The Profumo affair
England, 1961 to 1963
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In July 1961, during a weekend at Cliveden, Lord Astor's country house in Buckinghamshire, the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, 46, met Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model brought there by the osteopath Stephen Ward. Ward was a friend of Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy whom the British security service knew to be a Russian military intelligence officer, and Keeler is said to have been involved with both men. The affair with the minister lasted only a few months, but the triangle became a national security risk: according to Ward, Ivanov even asked for information about West Germany's nuclear armament.
In December 1962, a shooting at the door of Ward's house in London put Keeler in the newspapers, and the rumours reached Parliament. On 22 March 1963, Profumo told the House of Commons that there had been "no impropriety whatever" in the relationship. On 4 June he confessed that he had lied, and on the 5th his resignation was announced. Ward was prosecuted for living off immoral earnings, took an overdose of sleeping pills at the end of the trial and died on 3 August. The scandal shook the government of Harold Macmillan, who resigned in October 1963 citing illness.
Sources
In the game
Red Box
Buckinghamshire, Sunday, 15 July 1962, 9 pm. In a country house on the banks of the Thames, lent by a lord for the weekend, a red leather box lies open on the desk in the west wing.
Lord Denning's report, published on 26 September 1963, concluded that no secrets had leaked, a conclusion later criticised as superficial. In 2015, a historian of Soviet intelligence claimed that Ivanov had photographed sensitive documents left in the study of the minister's house. The game borrows the weekend at the country house, the Soviet attaché and the suspicion of photographed documents; the copied key, the hidden camera, the characters and the outcome are fiction.
