now on trial in Moscow on charges of 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. The Soviet regime is giving the trial considerable publicity, gloating over the confessions of guilt allegedly made by these dissidents.
However, these 'confessions' do not remember Yakir's message to a journalist three months before his arrest in June of last year: 'If they beat me, I will say anything - 1 know that from my former experience in the camps. But you will know it will not they did be the real me speaking. Another Stalinism. thing, I shall never in any circumstances commit suicide. So you will know that if they say I have done away with myself, someone else will have done me in. (The Times, ANTI-STALINIST Yakir is charged with plotting the overthrow of the Soviet regime, and of collaborating with the neo-fascist emigre organisation NTS for this From GERY LAWLESS have been a determined and courageous opponent of Stalinist As he once said: 'Unfortunately there is a tendency nowadays to confuse anti-Stalinism with anti-Sovietism. In way Stalinism is equated with come as a surprise to those who Soviet power, and this conflicts with the spirit of the 20th and 22nd party congresses and the resolutions they passed.' References to the party pression against internal dissidents. congresses was a safe way of making the point, although, as Yakir knows, not of course liquidate Yakir was involved in a number of actions designed to get this point across to Soviet citizens. In 1969, in response to an article in the journal Kommunist which attempted to rehabilitate Stalin, he demanded the opening of a legal action against Stalin, enumerating his crimes as matched against the Soviet code of political offences. Yakir was also one of a group of Soviet citizens who of basic rights and Soviet laws. In 1970, together with A. Sakharov, he founded the Human Rights movement in the Soviet Union.
INTENSIFIED REPRESSION The Soviet Union is keen to have diplomatic detente and pacts with the West. But this goes hand in hand with intensified reOnly in this way can they be isolated from all cultural or ideological contact with the West; above all, from the revolutionary marxist forces, part of whose programme is directed towards the overthrow of bureaucracy. Of course, sections of the Communist Parties in Britain and elsewhere have a "sensitive' approach to these excesses of the bureaucracy, which threaten the alliances they are busily constructing with the social democratic parties. But at the same time, they use the ideological weaknesses of the dissidents as an excuse for name of Sir Maurice Oldfield as the play the same role as did the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. The time is long overdue for members of the Communist Party to probe beyond these new Secret Service Supremo, Sir Peter Wilkinson.
A former British South Vietnam in 1966-67, Wilkinson is a personal friend not only of Heath but also of the Director of the CIA William E. Colby. Colby was in Vietnam at the same time as Wilkinson; both men are also former heads of the Far Eastern desk in their respective organisations, and both are experts in interrogation and pacification techniques.
Wilkinson, as Co-ordinator of Security and Intelligence, operates from Number 10, Downing Street, and takes overall responsibility for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, under the direct guidance of Heath himself.
In other words, Heath has become the first modern British Premier to be himself the political head of the Secret Service.
It was to cover this fact that we had the controlled leak of the name of the successor to Sir *Jack' Rennie as head of the S.l.S BEAVERBROOK The fact that Sir Maurice Oldfield had succeeded Rennie first appeared in the U.S. magazine Newsweek; and was picked up in the Beaverbrook paper the Daily Express. The first photograph of Oldfield to be published appeared in the German magaPyotr Yakir and his mother who spent many years in a labour camp with him show trials and 'confessions, and тасс up to the whole history Stalinist degeneration against which Yakir and Krasin have struggled zine Stern, and was picked up by the Beaverbrook Evening Standard. Ambassador to In fact I can reveal that in both cases the leak originated from within the Beaverbrook organisation, at the re quest of the Secret Service.
Magazines like Time Out, Private Eye, and even some sections of the left press then jumped on the story, not realising that diet they WCTO lapping up had been prepared and served by the S.I.S A further boost to the campaign against the French Government's ban* on the Communist League came this week with a motion from Edinburgh and district trades council condem ning the ban.
The trades council is going to send a delegation to the French Consulate in London to demand that the ban on League immediately dropped and all its arrested members released.
One leading militant of the former League, Pierre Rousset, is still in jail two months after the imposition of the ban. No date has yet been set for hearing the charges against him.
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EDINBURGH TC SUPPORTS LEAGUE