Orgies, Money, And Spies: The Russian Connection In The Profumo Affair

The Profumo Affair, which started in July 1961 and contributed to the 1963 downfall of the U.K. government led by Harold Macmillan made instant headlines across the globe. It starred, in no particular order, sex, money, members of Britain’s upper-class establishment having orgies, a famous picture of a naked model [Christine Keeler], and Russian spies—all with a backdrop of London in the Swinging '60s. As Calder Walton wrote last week in Air Mail, “The scandal centered on an affair that British secretary of war John Profumo had with Keeler, which quickly obliterated the staid and dignified image of Britain’s crusty upper classes.” At the time it was seen as a ‘moral issue,’ but declassified M.I.5 records now reveal that it also was an issue of British national security, involving Russian espionage. “In the summer of 1961, Cold War tensions were escalating over the future of Berlin,” Walton says. During a heat wave in England in early July, Profumo and his wife were partying with other guests in the private pool at the home of Osteopath Stephen Ward in Cliveden. It was there, in the walled garden, that Profumo met Keeler, as she dashed naked from the water to find a towel, leaving wet footprints behind her on the terra-cotta tiles. They soon engaged in an affair that ended one month later; Keeler later described it as a “very, very well-mannered screw of convenience.” One of Ward’s other guests that sultry weekend was the Soviet naval attaché in London, Yevgeny Ivanov, who actually was a military intelligence agent working for the Soviet GRU. When news of the scandal leaked, Profumo lied about it to the House of Commons in order to save his marriage, and because he knew the involvement of a Russian official made the scandal much worse.

DNA COLD CASE

Decades-Old New Hampshire Murder

Solved Through DNA Genealogy

On the morning of Sept. 28, 1981, the body of 23-year-old Laura Kempton was discovered in her apartment in Portsmouth, NH. She had come home after a night out with a friend, and entered her residence alone. An autopsy determined she died of massive trauma to the left side of her head, but authorities—despite pursuing hundreds of leads and suspects—were never able to identify the suspected killer. The murder occurred years before DNA testing became standard forensic procedure but, decades later, investigators analyzed evidence collected at the scene. For years they found no match in any of the various databases, but in 2021 police began analyzing the samples—including a cigarette butt—using forensic genetic genealogy technology. In May 2022, the suspect's DNA profile matched to two relatives in a third-party public genetic genealogy database, and the following month they identified Ronney James Lee as the killer. Lee, who was 21 at the time of the Kempton's death, died of acute cocaine intoxication at the age of 45 on Feb. 9, 2005. New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said if Lee were still alive, he would be charged with first-degree murder for knowingly causing her death in connection with sexual assault. Formella said during a press briefing Thursday that the case has been officially closed and marked as solved, noting the news may be "bittersweet" for Kempton's family.

Mystery Readers International Announces 2023 Macavity Nominees

Nominations for the 2003 Macavity Awards, presented for mystery books published in 2022, were announced last week. Some of the nominees include:

Best Mystery Novel:

• Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King (Bantam)

• Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone (MCD)

• A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

• A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown)

• Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)

• Secret Identity by Alex Segura (Flatiron Books)

Best First Mystery

• Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (Atria/EmilyBestler)

• Shutter by Ramona Emerson (Soho Crime)

• Devil’s Chew Toy by Rob Osler (Crooked Lane Books)

• The Verifiers by Jane Pek (Vintage Books)

• The Maid by Nita Prose (Ballantine)

The Macavity Awards are voted on by members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal, and "friends of MRI." The winners will be announced at opening ceremonies at the San Diego Bouchercon in late August. Congratulations to all!

The Brief Rise And Sudden Fall Of

1970s "Hixploitation" Crime Movies

For those too young to remember, there was a time before streaming services that first-run movies could only be seen in a theater or drive-in. As Scott Von Doviak wrote last week in Crime Reads, “In the early ‘70s, the theater was the only place to see a movie until it turned up on television years later. Films would hang around for months, and many would resurface later as part of a drive-in double bill. But the drive-in wasn’t exclusively the home of recycled Hollywood hits; American independents were churning out exploitation films specifically geared for rural, often Southern, audiences. Very often, these ‘hixploitation’ flicks shared a handful of ingredients: fast cars, good ol’ boys gone bad, the Daisy Dukes-clad women who love them, and the redneck sheriffs determined to catch them. Some of these movies featured just enough excitement to fill a two-minute trailer, while others toyed with the formula just long enough to be memorable.” The year 1974 was particularly fertile for this type of entertainment, Doviak says, noting that Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry [Peter Fonda, Susan George, and Vic Morrow], The Sugarland Express [Goldie Hawn, William Atherton], and Macon County Line [Max Baer Jr.] all were released within months of each other. The hixploitation trend reached its apex in 1977 with Smokey and the Bandit [Burt Reynolds, Sally Field] with a now-improbable plot of smuggling Coors beer from Texas to Georgia.

Real-Life Spies Reveal Their All-Time

Favorite Cold War Movies

I suspect everyone who reads BunzelGram loves a good spy movie, and we all have our favorites. But Spyscape recently asked 25 intelligence pros—many of them trained by the CIA, FBI, DIA, and Mossad—to reveal their favorite Cold War films. While some of the pictures mentioned are genre classics [The Manchurian Candidate, The Hunt For Red October, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy], others might be more than a bit surprising. For instance, Emily Crose, a former CIA, NSA, and US Army Intelligence and Security Command infosec specialist, says, “My favorite spy movie is, without a doubt, Atomic Blonde. I have as much respect for the depth of realism many other movies have with respect to tradecraft, but… I'm selecting a movie that is just plain fun to watch.” Meanwhile, Ulrich Larsen, a former mole who worked undercover in North Korea, says his top pick is Torn Curtain: “First of all, Newman is playing it so damn good, and the story is so realistic. I saw the movie for the first time around 1984, and I think I’ve seen it twice a year for the last 10 years.” And Jack Barsky, a former KGB sleeper agent in New York during the Cold War, says Thirteen Days, a tense drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “gives us a sense of how close we came to make MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) a reality. It also is a great example of how a group of leaders grapples with the biggest challenge in their lives without panicking. This is something sorely missing in the western world today.”

Coming September 12:

INDIGO ROAD

“Indigo Road is a beautifully wrought, hard-biting story with elements of classic noir presented through a prism of modern sensibilities. A fantastic read.” –S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears 

While still slinging drinks fulltime at The Sandbar in Folly Beach, Jack Connor works a side gig as a licensed bounty hunter. One afternoon, as he's transporting his latest bail skip named Willis Ronson back to jail, his SUV is ambushed by a team of gunmen, killing Ronson instantly and seriously injuring his court-appointed attorney, Alisha Dupree. Connor can’t help but poke around the edges of the deadly incident and quickly learns that Ronson was a man of many secrets, including a mysterious woman from his past who has caused him to be sucked into a domestic terrorist fringe group.