by Vikas Khatri
hatched a bizarre plot to persuade the Soviet to defect. Ivanov was a known spy – double agent Oleg Penkovsky named him during debriefings by British and American interrogators – and Ward was ordered to ply him with Western luxuries, cultivating his passion for drink and women. Christine Keeler was one of those who shared his bed.
Sadly for MI5, Ivanov was a committed Communist who soon saw through the attempted entrapment. Ward, who had some socialist sympathies, may even have told him of it. The Russian reported the situation to Moscow while playing along with Hollis’s scheme. He discovered that, in addition to providing girls for important people, Ward also took pictures of them making love through two-way mirrors. Ivanov obtained copies from three albums of incriminating photographs collected by the osteopath, and his masters for possible blackmail attempts. And when he found that Keeler was Profumo’s mistress, he hinted that, if she coaxed from the minister the date on which America planned to equip West Germany’s air force with nuclear weapons, Ward would have no more trouble getting his visa for Moscow.
There is no evidence that Keeler ever asked the question, and no suggestion that Profumo would have answered if she had. But news of what was in Ivanov’s mind forced Sir Roger Hollis to act. Puzzlingly, he did not go to the War Minister himself, or the Prime Minister, or the Home Secretary, to whom he was directly responsible. Instead he told Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook of Profumo’s invidious position – then, astonishingly, asked Sir Norman if he would try to persuade Profumo to help in inducing Ivanov to defect. It was a ploy fraught with danger. No minister could be seen dabbling in espionage, let alone caught trying to subvert a foreign national, and Profumo had the good sense to reject the idea out of hand. At the same time, he decided to end his affair with Keeler, but unwisely did so by letter, using the word Darling. It was to be another nail in his political coffin and in any case, it was too late for Profumo to wriggle out of his predicament.
The Opposition Labour Party was already sniping at the Tory Government over a series of spy scandals – the Portland ring, Admiralty spy William Vassall and double agent George Blake. George Wigg was spearheading the attack. On 11 November 1962, he received a mysterious phone call at the home of his political agent in Dudley. A muffled voice said: ‘Forget Vassall, you want to look at Profumo.’ Wigg and Profumo were not on the best of terms. They had clashed angrily in the Commons days earlier over the lack of heat acclimatisation given to British troops before duty in the Middle East. But the call had not come from a political aide. In fact, Wigg, who died in August 1983, never found out who made it. It could have been a journalist anxious to bring unprintable rumour into the public spotlight. Equally, it could have been a mischief maker with a grudge against the War Minister. But security experts believe the call came from a Russian agent, intent on causing a scandal. If that was the Kremlin’s aim, they were not kept waiting long.
Wigg and his aides began checking on Profumo. Christine Keeler confirmed she had been mistress of both the minister and Ivanov. And it was on the security danger rather than the moral issue of adultery that Wigg launched his assault with a Commons question on 21 March 1963. Labour Party chiefs and the whole of Fleet Street knew a scandal was inevitable. But Home Secretary Henry Brooke, to whom the Wigg question was addressed, was completely in the dark. Profumo foolishly denied any affair with Keeler. Then Brooke summoned Sir Roger Hollis, and demanded to know what was going on. The MI5 chief at last revealed what he had learned 18 months earlier – that Ivanov had asked Ward to get him the date of nuclear arms being given to Germany – but maintained that any security fears ended when Ivanov fled back to Moscow in January 1963, tipped off about the impending storm.
The Government, ill-informed by its top spymaster, now had its back to the wall. Christine Keeler had become involved with two West Indian lovers, one of whom was arrested for beating up the other and jealously firing shots at the home of Stephen Ward. Keeler, hard up for money, approached Fleet Street papers, offering to sell her story. She handed over Profumo’s letter. Then she too fled the growing pressure. There were ugly rumours that the Establishment had got rid of her. She was traced to Madrid, still ready to tell her side of events for cash. Profumo continued to deny the affair. He lied to the House of Commons in a statement, and successfully sued an Italian magazine for libel when it doubted his word. But this was not a political squall that would blow over. Profumo went off to Venice on holiday with his wife, former actress Valerie Hobson. He decided to clear his conscience with her. They returned immediately to London where, on June 4, he resigned as War Minister and as an MP – a job he had held for 25 years. His disgrace for contempt of the Commons was complete when his name was removed from the Privy Council.
