Great Britain: Miss Mary Doesn’t Answer Any More

With his Savile Row suits and ingratiating manner, spare, handsome William John Christopher Vassall liked to move about Britain’s nicer resorts, impressing elderly ladies and retired colonels as an outwardly gay blade who was really some sort of secret agent. Trouble was, nobody realized just how gay he was—or, for that matter, how secret. Last week Vassall, 38. was convicted in London’s Old Bailey of passing British Admiralty secrets to the Russians for six years, rather than risk exposure as a homosexual.

Chalk Circles. Son of the Anglican curate of Piccadilly’s fashionable St. James’s Church, Vassall was a lower-echelon Admiralty clerk with talents so mediocre he had been passed over for promotion seven years running. He was also, said his defense attorney in a plea for mitigation, a man with “a weakness which has been with him ever since he came into this life.” His weakness did not get him into real trouble until 1955, when he was with the British naval attache’s office in Moscow. At a dinner party arranged by a Pole, Vassall recalled, “I was plied with very strong brandy,” and soon he found himself engaging in “several compromising actions” on a divan with “two or three” other men. Having thoughtfully filmed the occasion, Soviet intelligence agents then smoothly blackmailed Vassall with the pictures.

Sent back to London in 1956, he regularly gave his Soviet embassy contacts copies of Admiralty documents. He arranged some meetings by drawing a chalk circle on the trunk of a plane tree, others by dialing Kensington 8955 and asking for “Miss Mary.” Last May British counterspies finally caught on, and in September he was arrested with 140 photos of Admiralty documents whose exposure, in the court’s words, “would gravely damage the State’s security.”

High Living Standard. The mystery was what took them so long. On $49 a week, Vassall lived in a comfortable Pimlico flat whose proudest ornament was an antique, $1,000 Queen Anne wardrobe. He had 100 silk ties, 19 suits. By paying him nearly as much as the Admiralty did, the Russians helped maintain his high living standard. “He was trapped by lust,” said Attorney General Sir John Hobson, “and cash kept him a prisoner.” Vassall, pleading guilty to four counts of espionage, drew an 18-year sentence.

Coming only six months after a government committee had urged a severe tightening of security procedures, the Vassall affair shook the government. Prime Minister Macmillan responded by ordering a three-man panel of civil servants to report by year’s end how Vassall could have spied for so long without being caught, and whether there was any negligence by those who hired him.

Also upset, though for a different reason, was an elderly widow named Mrs. Norah Reeve, who recently moved into a new apartment—no one seemed quite sure just who occupied it before. After Vassall’s confession was published in the dailies, her phone rang incessantly, she complained, but it was always somebody asking for “Miss Mary.” The post office obligingly changed her number from Kensington 8955.