[3] Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof.
The Service's description of James for its operatives, which was put on file around 1938, said: "Height about 5 ft 8 in (173 cm), light build, broad brow, small featured face, fuzz of greyish hair, probably wears glasses, not remarkably Jewish but rather foreign appearance."
"[6] He had joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in 1940 but, having a natural flair for languages, he was soon transferred to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who apparently ignored his communist sympathies.
Klugmann became critical of the Serb Royalist leader General Draža Mihailović, who was at the time the chief beneficiary of British aid and support in the resistance movement in Yugoslavia.
[citation needed] He suggested that the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito and his Partisans were killing more Germans than Mihailović's Chetniks, despite smaller numbers.
Proof of this was found in the KGBs archives and it is confirmed that John "James" Klugmann was a KGB talent-spotter and agent who was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge Five.
[9] During his time in SOE and later whilst a civilian in UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in Yugoslavia he supported Soviet aims.
[8] Michael Straight (later owner and editor of The New Republic and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), an American who had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and who had become friends there with Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Kim Philby, described Klugmann as "a warm-hearted and compassionate intellectual whose commitment to Communism left him no time for such minor preoccupations as taking a bath or cleaning his fingernails."