Documents reveal MI5 role in Guyana coup

The Jagans

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Secret intelligence documents declassified last week reveal that Britain’s Security Service, known as MI5, played a significant role in the lead-up to the 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected government of British Guiana. The Latin American territory, which borders Suriname, Venezuela and Brazil, was once one of the British Empire’s most lucrative sugar-producing colonies. In 1963, after gaining its independence from Britain, it was officially renamed the Co-Operative Republic of Guyana. Instrumental in the fight for independence was Cheddi Jagan —an ethnic Indian former dentist who is today considered the father of the nation— and his American-born wife Janet (née Rosenberg). In 1950, the couple founded the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), which became the primary pro-independence political vehicle in the British colony. But dozens of folders of classified documents that were released last Friday by Britain’s National Archives show that MI5 was suspicious of the Jagans, and believed that Janet had been a member of the Communist Party of the United States in the 1940s. Several MI5 reports from the 1950s express concern that the PPP intended to establish close proximity between a newly independent Guyana and the Soviet Union. The declassified MI5 archives contain countless transcribed telephone conversations between the Jagans and their political allies, as well as copies of intercepted correspondence and reports of physical surveillance by MI5 informants. They reveal that British intelligence closely monitored the Jagans for at least a decade. Even though MI5 concluded that the PPP had no close contacts with Soviet agents or agencies, and that the party was “not receiving any financial support from any Communist organization outside the country”, it continued to describe Janet Jagan as “a committed communist” and remained apprehensive of the couple’s “disruptive antics”. The British government of Winston Churchill decided to take aggressive action in 1953, after a landslide election victory for the PPP in British Guiana elections. Read more of this post