ONE of the most influential historians of the 20th century, who went on to be Master of Balliol College, Oxford, stands accused today of taking a dark secret to his grave: he was a Soviet mole.

Christopher Hill, who died last week aged 91, concealed his membership of the Communist Party to serve first in Military Intelligence, then at the Foreign Office, during the Second World War.

Declassified government papers suggest that Hill used his position as head of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office to push pro-Soviet policy, and that he was a close associate of another Soviet agent.

He was confronted by a fellow historian who had unearthed the papers while researching a book about Soviet espionage in Britain. When they met, however, Hill is said to have begged his colleague to keep the discovery a secret, and the two men agreed that he would not be named as a mole during his lifetime.

“The first thing he said to me as he took a seat in my living room was, ‘You’re not going to unmask me, are you?’ ” Anthony Glees said. “He was a sad, rather pathetic figure, he appeared to have had a stroke, and I took pity on him.”

Hill never made any secret of his left-wing sympathies and was open about his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the postwar years, before resigning in 1957. However, his name appears to have been kept on one of the CPGB’s secret membership lists. He joined at some point between taking a first in history at Balliol in 1934 and returning as a tutor in 1938. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union in the intervening period. Hill established his academic reputation by offering a Marxist interpretation of the events surrounding the English Civil War and was elected Master of Balliol in 1965.

The existence of a group of spies at Oxford, similar to but less successful than the infamous Cambridge spy ring, was discovered when the KGB briefly opened its files four years ago. However, while researching his book in 1985, Dr Glees came across a series of previously confidential Foreign Office papers which, he says, suggest that Hill operated as an “agent of influence” for the Soviet Union during his time as a civil servant.

Dr Glees wrote to Hill in September that year to request a meeting. “He rang me a couple of days later and asked to see me immediately, before catching a bus from his home near Banbury to visit me at my house in Oxford.”

During their 90-minute meeting, Hill explained to Dr Glees that he assumed he had been vetted by MI5 before being recruited to Military Intelligence in 1940 and seconded to the Foreign Office three years later. However, he escaped identification as a Communist by simply not declaring his party membership.

Hill had first worked as a liaison officer with Soviet military engineers who were in Britain to inspect British tanks and had then been assigned to a small unit that was preparing to be parachuted into the Baltic states to foment rebellion. When that mission was shelved, he was seconded in 1943 to the Northern department of the Foreign Office, and as a fluent Russian speaker was quickly appointed head of the Russian desk.

Among the papers discovered by Dr Glees was a proposal, signed by Hill, that all White Russian emigrés teaching Russian at British universities and schools should be sacked and replaced with Soviet-approved staff. Polish exiles were to face similar treatment after the war.

Hill suggested that Churchill should make this offer to Stalin at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, but Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, wrote back to him to say: “I am a little surprised that the Foreign Office wants to put so small a matter on the agenda.” The documents show that Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, also took exception to Hill’s plans.

Dr Glees discovered that Hill had forged a relationship with Peter Smollett, the head of the Russian desk at the Ministry of Information, and that the two men had formed a committee to help to develop future British government policy towards the Soviet Union.

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