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.


This podcast was recorded as part of The National Archives’ Cold
War season, a programme of events to coincide with the
exhibition, ‘Protect and Survive: Britain’s Cold War Revealed’.