- Yevgeny Ivanov
Captain Yevgeny Ivanov (
January 11 1926 –January 17 ,1994 ) was aSoviet naval attaché at theRussia nembassy inLondon in the late 1950s, and was also engaged inespionage .He became friends with
osteopath DoctorStephen Ward .MI5 saw Ivanov as a potential defector and asked Ward to try and convince him to shift his allegiance to Great Britain.Ivanov was at the party at the Cliveden estate when
Christine Keeler metJohn Profumo , the British Secretary of State for War. Keeler's subsequent affair with Profumo went on at a time when she was also romantically involved with Ivanov. This was at a time whenCold War tensions were already heightened as a result of theCuban Missile Crisis . Ward and Ivanov are said to have asked Keeler to quiz Profumo as to when American nuclear missiles would be taken to then-West Germany .When the
Profumo affair became public, the ensuing scandal of Britain's defense minister having an affair with the mistress of a Russian spy resulted in a number of far-reaching changes. On a personal level, Ivanov's relationship with Keeler caused his wife to leave him, while back inMoscow , theKremlin failed to show him much recognition. That double rejection manifested itself in heavy drinking by Ivanov.Nearly three decades later, in early 1993, Ivanov met Keeler for dinner in Moscow. He later sent her a letter apologizing for the way he had treated her in his attempt to get military secrets from Profumo.
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