The Kremlin's Confidant, page 24
The dispute with the doctors had hit the island’s tourism and in spring 1978 Martin began to wonder whether Mintoff’s Malta risked going the way of Allende’s Chile. Martin felt that Mintoff needed advice and that Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blower whom he had met three years earlier, could help. He gave Mintoff the telephone number of Agee, but did not become otherwise involved. He believes that Mintoff sent an Air Malta plane to Amsterdam to bring Agee to the island and that Agee had warned Mintoff that the CIA, worried about his socialism and his foreign policy would seek to hit the island’s economy in general and tourism in particular. Mintoff had banned visits by the US Sixth Fleet and closed the NATO sub-headquarters.
There is no reference to this trip in Agee’s appointment diary, now stored in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in New York. However, Agee’s widow, the ballet dancer and teacher, Giselle Roberge, wrote to me that he had travelled to Malta in the period between their marriage on 13 March 1978 and joining her in Hamburg three months later. ‘He described Malta as beautiful, [its] people as progressive and like-minded, and mentioned a woman in government or connected to it who had suggested Malta might give him residency.’8 Michael Welsh too remembers meeting him on the island.9
At that time, Agee was being hounded in Western Europe. He had been thrown out of Britain and France and was having problems in other countries. Files released to Agee under the Freedom of Information Act showed that as of June 1980 the CIA had 45,000 documents on him. One of these reported that in January 1978 the lead investigator of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had written to the Attorney General questioning ‘whether to prosecute CIA officials for civil rights violations against Philip Agee’.10 Such a prosecution never happened.
Recent files released by the CIA show their concerns about the Soviets increasing their presence on the island, though noted Mintoff’s refusal to allow a Soviet mission until commercial accords were signed. They also reveal US anxieties over Mintoff’s relationship with Gaddafi. A CIA report of 1980 described the Malta–Libya relationship as a:
peculiar one given the Libyan leader Gaddafi’s unpredictability and Maltese Prime Minister Mintoff’s monumental ego. This unlikely alliance of two men who seem to swing between manipulating and being manipulated by each other is kept afloat by Gaddafi’s desire for a client state to bolster his sense of legitimacy on the world stage and by Mintoff’s never ending search for money to enhance both industrialisation and socialism in Malta.11
That said, a CIA analysis made at the same time is relatively benign – which may be why it has been released. It describes him as ‘something of a folk hero’ and as having a ‘forceful and charismatic personality’. It concludes: ‘Under his leadership Malta’s economy has remained relatively healthy; unemployment is low, monetary reserves are rather high and the inflation rate is respectable.’12
The first scheme in which Mintoff involved Martin was his vision of creating a University of the Mediterranean. This would use buildings from the emptied British bases on the island. Mintoff suggested that Martin act as the catalyst and manager of the project:
The idea was that I would find a number of countries, each to finance one particular faculty. I got an agreement from Japan that they would finance a faculty of maritime studies. I was to approach the Italians, Gaddafi and the Libyans, the French … That was the idea. It didn’t get very far. I had too much else to do.
The projects which Mintoff put Martin’s way showed imaginative rather than commercial flair. On one occasion, Mintoff asked him to assemble a consortium to build a railway from Rabat to Cairo. This was a 4,000km undertaking, requiring bringing a rolling stock factory from Scotland to a somewhat unprepared Malta, and Malta had virtually no construction companies. But Mintoff had arranged promises of Arab League funding. Martin spent some time on this before the dream eventually foundered. He was quicker to recognise as a poisoned chalice the offer to take over the largest textile company on the island, the state’s Spinning and Weaving Company. This had been the biggest employer after the dockyards, but had run into difficulties and then folded. One day when working at CIM, Martin was summoned to attend a meeting of the cabinet. He went to find the whole cabinet assembled there. After he was introduced, Mintoff said, ‘Martin, I have decided to make the most generous gesture in Maltese history. I have decided to give you Spinning & Weaving.’
Martin said, ‘Just a minute, what do you mean give it to me?’
‘Hand the whole thing over to you.’
‘They have got massive debts. Who will be responsible for the debts?’ Mintoff went ballistic. Martin tried to appease him by saying that he would look at the proposition, but his continued refusal to take over the company’s responsibilities caused Mintoff to call for his secretary. ‘Take a note. Mr Packard and other selected Englishmen will be declared personae non gratae.’ Two hours later he called Martin to his home. He had calmed down, and Martin repeated his promises to do what he could.
An opportunity to make use of the troubled behemoth quickly turned up in the shape of a trade delegation from East Germany. They were interested in buying CIM’s jeans but also talked to Mintoff about other business opportunities:
He sent them up to me, as he used to. The delegation came, and I chatted with them, and they said, ‘Of course, one of our problems is that we have got all these deals selling weapons to Africa and they don’t know how to pay us any longer.’
Martin pointed out that they were cotton producers and could pay with cotton:
‘What do we do with this cotton?’ one said. I said, ‘You send the cotton to Malta. You refinance the re-establishment of Spinning & Weaving. They will then spin fabric for you. We can do some really interesting fabrics there, then you can either take them back into East Germany for your own use, or you use the Malta quota for selling them in Europe, where they would be extremely competitive.’
