CHRISTINE KEELER SLEPT
Incredible story of how model at the centre of scandal flew to a reunion with her spy lover
THREE decades after their sex scandal brought down a Tory government, Christine Keeler and her Soviet spy lover Eugene Ivanov met again after she flew clandestinely to Russia. I know – because she slept in my bed at the Sunday Express Moscow bureau flat on Dmitry Ulyanova Street.
In my quarter of a century as an accredited correspondent in turbulent Moscow, this remains one of my most memorable – and bizarre – stories.
Less than 500 days after the crash of the USSR, a reunion between the pair had suddenly become possible in a way that it was not during the Cold War. Both wanted it, and the Sunday Express along with Ivanov’s biographer, my friend Gennady Sokolov, enabled the get-together.
We were concerned [without reason in the end] that another British newspaper had rumbled our story, so rather than risk putting Christine into one of the few Western-style hotels in post-communist Moscow in 1993, she stayed with me.
I gave up the main bedroom to the former Camay model famed for her naked chair pose who had unhelpfully arrived in cool April Moscow shivering without a coat – but with a secret personal stash of illegal drugs, thankfully not discovered by customs or police.
What followed on her only Russian visit will not be highlighted in the eagerly anticipated BBC drama The Trial Of Christine Keeler, which starts tonight.
Yet it showed much about this odd couple who changed history by forcing the resignation of War Minister John Profumo. He had lied about his own affair with the showgirl before being exposed.
The day after Christine, at the time 51, flew in with then Sunday Express journalist Cathy Scott-clark, a visibly ageing Ivanov, 67, arrived at this newspaper’s flat.
When he had seduced Keeler 28 years earlier, he was a dashing assistant naval attache at the Soviet embassy, a suave socialite who beguiled and infiltrated London society with extraordinary skill at the height of the Cold War.
He was also a cunning GRU military intelligence agent armed with a Minox camera, not novichok.
“My gift to you, Christine,” he said warmly as he set eyes on her.
He kissed and embraced her, handing her a box of the best Russian chocolates.
They clinked glasses, toasting their reunion with Champanski from my fridge.
Over the coming days they would walk arm-in-arm on Red Square, stroll through Gorky Park, and share a candlelit dinner at a cosy restaurant in the eye of the Kremlin.
But soon they would argue, and fiercely. There was unfinished business, as each tried to understand a tryst that decimated both their later lives across the East-west divide.
It was soon clear that the sex that sparked the Profumo Scandal only happened once and was perfunctory.
It followed Ivanov seeing Christina naked in Lord Astor’s pool at a society party, and riding on Profumo’s shoulders. The Russian drove her back to London, to osteopath Stephen Ward’s flat at 17 Wimpole Mews, London W1, where he seduced her.
“We drank a bottle of vodka first,” recalled Christine with a smile. “No, it was whisky,” countered Ivanov. “We’d already drunk all the vodka.”
Then Christine angrily took issue with the spy’s claim in his autobiography that “she was so active that the bed was shaking” and that “we were two hungry beasts”.
It was “desire on both sides”, he boasted. “She wanted me as well.”
Within a few minutes, on my sofa, Christine fixed him with an icy stare and told him that far from being an all-night session it was over in less than five minutes.
“You hated having sex with me. I could tell. You almost forced yourself on me and hated yourself afterwards,” she told him.
She repeatedly demanded he admit that he had been ordered to seduce her by a controlling Ward, who some saw as a pimp to high society, others as a Soviet agent.
“No, no, a hundred times no,” thundered Ivanov.
IT WAS obvious this pair had been virtual strangers in the 1960s despite their fleeting intimacy. “The funny thing about being here,” Christine told me, “is that we never really knew each other before. I am only starting to get to know Eugene now. It is the first time he has ever really looked me in the eye.” He also apologised for bedding her. “I never would have slept with you if I had not seen you on Profumo’s shoulders in Lord Astor’s swimming pool,” he said. “I realised there was something going on between you two. I used you in my attempt to get military secrets from Profumo. Thirty years later I can say sorry.”
He had aimed to blackmail the war minister but events intervened. Their dangerous liaison became public knowledge ultimately forcing Profumo’s resignation. Ivanov would slip his MI5 watchers and escape back to Moscow.
If he lacked secrets from the war minister, there are compelling reasons to believe he took a cache of royal secrets back to Russia, obtained from Ward, who was close, among others, to Prince Philip.
There are those in Moscow who say this incendiary material has not yet surfaced and is now in the hands of Vladimir Putin’s secret services.
Yet Ivanov, like Keeler, would get no credit. His marriage to Maya, daughter of the USSR’S top judge, was in ruins and his career flatlined as he hit the bottle. He could not spy again in thewest.
As they talked, the feeling was of the personal misery from their role in one of Britain’s great sex and spy scandals. These two Coldwar actors were terribly lonely.
“Certainly I received the Order of Lenin,” he said glumly. “Profumo had been compromised, and resigned. the Macmillan government came apart.
“Yes, I caused all that. But when my wife heard about me and you, she walked straight out.
“She left me.that’s it.the end.”
He turned to his beloved vodka and watched as the Soviet Union collapsed around him leaving his GRU pension worthless. “I can’t afford a bottle of Pepsi now,” he said.
He asked about her life. “I don’t want to go into it,” she grimaced. “I’m alone. My two sons have grown up and left home.”
Christine, who died two years ago, never escaping the notoriety from the Profumo scandal, had come to Moscow just in time.
Ivanov died less than a year after their reunion. I went to his funeral, and was taken aback. As he lay in his coffin on a biting January morning, the lid open, a senior uniformed GRU officer denounced him over the Keeler affair.
He was one of the USSR’S most talented spies, but he had disobeyed orders. Seducing Keeler had not been sanctioned.
Even in death there was no peace for him.
‘You hated sex with me. You almost forced yourself on me and hated yourself afterwards’