An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (35 page)

The next stage of Macmillan’s diplomatic strategy – the Four Power Summit in Paris in 1960 – was wrecked when a US spy plane was shot down over Russia, its pilot captured and Eisenhower’s White House caught in puerile lies. The Russians had known of the spy flights for years, but the incident provided Khrushchev with the sledgehammer with which to smash the Paris summit. ‘In his crude arrogance, and acting like a Court buffoon, this wily Russian peasant got far more out of his blatant sabotage act than he could have achieved by hours of diplomacy,’ wrote the diplomatic correspondent Honor Balfour. He issued an intolerably provocative ultimatum to Eisenhower, which included a ludicrous moment when, denying Soviet espionage, he raised his hands towards heaven crying, ‘As God is my witness, my hands are clean and my soul is pure.’ After ranting that the American people must grovel, he went to bellow at 3,000 journalists in the Palais de Chaillot. ‘It was a revolting and frightening performance,’ noted Balfour. ‘The fat fleshy face swelled to a ruddy pulp. The little piggy eyes shrank to darts of wily evil. The voice roared and the fist stabbed in alarming resemblance to Hitler in the Nuremburg stadium.’ The sequel in which this raging brute reverted to ‘a roly-poly of jollity served only to aggravate the horror of the scene’.
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The collapse of the Paris summit was Macmillan’s gravest reverse since becoming Prime Minister. ‘This was the moment,’ said one of his aides, when ‘he suddenly realised that Britain counted for nothing; he couldn’t move Ike to make a gesture towards Khrushchev, and de Gaulle was simply not interested. I think this represented a real watershed in his life.’ Macmillan felt sick at heart, as he recorded in his diary back in England. ‘The summit – on which I had set high hopes and for which I worked for over two years – has blown up, like a volcano! It is ignominious; it is tragic; it is almost incredible.’ It was a chill, drizzly day, he added in his diary. He rested in bed, read
Dombey and Son
, and dozed.
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‘Russia,’ wrote a commentator in 1961 after the spy plane revelations, ‘has suddenly brought into public view all those activities which are traditionally carried on in a decent obscurity, not because they are wrong, but because they involve prestige – the passions, the conceit, the self-regarding complacency of the peoples of the world and their leaders. As a result, the public which, particularly in England, has been cosily snuggling into 1910, is being bumped and banged into the icy air and blows and counterblows of the 1960s.’
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A few days later the arrest of five Soviet agents who comprised the Portland spy ring, operating in the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, made the bumping feel rougher.

In September 1962, in the month of
Dr No
’s film première, Toby Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, marched into the office of Peter Rawlinson, the Solicitor-General. ‘Sit down, Solicitor,’ said Mathew looking pleased with himself. ‘You will need to. We have arrested a spy who is a bugger, and a minister is involved.’ A few years earlier the two men had been in court together: Mathew had gone in triumph to watch the sentencing of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Peter Wildeblood in the homosexuality show trial of 1954. Rawlinson had defended Wildeblood, and felt ardent sympathy for him. When, in response to the excesses of this case, the Wolfenden inquiry had been appointed, Mathew had testified that ‘young men should be taught that these habits are dirty, degrading and harmful, and the negation of decent manhood’.
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The spy was John Vassall, an Admiralty official who had been a cipher clerk in the British embassy in Moscow. Born in 1924, Vassall was the son of a luckless, precarious Anglican clergyman. His memoirs gave a wistful, snobbish account of the public schools that his parents considered for him and the reasons for their rejection: Trinity College, Glenalmond – but fares to Scotland were too expensive; Marlborough – but boys were forbidden to wear overcoats in winter; Charterhouse – but Mrs Vassall disliked Lady Fletcher, the headmaster’s wife, a vivacious, cultivated woman not unlike herself. Mentioning these imposing schools somehow hid the obscurity of the final choice, Monmouth, on the Welsh borders, so exiguously funded that it suffered demotion soon after Vassall left and became a grammar school. ‘Reading about Vassall,’ wrote the cultural historian Marcus Cunliffe in 1963, ‘I pounce with cruel enlightenment upon the disclosure that this debonair creature went to Monmouth Grammar School, and left at sixteen. What an apprenticeship … he must have served in concealing that stigma before he moved on to wider evasions.’ Vassall prompted Cunliffe to muse on snobbery, that ‘non-violent, second-rate and above all hermetic vice’. Its effects were ‘cosy, indirect, inhibiting, malicious. The art is to put oneself at ease by making someone else uneasy.’
