Norman John Klugmann, generally known as James Klugmann, was a leading British Communist writer and WW2 Soviet Spy, who became the official historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
21 Facts About James Klugmann
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James Klugmann's father was a tobacco pipe merchant, while his sister Kitty Cornforth was a committed Communist, marrying the Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth.
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James Klugmann joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933 whilst studying at Cambridge, where he earned a double first in modern languages.
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James Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof.
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James Klugmann had however been on the fringes of such activity, which no doubt gave rise to suspicion, along with his university friendships of some of those who were involved in espionage.
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In 1935, James Klugmann gave up an academic career to become Secretary of the World Student Association, based in Paris, travelling widely across the world.
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In 1936 James Klugmann met Arnold Deutsch, the head of recruitment for NKVD agents based in England.
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Deutsch's main objective was to get James Klugmann to help recruit John Cairncross as a spy.
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James Klugmann is known to the British police as an active communist.
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James Klugmann is used to legal work and therefore incautious.
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James Klugmann had joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in 1940 but, having a natural flair for languages, he was transferred to the Special Operations Executive, who apparently ignored his communist sympathies.
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In February 1942 James Klugmann was posted to the Yugoslav Section of SOE as an intelligence and coordination officer, based in Cairo.
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James Klugmann became critical of the Serb Royalist leader General Draza Mihailovic, who was at the time the chief beneficiary of British aid and support in the resistance movement in Yugoslavia.
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James Klugmann's reports influenced thinking at the Political Warfare Executive, Secret Intelligence Service, the Foreign Office, and the BBC.
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James Klugmann suggested that the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito and his Partisans were killing more Germans than Mihailovic's Chetniks, despite smaller numbers.
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James Klugmann rose to the rank of major, an unlikely outcome given his general disposition.
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James Klugmann was under constant surveillance, suspected of being an NKVD agent along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom he knew at Cambridge, and one of whom, Maclean, had been a friend at Gresham's.
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Proof of this was found in the KGBs archives and it is confirmed that John "James" Klugmann was a KGB talent-spotter and agent who was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge Five.
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James Klugmann remained a devout Communist all his life and went on to play a significant role in the CPGB becoming responsible for the Education branch.
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One of the most active and overt British communists of his generation, James Klugmann became an influential left-wing journalist after the war and wrote the first two volumes of the official History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was continued by Noreen Branson.
21.
James Klugmann wrote the controversial From Trotsky to Tito, justifying to a British communist audience the party's policy towards Tito's Yugoslavia.