Britain: ‘Zinoviev letter’ forgery

From British daily The Independent:

A British spy and close friend of Winston Churchill was deeply implicated in the Zinoviev Letter, the most notorious political forgery in British history.

The publication of a letter purporting to be from Soviet officials four days before the 1924 general election helped to sweep Ramsay MacDonald‘s government from power.

But the correspondence mobilising “sympathetic forces” in Labour was later found to be a fake.

Now a new official history, based on access to closed intelligence files, suggests the document was a “dirty tricks” operation by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), overseen by Major Desmond Morton.

Morton, a First World War hero whom Churchill befriended in the trenches, became an SIS officer on his recommendation and went on to become the war leader’s “spymaster”.

In the early years of the Second World War, he was a trusted fixer within the inner circle of Churchill’s bunker.

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