One reason the Profumo scandal caught and held the public’s attention so very firmly was the added ingredient of espionage mixed in with the revelations. At the time, there had been some very public spy scandals, and popular culture had re-imagined these to be the ultimate fantasy lifestyle of James Bond. Think black-tie dinners, gentlemen’s clubs, fancy cars, cocktails, exotic locations and, of course, the tantalising Bond girls. It’s no accident that at the time Profumo was chasing Keeler, Ian Fleming’s books were riding high after From Russia with Love was reported as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favourite books in Life magazine.
In 1955, Harold Macmillan was Foreign Secretary when diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to Russia. The spies came from public school backgrounds and had both attended Cambridge. They were both alcoholics, Burgess was gay, while Maclean bisexual. This added to the stereotyping of gay people as being easy targets for potential blackmail since homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967. It also suggested that promiscuity was in some way aligned to the sort of lack of moral fibre that would cause someone to betray their country.
Amusingly, Davenport-Hines reminds us that Bill Astor initiated a Lords debate on Burgess and Maclean,1 in which he thought it was important to get all the government’s findings out in the open and argued that the bar for the expected behaviour of MPs and officials should set at a higher level. One had to wonder if this higher standard of personal conduct was in evidence at the parties in Cliveden, particularly around the pool, the shows at Murray, where many a statesman could be regularly found, or at the private dinners that were later described when the Profumo Affair hit the headlines.
The Portland Spy Ring was also discovered to be operating in England from the late 1950s to 1961. It was an example of the use of ‘resident spies’, foreign operatives that lived in a country and carried on with their ‘cover’ lives while reporting back to their own government. The Portland Spy Ring’s core members were Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, ‘Gordon Lonsdale’ and an American couple calling themselves Peter and Helen Kroger. However, it’s possible that the subsequent investigation into the group might not have rounded up all those involved, and perhaps missed some of those involved at a top level. After all, how do you know you’ve got everyone?
This Soviet ring was brought down by a mole, complete with the tantalising codename ‘Sniper’. Sniper was a triple-agent, giving Polish and Soviet secrets to the Americans, and was able to reveal that information from an Admiralty research department and the submarine training facility HMS Osprey was being delivered to the Russians. MI5 identified a civil service clerk, Harry Houghton, as a suspect, since his spending patterns were not in line with his pay scale.
Surveillance revealed that Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee, a filing clerk, regularly met and exchanged packages with a Canadian businessman called Gordon Lonsdale in London. In turn, Lonsdale would then travel to Ruislip in Middlesex and visit Peter and Helen Kroger, with Peter purportedly being an antiquarian bookseller. When Special Branch later arrested Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale, classified material, including details of Britain’s first nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought, were discovered in Gee’s bag. A subsequent search of the Krogers’ home revealed microdots showing the Krogers were communicating with their family back in Soviet Poland, and smuggling secrets given by Houghton and Gee via microdots hidden in the antique books. Spying equipment, money, fake passports and radio transmitters were also found. Money was also discovered in the homes of Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale. It was a complex operation carried out by experts in the field.
All five suspects were charged with espionage and found guilty at the 1961 trial. Fingerprinting revealed the Krogers to be renowned spies Morris and Lona Cohen, while the authorities ascertained Lonsdale was in reality a KGB agent called Konon Tromfinovich Molody. Molody appeared to have been selected to become an intelligence office in his childhood; his parents were both Soviet scientists. He was sent to a relative in San Francisco at age 10 in 1932, and by 1954 had established his fake identity in Canada, using a ‘dead double’, one Gordon Arnold Lonsdale who was born in Ontario but emigrated to the Soviet Union with his Finnish mother and died in 1943. The new Lonsdale travelled to the UK in 1955, enrolling as a student.
Houghton and Gee were sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while Molody was exchanged in a spy-swap. The Cohens were also exchanged in 1969, having been sentenced to twenty years. As part of the deal, the Soviets confirmed the couple were indeed spies. There really was an epidemic of ‘reds under the bed’. The events of the Portland Spy Ring so caught the popular attention, they were used as the basis for the 1964 film Ring of Spies.
Files released by the National Archives in September 2019, however, showed that Houghton could have been stopped as early as 1956, when his wife reported him as suspicious. MI5 chose to ignore these warnings and only acted after the CIA tipped the British off. Catching the spies seemed too difficult for the British authorities.
But not all spies were imported. William Marshall worked in the British Embassy in Moscow and spied for the Russians. Born in 1927, Marshall was the working-class son of a bus driver and newsagent worker from Southfields in Wandsworth. After serving in Palestine and then Egypt, when he was released from the army, he joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service in Ishmailia. From December 1950, he served for a year in Moscow, where he proved to be unhappy and introverted, later revealing that he felt very bitter about his experiences there. It was because he hadn’t fitted in and felt scorned by the upper-class diplomats while there, that he found the communist ideologies appealing.
