GUYANA will have to wait maybe another 20 years, maybe forever, because declassified intelligence reports from a country’s spy agencies are always redacted, thus names are lost forever. So even if we wait another 20 years for the British and American spy agencies to reveal the names of the people who were moles inside the leadership of the WPA in the 1970s, we will never know. The identities will be erased.

The British espionage department, MI5 had a mole in the PPP in the 1950s. Released documents referred to him as “Lascar” but the documents did not identify the real person.  The world will never know who Lascar was because the papers, released after 60 years, did not disclose the real person.

I believe Lascar was Martin Carter and in three previous columns, I used circumstantial evidence to prove it was him. I have a rough idea of who in the WPA provided information to MI5 and CIA in the 1970s. There were two such persons. They are still alive and until they die, I will not be able to write on them. Who knows, I may die before them. Life is unpredictable!

I am revisiting the spy controversy of Martin Carter because Saturday was his death anniversary and the “Moray House Menseviks” (the term given to the Moray House management by well known Guyanese Journalist, John Mayer AKA, Bill Cotton/Reform),  celebrated his death anniversary last Saturday by a YouTube recitation of a certain collection of his poems written by Carter in the early 1950s.

Interestingly, Carter gave the anthology the name, “The Hidden Man” and interestingly that was the collection Moray House used. At Freudian level, was Carter showing guilt for being an MI5 informer, thus the title he used? Was Carter trying to tell us that indeed he was a hidden man, hiding behind another persona, and that persona was a hidden spy?

The political life of Martin Carter during the raging Cold War between the West and the USSR has no parallel anywhere in the world. If Guyana was a famous country in the 1970s and 1980s, global researchers would have written books about him. What Carter achieved during the Cold War no one has ever done in the world since the Cold War started after World War 2.

Carter picketed Queen Elizabeth’s sister on her visit to Guyana demanding she go home. He was a self-declared Stalinist. At a time when communists around the world were not afraid to say they were communist, even when Senator McCarthy in the US was persecuting every American including celebrated Hollywood stars, few communists did what Carter did – declare they were Stalinist.

Carter was expelled from the PPP for being a wild, extremist communist. Imagine that! Even Burnham and Jagan and Eusi Kwayana were committed anti-colonialist and leftist, but Carter was more extremist than them. Of all the places Carter turned up after he was expelled from the PPP was the local colonial office in Georgetown.

Do the logic deduction: here was a man so wild in his communism that the communist PPP party expelled him, but the local colonial office trusted a Stalinist to work inside this office where all the sensitive papers on colonial policies towards British Guiana must pass through. If you think that was an accident, then you are obviously a deeply foolish person. In the British colonies in the 1950s, if you say you were a Stalinist you might end up dead rather than being employed in the local colonial office.

The Colonial Office in London then arranged for Carter to be transferred to one of colonialism’s most precious assets in British Guiana – the British plantocracy named Bookers. This Stalinist was now serving the interests of the British aristocracy’s economic interests in British Guiana.

Since MI5, the CIA and USAID had been instrumental in bringing Forbes Burnham to power in 1964. Burnham could not have refused their request to make him a minister in the first independence Cabinet where he was Minister of Information. Maybe Burnham suspected Carter was a mole in the PPP in the 1950s but he had no choice; he could not refuse the request. But the relationship did not last long because Burnham knew that Carter would send back information on his government.

The handlers of Carter saw him in extremely fond ways. Carter was one of the darlings of the British Empire. After Burnham tossed him out of his government, the British rescued Carter and gave him an expensive paying job at Bookers once more. This then is the story of Carter.

President Janet Jagan was in love with his poetry and when he died, she had him buried in the Place of the Seven Ponds. Mrs Jagan died without knowing that the hidden man was the hidden spy inside her party.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.