John Vassall

William John Christopher Vassall (20 September 1924 – 18 November 1996) was a British civil servant who, under pressure of blackmail, spied for the Soviet Union.

In World War II, Vassall worked as a photographer for the Royal Air Force. After the war, he became a clerk at the Admiralty. In 1952, he was posted to the staff of the Naval Attaché at the British embassy in Moscow. There he found himself socially isolated by the snobberies and class hierarchies of diplomatic life, his loneliness further exacerbated by the fact that he was homosexual (at that time illegal in both Britain and the Soviet Union). He became acquainted with a Pole named Mikhailsky, who worked for the Embassy, and who introduced him to the homosexual underworld of Moscow. In 1954, he was invited to a party (arranged, unbeknown to him, by the KGB), where he was encouraged to become extremely drunk, and where he was photographed in a compromising position with several men. The KGB used these photographs to blackmail Vassall into working for them as a spy. During his career, Vassall provided the Soviets with several thousand classified documents, including information on British radar, torpedoes, and anti-submarine equipment.

Vassall was identified as a potential spy when Anatoliy Golitsyn, a senior member of the KGB, defected to the United States. The KGB, worried that Vassall would be exposed, ordered him to cease operations until further notice. Another defector, Yuri Nosenko, added to the case against Vassall, but doubts about the evidence provided by both Golitsyn and Nosenko persisted. Vassall soon resumed his work. He worked as Private Secretary to Tam Galbraith, a junior Conservative Minister in the Admiralty. It became obvious to his work colleagues that Vassall had some other source of income for he moved to an expensive flat in Dolphin Square and threw lavish parties, but he explained that he had an inheritance from a distant relative.

On 12 September 1962, however, Vassall was arrested and charged with spying. He gave a full confession, but the documents which he admitted to stealing did not account for everything believed to have been taken. This led to speculation that there was another spy still operating in the Admiralty. Some have suggested that Vassall was deliberately sacrificed by the KGB in an attempt to protect the other (possibly more senior) spy. In October, Vassall was sentenced to 18 years in jail. A tribunal was held to inquire into whether the failure to detect him earlier amounted to a failure of intelligence, as many British newspapers had claimed; it exonerated the government.

Vassall was released in 1972, having served ten years. He published an autobiography in 1975. In later life he changed his surname to Phillips, and worked quietly as an administrator at the British Records Association, and for a firm of solicitors in Gray's Inn.

See also

• British political scandals