On 12 September 1962, John Vassall, a clerical officer at the Admiralty, was arrested in London and charged with espionage. His confession and conviction as a Soviet agent sent shockwaves through the political establishment. The major scandal was a major embarrassment to Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.

Vassall had begun his civil service career in 1948 and was posted to the British embassy in Moscow in 1954 as a clerk to the naval attaché. While there, he was targeted by the KGB in a ‘honeytrap’ operation.

Vassall, aged 30, was invited to a party, plied with alcohol and photographed in compromising situations with “two or three men”.

The KGB used these photographs to coerce him into becoming a spy. He was told that he had committed a criminal offence under Soviet law, and threatened with the prospect of an “international incident”.

Upon his return to London in 1956, Vassall was posted to the Naval Intelligence Division and later worked in the private office of Tam Galbraith, then the civil lord of the Admiralty. For several years, he supplied his Soviet handlers with classified documents and top secret information.

His espionage was eventually exposed following tip-offs from Soviet defectors, including Anatoliy Golitsyn. Vassall was arrested at his flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, where security services found cameras and films.

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On 12 September 1962, Macmillan was informed by Sir Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, that he had found a spy. Hollis later recalled that the prime minister did not share his enthusiasm.

Macmillan is said to have replied: “I’m not at all pleased. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the master of foxhound’s drawing room: he buries it out of sight. But you can’t just shoot a spy as you did in the war.

“There will be a great public trial. Then the security services will not be praised for how efficient they are, but blamed for how hopeless they are. There will then be an inquiry. There will be a terrible row in the press.

“There will be a debate in the House of Commons, and the government will probably fall. Why the devil did you catch him?”

Vassall, having confessed his guilt, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on 22 October.

The lord chief justice, Lord Parker, told Vassall: “I take the view that one compelling reason for what you did was pure, selfish greed”.

Parker said: “It was quite clear that the information passed over was of a highly secret character and capable of doing great harm to the country.”

He told the court: “I accept entirely that in Moscow you were subjected to threats but when you came back to this country you could have made a clean breast of it. You didn’t.”

Jeremy Hutchinson, Vassall’s counsel, had described his client as a victim of blackmail and said “he has a weakness, a weakness which has been with him ever since he came into this life. He is a homosexual.”

John Hobson, the attorney general, said Vassall was “trapped by lust, and cash kept him a prisoner”.

Parker asked how a Vassall, an apparently junior official, could gain access to such sensitive material for so long.

Hobson replied that he “only got access because he was a personal assistant and working in the same room and assisting the person who was actually head of the section.”

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Macmillan was right, of course. The case became the subject of a major political scandal. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which played out from 16-28 October 1962, undoubtedly informed the public and press interest.

The revelation of Vassall’s arrest sparked a media frenzy – as moral and political panics converged. The press did not explore the apparent nuance of the case: Vassall’s status as both traitor and victim.

Instead, reporters hinted suggestively that Vassall’s subversion extended to Galbraith, who – once tipped for high office – was forced to resign on 8 November. Letters from Galbraith had been found in Vassall’s possession; the mundane material was treated sensationally by the press.

Among other allegations, it was suggested that Galbraith had shielded Vassall.

Macmillan initially appointed a committee of civil servants to investigate the case – a response that was criticised by opposition MPs. Labour wanted the government to institute an independent inquiry.

Macmillan’s three-person committee ultimately concluded that the aforementioned Vassall-Galbraith letters did not appear “to contain any implication of a relationship constituting a security risk”.

But this finding did not satisfy either the press or opposition MPs.

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The Vassall case was first discussed in the House of Commons on 2 November, during a debate on the recent Queen’s speech. Gordon Walker, leading the debate for the Labour Party, accused the government of trying to “play down this vital and damaging” episode.

He referred to the case as raising “matters of the gravest concern – matters that have done great and grievous harm to the nation.”

He condemned the prime minister’s “extraordinary haste” in appointing the committee of civil servants “before the trial started” and “before the actual facts which were disclosed at the trial were known to the public”.

He hinted at wider impropriety, claiming Vassall was “picked out continuously and in a most extraordinary way for tasks well above his status, well above his salary, which gave him free access to top secret documents.”

Walker also pointed to a failure of vetting, questioning why officials were not thrown off by Vassall’s apparently lavish lifestyle. He suggested Vassall was “a man who could easily have been discovered to be a homosexual” because he lived “ostentatiously above his means, extravagantly above his means”.

He said Vassall’s flat in Dolphin Square was “a very strange dwelling for a clerical assistant in the Admiralty.”

He added: “I understand that in his flat Vassall had a £400 Queen Anne wardrobe and a £150 Persian carpet. And there were other signs of ostentatious living.”

Walker argued that had Galbraith “shown the slightest acuteness of mind the state’s secrets would have been preserved for three or three and a half years thereafter”.

Walker said he hoped the prime minister would be persuaded of the need for “an independent kind of inquiry, an inquiry of such a kind that it can go thoroughly into the question of his own and the [former] civil lord’s responsibility – and not only able to do that, but to be of such independence that no one can question that it was an independent inquiry.”

Speaking on 5 November, George Brown, the shadow home secretary, referred to letters that he claimed indicated Galbraith, in his relationship with Vassall, showed a “degree of ministerial responsibility which goes far beyond the ordinary business of a minister in charge, being responsible for everything which goes on in his department.”

