The scandalous case of John Vassall

In 1962, while working as a clerk in the British Embassy in Moscow, homosexual civil servant John Vassall was caught in a ‘honey trap’ sprung by the Soviet Secret Service. He was blackmailed into passing secrets to the Soviet Union and as a result sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment for espionage. Our contemporary records specialist Mark Dunton delves deeper into this scandal - one of a series that rocked the Macmillan government in the early 1960s, feeding into a national obsession with spy culture at the time.