The Coal Point retiree had woken on Monday to news his father, the late Albert "Bert" James, Labor MP for the federal seat of Hunter from 1960 to 1980, had been named as a KGB informant.

He said his two sisters were upset by the news and he was finding it hard to believe.

"My dad was a loyal Australian, his commitment was to the people of the Hunter electorate," Mr James told the Newcastle Herald on Monday.

"He was an earthy, populist, grassroots politician, not an academic like they want today. He'd go and meet his constituents on Saturday mornings, at Cessnock, Kurri Kurri, Toronto.

"[His father] Old Rowley would do the same."

Albert James is listed as an informant of the Soviet intelligence service in the papers of former KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, which were released by the Churchill College Archive in the UK last month.

For much of the 20th century, the James family was synonymous with Labor politics in the Hunter region.

Rowland "Rowley" James was a coalminer who held the seat of Hunter from 1928 to 1958.

H.V. "Doc" Evatt held the seat until he retired to the NSW Supreme Court, paving the way for Bert James, who was a police detective-sergeant before entering politics.

Mr Evatt was a key player in the Cold War ructions of the 1950s, which saw the ALP split in two over communism.

Although the Liberal government of Robert Menzies failed to have the Communist Party outlawed in 1951, the "Petrov affair" and other scandals left Labor at the mercy of the "Reds under the bed" scare. But the Soviets were active, and successful, in infiltrating Western governments and their intelligence agencies.

Peter Barrack, whose long stint as secretary of Newcastle Trades Hall Council began a year before Mr James left Parliament, said he had lots of political discussions with the retired MP but he "never indicated to me he was in negotiations with the Soviets".

The spying went both ways and Mr Barrack said he was surprised at the level of detail that was in his ASIO file when he requested it a few years ago.

A long-time member of the Communist Party of Australia, Mr Barrack said ASIO "had to have had someone just about sitting next to me" in Communist Party meetings to have the information that it did.

Coalfields Labor identity Bob Brown - who succeeded Mr James in the seat of Hunter before moving to Charlton - said the elder MP "supported and sponsored me".

He said embassy staff from all countries went out of their way to befriend parliamentarians.

"But ... what could Bert James tell them?" Mr Brown said.

"He was a back-bencher ... The idea he was some sort of informer is absurd in the extreme."

Mr James's parliamentary speeches show an interest in the activities of the US and the CIA.

In one speech criticising the government over ASIO, he said intelligence officers had told him their job was easy, because they had no need to enter the witness box in a court. "All they have to do is submit a report irrespective of whether or not it is accurate," he said in Hansard.

Newcastle Herald