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Money shortages forced Vassall to leave school early: he felt the loss keenly, saying that it deprived him of his chance to go to Oxford after the war. He perforce took jobs in a branch of the Midland Bank and as a temporary clerk in the Admiralty. In 1943 he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force, where he became an expert photographer, handling Leica cameras, developing pictures and making prints. After his demobilisation in 1947, he became a clerical officer in the Admiralty.

At Monmouth, Vassall enjoyed sex with handsome, masterly, older boys. ‘I lived in a secret world,’ he recalled. ‘My whole being was stimulated by my sense of their virility.’ London in wartime, with the black-out and servicemen on leave, offered boundless opportunities. He became an experienced mover in the capital’s semi-clandestine sexuality. Rebecca West depicted him as a doe-eyed, soft-voiced dandy who was sincere in his kindliness. He was suspected of legacy-hunting, because he liked the company of old ladies; but although some of them were rich, he was equally attentive to old ladies who were poor. He played bridge well, was a model railways enthusiast, musical and churchy. Supremely, though, he was a much-courted ‘queen’, whose admirers included rich, clever and moderately important men. ‘They made his life in London amusing, and when he went abroad, even so far as Egypt and Mexico, he was passed from host to host. He was very successful in this sphere, which meant that he was not merely playful and girlish, but could hold his own in an outlaw world where tact, toughness and vigilance had to be constantly on the draw.’
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In 1954, Vassall applied for a post as a clerk on the naval attaché’s staff at the British embassy in Moscow. He depicted his application as a chance impulse, dictated by his desire to see the world; but this is improbable. At the time of his detention in 1962, during the tribunal of investigation of 1963 and in his memoirs published in 1975, he gave a consistent account, which is worth recapitulating to show its implausibility. Like Marshall before him, Vassall suggested that he would not have been tempted to espionage if the English had not been snobbish. After reaching Moscow, he was invited for luncheon by the ambassador and his wife, Sir William and Lady Hayter. He found their manners starchy; his note of thanks afterwards to Lady Hayter was thought effusive; his angling to join her bridge parties was snubbed. The naval attaché for whom he worked, says Vassall, rebuked him for infiltrating circles above his ‘station’. His retrospective complaints that the Hayters were aloof, that the embassy hierarchy was rigid, and that protocol was relentless, were uncannily like Marshall’s. It was, one must assume, part of the Soviet training that English spies, if caught, had to parrot tales of class stigma and subjugation.
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His loneliness, by his account, drew him to an embassy interpreter named Sigmund Mikhailsky. While dining with Mikhailsky, he was decoyed, he said, by a young man who ‘looked at me with fire in his eyes and showed me with his smile how passionate he felt’. The decoy began to meet him for sexual bouts. They went together to dinner at a smart hotel. There, Vassall hinted, his wine was doped, for he became extra-suggestible, was guided to a divan, told to strip naked and to brandish his underpants above his head. Three men joined him, and he was photographed under harsh lights. ‘When I cried out to someone that what was going on was painful I was told that it would not last much longer, but it felt endless to me,’ he recalled. ‘When they had finished … I asked if I might go to a bathroom to tidy myself up … On my return I was dressed properly, and we all behaved as if nothing had happened. It was like a painful dream.’ Months later, Vassall continued, he met a soldier, ‘a tall, slim man, upright and fair of face’, ‘gentle but firm’, with whom he was then surprised in bed by policemen, who brandished the earlier photographs, and threatened Vassall with arrest. He claimed that he did not confide his quandary to embassy officials because of their class-exclusiveness. Instead, he agreed to spy after being threatened with Lubyanka prison: ‘I was terrified of being sexually and psychologically assaulted by specially trained experts, and I had fearful dreams of hooks, spikes and instruments being placed on my body and private parts.’
