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Today we're going back to 1971 and a Cold War spy scandal between Britain and the USSR.

As Dina Newman now reports, the British government expelled 90 Soviet diplomats from the country.

The final call for Aeroflot Soviet Airlines, flight number

SU-244 to Moscow.

Passengers to Moscow. At London's Heathrow Airport, someone somewhere has got a list. On it, 90 names, Russians, men and women with a choice of seven-era flot flights before the deadline for their departure tomorrow week.

In 1971, the Communist Block and the West were engaged in the nuclear arms race and proxy wars around the world. Western politicians on the

right were warning about the communist threat, while those on the left accused them of

paranoia and seeking the red under the bed. And then, seemingly out of

the blue, Britain took an unprecedented step, expelling 90s Soviet diplomats from London.

Drastic action as everyone now concedes, but every single person ordered to fly back to

Moscow is considered by the security services of this country to have had some part in activities organized by the Russian Intelligence Service.

The Soviet diplomatic corps in the UK was unusually large at the time, consisting of 550 people. They had been let in by the previous left-wing

Labour government.

Basically they hadn't been too difficult about accommodating Russian diplomats, both in numbers, wildly above what was necessary

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