Jeremy Wolfenden

Jeremy John Le Mesurier Wolfenden (26 June 1934, England – 28 December 1965) was a foreign correspondent and British spy at the height of the Cold War.

Biography

The son of John Wolfenden, headmaster of Uppingham School, and, later, chairman of the Wolfenden Report which recommended the legalisation of male homosexual acts in Britain, Jeremy Wolfenden was himself homosexual. He was regarded by others of his generation as a leader and a man of distinct individualism. He won a scholarship to Eton where he was known as 'cleverest boy in England', then to his father's alma mater Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He subsequently became a Prize Fellow of All Souls. His Finals examiner at Oxford, after giving him eight alphas, wrote: "He wrote as though it were all beneath him; he wrote as though it were all such a waste of his time."

He became night news editor of The Times in 1959 and the newspaper's Paris correspondent the following year. Wolfenden was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) before becoming The Daily Telegraph's foreign correspondent in Moscow (in 1961) where he indulged in his twin passions for sex and alcohol and was eventually compromised by the KGB. He struck up friendships with Guy Burgess, the British defector, and Martina Browne, the nanny employed by Ruari and Janet Chisholm, who were working for SIS and were instrumental in the defection of Oleg Penkovsky – a colonel in Soviet military intelligence – who was responsible for disabusing the Kennedy administration of the myth that the "missile gap" was in the Soviets' favour. Wolfenden subsequently came under pressure from both the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the KGB while in Moscow. According to Neal Ascherson in 1996, he was being blackmailed by both services. He had been photographed by the KGB having sex with another man, while MI6 tried to turn him into a double agent.