With the recent death of
Christine Keeler, the woman at the heart of the British Profumo affair in the
1960s, the sex and espionage scandal is back in the news.
While most of the coverage is centered on the sex, Ben Macintyre, author of many fine books on espionage,
including A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Agent Zigzag and
Operation Mincemeat, offers a look back at the Soviet naval officer and GRU spy
who was at the center of the scandal in his column in the London Times.
On June 14, 1963, nine days
after John Profumo resigned in a welter of scandal over his affair with
Christine Keeler, a spy deep inside the KGB sent a sensational report to his
American handler.
The KGB spy, who has never
been identified, reported that “the Russians had in fact received a lot of
useful information from Profumo from [sic] Christine Keeler, with whom Ivanov
had established contact, and in whose apartment Ivanov had even been able to
lay on eavesdropping operations at appropriate times”.
The “Ivanov” in question was
Yevgeni Mikhailovitch Ivanov (seen in the above photo), a Soviet intelligence officer posing as assistant
naval attaché in the Soviet embassy in London, who had also had an affair with
Keeler. It was the fact that a British cabinet minister had been sharing the
favours of a call girl with a Soviet agent and lying about it that precipitated
Profumo’s resignation.
Yet Ivanov is often treated
as a bit-player in the drama. It was assumed that Keeler was simply too dim to
have passed on important secrets as pillow-talk, and that British national
security was never compromised. The Profumo case is treated as a moral saga
rather than an espionage case.
In fact, Profumo was the
target of a highly sophisticated and successful Soviet intelligence operation.
He was about to be blackmailed by the Russian spy. MI5 had got wind of what was
happening, but, as with more modern intelligence failures, didn’t do anything
about it.
And at the centre of the
Profumo saga stands the shadowy figure of Ivanov: louche, seductive and
extremely dangerous.
Ivanov arrived in London in
March 1960, ostensibly a low-level diplomat, but in reality an officer of the
GRU, the military counterpart of the KGB. With his broken nose and fractured
English, Ivanov was an unlikely lothario, but during an earlier posting in
Norway he had proved himself a serial womaniser, who may have been sent to
London with the avowed purpose of worming his way into the confidence, and the
beds, of women in or on the fringes of high society.
You can read the rest of the
column via the below link:
You can also read my previous
post on Christine Keeler via the below link:
And you can read my interview
with Ben Macintyre about his book, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James
Bond, via the below link:
