Prague, Feb 16 (CTK) – Former Czechoslovak communist secret service (StB) officer Jan Sarkocy’s allegation that Jeremy Corbyn, now British Labour leader, knowingly collaborated with the StB in the 1980s is at odds with the files in the Czech Security Forces Archive, its director Svetlana Ptacnikova said today.
Sarkocy, who is 64 now and lives in Slovakia, made the allegation earlier today.
Ptacnikova said Corbyn could not have been an StB agent, otherwise “his” StB file in the Czech archive would have been very different.
“If Corbyn had been agent, his file would be kept in a different category, among the files with numbers beginning with 4,” Ptacnikova said.
She said files were kept on StB agents based on exact rules. If someone became an agent, he was transferred to another type of a file.
Sarkocy’s allegations are in direct contradiction to the archive materials, Ptacnikova said.
Sarkocy, an StB officer, worked as a secretary at the Czechoslovak embassy in London from 1986 to 1989, when he was expelled from Britain together with several other spies. At the very time, a final report on Sarkocy’s contacts still mentioned Corbyn as a “RS”, which is a person the StB wanted to exploit, but not an StB agent.
Documents in the file indicate that the StB was trying hard to prevent Corbyn from taking any suspicion of talking to spies.