The first official history of MI5, published this morning, reveals the extent to which the security service suspected leftwingers during the Cold War and believed that three Labour MPs were Soviet bloc agents, the Guardian reports.

The MPs named in the history, written by the historian Christopher Andrew, are John Stonehouse, who became postmaster general in Harold Wilson’s government, Bernard Floud and Will Owen. The three were “outed” by a Czech defector, but there is no evidence the politicians passed over sensitive information.

The book confirms many of the allegations already made about MI5’s activities, including its holding of a file on Wilson under the name Norman John Worthington. Officials were alerted by his east European friends and his role in trade with the Soviet Union. But Andrew dismisses claims of a “Wilson plot” under which MI5 tried to smear the Labour prime minister and destabilise his administration.

Andrew says Jack Jones, the trade union leader whom the Guardian has been told was the subject of many volumes of MI5 files, was not “being manipulated by the Russians”, but the security service was “right to consider the possibility that he was”. Britain’s top KGB agent, Oleg Gordievsky, said Moscow “regarded Jones as an agent”, Andrew notes.

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