It was on the Danish coast in 1977 that Oleg Gordievsky was first told by a KGB colleague that “a fiery Labour MP named Michael Foot” had been cultivated by the agency during the 1960s.

Foot had been regarded by Moscow, Gordievsky’s colleague said, as an “agent of influence”; someone who could be “fed pro-Soviet ideas, and reproduce them in articles and speeches”.

Gordievsky would next encounter the fiery MP’s name in December 1981 as he delved into the files in room 635 of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB. The dossier on Agent Boot, aka Michael Foot, by then leader of the British Labour Party, comprised a cardboard box of two folders, one 300 pages thick, the other about half the size.

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