Gay Spies in Intelligence

Once erased or exploited, queerness was long treated as a national security threat across Western intelligence agencies. From Cold War betrayals to rainbow flags over Langley and Vauxhall Cross, this is the story of secrecy, shame—and a reckoning decades in the making.

The Cambridge Ring

Trinity College’s cloisters and great courts were the early stage for the story of Britain’s gay spies. Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were both products of Cambridge University, where a left-wing, bohemian culture took root among certain elite circles. Burgess famously flaunted his aristocratic pedigree even as a young communist: he ‘always insisted on wearing his Old Etonian tie’ – at Cambridge, at the BBC, even while ‘trawling in his spare time for rough trade in the bars and public toilets of London’. Blunt, like Burgess, was also homosexual – then a criminal offence – and both men belonged to the secretive Apostles dining club at Cambridge, which boasted many Marxist sympathisers, also gay.  In that atmosphere of anti-bourgeois rebellion, sexuality and ideology went hand in hand for the ‘Cambridge ring.’ As journalist Richard Norton‑Taylor observed, espionage was ironically suited to men ‘used to hiding their personal proclivities’: they ‘could keep secrets, and tell lies’ almost by default .

Burgess and Blunt used their privileged backgrounds and social connections to secure sensitive jobs with minimal scrutiny. They were ‘barely vetted’ by MI5 and MI6 despite a track record of indiscretion and even drunken bragging that they were Soviet agents. Their fellow spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean were from similar circles, and one can imagine MI5 leaders privately whispering about the ‘unnatural proclivities’ of these men even as they failed to stop them. The Cambridge ring betrayed Britain on an unprecedented scale, but only after Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951 did the services begin to suspect how deep the rot had gone. The fact that Burgess and Blunt were gay only added to the scandal and the paranoia in Whitehall, reinforcing the now-discredited idea that homosexuality was inseparable from treachery.

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Blackmail and Paranoia

During and after the Cold War, Britain’s spy agencies treated homosexuals as special liabilities.  The belief was that a gay officer — legally vulnerable and conventionally closeted — could be easily blackmailed by an enemy. As Moore later noted, intelligence officials had argued that gay people were ‘more susceptible to blackmail than straight people.’  In practice, this meant that even top talent was taboo if known to be gay.  Perhaps the most tragic emblem of this era was Alan Turing: the brilliant mathematician who helped crack the German Enigma code was prosecuted in 1952 for having a gay relationship and was stripped of his security clearance. Bletchley Park’s greatest codebreaker, who had risked his life for Britain, was forced out of GCHQ and chemically castrated simply for his sexuality.

Consider now the case of Jeremy Wolfenden, a young British journalist and covert MI6 asset in 1960s Moscow. Wolfenden was gay at a time when Britain’s Espionage Acts forbade homosexual officers, and the KGB smelled blood. As The Independent recounts, a handsome barber working under KGB orders lured Wolfenden to the Ukraine Hotel with promises of love. Just as they prepared to sleep together, a hidden camera shutter snapped on Wolfenden and the barber. The Soviets then blackmailed Wolfenden: inform on Western diplomats, or be publicly exposed. Wolfenden did the only thing he could – he immediately reported the plot to MI6, which nonetheless urged him to cooperate with Soviet demands for more intelligence. Caught between both sides, Wolfenden ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown and died young. His story is just one of many where a gay man’s secret put him in the crosshairs of spies on both East and West.

Yet, Wolfenden’s ordeal underscores a more systemic tale. By mid-century, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western governments were conducting what one historian calls the “Lavender Scare”’ – the mass purge of gay and lesbian civil servants as alleged security risks. In the US, this often paralleled the anti-Communist “Red Scare”: state departments, the FBI, and CIA routinely denied or revoked security clearances for those who were suspected of same-sex attraction. The fear was that closeted LGBT employees could be blackmailed by Soviet agents. A 2000 Washington Post report recalled that ‘not many years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency automatically denied a security clearance to anyone it suspected was homosexual, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were ripe for blackmail.’ In practice, this meant blanket discrimination. President Eisenhower’s administration even labelled homosexuality a ‘sexual perversion’ unfit for intelligence work.

