Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 05 May, 1997

John Vassall has died at age 71. Known to friends as "Vera of the Admiralty," Vassall was outed in 1962 as a spy who made his fortune peddling British and NATO secrets to the Soviet Union.

Vassall claimed he was set up by a Soviet agent who had filmed him having sex with several men provided by the KGB. Others suggested he had spied for money and used the alleged "blackmail" as a cover.

Born into a family of good blood and little money, Vassall worked as a minor clerk in the Admiralty Office. In 1954, he obtained a similar, low-paying position at the British Embassy in Moscow.

The move puzzled his friends. Vassall had never expressed any interest in Communism, and Moscow was considered a "hardship post" because of the severe weather, frequent fuel and food shortages and restrictions on travel and on socializing with the Russian people.

In London, Vassall, a snob and a blatant social climber, befriended a large circle of elderly women in the hope, it was rumored, of inheriting their money. He also aggressively climbed the ranks of gay society, cultivating the rich, the famous and influential.

In Moscow he courted Sigmund Mikhailsky, a young man employed officially as an interpreter, and unofficially as the "fixer" at the embassy. Every embassy had such a "fixer," who could cut through Soviet red tape, arrange theater and travel tickets, and, through the black market, obtain almost anything one might want. Mikhailsky was also attractive, amusing, and obliging about providing more personal services, heterosexual or homosexual.

The British government knew Mikhailsky was a KGB "plant." They tolerated him because he was useful, but they repeatedly warned the Embassy staff to avoid any private contacts with him.

When he was arrested seven years later, Vassall claimed he had attended a party given by Mikhailsky. The KGB provided handsome men and plenty of brandy. Afterwards, he was shown photographs of himself enjoying a variety of sexual acts with several of the Russian men. The pictures seemed a bit stagy--Vassall always facing the camera--in one photo posing between two very naked Russians, grinning and holding up their underwear like trophies. But, he said, he'd been drunk.

Unless he became a spy, he said he had been told, he would be denied diplomatic immunity and prosecuted under Russia's draconian anti-homosexual laws. He began feeding British and NATO secrets to the Russians, who paid him generously.

Vassall lived luxuriously in Moscow and even better when posted back to London. He acquired a posh home and traveled extensively. At the time of his arrest, he had 36 suits, 30 pairs of shoes and a half-dozen topcoats, all custom-made, and drawers filled with hand-made silk shirts, underwear and pajamas.

He also had an antique armoire worth more than his annual salary from the Admiralty, which had been custom fitted with a secret compartment in which he concealed his expensive photography equipment and rolls of film containing copies of secret government documents.

Caught in the act of taking documents from the office to copy at home, Vassall pled guilty and told his story.

"Nonsense!" snorted Sir William Hayter, Vassall's boss in Moscow.

All employees had been warned that the Soviets would make efforts to compromise them, told to report any such attempts and promised protection. "One or two of these cases occurred during my time, and in none of them was there any difficulty," declared Hayter. In fact, another Englishman he compromised had reported Mikhailsky, who was fired, and his would-be victim was, as promised, protected.

"Miss Mary," as the Russians code-named Vassall, threw himself on the mercy of the court, but the Lord Chief Justice told him, "but when you could have made a clean breast of the matter you did not do so...You were accepting money to the extent it almost doubled your salary. I take the view that one of the compelling reasons for what you did was pure selfish greed."

Some gay people and their friends were even less sympathetic. Rebecca West, who moved in gay society as a sort of honorary member, wrote that homosexuals then "had a special liability to being blackmailed, as skiers have a special liability to break their legs." The smart ones knew what to do, and even the dumb ones had seen The Victim, the 1961 blockbuster film about homosexual blackmail.

Vassall was not, as he claimed, "weak and silly." His was a game which required skill, hard work, imagination, secrecy and risk. Daring and vain, proud of what he called his "bedroom eyes," a "much-sought after 'queen,' playful and girlish," Ms. West observed in her book about him, Vassall "was no tortured bearer of the cross, flinching under philistine scorn."

Had he been blackmailed, West continued, "he would have known the drill. 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, slightly 'camping' humor; he would have dined out on the story, telling it in two different ways to please two different sorts of people; and if he 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."

Like many gay people have thought, Ms. West believed that Vassall had gone to Moscow intending to become a spy. The orgy had been arranged to give him a cover story "should his treachery ever be discovered."

Vassall had applied for the job just after the British "gay spies" Burgess and Maclean were exposed. Burgess was a charming and predatory gay man who, during his tour in the Washington embassy, delighted in seducing men who thought they were immune to homosexual seduction. The FBI, the CIA and the Washington Vice Squad kept extensive files on him. When it was learned that he was a spy as well as queer, that seemed to prove the McCarthyite contention that queers tend to be subversives, or at least can be blackmailed into treason.

In London it was thought that John Vassall had cynically exploited the McCarthyites' thesis in order to line his own pockets and, by so doing, he risked importing McCarthyism into Great Britain.

After Vassall's conviction, the Kennedy Administration did pressure the British to seek out and fire gay employees. The U.S. Navy withheld secret American and NATO information from the British. The London press sensationalized the issue of homosexuals in government and took up "outing." The Labour Party concocted a story that Vassall and his superior had been lovers, and demanded that the Conservative Government purge itself of all homosexual employees.

Prime Minister Macmillan publicly scolded them all: "the time has come for men of decency and propriety not to tolerate the growth of what I can only call the spirit of Titus Oates and Senator McCarthy."

He appointed a commission to study the issue of homosexuals and national security. Instead, the panel chose to investigate the press and jailed several reporters for naming names and invading privacy.

The "Old Boy Network" closed ranks against the barbarians. That network consisted of "old boys" who had once been young boys in homosocial, all-male schools where, if they hadn't actually engaged in homosexual affairs themselves, had friends who did. Homosexuality didn't shock them; homophobic attempts to exploit it did.

The Conservative Government survived the Vassall scandal, but the next year, Minister of War John Profumo was caught sharing a mistress with an attaché in the Russian embassy in London. "Thank God, it's girls," Prime Minister Macmillan sighed.