MI5 Charlie Chaplin'i ABD'ye karşı korumuş: komünist değildi

Charlie Chaplin’s newly declassified MI5 files show that, although the film star was friendly with a Soviet spy, he was never suspected of being a true Communist by the British authorities.
Two dossiers on the film star in the National Archives show that the FBI repeatedly contacted MI5 in attempts to find hard evidence that the British-born comic had Communist leanings, but officers eventually concluded that the American claims were unreliable.
The only connection with a questionable character was a telegram sent to Chaplin while he was in London by Ivor Montagu, a film-maker, table tennis champion and Soviet spy known by the codename Intelligentsia. Although MI5 intercepted the telegram, in which Montagu said that he hoped to be back from Peking in time to meet Chaplin, it did not pass it on to the FBI.
MI5 found no evidence to support the Americans’ belief that Chaplin’s real name was Israel Thornstein, but it had to admit defeat in finding a birth record for the film star — normally a simple task. This inability to find a record in the register of births in Somerset House led agents to speculate that he had been born abroad, possibly in France, although searches of French registers also drew blanks.

Chaplin’s birth remained a mystery, but a memo in his file implies that this was far from suspicious, and suggests that the FBI were in the grip of anti-Communist paranoia. H.P. Goodwyn wrote on February 2, 1958, that American evidence of Chaplin’s connections to Communist front organisations in America “do not impress us by their prima facie quality” and concluded that he was not a security risk.
“It is of some interest that when Chaplin was last in London in 1957 in connection with his film A King in New York (a not very successful satire which featured ‘McCarthyism’), he was at some pains to avoid entanglement with the Russian Embassy here. He did not want to run the risk of political embarrassment. It may be that Chaplin is a Communist sympathiser but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a ‘progressive’ or radical.”
The Chaplin files are part of a batch of MI5 dossiers released to the public that also include a dossier on an enemy spy who penetrated the Security Service. Arie van Koutrik, a Dutchman who wore rimless spectacles, was recruited by MI6 in 1937 but was turned by the German Abwehr in 1938. He subsequently went on to work for MI5 in 1940 and returned to MI6 in 1942.
Van Koutrik was responsible not only for betraying MI6’s longest serving agent, Otto Kruger, but was instrumental in an incident on November 9, 1939 when the Nazi Party’s Security Service kidnapped two MI6 spies at Venlo on the Dutch-German border.
(The Times)