Records released by the British intelligence have shown that an osteopath at the heart of a notorious Cold War sex and espionage scandal also acted as an intermediary for the Soviet Union during the US Cuban missile crisis.
Among the documents hitherto kept secret by the British internal intelligence service M15 are reports in which the United Kingdom was investigating the possibility that Soviet spies had role in the sulphurous Profumo affair.
British Minister of War and rising star of the Tories, John Profumo, was forced to resign in June 1963, in the mid of the Cold War, after admitting to an affair with call-girl Christine Keeler, who had an affair at the same time with the Soviet military attache in London, Eugene Ivanov.
As a result of this scandal the conservatives lost the following legislative elections.
Profumo and Ivanov had been introduced to Christine Keeler by the same person, Stephen Ward, a renowned osteopath who counted Conservative parliamentarians among his patients, but who was also a Soviet “collaborator,” according to MI5 findings revealed by the National Archives.
In a report written in 1965, British intelligence concluded that there was “no concrete evidence” that the scandal was the result of a Soviet-inspired scheme, but it added details on the protagonists of the case and revealed, in particular, that Ward had served as an intermediary during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.
During the crisis, the Russians used Ivanov and Ward not only to try to get off-the-record reactions from the British government, but also to put pressure on the US government and, if possible, weaken the resolve of the West, MI5 noted at the time.
