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== Current scholarship == [[File:Robin Cook-close crop.jpg|thumb|Foreign Secretary [[Robin Cook]] launched an official historical review of the Zinoviev letter in 1998]] Contemporary scholarship on the Zinoviev letter dates from a 1967 [[monograph]] published by three British journalists working for ''[[The Sunday Times]]''. The authors, Lewis Chester, Steven Fay and [[Hugo Young]], asserted that two members of a Russian [[monarchist]] organisation called the "Brotherhood of St. George" composed the document in Berlin. Irina Bellegarde, the widow of Alexis Bellegarde, one of the two men said to have written the document, stated that she had witnessed the forgery as it was performed.<ref>Chester, Fay, and Young, ''The Zinoviev Letter'', pp. 51β52.</ref> She said that her husband had drafted the letter after fellow-Γ©migrΓ© Alexander Gumansky told him that a request to forge the letter had come from "a person in authority in London". Gurmansky and Bellegarde were later sentenced to death ''[[Trial in absentia|in absentia]]'' by a Soviet court.<ref name=outcast /> Bellegarde was later forced to work during the [[World War II|Second World War]] for the Russian section of the [[Abwehr]] (German military intelligence) in Berlin. Some evidence suggests that he was the highly effective British [[double agent]] known as "Outcast". He had been an important source on Soviet matters for the [[Secret Intelligence Service]] (SIS; commonly known as MI6) since the First World War, raising the possibility that he already had deep links to British intelligence when involved in the fabrication of the Zinoviev letter.<ref name=outcast>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/outcast-mi6-agent-zinoviev-letter-alexis-bellegarde|title=Revealed: the dark past of 'Outcast', MI6's top wartime double agent|last=Orange|first=Richard|date=11 October 2015|work=The Observer}}</ref> The forgers appear to have studied Bolshevik documents and signatures extensively before creating the letter to undermine the Soviet regime's relations with the United Kingdom. The British [[Foreign and Commonwealth Office|Foreign Office]] had received the forgery on 10 October 1924, two days after the defeat of the MacDonald government on the no-confidence motion initiated by the Liberals.<ref>Chester, Fay, and Young, ''The Zinoviev Letter'', p. 65.</ref> Despite the dubious nature of the document, wheels were set in motion for its publication, members of the Conservative Party combining with Foreign Office officials in what Chester, Fay, and Young characterised as a "conspiracy".<ref>Chester, Fay, and Young, ''The Zinoviev Letter'', pp. 65β81.</ref> These findings and allegations motivated the British Foreign Office to undertake a study of their own. For three years, [[Milicent Bagot]] of MI5 examined the archives and conducted interviews with surviving witnesses. She produced a long account of the affair, but the paper ultimately proved unpublishable because it contained sensitive operational and personnel information.<ref name="Bennett pg. 2" /> Nevertheless, Bagot's work proved important as a [[secondary source]] when the Foreign Office revisited the matter three decades later.{{cn|date=October 2022}} In the first two months of 1998, rumours of a forthcoming book on the true origins of the Zinoviev letter, based on information from Soviet archives, led to renewed press speculation and parliamentary questions.<ref>The book turned out to be Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev's ''The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives'', published by HarperCollins in 1998.</ref> In response, [[Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs|Foreign Secretary]] [[Robin Cook]] announced on 12 February that, in the interests of openness, he had commissioned the historians of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to prepare a historical memorandum on the Zinoviev letter, drawing upon archival documents.{{cn|date=October 2022}} A paper by the Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, [[Gill Bennett]], was published in January 1999 and contains the results of this inquiry. Bennett had free and unfettered access to the archives of the Foreign Office, as well as those of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and MI5. She also visited Moscow in the course of her research, working in the archives of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, the Central Committee of the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] and the Comintern archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain.<ref>Bennett, ''A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'' pp. 2β3. {{ISBN?}}</ref> Although not every operational detail could be published because of British secrecy laws, the publicly available extracts of Bennett's paper still provided a rich account of the Zinoviev letter affair. Her report showed that the letter contained statements very similar to those made by Zinoviev to other communist parties and at other times to the CPGB, but at the time of the letter (when Anglo-Soviet trade talks were taking place and a general election was impending), Zinoviev and the Soviet government had adopted a more restrained attitude towards propaganda in Britain. Despite her extensive research, she concluded "it is impossible to say who wrote the Zinoviev Letter", though her best guess was that it was commissioned by White Russian intelligence circles from forgers in Berlin or the Baltic states, most likely in [[Riga]]. It was then leaked to the papers, probably by MI6, that she had stated, "I have my doubts as to whether [Desmond Morton] thought it was genuine but he treated it as if it was."<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/feb/04/uk.politicalnews6|title=Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6|last=Norton-Taylor|first=Richard|date=4 February 1999|work=The Guardian|access-date=2019-10-17|language=en-GB|issn=0261-3077}}</ref> In 2006, Bennett incorporated some of her findings on the Zinoviev letter into chapter four of her biography of SIS agent [[Desmond Morton (civil servant)|Desmond Morton]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Gill |last=Bennett |title=Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence |location=London |publisher=[[Taylor & Francis]] |date= 2006 |isbn=978-0415394307}}</ref> <!--somebody needs to examine this book if they get a chance.--> Another 2006 book on [[espionage|spycraft]] attributes authorship to [[Vladimir Orlov (intelligence agent)|Vladimir Orlov]], a former intelligence agent of [[Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel|Baron Wrangel]] during the [[Russian Civil War]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Nigel |last=West |title=At Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, MI6 |location=London |publisher=Greenhill Books |year=2006 |pages=34β39}}</ref> The British historian Nigel West wrote that the [[OGPU]] (Soviet secret police) always initiated investigations into leaks of Soviet documents and into mishandlings of propaganda, and the fact no investigation was opened after the publication of the Zinoviev letter indicates it was certainly a forgery.<ref>{{cite book |last1=West |first1=Nigel |last2=Tsarev |first2=Oleg |last3=Carev |first3=Oleg N. |title=The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives |date=1999 |publisher=Yale University Press |location=New Haven |isbn=978-0300078060 |page=33}}</ref> In 2011, Jonathan Pile published his book ''Churchill's Secret Enemy'', detailing the mysterious career of [[Sir George Joseph Ball]]. Pile accessed Ball's papers (most of which Ball had attempted to destroy) from the [[Bodleian Library]], along with other newly available sources. Pile's thesis, explained in the book, is that the Zinoviev letter was likely composed by Ball (at the time a long-serving MI5 officer) and his cohorts.{{citation needed|date=June 2021}} In 2017, the British government claimed that it had "lost" a file on the Zinoviev letter scandal.<ref name="Loss">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/26/government-admits-losing-thousands-of-papers-from-national-archives|title=Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives|newspaper=The Guardian|access-date=26 December 2017}}</ref> The government added that they were unable to determine whether copies of the material had been made.<ref name="Loss" /> In 2018, Bennett published her book ''The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies''.<ref>{{cite book |first=Gill |last=Bennett |title=The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2018 |isbn=9780198767305}}</ref>
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