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On 14 November, the prime minister moved a motion in the commons for the establishment of an inquiry into the Vassall case.

Macmillan argued an inquiry was now necessary to confront a “dark cloud of suspicion and innuendo” and “squalid” personal allegations against his ministers. He referred explicitly to Brown’s comments on 5 November.

Homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967.

Later in his speech, Macmillan considered two “wicked” and “vile” rumours that related to national security concerns.

The first rumour suggested that Galbraith intended to “do a Pontecorvo” and “defect to Russia”.

The second, contained in a Daily Express article, alleged that “the presence of another spy inside the Admiralty was known to [the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Carrington] and his service chiefs… 18 months ago”.

Macmillan added: “These accusations have now left the area of vague insinuations and general charges which can never be easily pinpointed.

“They have been levelled, one by an individual disclosure, another in a publication which goes to millions of readers, against individual people on specific grounds.”

The Radcliffe Tribunal was thus tasked with investigating “the allegations made that the presence of another spy inside the Admiralty was known to the first lord and his service chiefs”.

It would also examine “any neglect of duty by persons directly or indirectly responsible for Vassall’s employment and conduct, and for his being treated as suitable for employment on secret work.”

Macmillan declared: “I have a feeling that the time has come for men of propriety and decency not to tolerate the growth of what I can only call the spirit of Titus Oates and Senator McCarthy.”

Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, welcomed the tribunal “belated as it is”.

Conservative MP Humphry Berkeley, in this same debate, referred to Brown’s comments as a “deliberate and squalid attempt at character assassination”.

Announcing the inquiry in the upper chamber, leader of the Lords Viscount Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) said that “though we are at peace in matters of security we live in the penumbra of a ruthless and diabolical war, the like of which has scarcely been seen in Europe since the time of the Borgias.”

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The Radcliffe Tribunal concluded that Vassall had acted alone, exonerating Galbraith. The Admiralty’s security, however, as well as the sensationalist press coverage, came in for criticism.

The tribunal reported that the “manufacture of compromising situations of [the kind seen in the Vassall case] must be regarded as one of the regular instruments by which the Russian Secret Service seeks to suborn and enlist British agents who can furnish it with information as to our state secrets.

“It has been attempted again and again in various forms, through blackmarket operations, through currency offences, through involving men with women, women with men and, as in Vassall’s case, men with men…

“The prevalence of this danger to our security was perfectly well-known to Vassall’s superiors at the Embassy in the years 1954-56 and in greater or less degree to the junior staff, to whose attention it was brought from time to time with appropriate.”

Of Vassall’s conduct, the tribunal stated: “It is, of course, one thing to fall into a trap that has been carefully set: it is very much another thing to be so overwhelmed by the consequences as to undertake to serve as a traitor rather than accept the possibility of exposure or confession.”

It added: “Was Vassall then to be identified in the Admiralty as a homosexual, and therefore a security risk, by virtue of his appearance, dress, manner and speech alone, without contributory evidence of fact?

“We have read quite a volume of public comment on this point, which seems to assume that he bore some visible brand which it was blindness not to observe. To us, who heard some 30 witnesses from the Department, seniors of colleagues who had worked with Vassall at one stage or another, the comment came to seem far-fetched indeed.

“We are convinced that Vassall had no office reputation of homosexuality…

“He was effeminate, not manly (“a bit of a miss”, as one fellow clerk said), well but not at all ostentatiously dressed (though one observer did go so far as to say “foppish”), very polite and anxious to please. That was all it came to.”

The tribunal also dismissed Brown’s suggestion of 5 November. Galbraith and Vassall’s correspondence was deemed to be “innocuous and entirely consistent with [a] friendly relationship”.

During the course of the inquiry, Viscount Radcliffe sent two newspaper journalists (Brendan Mulholland, Daily Mail, and Reg Foster, Daily Sketch) to prison after they refused to disclose their sources for stories about Vassall’s private life.

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The report of the Radcliffe Tribunal was debated in the House of Commons on 7 May.

Macmillan said the tribunal was necessary to cut through the “atmosphere of hysteria” that had followed the Vassall case.

He said the spurious allegations levelled against his ministers and government were not only “proved to be false, or based upon no evidence whatever, but they collapsed miserably, like a pack of cards.”

Harold Wilson, who had succeeded the late Gaitskell as Labour leader, said the central fact of the case was that “a man of pretty limited intelligence, not a master spy, just a small-time traitor, who, for seven years, was able to remain undetected and to abstract secret – top secret – documents almost at will.”

He argued that the “wilder press accusations” would have been “avoided if the prime minister had proceeded to set up an inquiry as soon as the case for it became clear”.

He called on Macmillan to take responsibility for the security failings.

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The Vassall scandal, alongside the Profumo affair the following year, contributed to a public perception of a government beset by sleaze, complacency and incompetence.

Macmillan, whose vacillation over the Vassall case came under considerable scrutiny, resigned as prime minister on health grounds in October 1963. He was succeeded by Alec Douglas-Home.

The Vassall and Profumo scandals are said to have contributed to the Conservative Party’s defeat in the 1964 general election.

Galbraith died on 2 January 1982, aged 64, while still an MP. Once the Vassall scandal had subsided, he was appointed as a junior transport minister, but never achieved high office.

Vassall died after suffering a heart attack on a London bus in November 1996, aged 71.