Eugene Ivanov, the Russian spy at the centre of the 1963 Profumo scandal, was a philandering alcoholic whose weakness for women and drink MI5 hoped to exploit to get him to defect, but who ended up toppling the Macmillan government by chance, according to newly released intelligence files.
He arrived at the Russian embassy in London as assistant naval attache in 1960 but MI5 suspected he was an intelligence officer, partly because he didn’t seem to know much about ships and also he carried an umbrella.
