When Profumo died in 2006, it was Keeler’s residence in Tottenham that the press flocked to.
As a result of Profumo admitting his affair with Keeler, details emerged in the press linking her to Russian naval attaché Ivanov too. The potential threat to national security highlighted by Opposition politicians and the press could no longer be brushed aside. On 21 June 1963, Macmillan called in Lord Denning to investigate.
But Macmillan and his government’s attempts to downplay the scandal couldn’t stop the inevitable and the PM resigned in October 1963. Some have suggested that Macmillan knew the truth about Profumo long before it was publicly accepted, and that he turned a blind eye to the carrying on of his ministers. It’s not unlikely in that era, and in some circles, that adultery (at least by the husband) was not that big a deal. Or it is possible that it was thought as unseemly to discuss the private lives of a ‘respectable’ gentleman. It’s also likely that the affair, the salacious details that came with it and the possibility of a spy ring were too damaging to reveal. If Macmillan was unaware of how his ministers were carrying on, and the risks they may have been taking, not just in their personal lives, but in their professional lives too, then that also called into question his fitness to lead.
Knightley and Kennedy’s research discovered that Macmillan had asked one of his closest friends, the American Ambassador David Bruce, to discreetly investigate the rumours surrounding Profumo. He may have suspected his own advisors were keeping what they knew about the affair from him. Bruce enlisted the help of an American businessman named Thomas Corbally, who Bruce knew was friendly with Ward, to arrange a lunch at Simpson’s in Piccadilly. Ward attended, meeting Corbally and his Secretary Alfred Wells, and Bruce’s nephew Billy Hitchcock. Ward told the group everything. Back at the office, everything was written down in a report, which eventually ended up in FBI files held in Washington. The details were passed to Bruce and on to Macmillan.2 Supermac either assumed these details were incorrect, or he pretended to himself or to others they were.
Opinion on Macmillan’s knowledge that his minister was lying versus him being naïve enough to believe Profumo’s lies was divided at the time and remains so. Lord Denning, himself appointed by Macmillan, said that he couldn’t find any suggestion that Macmillan knew Profumo was lying. And David Profumo also writes in his book that his father never mentioned that the PM knew he wasn’t telling the truth ahead of his confession,3 although he also admits that Macmillan saw what he wanted to, and that he should have asked Profumo directly about the affair.4 In fact, David Profumo even believes that Macmillan himself never forgave his father for the ‘body-blow’ he dealt to the Conservatives’ reputation.5
But this reluctance to accept his ministers might be misbehaving, the failure to do to do anything about it if it was known and the possibility that he remained completely in the dark about what was going on, were all problematic. Was the PM stupid, ineffective or did he condone immorality?
David Profumo points to the health concerns of Macmillan, rather than a sex scandal, as the real reason behind his resignation.6 On 9 October 1963, a fortnight after the publication of the Denning Report, Macmillan was admitted to hospital with prostate problems. Fearing the worst, he wrote a resignation letter from his hospital bed, and one for his colleagues at the upcoming Tory Party conference. Macmillan was visited by Alec Douglas-Home, who was Foreign Secretary at the time. Fearing his demise, the PM advised his visitor to run for Tory leadership, and Douglas-Home headed off to Blackpool to read out Macmillan’s resignation letter and claim the title. Douglas-Home served as PM from October 1963 to October 1964, when the Conservative Party lost the general election by four seats. Douglas-Home was notable because to take up his role he renounced his earldom. However, since the manner of his appointment was controversial, two of Macmillan’s Cabinet ministers refused to take office under him. Later Macmillan learnt he did not have cancer and he lived on for another twenty-three years.
But Macmillan’s beloved party didn’t fare as well, and perhaps that was Supermac’s greatest pain. John Wyndham, Macmillan’s Private Secretary, knew the PM well, having served in various appointments for him. He certainly thought the Profumo Affair was the worst thing to happen to the PM during his administration and that it forever affected the Conservative Party. The Astors’ staunch friend Pamela Cooper agreed. She wrote in her 1993 memoir, A Cloud of Forgetting, that the Tory Party was destroyed alongside Macmillan.7
Ivanov agreed, as he considered the Labour Party and Harold Wilson the only victors in the situation.8
And what of the Russian attaché/spy himself who may, or may not, have orchestrated the entire set-up? Ivanov returned to Russia, seemingly, at the first hint of the Profumo scandal breaking. If his job was to remain under the radar for him to collect information without detection, he failed spectacularly. But if he was tasked with making a fool of the British establishment, he did rather well. It has been reported that Ivanov was given the Order of Lenin, but, as with all Soviet ‘intelligence’, it’s hard to sort fact from fiction. We can only guess if Ivanov’s government was pleased with him.
For his own part, Ivanov has recorded that he felt his personal involvement with Christine Keeler was frowned upon by his masters at GRU, and while he didn’t think he was exactly blamed for the situation, no one congratulated him on the events that unfolded either.9 He resigned from the GRU as soon as he could, feeling like an outsider and that he had wasted his years in the organisation. He admits he began drinking heavily.10 With talk of his womanising, and his drinking, Ivanov’s wife left him, and he never remarried.
How did the scandal affect Bill Astor, whose country pile was the party location where Profumo and Keeler collided? His son, William Astor, writing for The Spectator in January 2014, as Andrew Lloyd Webber released his musical Stephen Ward, says that his father was under Ward’s spell. But he also maintains that the two were not great friends, and that the relationship was more one of a doctor and patient. Perhaps rather contradictorily, though, William Astor says that his father paid all Ward’s legal fees and didn’t desert Ward at the time of his trial. It was Ward’s own counsel who decided not to call the lord, his son says. After the scandal, Astor says his father struggled with his health and died a few years later. While, he says, some in society turned their backs on his father, most ‘rallied’ round and his family was closer because of it.11
Mandy Rice-Davies lived until December 2014, when she died, aged 70, from lung cancer. By then she enjoyed a suburban life, married with children, in Virginia Water, Surrey. Arguably it is Rice-Davies who fared the best after the scandal, going on to have a successful career both on and off the stage. In 2013, it was Rice-Davies who attended the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward musical when it opened at Aldwych Theatre. After the Profumo scandal, she made what she called ‘a slow descent into respectability’.
And Profumo? Externally, the ex-war minister was forgiven by Macmillan. In his memoirs, Macmillan said Profumo had paid a terrible price for his actions and thought his charity work was both brave and noble. But his biographer Alistair Horne says that Macmillan remained resentful and struggled to forgive Profumo for how his behaviour had affected the government, believing that if Profumo had resigned earlier, the minister may even have been able to return to politics.12
Known for what those sympathetic to the scandal that bears his name might call his ‘dignified silence’, Profumo did at least seem to express regret. Jim Thomson, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who was a friend of the disgraced minister, said that Profumo judged himself more harshly than anyone else did. And that the minister had experienced shame every day since the event.13
He also had the unwavering support of his ever-loyal wife, who said of her errant husband and his life after he resigned ‘it isn’t what happens to a man, it’s what he does with it that matters’. Although I think it’s important to point out that the affair, at least, was of his own making and didn’t exactly ‘happen’ to him.
Unfortunately, in hindsight, Profumo at several points in his political career failed to make the right choice, not least by continuing to deny his sexual relationship with Keeler when given plenty of opportunities to confess. Profumo’s solicitor, Lord Goodman, says that the disgraced minister always refused to talk about the scandal because of the ‘terrible pain’ it caused him.14 But, with an OBE for his charity work, the family finances to fall back on and a loyal wife, it seems perhaps he was the least affected by the scandal that bears his name.
Chapter 15
A Time of Spies
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.