The scandal was now at full flood, fuelled by the revelations of Christine Keeler, who sold her memoirs to a sensational Sunday newspaper for £23,000, and the sensational death of Stephen Ward. He took a drugs overdose in July while on bail facing charges of living on immoral earnings. He was described at his trial as a ‘thoroughly filthy fellow’ and ‘a wicked, wicked creature’. But Sir Colin Coote, the man who made the ill-fated introduction to Ivanov, said: ‘I should doubt whether a more trivial person has ever seriously embarrassed a government.’ In fact, it became increasingly clear that both Ward and Keeler had merely been pawns in the game.
The House of Commons held a full debate on the Profumo affair on 17 June. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was mercilessly mauled. He was forced to admit that no one had told him what was happening until it was too late to change the course of events. It was a staggering confession from the head of a government, and even arch antagonist George Wigg was embarrassed as he watched his political foe reeling from the twin blows of betrayed loyalty to a colleague and an appalling lack of information. Macmillan resigned as Conservative leader within 12 months, and many believe the Profumo debacle was a significant factor in the 1964 General Election defeat of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas Home, by Harold Wilson and the Labour Party.
M15 chief Sir Roger Hollis watched Macmillan stumble through his Commons ordeal from the public gallery. He too was to retire within a year, possibly under pressure from members of Macmillan’s Cabinet who felt he was grossly at fault for keeping them in the dark about Profumo’s predicament and the fact that Ivanov had proved to be a spy worthy of expulsion. Later it was learned that Sir Roger had specifically forbidden full investigation of Ivanov’s activities by MI5.
Sir Roger died in October 1973. Eight years later, writer Chapman Pincher analysed his career in the book “Their Trade Is Treachery”. He said that the spymaster had done as little as possible and as late as possible in the Profumo affair. He also accused him of doctoring a report of his interview with 1945 defector Igor Gouzenko; inexplicably suspending interrogation of Anthony Blunt for two weeks in 1964, thus giving the traitor time to consult his masters or destroy evidence; refusing to pursue inquiries against some of the men named as spies by Blunt; and presiding over MI5 at a time of conspicuous lack of success, partly because all anti-Communist operations were leaked to the targets. Pincher then pointed out that for more than a decade, Soviet defectors were terrified of coming to Britain because they knew of a Russian mole in a powerful position. And he made the devastating claim that Sir Roger, a trusted agent for
25 years, was that mole.
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher denied the allegation in the House of Commons in 1981. And Sir Roger was also cleared of blame in Lord Denning’s Committee of Inquiry report into the Profumo affair, issued in 1964. Perhaps he had given plausible explanations for the actions which so angered the Cabinet. Perhaps his role was minimised to avoid publicising MI5, which is still officially non-existent. But there was an implied reproach for an unwise attempt to induce a defection in these words from Lord Denning:
‘Captain Ivanov filled a new role in Russian technique. It was to divide the United Kingdom from the United States by devious means. If ministers or prominent people can be placed in compr
omising positions, or made the subject of damaging rumour, or the security service can be made to appear incompetent, it may weaken the confidence of the United States in our integrity and reliability. If this was the object of Captain Ivanov, with Ward as his tool, he succeeded only too well.’
The meaning was clear. Hollis had continued to play with fire when he should have known better.
The Russians had not created the Profumo scandal, but they had manipulated it to full advantage. More evidence of their wiles emerged in America. A KGB officer working at the United Nations was providing the FBI with information which spymaster J. Edgar Hoover valued highly. In 1963, he told the FBI of a talk in Moscow with Ivanov, who claimed he had bugged Christine Keeler’s bedroom, and gained valuable intelligence from her pillow talk with Profumo. Hoover sent the information to President Kennedy, but he declined to forward it to London, telling aides: ‘Mr Macmillan is in enough trouble already.’ In the event, the UN double agent was proved to be a stooge, feeding mischievous misinformation.
The fact that his career had been destroyed by a cynical Soviet scheme was no consolation for John Profumo, who withdrew from the spotlight with as much dignity as he could muster, and devoted his life to unpublicised charity work. He was ruined by his sexual appetite just as surely as those politicians and diplomats trapped by swallows and ravens. But at least he survived after getting caught up in the shadowy world of espionage.