The fear of blackmail was not unfounded. In 1962, John Vassall, a lowly clerk in the British naval intelligence office in Moscow, was lured into a KGB ‘honeytrap.’  Vassall’s situation was desperate: he was lonely in a foreign land and closeted at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in both Britain and the Soviet Union.  KGB operatives befriended him at a hotel dinner and got him drunk and, ‘soon, he was naked and lying on a divan,’ where two men raped him and a third took photographs . A few months later, Soviets burst in on Vassall during a consensual encounter, showed him the compromising pictures, and gave him an ultimatum: ‘He could spy for Moscow, or be ruined and exposed.’ Vassall chose espionage. Over the next six years he passed thousands of sensitive documents to the Soviet Union, even while maintaining his routine duties in London.

The Vassall scandal erupted in 1962 and caused a media frenzy. The government was embarrassed into a Whitehall ‘witch-hunt’ for other ‘gay traitors,’ and several of Vassall’s friends were summarily fired from government service. Yet in hindsight historians note that Vassall was targeted not because he was uniquely immoral, but because the circumstances of his life (greedy classmates, strict laws) made blackmail easier. In truth, any spy of the era, gay or straight, could have been coerced – but only one had the whole machinery of social stigma turned on him. The Vassall case cemented the stereotype of the homosexual security risk in British intelligence.

Changing Culture in Intelligence

It took until the 1990s for these rules to change. In the US, an Executive Order signed by President Clinton in 1995 officially ended the ban on clearances ‘solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the employee.’ Two decades later, CIA officers could attend Pride events at Langley with Congress members – a world away from the closet where their predecessors once hid.

Britain followed a similar arc, albeit on its own timetable. Homosexual acts were only decriminalised in England in 1967, yet MI5, MI6 and even the signals agency GCHQ carried on formal bans into the 1980s. One BBC account reported that gay recruits were barred at GCHQ until the 1990s.

The GCHQ director, Robert Hannigan, publicly apologiszed in 2016 for those policies. ‘Not letting gay people work for GCHQ until the 1990s was wrong,’ he said, calling it ‘the nation’s loss’. GCHQ had begun as the ultra-secretive successor to Bletchley Park, where codebreaker Alan Turing helped crack the Nazis’ Enigma cipher. Following state persecution for his sexuality, Turing would commit suicide in 1954. Decades later, GCHQ’s leaders openly lamented that they ‘did not learn our lesson from Turing.’ Only in 2013 did Queen Elizabeth II grant Turing a posthumous royal pardon, and in 2016 GCHQ’s head publicly apologized for the old ban on gay recruits. Later on Alan Turing became the face of the £50 bill.

By the 21st century, the tide had fully turned.  MI5 and MI6 had scrapped their old bans on LGBT!+ officers.  In MI5’s case though, official recruitment of openly gay candidates did not begin until around 2008. Only then did attitudes begin to thaw. MI5’s rank in Stonewall’s national workplace-equality index climbed from 25th in 2013 to the top spot in 2016. MI5’s Director General Andrew Parker summed up the new mindset: ‘Diversity is vital for MI5, not just because it’s right that we represent the communities we serve, but also because we rely on the skills of the most talented people, whoever they are’. MI6 followed suit. In 2016 MI6 announced that it would illuminate its Vauxhall Cross headquarters in rainbow colors for Pride, and then‑director Sir Alex Younger declared that MI6 must be ‘a workforce as diverse as the country it serves’ in order to keep Britain safe.

Internal practices also changed.  Where once security vetting included intrusive questions about a man’s private life, now the services emphasise equality.  MI5 even flies a permanent rainbow flag at its Thames House HQ on Pride days, and hosts an annual joint conference with MI6 and GCHQ for LGBT staff. The 2021 apology by Sir Richard Moore capped these changes by acknowledging past wrongs and pledging further inclusion. As Moore put it, even after the 1991 change some homophobia lingered and, ‘we still have more to do… [our] goal is to make sure MI6 is a workplace where you can always bring your true self to work’. In short, what was once a source of shame or secrecy in Britain’s spy agencies has become something to be openly celebrated.

