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.
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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.
Jeremy John Le Mesurier Wolfenden was born on 26 June 1934 at Uppingham School in Rutland, where his father, John Wolfenden, was a master. He won a scholarship to Eton College in 1947 and narrowly escaped expulsion in 1951 for a homosexual indiscretion. In 1952, he won a further scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford; but he was not quite finished with Eton. Towards the end of the year he wrote a letter to a boy at the school, advising him about his love life. When the letter got into the wrong hands, Wolfenden was banned from the school and his father was told. In the row that ensued, John Wolfenden learned that his son was homosexual. The boy was in no doubt of his sexual orientation and made no effort to deny it. Yet he already had an inkling of what he did not want to become. When he was eighteen he wrote: ‘I am not going to end up as [Evelyn Waugh’s] Anthony Blanche arty-tarting around the art galleries’. It was, indeed, a fate he managed to avoid.
After his stretch of national service in the Royal Navy, learning Russian and cryptography, Wolfenden went up to Magdalen to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was known as 'cleverest boy in England' at 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."[3]
Among homosexual friends at the university were Anthony Page, later a distinguished theatre and film director, and Kit Lambert (son of the composer Constant Lambert), who later became manager of the rock group The Who. During his vacations Wolfenden started writing for The Times. In 1956, the National Union of Students sent a delegation, including Wolfenden, on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union. It is possible that their interpreter and guide, Yuri Krutikov, slept with him with the intention of entrapment into espionage at some future date. At any rate, for the time being he returned to Oxford uncompromised, and after being awarded a first-class degree he became night news editor of The Times in 1959 and the newspaper's Paris correspondent the following year.[1][4]
In 1960, the paper sent him to Paris as its number two correspondent there. Then, early in 1961, despite his increasingly heavy drinking and the related waywardness of his frequent sexual encounters, he was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) before the Daily Telegraph offered him their post in Moscow. Having accepted it at once, he told a friend he expected to be caught and blackmailed within a fortnight. He set off from London on 11 April 1961. Predictably, Wolfenden soon established a friendship with Guy Burgess, who was single mindedly drinking his way towards the grave. They had a lot in common. It is possible they were lovers. He struck up friendships with 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 Soviet's favour. Inevitably, as he himself had forseen, he was indeed entrapped, photographed in his room with a young man, and blackmailed into snooping on other journalists for the KGB. (His biographer Sebastian Faulks has suggested that such an obviously unsuitable candidate may have landed the Telegraph job in Moscow because British Intelligence had wanted to get someone on the inside of the KGB working for them.)
When Burgess died in 1963, he left Wolfenden first pick of his library, but the KGB got there first. The last two years of Wolfenden’s own life were hectic and complicated. In January 1964, the Telegraph withdrew him from Moscow for a year and sent him to New York instead. Two months later he married Martina Browne. He went back to Moscow as a stopgap after a year, having asked not to be sent there permanently. He lived in fear of arrest until, having received a tip-off that the authorities were about to act, he left for London. At the end of the year he cheerfully took up an appointment in Washington, DC; but he was depressed to be contacted again by MI5, and then by the FBI. He was drinking more heavily than ever.
He died on 27 September 1965, aged just thirty-one in what appeared to be suspicious circumstances in Washington D.C. It was claimed he had fainted in the bathroom, cracked his head against the washbasin and died of a cerebral haemorrhage. It is now thought likely that he died of liver failure brought on by his excessive drinking. Wolfenden's own views survive. For instance, in a letter to Michael Parsons, an Oxford friend, from Paris, January 1961: "There is just no such thing as anyone’s real personality. Personalities are the product of the initial feelings or attitudes someone takes up and the needs of the situation they find themselves in...and, for that matter, the initial feelings themselves are the product of earlier conflicts of that sort. There is a dialectic of personality, just as there is dialectic of history (and it’s just as unpredictable)."[7] A short biography of Wolfenden appears in the book The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks.[8] Julian Mitchell's play Consenting Adults (2007), screened by BBC Four, is based on the relationship of father and son, played by Charles Dance and Sean Biggerstaff respectively.[9] Biggerstaff won a BAFTA Scotland award for Best Television Actor for his performance.[10]
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