Cocktails, tennis, film evenings and skiing filled the lavish social diary of one of the KGB’s most notorious British spies, newly-released security service files reveal. John Vassall, who was blackmailed into passing vital defence secrets to the Kremlin, was at the centre of one of the century’s most bizarre and sensational cloak-and-dagger spy scandals.
Newly-digitised MI5 files, published by the National Archives, also contain pictures of Vassall, as well as the cupboard housing a secret compartment in which films containing information copied from Admiralty files were found when police raided his London flat in 1962. The Admiralty was the government department that managed naval affairs at that time.
A 21-page diary of engagements at the British Embassy in Moscow, covering the period 1954 to 1956, gave an insight into the busy social life Vassall enjoyed. Dinners and drinks events featured heavily, as did bridge, while there were also boat trips, theatre outings, art class, Scottish reels dancing, skiing, films in the garden and picnics in the country. Mass was also noted fairly regularly in the diary.
