British diplomat linked to Profumo
Unmasked Soviet spy said to have attended pivotal lunch while working as a Telegraph correspondent
A BRITISH diplomat unmasked as a Soviet spy yesterday was linked to the Profumo scandal during his time as communist affairs correspondent on The Daily Telegraph.
David Floyd confessed to spying for the Soviet Union while working as a translator at the British military mission and embassy in Moscow, according to newly released Foreign Office documents.
Floyd’s son Sir Christopher Floyd, who is one of the country’s highest ranking judges as a Lord Justice of Appeal, has told of his shock at learning his father worked for the Kremlin. David Floyd, who died aged 83 in 1997, went on to become a senior reporter with The Telegraph and attended a pivotal lunch in 1961 at the Garrick Club in London at which Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché, met Stephen Ward, the osteopath and artist. Ward introduced both Ivanov and John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, to Christine Keeler.
Both men had affairs with Keeler. The ensuing scandal forced Profumo’s resignation and rocked the Conservative government of the day. Floyd’s outing as a Soviet spy may now force a reappraisal of the significance of his lunch with Ward and Ivanov at the outset of the Profumo scandal. Jeff Hulbert, a historian who obtained the Foreign Office documents through a series of Freedom of Information requests, said: “The usual interpretation of Floyd’s presence at the lunch was as a makeweight. But he was certainly there at the creation of the Profumo scandal. Who knows his true significance.”
Mr Hulbert, author of a book on the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, obtained almost 300 pages of documents on Floyd, known as “Pink Floyd” and described in his obituary as “one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgeable Kremlinologists”.
The files, from 1950 and 1951, reveal that Floyd had confessed to being a spy during his stint in Moscow between 1944 and 1947 but that the Foreign Office covered up the scandal, choosing not to prosecute him.
The embarrassment was all the greater as Floyd had been a prominent student Communist agitator while at Oxford University. The son of a railway worker from Swindon, he had become secretary of the Oxford University branch of the Communist party and later became fluent in Russian. Floyd was also suspected of leaking information while working at the British embassies in Prague and Belgrade although he denied that. In one file, prosecutors concluded there was “insufficient evidence”.
Floyd was sacked following his confession in 1951 but was subsequently hired within a year by The Daily Telegraph, whose editor, Sir Colin Coote, would later arrange the Garrick Club lunch at which Floyd, Ward and Ivanov were all present.
Intriguingly, Malcolm Muggeridge, Coote’s deputy editor, worked for MI6. It has been reported that Coote had also worked for the intelligence agency.
Sir Christopher, 66, told The Sunday Times, which confronted him: “It is very shocking for me to hear this.” He declined to comment further.
Mr Hulbert said that the role of Floyd – both as a spy in the late Forties and early Fifties and in the Profumo affair – needed greater examination. Mr Hulbert added that most of the documents he obtained contained large passages heavily blacked out and censored, suggesting the case remains sensitive. “There needs to be more disclosures,” Mr Hulbert told The Telegraph.