Counter-trade deals were the name of the game in Eastern European trade and the delegation was enthusiastic. Shortly afterwards, Martin received a letter from a minister in Berlin, saying they would like to work with him and see what else they could do together. He was invited to East Germany. But on his return, he faced the hostility of a for-once-united Maltese business community, resenting the position Martin was gaining. They told the East German minister that either he worked with them or the deal would be cancelled. The minister refused and the deal fell through.
By this stage, some of the characteristics which were to undermine his later business career were becoming evident. Martin’s boundless energy led him to initiate an extraordinary range of projects. But he did not see them through, delegating implementation to others and moving on to new, often imaginative and more alluring schemes.
Joining the family
Anne Mintoff was aged 14 when Martin first met her father. For all the changes Mintoff would make in opening up the Maltese education system, his two daughters, Anne and her younger sister Yana, were boarding at the prestigious Cheltenham Ladies’ College in Britain. A decade later, on a motor yacht sailing the family round the Peloponnese, Martin remembers finding her weeping, upset by her father’s treatment. Then in 1978, on a visit to Malta, he encountered her – now Dr Anne McKenna, following a degree from LSE and marriage to Bernard McKenna, a scriptwriter for British television comedy – and fell in love. He was aged 47 and she 30, elegant, vivacious, with striking looks and to be found with a red flag at the front of her father’s party’s protest marches. ‘I found her an exciting personality, and admired her commitment to socialism and human rights. I recognised from the beginning that there were issues deriving from the dysfunctionality of her background, but I was naive enough to suppose that I could deal with these.’ A friend of her sister’s remembers Anne as a ‘blonde Siren’.
Mintoff took a hands-off approach to Martin’s relationship with his daughter. He had long been complaining he could not communicate with her. Moyra, who was always fond of Martin, told Welsh, then visiting the island, that she was concerned about the relationship. She thought it would end up by damaging Martin rather than the other way round. And so it did.
Martin separated from Kiki, started divorce proceedings in Britain, and moved permanently to Malta. Giving up his apartment in Senglea, he moved into Anne’s apartment in G’Mangia. The relationship was tempestuous. One dinner guest remembers Anne upending spaghetti on Martin and another her pouring soup over him before storming out. Further complications ensued after Robinson hired Anne as export manager of CIM in 1979. She was well qualified, having done a similar job at Spinning & Weaving, but Martin was disturbed when he learnt of it. He thought it inevitable that it would lead to friction if he ever became directly involved in management, as indeed happened two years later. By then, Robinson had gone to launch the new plant in Witney and, with Levi Strauss cutting back on its orders, Martin felt obliged to step in as managing director to keep CIM on its feet.
Mintoff assisted by securing an agreement with the USSR obliging it to spend $15 million a year in Malta, most of it for CIM’s jeans. Anne went to Moscow and negotiated the first contract. In late 1983, she became pregnant, and frictions began to develop. Martin felt she should be spared trips to Moscow, which Anne interpreted as his taking over the relationships she had built up and excluding her from the running of the company. She also resented Martin’s failure to finalise his divorce from Kiki – this only came through just before the birth of their daughter, Emma, on 7 June 1984. Colleagues in the company also noted her close relationship with a manager at CIM and later with a client.
At this point, Anne’s sister, Yana, launched a series of articles attacking Anne for having ‘sold out to the capitalists’ and claiming that Martin was exploiting the company’s workforce by not allowing them adequate toilet breaks. Yana had proved a feisty student in Britain. She had been a close friend of Irish republicans such as Bernadette Devlin, was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and is still remembered for the incident on 6 July 1978 when she emptied three bags of horse manure from the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons on to the MPs below. She was protesting at the activities of British troops in Northern Ireland. Yana believed that fathers should be excluded from any role in the upbringing of their children and urged Anne to throw Martin out as soon as the baby was born. After Emma’s birth, she stepped up her articles.
Martin had not been present at the delivery. Moyra had sent him home saying that she would call him in good time, which she did not. After Emma’s birth, Martin tried to fulfil his various roles, as father, husband, general manager and export manager. But he recalls that Anne had not forgotten his failure to be beside her at the birth and her resentment of his taking over her work in Moscow. She may have believed the reports by her deputy that he was having an affair in Russia, an allegation Martin rejects. One day, after securing an order that would keep the factory going for almost a year, he returned from Moscow to find his keys to Anne’s apartment did not work. Anne claimed to be furious that he had stopped off at the factory to deposit the order before coming home. He was told that any further communication must be through her lawyer.
Martin had stayed close to Moyra, but she said there was nothing she could do to help. Mintoff said he would like to assist but that he couldn’t communicate with Anne and, in any case, ‘the whole problem was money’. This didn’t strike home at the time: on legal advice, Martin was already paying half his salary into a blocked account in Anne’s name. He learned later that she was refusing to draw this because she considered it inadequate. He had no savings or other sources of funds.
