Sunday Times – 9 May 1993

Christine Toomey's account of the role of the Stasi, the East German security police, in promoting the so-called Generals for Peace group in the early 1980s (May 2) comes as no surprise to opponents of its unilateralist campaigns at the time.

The group's first Administrator was the German vice-president of a Soviet propaganda front, the International Institute for Peace, set up in Vienna in 1957 to circumvent the expulsion of its parent body – the notorious World Peace Council (WPC). Four of the original 8 "Generals" (though not Gert Bastian) were open members of the Soviet-controlled WPC in their own right.

In September 1984, former foreign office ministers Lord Chalfont and Sir Peter Blaker publicly stated that the group was "intimately linked with the World Peace Council and other organs of the Soviet propaganda machine". The Government then denounced its activities as "gifts to Soviet propaganda ... stage-managed by the Soviet-controlled International Institute for Peace".

We now know that the British Communist Party, on which CND by its own admission depended in the 1970s, was simultaneously bankrolled by the KGB to the tune of £100,000 per annum. At least Generals for Peace made no secret of its bias – Bastian and the rest of them launched a film of their activities at an East Berlin reception in September 1986 as guests of that famous fighter for peace, Erich Honecker!

Dr JULIAN LEWIS
Director
Policy Research Associates
London SE1