After Moscow, Marshall was moved to the Secret Intelligence Service’s (also known as MI6) communications department at Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. Marshall then came to the attention of the British security services because of his meetings with the Second Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in London, Pavel Kuznetsov. The meetings were not carried out undercover and it was well known that the Intelligence Service kept tabs on all Russian diplomats. Why would a spy not cover his tracks? It became clear that the ‘secrets’ that Marshall could offer from his work were not high level, and it seems that his recruitment and easy detection may just have been a distraction from more serious spy rings.
Marshall was convicted at the Old Bailey on 10 July 1952 and sentenced leniently to five years in prison (the maximum sentence was fourteen years).
William ‘John’ Christopher Vassall was yet another British civil servant uncovered as a spy in 1962, having provided details of naval technology that were crucial to the modernising of the Soviet navy. Vassall was an Admiralty official who also worked in the British Embassy in Moscow, in his case as a cipher clerk. Born in 1924, he was the public school-educated son of an Anglican clergyman and a mother who was a Catholic convert. He left school at 16, unable to go to Oxford because of the cost. In 1943, he was conscripted to the Royal Airforce as a photographer. In 1947, after demobilisation, he went to work as a clerk at the Admiralty, a job he’d held temporarily before the war.
By 1954, Vassall was clerk to the naval attaché’s staff at the British Embassy in Moscow, where he became involved in the homosexual underworld of the city. Vassall claimed to have started spying after he was blackmailed with compromising photos taken while he was drunk and the threat of Lubyanka prison, as, just as in England at the time, homosexuality was outlawed in Russia. However, later Rebecca West claimed in her book The New Meaning of Treason (1964) that Vassall had been well paid for the information he supplied.
Thus, Vassal began passing documents from the naval attaché’s office to the Soviets and continued to do so when he was later employed at London’s Naval Intelligence Department. His espionage work halted briefly when he was first appointed as assistant secretary to Scottish Conservative MP Thomas ‘Tam’ Galbraith and began again when Galbraith was appointed to Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Scotland. He took another break when the Portland spy scandal broke, perhaps assuming both the authorities and the public were more attuned to rooting out traitors, but picked his intelligence work back up in December 1961. The recruitment and running of Vassall is considered a major triumph for the KGB, as during the seven years he was active, Vassall was able to provide the Soviets with several thousand classified documents, including information on British radar, torpedoes and anti-submarine equipment.
By April the following year, however, senior KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had provided details that led to his eventual discovery. It’s also thought that defector Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, another former KGB officer, identified Vassall. Suspicion was also aroused when Vassall moved to an expensive flat, while enjoying foreign holidays and Saville Row suits that suggested an additional income to his government salary.
On hearing about the uncovering of Vassall, Macmillan reportedly said the press would be responsible for a big fuss being made over the situation.2 This perhaps displayed an ever-weary reaction to more spies being discovered and a clear sign that the PM had had more than enough revelations ahead of the Profumo scandal.
In October 1962, Vassall was sentenced to eighteen years and later sold his memoirs to the Sunday Pictorial for £7,000, further adding to the heightened public thirst and interest for ‘sexy’ spy stories tangled up with homosexuality and the potential for extortion within the establishment. Vassall served ten years of his sentence and was released on parole in October 1972. Vassall later changed his surname to Phillips and settled in St John’s Wood. He died from a heart attack on a London bus in November 1996.
Davenport-Hines says the News of the World battled for its readership by highlighting the Norman Rickard case. Rickard was a gay civil servant working for the Admiralty and was found dead in a cupboard in his Paddington flat. He was naked, with his hands tied behind his back, and had been strangled. The People newspaper, which was part of the Mirror Group, suggested Rickard was working as an informant for the Admiralty, reporting back on those homosexuals that worked for the civil service and were presumably vulnerable to blackmail because of their lifestyle and would therefore pose an intelligence risk.
To lay to rest any further speculation at the time, Macmillan announced a tribunal inquiry into the Vassall case to establish if the failure to detect Vassall sooner amounted to a failure of intelligence or suggested any deeper problems. There had also been salacious rumours of an improper relationship between Vassall and Tam Galbraith. When the conclusions were published in April 1963, the report found no evidence that Vassall’s homosexuality was obvious or that he would have been a known security risk. The newspaper journalists that had run stories about Vassall being visibly out, and that refused to name their sources for such pieces to the tribunal, were held in contempt and received several months’ imprisonment.
