Jeremy Wolfenden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

The son of John Wolfenden, the chair of the Wolfenden Report, which led to the legalisation of male homosexual acts in Britain, Jeremy was himself homosexual.^[1][2] 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.

Wolfenden was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) before becoming the Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent in Moscow 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 Soviet's favour. Wolfenden subsequently came under pressure from both SIS and the KGB while in Moscow and swapped roles with the Telegraph's Washington correspondent, where he married Martina Browne.

He died aged 31 in what appeared to be suspicious circumstances in Washington. 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.

A short biography of Wolfenden appears in the book The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks^[3].

[edit] References