Eyewitness

British students and academics were obvious targets for the Eastern bloc's cold-war spymasters - but the West probably gained the most out of these activities, espionage experts said this week.

As more UK academics were named as alleged Stasi agents, two political historians with specialist knowledge of spying drew comparisons with earlier attempts to identify British students with espionage potential.

Archie Brown, professor of politics at Oxford University, said he knew academics whom the KGB targeted as potential recruits while studying in Eastern Europe in the 1960s: "They were set up and became victims of provocation in efforts to get them to work for the KGB. If that failed, they would try to frame them and then say we can get the charges dropped."

Professor Brown's friends resisted. But, he said: "Inevitably, in some cases the KGB was successful."

Christopher Andrew, professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge University and co-author of The Mitrokhin Archive, said successful targeting of British academics in the 1930s led to more ambitious tactics from the 1960s.

Members of the Cambridge spy ring were recruited as students. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess went on to work for British intelligence; Donald Maclean became a senior Foreign Office official; Anthony Blunt, surveyor of the Queen's pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, acted as a talent scout. The "fifth man", John Cairncross, was spotted by Blunt at Cambridge, introduced to Guy Burgess, and worked in the Foreign Office with Maclean.

"It doesn't make sense to think that they wouldn't bother after the second world war in the light of their earlier successes. They were told to target a broader range of institutions. But it was easier to target students in Leipzig," Professor Andrew said.

Professor Brown said that study exchanges did more good than harm to East/West relations. "The exchanges were very much in the interests of the West, because they helped to open up Eastern Europe to the outside world," he said.

Tony Tysome

Soapbox, p18