The Shadow Man by Andrews Geoff;

Author:Andrews, Geoff; [Andrews, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2015-08-25T23:00:00+00:00

6 James Klugmann and Bernard Floud arrive in China on the World Student Association delegation

7 Speaking at a student rally in China

8 Kim Philby’s memo to Roger Hollis after MI5 were alerted to Klugmann’s SOE activities

9 A communist at war

12

Comrade or Conspirator?

Klugmann’s admission that he manipulated reports to give more favourable impressions of Partisan strength has been the basis for the later claims that he was acting on behalf of Soviet interests. In 1999, the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia, in an interview with the historian Hugh Thomas in the Spectator, described Klugmann as the ‘determining influence’ in winning over Winston Churchill and Allied support for Marshal Tito’s communist Partisans. According to him, Klugmann’s role was crucial in ‘ensuring pro-Tito’ reports and by implying that Mihailović’s Chetniks were involved in German collaboration. In the ensuing discussion in the Spectator former SOE officers and historians debated Klugmann’s role. Richard Lamb claimed that Klugmann had ‘bamboozled’ SOE leaders as well as Churchill and others in doctoring reports and manipulating information, omitting evidence of notable Chetnik resistance and sending the best agents to Tito. Moreover, it was implied that this was done on the orders of Moscow to aid the Soviet cause.1

Many of these arguments were shaped and constrained by the remnants of the Cold War and its aftermath and some revisionist accounts of that period. However, as early as the end of 1943, George Orwell, in a proposed preface to his book Animal Farm entitled ‘The Freedom of the Press’, commented on what he saw as misleading pro-Soviet reports in the British press.

A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihajlovic, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihajlovic of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihajlovic’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of 1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihajlovic. The British press ‘splashed’ the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihajlovic; and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued.2

Some of those who served with the Chetniks in SOE would have endorsed Orwell’s concerns. Major Archie Jack, for example, worked as a sabotage officer with the Chetniks and was involved in operations against German forces which he later claimed were either ignored by SOE and BBC reports or wrongly attributed to the Partisans. He argued that the SOE hierarchy went along with all Tito’s main arguments. Rejecting claims that Mihailović was a traitor or collaborator, he maintained that the Chetniks were the strongest resistance movement throughout 1943, but that someone at SOE had ‘cooked the books’ and was sending out fake reports. He and Jasper Rootham, a former private secretary to Neville Chamberlain who was also serving with Mihailović forces, visited the SOE offices in

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