GOVERNMENTS are required by law to release state documents after a period of time — from 30 years onwards. Based on the nature of the contents, the 30-year period can be postponed to 50 years and onwards.

When the 50-year period is adhered to, people go to their graves without knowing what their friends and relatives did. If a foreign government was spying on Country A, if the prime minister at the time was 65, he will go to his grave without knowing that his Chief of Staff was an informant for a foreign power because after the release of the documents, the prime minister would have been long gone.

The case of Martin Carter, a former high-ranking executive of the original Jagan/Burnham PPP of the 1950s, is a perfect example of how leaders can go to their graves without knowing the true characters of their intimate comrades.

Cheddi and Janet Jagan were lifelong friends of Martin Carter. Both Jagans became president of Guyana and enjoyed a healthy friendship with Carter. When Carter died, President Janet Jagan made the decision to have his body interred at the Seven Ponds in the Botanic Gardens. Cheddi Jagan died in 1997 and Janet Jagan died in 2008.

The British spy agency MI-5 released its documents on the PPP of the 1950s, in 2011. That is 61 years after the PPP was born. Only Ashton Chase, of that original PPP leadership, was alive in Guyana when the MI-5 documents were made public. Both Jagans were not around to read what MI-5 was doing in Guyana from the time of the formation of the PPP and how MI-5 was spying on PPP leaders.

Even after 61 years, some of the MI-5 papers are redacted. The papers named a certain person in the PPP leadership that was the conduit inside the PPP’s hierarchy for MI-5. His code name was “Lascar.” We will never know who Lascar was because his real name has forever been lost because it was redacted.

I travelled up a long staircase to interview the only surviving member of the 1950 PPP party, Ashton Chase. Mr. Chase agreed that MI-5 was spying on the PPP leadership but said he could not point to anyone and he did not read the files on Lascar. The consensus of people I have spoken to is that Forbes Burnham was Lascar.

I don’t believe that. Circumstantial evidence points to Martin Carter. When the Iranian government hanged its deputy defence minister for spying for Britain, questions swirled around his life after he left the job. These included an expensive lifestyle, a huge bank account in the UK, the ease with which he obtained British citizenship and his frequent trips to Western capitals. The Iranians asked the question – why would the UK be so nice to a former defence minister, not Education Minister or Culture Minister, but one with the portfolio of defence?

A similar situation existed in British Guiana. Carter picketed the visit of Queen Elizabeth’s sister, proclaimed himself a Stalinist and was expelled from the PPP for ultra-communist activities. Soon after his removal from the PPP, Carter turned up as a highly placed officer in the British Office, which was the term used at that time for British High Commission.

Why the British Government would employ a Guyanese politician that insulted a visiting relative of Queen Elizabeth and a self-proclaimed Stalinist? That is a fairy-tale story you only find in comic books. Then he turned up as a senior employee of the Bookers Group of companies where he enjoyed an elite life.

For a man that the PPP expelled for being a wild communist, the Colonial Office in London and Bookers found him to be good company to have. Does it make any sense that there were far less ideological politicians in Guyana that were more educated than Carter, but yet Carter was chosen to work in the British Office where he would have had access to sensitive information?

In British Guiana, someone with the communist label as Carter had would have been victimised or ostracised by colonial society. The British and Bookers would not have touched him with a 10-foot poll. Carter became famous as a poet long after he stopped being an informant for MI-5.

He achieved national status as the nation’s poet and won the respect of the nation. But I think he became lonely and depressed in later years because of regrets for his role in the 1950s. The release of the MI-5 documents and the code name of Lascar should invite scholars to reassess the legacy of Martin Carter.