Profumo ‘had affair with Nazi spy’ before Keeler sex scandal

But the MI5 files, released by the National Archives in Kew yesterday, claim Profumo was in danger of scandal from the time he met Winegard at Oxford in the 1930s.

They show that the Dusseldorfborn beauty was living as a fashion model in Britain in the 1930s, but was ordered home because her visa did not allow work.

Home Office investigators then recommended she be barred permanently because she was on “intimate terms” with the German attache in Paris.

During the war years, she ran a secret Nazi information service in the French capital under cover of a “commercial information bureau”.

She went on to become the mistress of a high-ranking German officer – with whom she had a child – and was jailed for spying when the Allies liberated France in 1944.

Winegard, whose maiden name was Klein, then married her US army jailer, Edward Winegard, after he secured her release.

Even in peace time she was suspected by the American secret service of harbouring the head of a German spy ring who was on the run in France.

In 1950, her husband wrote to British intelligence saying they had separated briefly because of Profumo’s “endearing” letters – written on House of Commons notepaper.

During the Keeler scandal, MI6 flagged-up the Profumo-Klein links in a letter to MI5 investigations head Arthur Martin.

MI6 officer Cyril Mackay wrote: “You might like to have for your files the attached copy of a report.”

He said it “makes mention of an association between Gisela Klein and Profumo which began circa 1933 and had apparently not ceased at the time of this report”. One memo reveals that Profumo had told MI5 in 1941 about Klein, saying he had met her five years earlier and “got to know her well” before her modelling career.

The memo goes on: “She was always hard up. Later she went on to become a mannequin and made a large number of useful contacts.

“Lady Astor is alleged to have expressed the opinion she was a spy.”

The authorities believed Winegard and her husband had “recently engaged in blackmail activities and now think it possible their intended visit to the UK may be connected with this”.

Profumo became MP for Kettering in 1940, and went on to serve with distinction as a British Army officer and took part in the Normandy landings of 1944.

He lost his seat in the 1945 general election, but was elected MP for Stratford-upon-Avon five years later.

After leaving politics, he devoted himself to charity work – receiving the CBE in recognition – until his death, aged 91, in 2006.