Martin reflects that he did not handle Anne’s insecurities well. He remembers that these became worse when Emma began to walk and would make a dash for him whenever Anne became enraged. In his view, Anne must have thought that closeness with him endangered her own relationship with Emma. She accused him of being ‘just like her father’ in putting her down. Martin considers that he was always supportive.
With visits to his daughter proving increasingly awkward, he tried to obtain access through the legal process. He was told that no lawyer would handle an action against the Mintoff family. He negotiated with Anne’s lawyer for about a year and eventually reached agreement; the lawyer was then fired by Anne, with her insisting that the agreement had no validity. By this time, the need for a financial settlement between Martin and Anne had become central to a possible agreement on separation and care of their daughter, but Martin did not have spare funds. He had sunk most of the £125,000 he got from sale of the Kalamata plant into CIM. As managing director there, he was given a car and had his mortgage paid, but received a fairly nominal salary of around £2,000/month – and half of this was going to Anne. Any spare funds had gone to buying up shares in CIM and purchasing, with an 80 per cent mortgage, a farmhouse at Il’Qrendi.
Anne went on to be an economist at Malta Enterprise, the country’s economic development agency. In parallel with caring for her father, she built up a programme to recruit and train volunteers to visit residents in long-term care homes. This developed into The Foundation for Active Ageing.
In 2015, understanding that she might be reticent about her private life, I wrote to see if she would discuss her export activities. She did not wish to become involved. ‘Please excuse me, but I prefer to try to bury my past associations with Martin. He wrote to my father on a number of occasions proclaiming his belief that I am mentally unstable, so probably would not wish me to make any form of contribution to your writings.’ Martin denies writing any such letter. ‘I simply felt, and feel, very much that she would be helped by expert psychological counselling.’ He also wonders about the extent to which Moyra and Anne and Yana resented the fact that Mintoff was so close to him.
One of Martin’s rare contacts with Anne was around 1998. Mintoff was ill. Anne contacted him saying he needed help and Martin was the only person whom he trusted. In Martin’s view, the help he needed was political and, believing that Filias would be more effective, arranged for the Greek to go and stay with Mintoff.
Martin’s daughter has always used the name Packard, but maintained limited contact with her father. She studied chemistry at undergraduate and post-graduate level in two British universities before joining a pharmaceutical company. In 2015, she started working in Abingdon, 26 miles from Martin. They began to see each other, but one day, when Martin rang her, Anne picked up the telephone. Anne asked him if he understood why she had pushed him out of her life. When Martin suggested it was because Emma used to run to him when Anne started shouting, Anne became furious. Emma then cut communications to a minimum. In 2022, she started working at an initiative to promote use of the university’s research and expertise.
Martin has long been devastated by this fractured situation and considers the separation the real tragedy of his life. ‘Because I believe it resulted from insecurity, disinformation and other people’s venom, I don’t feel resentment towards Anne, only sadness that all three of us have had suffering inflicted on us, instead of the loving, creative and mutually supportive life that we might have had together.’
In a conversation in 2012, Emma told him that she thought Yana had been a bad influence on her mother, leaving everything to Anne when in his last years Mintoff developed dementia and the family were trying to decide whether he should be sectioned or not.
Moyra herself died fifteen years before her husband. One obituary referred to her as the island’s Mother Theresa. However controversial her husband may have been, she steered her own course and was respected for this. The sobriquet was because of her charitable work, and in the family she was remembered as a steadying hand. One visitor recalls:
She was quite charming in a Howards End kind of way and had a quality of serenity which in the circumstances was a welcome relief. Martin was very protective of her. I have the impression that they confided in each other quite a lot and that she was an invaluable source of calm and good sense at a very turbulent time.
Martin had first met her when he was still an intelligence analyst at the British Mediterranean command. He remembers receiving an American intelligence digest on Mintoff’s thoughts and activities which turned out be based largely on the musings of Moyra:
Her best friend, or the lady she thought was her best friend, was, in fact, a CIA lady in the American embassy. She was pouring out her heart on her problems with her husband and the American lady put every single word into the intelligence digest. It was gross and eventually I had myself taken off the circulation list.
She had met Mintoff when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Her mother was his landlady on the Cowley Road. They married in 1947, separated, and came back together. Mintoff had told her that as prime minister he needed her beside him. And she stuck it out, dying just after their fiftieth wedding anniversary. She was less an English aristocrat than a Dutch one. Though reputed to be related to the Dukes of Portland, the link was distant. However, her family had been the hereditary Barons of Bentinck in the Netherlands and active in the Teutonic Order. Carrington had got one thing wrong about her. It was not her father but her uncle who had been an admiral.
Chapter 5
Challenging the Cold War
The days of our past remain behind us;
They linger, in a row of extinguished candles:
Those closer to us are still smoking and curved,
Expressionless, melted, and cold.
I will not look at them; it would sadden me to see them now,
And remember their original light.
I look ahead, to my candles that wait and glow.
