Can I, as a Liberal Democrat, come to the defence of Jeremy Corbyn, as stories of his contacts with eastern bloc diplomats run through the rightwing media?

In the 1970s and 1980s, London swarmed with Russian and other diplomats, offering excellent lunches and presents to take home in return for gossip about British politics and foreign policy: 100 Russians with diplomatic status were expelled in 1972; but plenty remained, together with Czechs, East Germans and others, sending back reports that exaggerated the importance of their contacts in order to justify the expenses they claimed.

Stories floated about all sorts of people. Harold Wilson was suspected of being a Soviet agent by some within the intelligence services, on the basis of earlier business dealings with the USSR. One backbench Labour MP was prosecuted for receiving payments from the Czech embassy, and acquitted on the grounds that all he had given them in return were parliamentary reports a day before publication.

Chatham House was accused throughout the 1980s of pursuing improper contacts with the USSR, since we organised the British end of the UK-Soviet round table, initiated by Callaghan and Brezhnev in 1979. The Sunday Times dubbed our director, Admiral Eberle, “the red admiral” for his extensive exchanges with Yevgeny Primakov and others. Rightwing researchers pursued the chimera of “the Chatham House spy” for years after the cold war ended, as the Guardian last reported in June 2003.

The pursuit of Jeremy Corbyn revives this paranoid tradition of attacking those who sought to maintain a dialogue with our cold war antagonists.

William Wallace

Lib Dem, House of Lords; deputy director, Chatham House, 1978-90

• I am amazed that Matthew d’Ancona gives credence to the ridiculous articles in the rightwing press about Jeremy Corbyn being a paid communist spy (Corbyn’s Czech contact is not an irrelevance, 19 February). If the Czech secret services wanted to recruit a useful spy, they would look for someone who was part of the establishment and could tell them something they didn’t already know. A rebel leftwing backbench MP who would never be privy to any secrets of government would be the worst choice possible.

Everything that Jeremy Corbyn knew about nuclear weapons he was freely telling to anyone who would listen, and his only knowledge about MI5 would be that they were spying on him and many others who were campaigning for peace and justice.

Corbyn has always believed in talking to those with whom we disagree so that we can seek common ground and look for solutions, rather than threatening Armageddon. That is what he would have been doing with Czech diplomats. The head of the Czech security service archive has already confirmed that Corbyn is not listed in its records as a collaborator (Report, 20 February), and Corbyn would not have known that Jan Sarkocy was a spy.

Labour supporters do not claim this whole story is a smear campaign out of blind loyalty to our leader as D’Ancona suggests. It genuinely can be nothing else, because it simply does not make sense.

The Conservative party and all who support them are terrified that they will be swept away by support for Corbyn’s policies of protecting the NHS, renationalising our utilities and more equitable sharing of the nation’s wealth, and they are pulling out all the stops to discredit him.

Linda Walker

Glossop, Derbyshire

• Matthew d’Ancona clearly does not understand the routine work of spies. In the early 1960s I was a keen young communist and came into contact with a junior cultural attache at the Czech embassy. He invited me regularly to his nice house in Hampstead, gave me a meal and quizzed me about the current manoeuvrings within Harold Wilson’s government. Prior to our meetings I scanned the daily papers, and then gave him my views on any developments I thought relevant. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that my deep insights would form the basis of reports back to Prague.

Many years later, I was employed as a trade union official and received a phone call from a woman who said she wanted to talk to me about the possibility of her son working for the union. She suggested we meet for drinks at the Charing Cross Hotel. It turned out that she was mostly interested in the thoughts and activities of the communist general secretary of the union. As far as I knew he had no secrets and I told her as much, but she she persisted with invitations until eventually I declined to attend more meetings. She was undoubtedly MI5.

The point that D’Ancona fails to grasp is that these people talk to almost anyone in order to justify their pay and expenses. For the Czech it was far better to live in Hampstead than in a state-owned flat in a Prague suburb. For the MI5 woman, searching for a communist conspiracy helped her maintain her comfortable lifestyle and her son’s private school fees.

Tim Webb

London

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