Ruinous disclosings and targets for blackmail

Press, 21 July 1982, Page 8

Ruinous disclosings and targets for blackmail

Revelations of homosexuality have led to the downfall of several men in sensitive posts over the last 25 years. The tendency carries with it an automatic risk of blackmail.

A former Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, lan Harvey, resigned in 1958 after pleading guilty to an act of indecency with a young Guardsman. He was later to publicly admit to liaisons with male prostitutes for 13 years before that. John Vassall, the Admiralty clerk sentenced to 18 years’ for spying in 1962, always asserted that it was Russian blackmail over his homosexuality that had led him into giving away secrets to the Soviets. ’ He had been a clerk in the intelligence department of the British Embassy in Moscow when he was first framed by the Russians at a homosexual party. The late Tom Driberg, member of Parliament, always said that it was his blatant homosexuality — he haunted the public lavatories of Soho in London’s West End — that had stopped him ever getting a Cabinet post. He asserted that his public life in Parliament had been no hindrance to his homosexuality.

“If anything, upon my election as a member of Parliament I became even more promiscuous,” he wrote.

Homosexuality featured in other post-war spy scandals besides Vassall’s. Anthony Blunt, the former Keeper, of the Queen’s pictures and self-confessed Russian spy was a homosexual, as were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.