Jeremy Corbyn was paid by Czech secret police spy claims

Jeremy Corbyn was a paid informant of the Czech secret police during the height of the Cold War, it has been claimed.

Former Czech secret agent Jan Sarkocy – also known as Jan Dymic – said he met the Labour leader in the 1980s and paid him money for information.

He reportedly told the Czech news channel CTK that Mr Corbyn – code named ‘Agent Cob’ – ‘was recruited’ and ‘was rated in Moscow as the number one’.

But Mr Corbyn’s official spokesman rubbished the claims – branding them ‘smears’.

He said: ‘As Svetlana Ptacnikova, Director of the Czech Security Forces Archive, has made clear, Jeremy was neither an agent, asset, informer nor collaborator with Czechoslovak intelligence.

‘These claims are a ridiculous smear and entirely false.

‘The former Czechoslovak agent Jan Sarkocy’s account of his meeting with Jeremy was false 30 years ago, is false now and has no credibility whatsoever.

‘His story has more plot holes in it than a bad James Bond movie.’

It was revealed earlier this week that Mr Corbyn met the Czech agent three times in 1986 and 1987 while he was stationed in the UK under the guise of being a diplomat.

Two meetings took place in the heart of British democracy – the House of Commons, while the other was in his north London constituency.

And in fresh bombshell claims today, Mr Sarkocy said Mr Corbyn – then a backbench Labour MP – was paid for information by the Czech secret police, known as the STB.

He said: ‘Corbyn was recruited. He also received money.’

He said the Labour politician’s recruitment took place ‘under the protection of Russia’.

Asked if Corbyn knew he was talking with an StB agent – not a diplomat – Mr, Sarkocy said there was no doubt that Czechoslovak diplomats were working for the StB at the time.

He added: ‘All the information we received not only from him but also from one supporting source to be verifiable was rated in Moscow as the number one.

‘What we could not do was to do the Russians.’

The Labour leader met the Czech agent at least three times after being vetted by communist handlers in 1986, papers reveal

Mr Corbyn allegedly provided the spies with material about the arrest of an East German, according to the leaked documents

One page of the documents reveals contact was established with Mr Corbyn twice in 1986

A spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn (pictured in Scotland on Monday) denied the allegations branding them ‘smears’

And he said that arrangements had been made to exculpate the politician from Britain to Russia if the need arose.

He said: ‘If something happened at that time, he (Corbyn) could go to live in Russia.’

Mr Sarkocy was thrown out of Britain by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1989 amid an ongoing ‘spy war’ between the UK and the Soviet Bloc, when his supposed role as a diplomat was exposed as a sham.

But while he insists that the Labour leader must have known his real identity, other experts cast doubt about the claim.

Ms Ptacnikova, who runs the archives in the Czech republic, said Mr Corbyn was not registered as an STB collaborator.

Spies from Moscow and the Soviet sattelite states across eatsern Europe regularly deployed spies in Britain under cover of working at their embassies during the Cold War.

The Soviet intelligent recruitment strategy during the Cold War

Soviet spies gathered intelligence on the UK during the Second World War and Cold War by communicating with Communists and Communist sympathisers in the country.

In the mid-1930s, the USSR began a new agent recruitment strategy that involved attracting bright young Communists or Communist sympathisers from leading universities.

They were told to break all links with other Communists and use their talents and educational success to penetrate the corridors of power.

The most successful of ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’ were the ‘Cambridge Five’—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross—possibly the ablest group of foreign agents ever recruited by Soviet intelligence.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that Britain became a hard espionage target for Soviet intelligence for the first time.

MI5’s Operation FOOT led to more than 100 Soviet intelligence officers being expelled from London in 1971, marking a major turning point in counter-espionage operations in Britain during the Cold War.

It followed a long campaign by the Security Service to persuade successive governments of the need for the expulsions.

Over the previous two decades, the Security Service acknowledged: ‘The steady and alarming increase … in the number of Russian intelligence officers threatened to swamp our then meagre resources.’

For several years, most Soviet agents in Britain were put on ice and the KGB was forced to ask Soviet Bloc and Cuban agencies to help plug the intelligence gap.

However, the KGB’s contacts with probably its most important British agent in the 1970s, Geoffrey Prime, who worked at GCHQ until 1977, were unaffected by the FOOT expulsions because, since his recruitment in Berlin, he had been run exclusively outside the UK.

Source: MI5

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk