The post you are reporting:
Whilst we at on the subject of treason this is in today's Sunday Times.
A former British diplomat who became the communist affairs correspondent of The Daily Telegraph is today revealed to have escaped prosecution in the 1950s after he confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The Foreign Office covered up the scandal. David Floyd, who was described on his death in 1997 as “one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgable Kremlinologists”, admitted having passed information to Russian intelligence agents while based in Moscow at the end of the Second World War.
Top secret Foreign Office files, released after a freedom of information application, show that senior officials disregarded Floyd’s past as a student communist agitator at Oxford University and were horrified to learn of his confession in July 1951, only a few weeks after the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had disappeared, igniting one of Britain’s worst spy scandals.
Like Anthony Blunt, the Cambridge spy who was allowed to pursue a career as an art historian in exchange for a detailed confession, Floyd’s spying activities were kept secret. Unlike Blunt, who was stripped of his knighthood when his past was exposed in 1979, Floyd died with his secret intact.
The papers obtained by Jeff Hulbert, a historian and author of a Burgess biography, show that the director of public prosecutions (DPP) decided not to prosecute Floyd, a fluent Russian speaker who had worked as a translator at the UK military mission and embassy in Moscow, before taking up more senior embassy posts in Prague and Belgrade. He was suspected of leaking further material from both embassies but denied this. The DPP concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” against Floyd, even though he had confessed to spying in Moscow.
He was sacked from the Foreign Office, yet one memo notes that “MI5 . . . want to find him a job” — suggesting that, like Blunt, Floyd may have struck a deal with the security services to stay out of prison. Within a year of his return from Belgrade in 1951, he was hired by The Daily Telegraph, whose then editor, Colin Coote, and deputy editor, Malcolm Muggeridge, had worked for MI6. The case against Floyd is laid out in more than 300 Foreign Office documents from 1950 and 1951. Many of them have large sections of text blacked out, signalling that the case remains sensitive almost 70 years after Floyd shocked his superiors by declaring that he “wished to make a clean breast of the affair so that I might eventually begin life anew with a clear conscience”.