Too Secret Too Long : A Cold War spy scandal by Chapman Pincher

Author:Chapman Pincher [Pincher , Chapman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

chapter thirty-four

The Profumo Affair

While certain MI5 officers were weighing the eventual political consequences of the possible proof that either the Deputy Director-General or the Director-General himself was a spy they found themselves involved in an issue of immediate political importance – the so-called Profumo affair. After long study of this complicated case, close professional involvement at the time and discussions with well-placed witnesses, including MI5 officers, I am convinced that only blind reluctance to criticize the Security Service by the leading Establishment figures concerned enabled Hollis to escape severe public censure and even suspicion.

The official account of the Profumo affair is a long report by Lord Denning which has been hailed as a brilliant tour de force and a model of its kind in bringing to the general reader the intricacies of a complex case in an easily understandable way.[1] My inquiries, however, have satisfied me that it was one of the most misleading official documents ever foisted on the public. Lord Denning was repeatedly misled by witnesses and especially by the chief MI5 witness, Hollis.[2] To quote an MI5 officer who was involved in the case, ‘Denning had wool pulled over his eyes’. As a result he made judgements which were flawed and excused officials who should have been censured.

For anyone interested in the activities of Soviet Intelligence against the West, and against Britain in particular, the Profumo affair offers illuminating insight into how the Moscow Centre seizes upon opportunities and exploits them.

The most contentious issue concerns a character whose activities Denning’s witnesses and Denning himself were at pains to under-estimate. This was Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval officer who arrived in Britain on 27 March 1960 ostensibly for duties as Assistant Naval Attaché at the Soviet Embassy but, in reality, for intelligence operations because he was a professional G.R.U. official.

Ivanov took over contacts established by his predecessors but was also required to establish his own through the diplomatic social network, which included journalists. Among the latter was Coote, editor of the Daily Telegraph, who was a patient of an osteopath called Stephen Ward, a strange character so sympathetic to communism and to the Soviet Union that some of his distinguished patients appear to have reported him to MI5 as an agent of influence. Ward was also a capable artist and had told Coote of his desire to visit Moscow to draw some of the Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev. Coote had offered to help and a little later, on 20 January 1961, hosted a lunch with Ward and Ivanov who said that he might be able to arrange a visit to Moscow. Following this lunch Ward and Ivanov became close friends.

The circumstances of this lunch, held at the Garrick Club, are odd. Fleet Street editors do not usually know Soviet defence attachés and there is evidence that Coote did not know Ivanov very well, if at all. He had invited his correspondent for communist affairs, David Floyd, to be present on the grounds that his knowledge of Russian would

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