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
Chapter 16
The Role of the Press
Davenport-Hines believes Fleet Street was the most important location in the Profumo Affair scandal, more so even than Wimpole Mews or Cliveden.1 But does the press lead the way in a scandal such as this or simply offer a mirror to society? It’s a common enough practice to blame the media for encouraging interest in the seedy details of the rich and famous, because it sells papers… but there’s no denying that Profumo, a middle-aged and married government minister, pursued a young and vulnerable girl, and then vehemently denied it.
It’s hard to distinguish if the public’s demand for salacious gossip is the driver for the content that appears in tabloids and the like, or if it is the other way around. Does the availability of gossip motivate people to want more? Should we be concerned with the private lives and mistakes of public individuals? These are age-old questions that persist today. But in the case of the Profumo scandal, Davenport-Hines believes the interest in the war minister and the showgirl was whipped up and used by journalists, with a press frenzy that had a lasting impact on the industry.2
You can break this reasoning down into three arguments.
The first is that at the time the Profumo scandal broke, newspapers were seeing a fall in circulation. In 1914–1918, reading a national rather than just a local newspaper was an essential way to keep updated about the Western Front; this need for information also made Sunday editions popular. However, until 1923, it was still local newspapers that had higher circulation figures than their national counterparts. But by 1939, the habit of taking a daily national had spread among both the middle and working classes, with almost the entire population reading a Sunday paper and two-thirds seeing a daily through the working week. And thereafter, the Second World War saw national newspapers become more popular than ever.
However, by 1951, when Sunday circulation figures were as high as 30 million and the eight national dailies garnered 16.6 million, the figures had peaked. And with the advent of television, newspapers were becoming less popular. By 1955, ITV had launched and within four years of that, the Sunday newspaper circulation figures had dropped to 27 million and the dailies to under 16 million.3 By 1960, there were 10 million television sets in Britain, by 1964, 13 million.4 TV was taking over, and the newspaper industry needed to do something about the drop in sales.
The solution was for the papers to aggressively pursue sensational stories whenever they could, using plenty of pictures so that the industry could rival the images now available on the TV screen. This often meant offering money for the first-hand stories of those it featured, a practice that Davenport-Hines says started when the News of the World paid the defence costs of ‘Acid Bath Murderer’ John Haigh in return for his exclusive memoir in 1949.5 The ‘gutter press’ quickly learnt it could make money out of pillorying those it featured, taking the moral high ground and castigating others for poor behaviour. It also learnt that old adage, ‘sex sells’.
Because of the direction it was felt some sections of the press were taking, and the dubious ways in which some reporters were getting stories and pursuing those they wished to speak to or photograph, in March 1961, Lord Mancroft attempted to get the Right of Privacy Bill through the Upper House but failed. Two years later, I wonder if in hindsight more peers wished they had voted in the Bill’s favour?
The second reason that the papers pursued the Profumo scandal so readily, says Davenport-Hines, was personal score-settling by those that ran the press. And, in particular, revenge by Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Express Newspapers. Beaverbrook held a, perhaps understandable, grudge against the Astor family following an unflattering profile of him that was published in the Observer newspaper, by David Astor. This was in spite of the fact that Beaverbrook had previously kept details about Bobbie Shaw’s – David and Bill’s half-brother – sentencing for homosexuality out of the papers, at the request of their mother Nancy Astor.6 It was the Daily Express front page on 15 March that ran the infamous ‘War minister shock’ headline so carefully alongside an eye-grabbing photo and accompanying piece about the disappearance of Keeler, a key witness in the Edgecombe trial, forever linking the two stories in the minds of the public. Davenport-Hines reports that the Daily Express dispatched a reporter to Cliveden to harass the Astors when Ward was in hospital after his overdose.
Davenport-Hines says those at the Mirror Group Newspapers, which then included the titles the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial (later renamed the Sunday Mirror following restructuring and the creation of the International Publishing Corporation (IPC)), were dead set on bringing down the Macmillan government and criticising the establishment. Publishing magnate Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, founded the Daily Mirror in 1903, and then sold it to his brother Harold in 1913 (Harold became Lord Rothermere the following year). Originally pitched to the middle-class reader, after 1934, in order to reach a larger audience, it was targeted at younger, working-class readers who were more likely to vote Labour. Thus, it needed to reflect the interests and views of that readership.
By 1963, Cecil King, who was the nephew of Northcliffe and Rothermere, and Welsh journalist and editor Hugh Cudlipp, were running the Group. The pair later became the successive chairs of the IPC when the company’s publishing acquisitions, including consumer magazines, trade and technical periodicals, and interests in book publishing, were rolled into one. Between them, King and Cudlipp turned the Daily Mirror into the world’s largest selling daily paper. During the mid-1960s, daily sales exceeded 5 million copies, a feat never repeated by it or any other daily (non-Sunday) British newspaper since.7 As such, the impact of the title during the Profumo scandal was huge.
