Gott

I'll say this for the KGB, once they bought someone, they really managed to make it stick. Take Richard Gott. It's been 30 years or so since he started working for the KGB, and more than a decade since he was exposed as such, but he's still writing articles in praise of his beloved Soviet Union.

But then, Gott was clearly an enthusiastic traitor before even being approached.

By The Spectator’s account, Gott was so eager to work for the KGB in the late 1970s that he excited suspicion. Palmer wrote, “Some KGB officers thought he was a ‘dangle’ - KGB slang for an MI-6 plant. He was too good to be true. How could anyone be so eager to work for the KGB? It made no sense. But the majority view was that no one could fake Gott’s degree of sincerity or enthusiasm. So contacts started.”

But as an agent “Gott seems to have been a serious disappointment,” Palmer wrote. “He had no significant contacts within the British government, and no secret information to impart.” There was talk of him recruiting a relative, a civil servant, who might have secrets but nothing came of it. The Spectator reported, “Gott was useful to the KGB only in one respect. He passed on the names of other Guardian journalists he thought might be recruited by the organization.”

Makes you wonder how long that list was really, doesn't it?