Editor 'provided cover for MI6 agent's Estonian trip'

Dominic Lawson, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph, provided cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain, according to Richard Tomlinson.

Dominic Lawson, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph, provided cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain, according to Richard Tomlinson.

Early in the 1990s Mr Lawson, then the editor of The Spectator, was on MI6's books and provided journalistic cover for an agent called Spencer who was put on the case of a young Russian diplomat, Platon Obukhov, in Tallin, the capital of Estonia, according to Mr Tomlinson's book, The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security.

Yesterday Mr Lawson, son of the former Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson, strongly denied the allegations and further claims that he provided cover for an MI6 trip to Macedonia.

According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Moscow tabloid which has been publishing excerpts from the book this week, Spencer was given the job of handling Obukhov, codenamed Masterwork. The book claims: "For the trip Spencer took one of his favourite MI6 covers - journalist. The editor of The Spectator magazine provided him with cover on condition that Spencer wrote just one article for him."

After a visit to MI6 to arrange his bogus journalistic credentials, the agent is reported in the book as saying: "Flippin' outrageous! They've got the editor of The Spectator on the books. He has agreed to let me go to Tallin undercover as a freelance for his magazine. The only condition is that I have to write an article which he'll publish if he likes it. The cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer."

The Russian newspaper quoted the Tomlinson book as saying that "Spencer" continued to meet the junior Russian diplomat regularly in Tallin and then Moscow until Russian counter intelligence arrested Obukhov in the Russian capital in April 1996.

Obukhov was found unfit to stand trial and a Moscow city court ordered psychiatric treatment until July last year when he was jailed for 11 years.

The agent handling Obukhov also claimed he was given cover by The Spectator magazine while on a mission to Macedonia to develop contacts with ethnic Albanian politicians. He was reportedly given a letter to take on the trip from the magazine and told by his superiors that if his Albanian interlocutors phoned The Spectator to check on him Mr Lawson would vouch that he was a journalist, the book claims.