Across the Atlantic, after the Clinton-era change, the CIA joined other agencies in outreach to LGBT employees. In June 2000, CIA Director George Tenet welcomed openly gay Congressman Barney Frank to Langley for a Gay and Lesbian Pride Month event, signaling, ‘how far the agency has come from its homophobic past’. That same year saw the formal recognition of ANGLE (the Agency Network of Gay and Lesbian Employees) at CIA, the first time the spy agency accepted an internal LGBT affinity group. From the 2000s onward, annual Pride celebrations became routine.

Even President Obama’s administration publicised CIA’s active inclusion. In a 2012 CIA blog post anonymously by “Central Intelligence Agency,” senior leaders emphasized diversity for ‘LGBT employees’ and hailed the goal of an inclusive workplace – ‘one Agency, one organization, one workforce’. In other words, a staffer’s sexuality was no longer seen as a security flaw but as part of a multicultural whole. Similar shifts happened in other Western countries: the U.S. Department of State formally apologized in 2017 for the “Lavender Scare” purges of the mid-20th century , and even lawmakers have pressed for official apologies on behalf of all federal agencies. A U.S. Senate resolution from 2016 urged a collective reckoning with that history. In 2025, we expect the Trump administration to reverse all the progress in this direction.

The Rest of the World

But what about America’s adversaries? The Soviet intelligence services had their own tangled relationship with homosexuality. Homosexual acts were illegal in the USSR (only decriminalized in 1993), so very few openly gay Soviet citizens served in KGB or FSB ranks.  However, the KGB did exploit homosexuality ruthlessly as an espionage tool. Besides the Wolfenden case, many American and Western diplomats fell victim to Moscow honey-traps.  Joseph Alsop, a prominent U.S. journalist and ex-CIA consultant, was lured to Russia and blackmailed for his bachelor homosexuality; the KGB’s files on him were later recovered as part of the Venona intercepts. As one retrospective notes, ‘western nationals being seduced and blackmailed by Soviet agents was a surprisingly well-documented thing’, and while heterosexual traps were common, ‘the threat of exposure of homosexual leanings made blackmail that much more potent.’ Countless lesser-known incidents surely slipped under the historical radar. Inside the USSR, the attitude was hypocritical: while uniformedly homophobic in public, the KGB sometimes used coerced—or even willing—gay agents in their spycraft. The Communist Bloc’s internal narrative often lumped Western spy-hunts and gay ‘depravity’ together, reinforcing Stalin-era paranoia about ‘internal enemies.’

A fascinating twist came in East Germany. The communist GDR technically decriminalised male homosexuality in 1968 (having followed Soviet law until then), but the Stasi (East German secret police) still viewed gays with suspicion. Historian Samuel Huneke has shown that by 1960, Stasi officers feared that Western intelligence was ‘recruiting among homosexual circles.’ One memoir relates how the Stasi recruited a young gay man code-named ‘Franz Moor’ to infiltrate West German gay bars and groups. In effect, the GDR repurposed homosexual networks – once considered ‘enemy elements’ – as vectors of espionage. The Stasi’s files on ‘Franz’ run hundreds of pages, mapping friendships and outings in the gay subculture. In Huneke’s words, this became a ‘self-reinforcing cycle’ of paranoia: the regime believed gay men and their hidden social networks ‘posed an intelligence threat’, and so insisted on surveilling and recruiting them.

By contrast, in unified West Germany, homosexuality was slowly liberalised: Hitler’s amplified Paragraph 175 (criminalising gay sex) was repealed by 1969, and the law stayed on the books only in East Germany until 1968. Thanks to reunification, ‘Paragraph 175 remained in various forms until 1994,’ the U.S. Holocaust Museum notes. It’s fair to infer that West German agencies like the BND quietly aligned with these changing social norms; in any case, by the late Cold War the rich, secretive corridors of Bonn and Berlin were no longer officially closed to gay men and women.

