Anni Donaldson has written a piece for The Glasgow Wrap sharing the remarkable story of when her father, as a young bricklayer from Glasgow, was cast into world of Cold War espionage.
Ned Donaldson was 22 years old when the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain asked him to go to Yugoslavia on an undercover spying mission.
He was a trusted comrade, having joined the Young Communist League in his teens, playing a key role the Party’s Maryhill branch and then becoming a member of the CPGB’s Glasgow Committee. He was also an activist in the Bricklayers Trade Union.
In his autobiography, Ned recalled the split in the communist movement between Stalin and Tito in the late 1940s: “The Yugoslavs were planning to create a ‘Britanska Omladinski Brigada’ (British Youth Brigade) – to help build the ‘Autoput Bratsfo Yedinsfo’ (The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity) and use them as a tool of international propaganda to boost their cause and profile with their communist comrades across the globe. The British Communist Party, loyal to Stalin, condemned the Yugoslavs and decided to disrupt their propaganda plan by planting a spy inside the Britanska Omladinski Brigada to counter the Yugoslav’s propaganda and show the regime in a less than favourable light. Word came to Glasgow from Party HQ in London asking if I would join a group of young British volunteers.”
Anni takes up the story in her Glasgow Wrap piece, which is well worth reading. The Substack site brings together and curates news and features about the city and is well worth a look. It operates a paywall system, but those who want to read Anni’s article and look around the site can take up a free trial of The Wrap for 7 days: click here to do so.
She concludes that ‘what Ned witnessed in Yugoslavia planted the first seeds of doubt in his mind about the wisdom of slavishly following a remote leader and ignoring how to improve things or bring about change to people’s lives in the here and now’.
With acknowledgements to the Glasgow Wrap. Published 5 December 2024.