However, it wasn’t a mainstream publication that first broke the story. It was in fact the newsletter Westminster Confidential, run by Andrew Roth, who had moved to West Hampstead from New York in 1950 to escape McCarthyite hysteria over anyone with even the slightest pro-communist sympathy. Roth says Tory MP Henry ‘Bob’ Kerby passed him a copy of the ‘Darling’ letter Profumo had sent Keeler in February 1963. He was told Keeler was unsuccessfully trying to sell it in Fleet Street, where editors were loath to touch anything that might upset the government after the jailing of the journalists caught up in the Vassall case fallout. Roth checked details about Ivanov with a press gallery colleague working for Tass, the Soviet news agency. He only decided to run the story in March when he had to drop another piece about the plan to float the pound by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Maudling, was stopped. Roth says when Chief Whip Sir Martin Redmayne saw the newsletter, he tried to stop Roth’s lobby privileges.8
After Profumo’s resignation, with the threat of libel over, the press was able to run with all aspects of the scandal. Journalist Malcom Muggeridge, himself an anti-communist after living in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and who was a well-known critic of the sexual revolution, said high society was finished in the Sunday Mirror.9
The papers also reported on Ward’s trial. After he was found guilty, the News of the World focused on morals and promiscuity, and the witnesses that appeared were referred to as whores, scrubbers and tarts, with Ward said to be living in a ‘cess-pit’. The People defended Ward, saying he wasn’t a pimp and was instead a victim. The Daily Express meanwhile sent doorstoppers to Cliveden to humiliate Bill Astor, says Davenport-Hines.10 On 4 August, the People’s headline called Keeler a ‘shameless slut’, suggesting that she was stupid and that the only skill she possessed was using her physical attributes.
The Profumo Affair and all its sensational stories ran seamlessly into coverage about the equally salacious divorce of the Duchess of Argyll that hit headlines later that summer. And it wasn’t just promiscuity that the papers focused on, in the Profumo Affair there was the thrill of espionage too.
On 1 July 1963, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, was forced to confirm to the House of Commons that Kim Philby had been working for the Soviet authorities as a double agent during his time with the Foreign Office. As previously suspected but not proven, he was the ‘Third Man’ alongside Burgess and Maclean.11 Discussing the announcement, and the scandals involving Maclean and Profumo, the Daily Mirror suggested that the government had excessive amounts of whitewash going spare.12
Finally, another factor in the media furore at the time of the Profumo scandal was that Macmillan also struggled with his understanding of and relationship with the press – and, in particular, its coverage of the spy scandals he had faced. He was unhappy with the way the papers covered the Burgess and Maclean case, referring to it as a ‘hue and cry’. Horne suggests Macmillan thought it would be far better for public morale if such things weren’t written about at all, since the damage of the public finding out about the security failings was worse than the damage done by the actual information the spies had passed over. When George Blake was exposed, Macmillan’s diaries show he didn’t want the public to know that Blake was working for MI5.13
Horne also reports that around the time of the Vassall debate in the House, Alan Watkins of the Observer claims to have heard Macmillan say he would catch out the journalists. It was true that Macmillan felt the press had hounded him over the spy scandals and unrelentingly targeted Galbraith and Lord Carrington. He also believed that the press didn’t fully understand the matter, complaining that the Vassall case received more press coverage than the Blake one, even though Blake’s subterfuge had had a deeper impact. Thinking of the press, in his memoirs, Macmillan thought anyone who wrote what he considered lies should be punished.14
Two journalists were punished, in fact, for refusing to name to the Radcliffe Tribunal the sources they claimed they had used when linking Vassall with the Portland Spy Ring. Brendan Mulholland from the Daily Mail and Reg Foster, a freelancer for the Daily Sketch, were jailed for contempt of court for six and three months respectively. The move made the pair martyrs to the rest of the industry, and understandably incensed the press, although it could be argued that it was ultimately the judge’s decision rather than the PM’s to jail the pair.
Nevertheless, journalist Harold Evans, who was to become editor of the Sunday Times in 1967, said that the court action ruined the relationship between Fleet Street and Macmillan more than anyone could have expected.15
Such a bitter relationship can’t have helped as events unfolded during the Profumo scandal.
As early in the scandal as August 1962, Knightley and Kennedy tell us a smaller publication made the link between a member of the British government and a Soviet diplomat. The magazine Queen ran a piece that included sentences the writer Robin Douglas-Home, a nephew of the Foreign Secretary, said he’d like to hear the end of. One such example of the sentences mentioned MI5, a chauffeur-driven Zis pulling up at the front door of an unidentified female while someone else left by the back door via chauffeur-driven Humber.16 But with its limited circulation, the Queen seems to have avoided any legal action.
During the Profumo scandal, Sir William Hayley, who was editor of the Times, wrote an editorial about the morality at the core of the story. His piece asserted the nation had been brought low by the Conservatives. He also said that while Macmillan and his ministers might just make it through another year, they should be more proactive if they wanted support.17
Biographer Horne says Macmillan also told Harold Evans repeatedly that the Profumo scandal was being used by the press as part of a plan to bring down the system.18
It may well have succeeded.
Chapter 17
Security Concerns Are Raised
Aside from lying to the House, cheating on his wife and behaving in a way in that we might think not befitting a man of his status and importance, the real problem with the Profumo scandal was one of national security. In fact, the government was so concerned about real and imagined security risks at that time that on 21 June 1963, Macmillan announced in the House of Commons that Lord Denning had been asked to set up and conduct an inquiry into the security aspects which led to the resignation of John Profumo. How had Profumo ended up the subject of an inquiry into his possible role as a traitor?
