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THEIR trade was treachery but Cold War spies became box office gold in thrillers like The Ipcress File.

But not even Len Deighton, the novelist who dreamed up the plot, would have placed Aberystwyth at the heart of Soviet era espionage.

Now, after the ultra-secret Government Communications Headquarters opened its doors for the first time, it has been revealed that a Soviet encrypted radio transmitter was found near the coastal town in 1960.

And a further web of intrigue and political scandal has emerged.

The sophisticated transmitter is contained in an in-house museum at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

It was used to send messages to Moscow in the shadowy 1960s Cold War spy era in which bodyguards were known as babysitters, M16 was “the circus”, after nearby Cambridge Circus, and inconspicuous surveillance officers were known as pavement artists.

“This is a simple but robust radio transmitter discovered early in the 1960s in a field near Aberystwyth by a farmer who was ploughing his land,” said GCHQ’s official historian, referred to only as Tony.

“It had obviously been cached there by someone who was working for the Soviets.

“Nobody has a clue who this belonged to, who it was serving, or even which bit of the GRU [Soviet foreign intelligence network] he was working for.”

Officials at Britain’s listening post opened their doors to the media for the first time for the BBC’s Cracking the Code.

Further investigation, how-ever, has revealed Aberystwyth’s close association with wartime skullduggery and Britain’s most infamous spy ring, the Cambridge Five, whose outing was novelised in John Le Carre’s book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The Cambridge Five – among them Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, all KGB moles employed in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – were all friends of Goronwy Rees, a handsome Marxist-leaning academic from Aberystwyth, who would later become principal of his home- town university.

What Rees kept to himself for years, however, was that he had passed on information to Russia before World War Two under code names, Fleet and Gross.

His daughter Jenny Rees, 67, a former Daily Telegraph journalist now living in Spain – who wrote a book about her father called Looking for Mr Nobody – said he was never a traitor.

She said yesterday: “The Russians wanted to know in the late 1930s if the British would fight the Germans or if it would leave it to them to do it.

“My father passed on information about the British people’s views and about appeasers at the time whom my father hated.

“He and Anthony Blunt and Burgess decided to help the Russians because, in my father’s view, somebody had to fight the Germans and it looked like we were not going to.

“When the fellows got together, all they talked about was appeasement and he just reported that back to Burgess.

“But when the Russians made a pact with the Germans, he made it clear he was not going to pass on any more information and did not.”

Mr Rees fought in World War Two and became a colonel. He worked for M16, but in the mid 1950s, as principal of Aberystwyth University, he wrote anonymous newspaper articles decrying Burgess, who had defected to the Soviet Union.

Controversy followed when his association with Burgess was revealed.

He resigned in 1957 and died of cancer in 1979, aged 70.

Yesterday his daughter said Mr Rees was not the Russians’ “man in Aberystwyth”.

She said: “He couldn’t make a cup of tea or change a light bulb, nor could he drive, so he would not have been able to use that transmitter. Also, we had left Aberystwyth by the 1960s.

“He was never intended to be, and was never cut out to be, a cloak-and-dagger type operator, sending signals back to his controllers with a transmitter.

“He wrote a lot about what he actually did in his own memoirs, he just did not tell us everything because he was frightened of Blunt and he was frightened of the Russians.”

Mr Rees had spent much of the early part of the 1930s working in Berlin.

His biographer John Harris said: “He had seen the rise of the Nazis, the insidious permeation of their totalitarian ways into a country he cared for, and he hated them for it.”