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A LABOR MP who held the federal seat of Hunter for 20years has been named as a KGB informant in Russian archives.
Albert William James – known as Bert James – held the seat from 1960 to 1980.
A dossier of Soviet intelligence matters brought to the West in 1992 by former KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin describes the late MP – he died in 2006 – as an informant with the code name ‘‘Albert’’.
Mr James’s son Rowley James, of Coal Point, said he was ‘‘alarmed and incredulous’’ at his father being named as a KGB informant, and ‘‘shocked’’ by the news.
But former federal Labor MP Kelly Hoare, who described the former MP as a mentor, said she was ‘‘not surprised at all’’.
‘‘He used to talk to me about meeting the people from the embassy in [the old] Parliament House, and about being watched while he did it,’’ Ms Hoare said.
‘‘My surprise is more that it hadn’t already come out into the open.’’
Prominent Australian intelligence writer Philip Dorling revealed Mr James’s previously secret role in an article published in Fairfax papers yesterday.
The Soviet file was made public in Britain last month.
Mr Dorling told the Newcastle Herald that Mr James was one of a number of Australians named in the archive, and as an MP he was obviously a person of interest to the general public.
Mr Dorling said there was nothing in the KGB archive to indicate what information, if any, Mr James had given to the Soviets.
But Mr James’s ASIO file revealed he was in regular contact with staff of the Soviet embassy in Canberra in the early 1970s.
He said the ASIO file showed Mr James was in contact with one Soviet staffer suspected of being a Russian intelligence officer.
He said Mr James had been a regular recipient of Soviet hospitality.
Another intelligence specialist, academic David McKnight, said he had seen the material on James and believed it was likely that the Russians saw him as someone who would ‘‘gossip’’ and ‘‘keep them informed of anything he knew’’.
‘‘It’s likely that he was driven as much by his dislike of the Americans as anything else, and it is interesting to see someone like that, enmeshed in the Cold War at that level [politically],’’ Mr McKnight said.
‘‘Russia was like any other country. It wanted to know what was going on in other countries and when they found someone sympathetic to them they would make use of them.’’
Mr Dorling said there was nothing to show that Mr James had passed any secrets to the Russians, and anything beyond his status as ‘‘an informant’’ was speculation.
‘‘What we might regard as gossip might not be seen in the same way by a foreign intelligence,’’ he said.
Mr Dorling said his personal view was that Mr James’s views were probably ‘‘not that dissimilar from many on the Labor Left’’, although he had apparently maintained his Russian links well after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which disillusioned many others.
The Newcastle Herald sought the views of the federal government on the disclosure.
But a spokesman for Attorney-General George Brandis said there was no comment.