Lebedev seeks to gloss over his KGB past

Having concluded his deal to buy the London Evening Standard, the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev (pictured) has asked the British media to stop talking about his former job as a Soviet spy. In an interview broadcast on ITN News yesterday, he said: "I personally would advise to use 'foreign intelligence' [rather] than KGB, which is a notorious concept in people's minds.

"And then the KGB has ceased to exist in '91? and I left the job in '92. So it has nothing to do with that. If I were a gynaecologist for example, would you ask me the question 'Why did you buy the Evening Standard?' "

His remarks appear to be a re-writing of history. Lebedev, who is a friend and business partner of the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, worked as a lieutenant-colonel in the KGB's foreign intelligence directorate. He was attached to the Russian embassy in London, where he says he often read the Evening Standard with great interest.

In London he had the diplomatic cover of an economics attache, but according to Lebedev's personal site his assignments revolved largely around preventing capital flight from the Russian Federation. However, it has been claimed that he spent more time studying finance and the City than British secrets.

Lebedev used the ITN interview to reveal some grand plans for the Standard, which will be edited by his friend Geordie Grieg, former editor of the society magazine Tatler. He said that he wanted to create a new type of high-minded journalism, where writers concentrated "on the most important topics and stories for humanity from corruption to greenhouse effect, from alternative sources of energy to how the oil prices are being formed, from wars in Darfur and Iraq".

He added: "And if we're lucky to find somebody like Mark Twain, who used to be a reporter, or Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekov, then we have something completely new, which may answer to a challenge from autocratic government and bureaucracies trying to limit the freedom of press."