Jack Jones – can they all be wrong???

So Jack Jones died the other day at a ripe old age. Long and flattering were the tributes paid to him. In fact the more ‘left wing’ the paper, so the more flattering were the tributes.

Today, in the letters page of the Daily Telegraph, came a bit of a bombshell in the form of a letter from Oleg Gordievsky – whom some may remember was a senior officer in the KGB and who defected to the West some years ago.

@Oleg Gordievsky wrote:

Sir,
Simon Heffer (Comment page April 25th) writes that my information that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent “may or may not be true”.
I was his last case officer, meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham, together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930’s.
I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981 I had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1985, when they were passed on to the archive.
Oleg Gordievsky
London W1

Well well well, so the old chap really was a commie spy after all and all those rumours about the Russians fomenting industrial strife were clearly founded in fact. I bet he’ll be turning in his grave right now to know that his KGB controller had so publicly ‘outed’ him after all these years.