troops.

Von Finkenstein later named her as Marina Lee, a married woman who had fled to Scandinavia, after her parents were "murdered by the Bolsheviks", where she had married a Norwegian.

"She was trained in Russia as a ballerina and in Oslo was for some time the head of a school of ballet. She is a highly valued and experienced German agent," he told Van Wijk. He also said that he believed she had gone on to work for the Germans in Spain, operating from the Ritz hotel in Madrid with a red car. He had a photograph of her but threw it into the sea with his passport when he was picked up by the British.

Hmm I wonder what became of her....