A federal Labor MP was a secret KGB informant, according to newly released intelligence archives.
The former Labor member for Hunter, Albert James, is listed as an informant of the Soviet intelligence service in the papers of former KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin which were released by the Churchill College Archive in Britain last month.
James, a former NSW policeman and left-wing Labor MP who served in federal Parliament from 1960 to 1980, is one of a number of Australians recorded in Mitrokhin's list of KGB agents and informants active in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s.
Mitrokhin's notes do not reveal what information James may have passed to the Soviet Union, but they do confirm his status as an KGB informant, albeit with the insecure codename of "Albert".
James was highly critical of the US, strongly opposed Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and praised Fidel Castro's Communist regime in Cuba.
Declassified Australian Security Intelligence Organisation records, mainly telephone intercept transcripts, reveal that James was in regular contact with the Soviet embassy in Canberra in the early 1970s. He dealt with third secretary Alexander Ekimenko, who was suspected by ASIO as being a Russian intelligence officer, and was a regular recipient of Soviet hospitality.
In an oral history recorded in 1984, James said "the greatest threat to world peace is USA imperialism'' and claimed the US Central Intelligence Agency had tried to remove prime minister John Gorton from office. He described himself as a socialist who believed in free speech and "not a socialist of the extreme Russian type".
James died in 2006, aged 92.
James has not previously been the subject of allegations of involvement with Soviet intelligence activity. Mitrokhin's notes shed new light on KGB activities in Australia, including the revelation that Australia's 1963 expulsion of Soviet diplomat Ivan Skripov severely disrupted Soviet intelligence operations which had to "start over from scratch".
The KGB's priorities here included information on politics, international affairs in Asia and the Pacific, "infiltrating the embassies of England, US, the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs [as well as] counterintelligence operations to infiltrate intelligence and counterintelligence agencies."
Mitrokhin's papers show that the KGB exploited academic exchanges with Australia to infiltrate agents into universities, including Leonid Stupin, agent "Gatsky", a Soviet academic who taught Russian at the Australian National University from 1968 to 1970.
The notes also record the KGB's recruitment of an informant, codenamed "Silver," a Russian-born professor at a Melbourne University. Recruited by the KGB in Moscow in October 1963, Silver was tasked to provide information about persons linked with Australia's intelligence services.
Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, defected to Britain in 1992, bringing with him what has been described as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source". He died in 2004.