In France and Israel, the historical arc was a little different. The French intelligence service (DGSE) has never published any dating of bans; France decriminalised homosexual acts as far back as the Revolution (though Vichy reintroduced restrictions during WWII). There are few public anecdotes of French spies in this context. By the late 20th century, French military and intelligence culture became broadly tolerant. In Israel, homosexuality was never illegal under state law (indeed, Israel has long been apparently liberal by Middle East standards); the IDF (Israel Army) only formally lifted its ban on gay soldiers in 1993. Mossad officials have remained tight-lipped, but Israel’s spy agencies operate in a society that legalised same-sex marriage in 2000 and where LGBT rights are robust. Anecdotal evidence (and the sheer lack of public scandals) suggests that by the 21st century, an Israeli intelligence officer’s sexual orientation appeared to be a non-issue. Still, we must remember that Mossad is considered the most secretive of all and the most brutal intelligence agency.

New Realities

This radical shift in culture still leaves open questions. By their nature, the security services keep personnel records secret, so no one knows exactly how many careers were wrecked by the gay ban. As one MI6 statement admitted, ‘it is not known how many people were affected by the discriminatory policy’. We do know some stories. A Foreign Office official who arrived in 1991 was promptly outed to MI5, sent home on a flight and told he would be sacked – and only kept in service after humiliating concessions (he had to ‘come out’ to dozens of friends and carry a ‘pink tag’ on his file). These experiences left scars of ‘resentment and fear,’ even after the law changed.

Yet many current officers report a very different atmosphere today. The spy agencies now recruit openly without the old suspicions: gay men and women serve in MI5 counter‑terrorism teams, MI6 intelligence operations, and at GCHQ, often without fanfare. The rainbow banners and networks aren’t just gestures – they reflect a war for talent and trust in the post-Cold War world. In intelligence, as in society at large, the door to the closet has at last been forced open. The agency chiefs insist that love of country, not the gender of one’s partner, defines a good spy. For the generation of closeted agents who slipped quietly out of the services, today’s acknowledgments may come too late. But for their successors, the message is clear: it is ideas and loyalty – not one’s secret life – that matters in Britain’s secret service.

Today, by contrast, open pride marches and affirmative policies have largely replaced the old taboos at least in the West. Intelligence agencies now vie to show inclusiveness. The CIA posts LGBT recruitment messages; its affiliate ANGLE hosts networking and outreach.  British intelligence celebrated its first LGBT History Month and participates in Pride parades. U.S. cyber-espionage units like Israel’s 8200 (and even branches of the KGB’s successor agencies) are noted in open sources as among the most gay-friendly units in their militaries. There is even official recognition that forcing LGBT staff out was counterproductive: MI6’s apology notes that Britain ‘deprived ourselves of some of the best talent’ by banning LGBT recruits. The language has shifted from spying on ‘deviant’ sexualities to recruiting diversity of thought as an asset. MI6 has even appointed this year a woman, Blaise Metreweli, as its leader, a historic first for the group.

Yet the past is not forgotten. Declassified archives continue to expose how many queer lives were entangled in the intelligence game – sometimes as operatives, more often as pawns. For intelligence historians, the history of homosexuality and espionage remains a powerful case study in how state security paranoia can warp justice and ruin careers.  Espionage thrives on secrets, and for a time the secret of the spy’s own self was deemed the greatest vulnerability of all.  In the end, many agencies themselves have acknowledged how misguided that fear was, and have sought to atone. The elegiac lesson – voiced in BBC documentaries and stonewall apologies – is that openness and loyalty need not be adversaries. As one veteran MI5 officer put it, a service ‘thick with homosexual officers’ once joked that their network was the ‘Homintern’ – a playful riff on communist paranoia.  Today that hidden community can finally step into the light, while intelligence agencies claim they are safer for it.

Note: Historical and journalistic accounts from the CIA, MI5/MI6, and others, including declassified archives and expert analyses. Key quotations are drawn from declassified statements and news reports , and from memoirs or interviews with intelligence figures where available. The independent case of Wolfenden is documented in The Independent. Ministry of Defence and intelligence websites provide official apologies. Emphasis here is on well-documented cases and credible commentaries. The cultural shift is reflected in Stonewall Workplace Equality Index reports and agency press releases.

Research by Taylor Abbot and Dominik Böhler. Supported by OpenAI o3.

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