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The Fatal Umbrella
Fear shot through the heart of Georgi Sergeevich Okolovich when he opened the door of his Frankfurt home on
18 February 1954, and he was confronted by a burly Russian. Okolovich, a leader of the prominent anti-Communist Soviet emigre group NTS, had survived two earlier kidnap attempts. Now it seemed Moscow had decided on more drastic action. The visitor, who introduced himself as Nikolai Chochlov, had written orders from the Communist Party Central Committee for Okolovich’s execution. But after showing his victim the death warrant, Chochlov asked him to ring the West German authorities. And what he later told them was soon front page news around the world.
Chochlov, a secret service veteran, had sent dozens of men into free Europe to kill or kidnap influential critics of the Kremlin or refugees from the Russian regime. But when he himself was ordered to carry out a ‘wet affair’ – spy jargon for liquidating an enemy of the state – he knew it was his chance to escape. American and German counter-intelligence men arrested his two accomplices. Then Chochlov led them into woods outside Munich. There, hidden inside a car battery, was what seemed like a gold cigarette case. Chochlov demonstrated its real use – as an electric pistol which noiselessly fired dum-dum bullets coated in potassium cyanide.
At first the KGB merely tried to discredit their former agent. Moscow announced that his story was a CIA invention, that he and Okolovich were relatives and both Nazi war criminals. When Chochlov continued to speak out, more lethal steps were taken. In September 1957, he collapsed at a Frankfurt meeting with violent stomach pains and nausea. Within days of entering hospital, he was covered in hideous dark brown stripes and blotches, and black and blue swellings. Blood seeped through pores of his dry, shrunken skin. His hair fell out by the handful.
Suspecting poisoning by the toxic metal thallium, German doctors tried every known antidote without success. As the victim’s bones decayed and his blood turned to plasma, Okolovich was told there was no hope for the man who had spared his life. But the reprieved Russian exile refused to give up. He persuaded a local American hospital to take over the case. Six top military surgeons began round-the-clock treatment at a heavily-guarded U.S. Army camp. For a week massive injections of cortisone, vitamins, steroids and experimental drugs, plus continuous blood transfusions, kept the patient alive. Then, slowly, almost miraculously, he began to recover. By late October, totally bald and badly scarred, he was off the danger list.
Toxicologists later discovered exactly why Chochlov’s complaint had been so difficult to cure. He had been poisoned with thallium exposed to intense atomic radiation, which made the metal disintegrate almost instantly through the system, destroying the white corpuscles of the blood and draining the body’s life-sustaining fluids. Chochlov had been more than lucky to survive. Later victims of Eastern bloc poison attacks were not so fortunate.
On the evening of 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus on London’s Waterloo Bridge after finishing work at the BBC World Service building nearby. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. Turning, he saw a man picking up an umbrella he had apparently dropped. The man mumbled an apology before leaping into a taxi. Markov went home for a quiet dinner with his wife. At bedtime, he began to feel unwell, and mentioned the umbrella incident to her for the first time. By 2 p.m., his temperature had reached 104º F and an ambulance rushed him to hospital. He died there four days later.
At first the mysterious fever and nausea baffled doctors. Then an inch-by-inch search of the body using a magnifying glass revealed a tiny metal ball, measuring just 1.52 millimetres in diameter. The ball, made of a platinum and iridium mixture used in jet engines, had been expertly drilled with two microscopic connecting holes 0.35 mm wide. And they had been filled with ricin, a by-product of the process of extracting oil from the castor oil plant, and twice as deadly as cobra venom. There was then no known antidote.
Detectives found it impossible to trace the taxi driver, or witnesses from the bus queue. But painstakingly they built up a picture of what had happened. And the Battersea inquest was sufficiently convinced to record a verdict of unlawful killing.
Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian-born author and playwright who fled his homeland in June 1969, after a satirical stage performance he wrote upset the authorities. He became a broadcaster in the West, never afraid to speak his mind in radio transmissions to the Eastern bloc from both Britain and West Germany. ‘He hated the regime,’ his widow told the inquest. Increasingly, the regime of Bulgaria, the most Stalinist Soviet satellite country, hated his attacks. And in August 1978, a hit-man travelled to Western Europe with a double mission. In Paris he fired a pellet into the back of Bulgarian radio and TV reporter Vladimir Kostov during a Metro journey. Kostov was lucky – not enough of the poison, manufactured mainly in Czechoslovakia and Hungary – had been used and he survived after an agonising battle in hospital.
Two weeks later there were no mistakes on Waterloo Bridge. Nobody noticed the pellet hit Markov, fired, it is believed, by a surgical implantation gun concealed in the umbrella tip. And had the victim not gasped, ‘I have been poisoned, murdered,’ as the lethal ricin more than doubled his white blood-cell count, the West might never have learned of yet another sinister Soviet bloc murder method.
Scotland Yard officers believed the assassination was organised independently by Bulgarian espionage agents, and Whitehall sources claimed the Russians were furious at the bad publicity it caused. But Western spycatchers remembered the Politburo orders following the Stashinsky defection, and began re-evaluating other sudden ‘natural deaths’. One in particular has always concerned security chiefs.
On 18 January 1963, Hugh Gaitskell, moderate leader of the British Labour Party, died in hospital of systemic lupus erythematosus, a failure of the heart and kidneys. It was a complaint hardly ever seen in men over 40 in temperate climates, yet Gaitskell, 56, had contracted it less than a month after being released from hospital after treatment for viral pneumonia. Then Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsin told interrogators that, before he fled, the chief of the KGB’s northern Europe section mentioned plans to kill an opposition party leader. And MI5 investigators discovered that, shortly before his death, Gaitskell had visited the Russian embassy in London to collect a visa for a trip to Moscow, and had been given coffee and biscuits.
Experts at Britain’s Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire, could not say how the disease might be caused — but CIA spymaster James Angleton discovered Soviet medical papers announcing success in experiments with a drug
that could induce fatal heart and kidney failure. Though Gaitskell’s widow and most of his Labour Party colleagues continued to believe the death was natural, top espionage men, including MI5 chief
Sir Martin Furnival Jones, kept an open mind. Gaitskell had fought hard to stop the Party swinging to the Left. Under his successors, extremist Marxists openly flaunted their views under Labour’s banner.
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Sambha Espionage Scandal
This is one of the most sensational and complicated spy scandal in free India. It is supposed to be a case of selling secret informations by arm of officers. If that was so, why were so many manoeuvres made? The whole thing got enmeshed in moves and counter-moves. Then, inspite of best efforts made, no convincing evidence could be produced. Why? Were all the officers charged in this case guilty? Was this matter as simple as it seemed to be? Verily, it was a very complicated spy scandal that had many loose ends about which nothing will ever be revealed.
It was a sudden move. Major Uppal covered the face of Captain Rathore with a hood similar to that which hangmen usually use to cover the face of the person to be executed. The entire face of the convict is covered by it and it reaches up to his neck. Captain Rathore was totally non-plussed. “What is this?” he asked in a voice choked with emotion.
The Major replied in a cold and stem voice, “Your game is up Captain. You stand exposed for spying.”
This happened on August 24, 1978. The place was India’s capital, Delhi. Captain Ranbir Singh Rathore was returning after meeting Col. Grewal of the Military Intelligence Directorate. The Captain was posted at Kamptee in Maharashtra and had been called to Delhi. As he reached Army Headquarters, he was met by Major Uppal at the main entrance. The Major told him that his son had been admitted to the Army Hospital. Could Captain Rathore reach him there in his jeep? The Major had an escort of a few armed soldiers. The Captain turned the jeep towards Delhi cantonment. At a lonely spot in South Delhi, the jeep was stopped and Captain Rathore was asked to sit at the back. Around 10.30 in the night, Captain Rathore was locked up in the Military Intelligence Interrogation Cell in civilian clothes. His interrogation started as soon as he felt sleepy. He was not allowed to sleep and searching questions about the spy ring were put to him. A few months after his interrogation, raids were conducted at Delhi, Junglot, Jammu, Nagarkota and many other places on the India-Pakistan border on the night between 22-23 January, 1979. A total of fifty three army officers were arrested during these raids.