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The story of his entrapment was told by Vassall as a long rigmarole, with an uneven splattering of details and vagueness. Would he have lost his head in this way? Only a weak, helpless fool would have submitted to KGB threats of exposure, and Vassall was hardy, smart and resourceful. If he was so timid and submissive when blackmailed for sexual indiscretions, he would not have had the nerves for years of high-level espionage. No one who met him thought he was easily ruffled, or inexperienced in the world’s ways. ‘His friends had a special liability to be blackmailed, as skiers have a special liability to break their legs,’ so Rebecca West observed. ‘If Vassall really had been blackmailed … he would have gone to the right member of the Embassy to make his report, and made it in terms likely to bleach the embarrassment out of the blushing occasion, he would have made the journey home with just the right camping humour, he would have dined out on the story at home, telling the story in two different ways to please the two different sorts of people, and if he had found the atmosphere chilly in Whitehall he would have found some shelter in an art gallery or interior decorator’s shop where the air was balmier.’
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Vassall began taking documents from the naval attaché’s office, giving them to Soviet agents for photographing, and then returning them. On returning to the Naval Intelligence Department in London in 1956, he regularly photographed secret documents. After a year he was appointed as assistant secretary in the private office of the Civil Lord of the Admiralty – a Scottish MP, Thomas Galbraith, who proved courteous and friendly. Tam Galbraith was a typical figure in the Conservative Party of the 1950s in that he seemed to journalists to be a patrician Oxonian, with pleasant manners but no force of character, whereas he came from a hard-headed family which had made its recent fortune as accountants and pub owners in Glasgow. There were no secret dossiers to be filched or photographed in Galbraith’s office. On a few occasions Vassall acted as a courier taking papers from Whitehall to Galbraith’s Scottish home, Barskimming. He never stayed for more than a scratch lunch. In 1959, when Galbraith was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary for Scotland, Vassall was posted to the Fleet section, where he had access to secret documents. He suspended spying when the Portland Spy scandal broke, but resumed in December 1961. Information received in April 1962 from the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn led to his detection. Harold Macmillan, when Thorneycroft, the Minister of Defence, and Carrington, First Lord of the Admiralty, told him on 28 September of Vassall’s arrest, predicted: ‘There will be another big row, worked up by the Press, over this.’
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After an Old Bailey trial held partly held
in camera
, Vassall was sentenced to eighteen years of imprisonment on 22 October – the first day of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The prosecution accepted his story of the compromising photographs as the reason that from 1954 until 1962 he supplied his Soviet controllers with documents. The judge endorsed this tale in his summing-up. The House of Commons debate after the trial invigorated this improbable mish-mash, which was popular with the press – always keen on tales of voyeurism, and avid to magnify sexual turpitude. Lord Radcliffe’s tribunal of investigation did not challenge the legend. It enforced the view that Vassall was flighty, malleable and timid, which seemed less threatening than the reality that he was a resilient, subtle man whose treachery gave the Russians a rich fund of secrets.

The notion that Vassall had a protector in Whitehall, who probably secretly shared the same criminal sexual tastes, appealed to those journalists who made their money by seeking people for pillorying. They started to hunt down the powerful queer who had inveigled the little pansy-boy into the Admiralty, protected him and promoted him. Brendan Mulholland of the
Daily Mail
, for example, visited Galbraith, without appointment, at Barskimming on 11 October. He claimed to have interviewed Galbraith for up to an hour: Galbraith said they might have spoken tersely for as little as five minutes. Yet, on the day after Vassall’s conviction, Mulholland published a fanciful account of the spy’s visits to Scotland. ‘In his eighteenth-century mansion Mr Galbraith and his assistants waited for Vassall – their trusted courier a paid servant of Moscow.’ After arrival, Vassall ‘mingled with the other weekend visitors. He would listen so attentively that he made a good impression on his superiors … Over the weekend Vassall had plenty of time to develop his friendships. There were often as many as thirty people staying at Barskimming.’ Lest readers had forgotten Vassall’s sexuality, Mulholland provided some reminders: ‘his love of music was a basis for many an opening … and he always had the correct clothes for the occasion’.
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Mulholland later claimed that his fantasy was based on informants in the district, but the figure of thirty guests was demonstrably false; the seams and patches of his Vassall reports were easily unpicked, and found to be fictional in details and gist. So, too, were the
Daily Mail
’s claims on the same day, 23 October, that Vassall owned a hundred ties, nineteen suits, three dozen shirts and twelve pair of shoes.