Profumo thus found himself exposed after a war between politicians and the press had been declared. The story of sex and espionage among the Tory elite that surrounded the Profumo scandal almost wrote itself.
Davenport-Hines calls the Vassall case a crucial ‘prelude’ to the Profumo Affair and says that the war minister’s scandal kept the impetus going. He argues however that the Marshall trial, and the press interest in it, had paved the way for the intense interest of both revelations.3
Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, codenamed ‘Hero’ for added excitement, was a Russian double agent working for the West who was exposed in the 60s. In his book The Naked Spy, Ivanov says Penkovsky offered his services to the West voluntarily but had only worked for the British and Americans for two years before the GRU caught him. It still meant many undercover GRU and KGB personnel had to be replaced for their own safety, as it was likely Penkovsky had revealed their identities. It also meant British double-agents were exposed as working for Russia. Penkovsky was said to have revealed information about Soviet missiles to the CIA at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962 and was sentenced to death.4
Recently, when MI5 files from the time were released to the public, it showed that in 1959 the British Security Service had watched its Soviet counterpart set up a Disinformation Department designed to ‘discredit the West generally, and each national government specifically’. The Service put some time into considering whether the entire Profumo Affair had been staged by the Russian Intelligence Service to ‘discredit Her Majesty’s Government’.5
The files also show that while they considered Ward may have helped Ivanov unintentionally, Keeler’s motivations were ‘purely mercenary’ and not in any way a part of any larger plan or ‘Soviet inspired disruption game’.6
The British Intelligence Service did, however, harbour suspicions about other characters caught up in the wider scandal. This includes Eddowes, who the files refer to as presenting behaviour that was ‘not unlike that of an agent of influence’ (it was Eddowes that visited Keeler’s parents and said Keeler could make money by suggesting she had passed information between Profumo and Ivanov). It also raised suspicions about Andrew Roth, who was the editor of Westminster Confidential, which was the first publication to run a story based on the rumours surrounding Profumo. The files note that Roth, an American citizen of Hungarian origin, was ‘strongly suspected of complicity in a Russian Intelligence Service case in the USA in 1945’. The report adds that Roth ‘has many of the qualifications to fit him as an agent of influence and a talent spotter for the Russian Intelligence Service’.7
Even the MI5 files of the time read like a spy novel, with a section covering the use of the drug Methedrine in the social circles those involved in the Profumo Affair moved within. The substance, designed for the treatment of heroin addiction, was said to break down inhibitions and make those that had taken it highly suggestible. The National Archive material shows that an MI5 source witnessed Rice-Davies being under the drug’s influence after being given it by an ‘American con man’. Clearly the drug could be of use to intelligence agents hoping to discover secrets.8
In 2009, Christopher Andrew was commissioned to write The Defence of the Realm, an authorised history of the Security Service, which marked its centenary. The belief was that the book would be open enough to encourage public support and understanding but still allow the Service to protect those who share information with it and allow it to continue to protect the nation and its people from its enemies.9 The book dedicates a chapter to the Profumo scandal and the relationship between the government and the Service at the time.
The book asserts that the relationship between the government and the Service was irreparably damaged when Sir Dick White moved to his role at the SIS in 1956, mainly because of Macmillan’s dislike of Hollis. However, Andrew also states that the majority of ministers at the time had little or no idea of how the Security Service worked for the first half of the Cold War, with Home Secretary Rab Butler not even knowing where the Service had its HQ.10 Andrew also says that Macmillan avoided dealing with the Security Service after all the previous spy scandals he’d had to endure.
Andrew readily admits that the Service had proved to be ineffective against the Soviets in the latter part of the 1950s and that investigation into the Magnificent Five was slow.11 Then the Blake case showed up more failings and had the potential to sour the fledgling relationship being established with the Americans. Andrew argues, however, this was at a time when the KGB and GRU were increasing the number of resident spies it used, and when the Service was overstretched. The difficulty in bringing successful prosecutions was also an issue, since possessing espionage equipment was not a crime in itself.
The Service also tells a different version of Macmillan’s learning about the Vassall discovery and arrest. In Defence of the Realm, Andrews says that Macmillan’s memory was at fault, and there was no discussion between the PM and Hollis in which Macmillan told the DG that it was better to control a spy than catch him. Hollis didn’t even have a meeting with Macmillan at all, it’s claimed, and the PM learnt through a written report of the events channelled through Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook, says Andrew.12
The Denning Report vindicated the security services to some extent, as it reinforced the notion that it was not the job of the Service to investigate or judge the moral behaviour of a minister. Denning explained that when looking into the Profumo Affair, and finding no security risk, the Service didn’t pass on the information about the war minister’s love life because the situation it found itself in was unprecedented and the system did not have a framework with which to deal with it.13