Tribune – 29 July 1988

As the person who collected and supplied nearly all the material used by Michael Heseltine and Ray Whitney to expose the Left-wing affiliations of CND leaders so damagingly before the 1983 election, I am especially qualified to rebut Robin Ramsay's paranoid outburst on this subject (Tribune, July 22).

Ramsay would do well to study Mr Justice Taylor's judgment of September 2, 1986, on CND's unsuccessful telephone-tapping case. On page 37 it is made quite clear that ex-MI5 officer Cathy Massiter does not claim that the material used by Mr Heseltine was based on her report to the DS19 unit in the Ministry of Defence. I have corresponded with her in detail on this very point. Ramsay is welcome to inspect this correspondence.

If he bothered to examine Mr Heseltine's April 22, 1983 letter to Conservative candidates, he would see that its purpose was not to claim that CND was dominated solely by Marxists, but simply – as he put it – by committed Left-wingers "ranging through the Labour Party to the Communist Party".

The Whitney/Heseltine analysis successfully showed that CND was a Leftist-run body at a time when it falsely claimed to be "political but not party political". This is quite compatible with Miss Massiter's evidence to the Court that in the late seventies CND "was no longer regarded [by MI5] as subversive, but merely as a 'communist-penetrated' organisation".

That is precisely how informed Conservatives regard it too.

Dr JULIAN LEWIS
Director
Policy Research Associates
London SE1