Free Republic

The woman at the centre of the Profumo affair that helped define a decade, has died aged 75. Often presented her as a femme fatale behind the downfall of two powerful men, she spent much of her life trying to shake off that image. In 1963, she rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister, John Profumo while also having a relationship with the Russian diplomat Yevgeny Ivanov at the height of the Cold War. Her life is the subject of a BBC series which will be filmed next year and outlines her upbringing in...

...Fifty years after the Profumo affair erupted, Christine Keeler, now 71, has confessed she played a role in a high-placed spy ring... ...she says: 'However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. The truth is that I betrayed my country. ...The scandal hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler in December 1962. It then emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with former Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then 48, and a handsome Russian...

Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the 'Ace of Spies,' planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918 An MI6 agent became a serial killer as he used pretty young women to lure Russians to their deaths with the promise of sex, new documents reveal. A Cossack colonel called Mohammed Bek Hadji Lashet, and his gang used the women to attract communists to a lakeside villa where they were tortured and then killed, according to a new history of the intelligence service. The book, Six, by former military intelligence officer Michael Smith, reveals...