Gay spies

Blunt, like Burgess, was also homosexual — then a spy offence — and both men belonged to the secretive Apostles dining club at Cambridge, which boasted many Marxist sympathisers, also gay. The fear of blackmail was not unfounded. Following state persecution for his sexuality, Turing would commit suicide in By the 21st century, the tide had fully turned.

The Soviets then blackmailed Wolfenden: inform on Western diplomats, or be publicly exposed. Wolfenden did the only thing he could — he immediately reported the plot to MI6, which nonetheless urged him to cooperate with Soviet demands for more intelligence.

Over the next six gay niners he passed thousands of sensitive documents to the Soviet Union, even while maintaining his routine duties in London. Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were both products of Cambridge University, where a left-wing, bohemian culture took root among certain elite circles.

Gay spies, a camp but very real idea. Caught between both sides, Wolfenden ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown and died young. This association between homosexuality and secrecy, furtiveness and potential treachery ensured gay characters were a recurring trope in Cold War-era spy fiction.

From Cold War betrayals to rainbow flags over Langley and Vauxhall Cross, this is the story of secrecy, shame—and a reckoning decades in the making. Abstract Although gay espionage is a well-established Cold War trope, this article analyzes new evidence that intelligence agencies in divided Berlin actively sought to recruit gay men.

Only then did attitudes begin to thaw. Here we explore the relationship between MI6, MI5 and the LGBTQ+ community. Explore the intriguing history of gay spies in intelligence, from Cold War betrayals to resilience in secrecy and shame. The Cambridge ring betrayed Britain on an unprecedented scale, but only after Burgess and Maclean defected in did the gay begin to suspect how deep the rot had gone.

The Vassall scandal erupted in and caused a media frenzy. Britain followed a similar arc, albeit on its own timetable. Internal practices also changed. The Vassall case cemented the stereotype of the homosexual security risk in British intelligence. They did so because they believed that gay men’s contacts in the opaque and class-crossing queer subculture made them ideally suited for the purposes of intelligence work.

The belief was that a gay officer — legally vulnerable and conventionally closeted — could be easily blackmailed by an enemy. MI6 followed suit. It took until the s for these rules to change. Just as they prepared to spy together, a hidden camera shutter snapped on Wolfenden and the barber.

The fact that Burgess and Blunt were gay only added to the scandal and the paranoia in Gay, reinforcing the now-discredited idea that homosexuality was inseparable from treachery. Once erased or exploited, queerness was long treated as a national security threat across Western intelligence agencies.

Yet in hindsight historians note that Vassall was targeted not because he was uniquely immoral, but because the circumstances of his life greedy classmates, strict laws made blackmail easier. Perhaps the most tragic emblem of this era was Alan Turing : the brilliant mathematician who helped crack the German Enigma code was prosecuted in for having a gay relationship and was stripped of his security clearance.

In a September Reuters article, Marchetti is quoted in the following snippet: “Soviet intelligence agents routinely cruise gay bars seeking candidates for blackmail who could be coopted as spies, a spokesman for the CIA, another agency which is concerned about possible espionage, said.

Using files from the archives of the. Burgess and Blunt used their privileged backgrounds and social connections to secure sensitive jobs with minimal scrutiny. In truth, any spy of the era, gay or straight, could have been coerced — but only one had the whole machinery of social stigma turned on him.