Girl with a short towel

Kristin Kiler, a woman, died, due to which the main spy sex scandal in modern British history happened

On December 4, Christina Kiler died in the English Farnborough, a woman who, when she was 19, provoked the most loud government scandal in the modern history of Great Britain. The novice model and stripper, the killer slept simultaneously with a senior official of the conservative government and an employee of the Soviet embassy; When everything was revealed, the official had to resign first, and then the prime minister. "Medusa" tells the details of the history of KILL, in which there was a place for the pro -school, and armed attacks, and suicide, and lies under the oath, and lonely old age.

On July 8, 1961, nineteen -year -old Christine Kiler decided to swim in the pool naked.

The case was in Klawden-the suburban estate of the English Lord Astor, who, in kindness of sincere, allowed one of the houses on the territory of the estate, Stephen Ward, his friend, the famous osteopath with an elite clientele-amateur, who also painted members of the British royal family. Ward loved a beautiful life and beautiful women-in particular, he often went to the Murray= strip club in London Soho, where he met a young killer who escaped to the capital from a dysfunctional youth: the girl grew up with her mother and stepfather in a residential building, which was converted to a residential building next to a career, and at the age of 17 gave birth to her first child. From the audible American soldier, who was behind the ocean by the time of birth (the boy died six days after birth). KILER and her MURRAYER friend Mandy Rice Davis made friends with Ward, who by that time was already almost 50; Although the girl had new boyfriends every now and then, she still regularly returned to live with an osteopath - and spent time with him and his friends on the estate of Astora.

On those July weekend in 1961, Astors received high-ranking guests. When the killer sailed naked in the pool, John Profumo, military secretary of the then British conservative government, came there. Leaving the water, the girl tried to cover herself, but the towel was short, and there was not enough for his whole body. Kiler became interested in Profumo - however, the minister’s wife, the famous British actress Valerie Hobson, soon came up, so they only managed to get to know each other.

The next day, on Sunday morning, another important guest came to Astora-Evgeny Ivanov, assistant to the naval attache of the Soviet embassy in the UK. Ivanov was also an officer of the GRU - the British services knew about this and hoped to turn over the intelligence officer who clearly liked the bourgeois life and frivolous parties. The guests all together swimmed in the pool (this time in bathing suits); Profumo promised Kiler that he would be in touch with her - but she left for London with Ivanov. Already there, according to the later statements, Kiler, she had sex with a Soviet citizen.

A few days later, the killer himself contacted the Kiler - and they began a fleeting romance. For all later evidence, love about love here was not about - exclusively about physical attraction; Profumo himself, after many years, recalled that he had nothing to talk about with a girl: she was interested in exclusively cosmetics, styling and pop singing. They usually met at Ward at home.

In early August, rumors that the military secretary was communicating with the company around Ward, reached Profum's colleagues - and he was warned that it could be unsafe: British intelligence was not fully confident in why the osteopath was establishing ties with Soviet officials (he himself said that he wanted to go to the USSR to draw portraits of communist leaders). After that, the KILLER wrote a felt letter that they would not be able to meet again until September; Whether their meetings continued after that, it is certainly not known, but by December 1961 the novel was definitely over.

Christina Kiler continued to live a full life and drive men crazy. In October 1961, she had an affair with Aloisius Gordon-a Jamaician musician with a criminal past; At some point, he began to be jealous of the killer, and she did not like it; She complained about him to the police. A year later, a similar story happened to another boyfriend Kiler - Johnny Edjkomb; When they met with Gordon, Edjkomb even attacked a musician with a knife. In December 1962, the jealous Ezhkomb appeared home to Ward, where the killer lived, and demanded that he be given a former girl then; When this did not happen, he shot several times at the front door. The police arrested Ejomb and began to figure out what had happened. So the sex scandal with the participation of the British Military Secretary, which until then spoke of an undertone, gradually became public.

After this incident, the killer, trying to take away the accusations of prostitution, began to talk about her connections with Profumo and Ivanov. On January 22, 1963, the Soviet government recalled to Moscow. At first, the British newspapers were very careful about this story: shortly before, in the fall of 1962, two journalists were sent to prison for refusing to disclose the sources of their publications on homosexual relations between the clerk of the British Admiralty, which turned out to be Soviet spy and his boss (information in these publications turned out to be false). One way or another, the intrigue became the secret of the postgraduate-and when the killer suddenly did not appear at the court session in the case against Edzhkomb on March 14, 1963, the newspapers began to hint very transparently that something was unclean and that the girl could be connected by professional.

A week later, they started talking about the scandal in parliament. One of the deputies of Labor, demanded clarifications from the conservative government about rumors about the connection of one of the ministers with a killer and a criminal case against Ejomb, the other hinted at the disappeared witness. On March 22, 1963, Profumo himself made an official statement in the parliament: he said that he was “friends” with Kieler and Ward, said that he had the last time he saw a girl in December 1961, indicated that he had met with Ivanov twice in the same year, and categorically stated that there was “nothing obscene” in his relationship with Kieler.

A few days later, Kiler himself was found in Madrid: she stated that she went to Spain to rest and simply confused the date of the court session, which was supposed to speak.

From a formal point of view, it all ended on this - but history continued to develop. The police launched an investigation against Ward, and customers began to leave him; Ward, in turn, secretly turned to the government, saying that he lied, covering Profumo, and asking for the investigation against him to be stopped. At some point, he turned to the leader of the Labor, who, in turn, showed Warder Garold Makmillan. It soon became clear that Profumo lied. The military secretary admitted to his whole wife and superiors - and on June 5 he resigned, confessing that he was telling the lie.

Oddly enough, in the end, this story ended better than all specifically for Profumo. The military secretary decided to atone for his guilt before charity, and achieved great success in this field. He began as a volunteer in an organization helping the London poor, and as a result, after a few decades he became its president; Margaret Thatcher for his work called him a national hero; Their marriage with Valery Hobson survived the shocks of the early 1960s-and they remained together until the actress’s death in the late 1990s.

The rest had to be worse. Ward was accused of immoral behavior and that he earned the fact that he sold the sexual services of his friends; Without waiting for the verdict, he took a huge dose of sleeping pills and died a few days later, without regaining consciousness (however, the court managed to find him guilty during his lifetime - although then he was criticized a lot). Lord Astor, who provided Ward with his cottage, became an outcast in the British highlight; He died in 1966, and the estate, where the killer sailed naked in the pool, was soon sold.

The whole story was worth the power to the conservatives. The publicists wrote that the case of a professional finally designated the complete moral fall of the British aristocracy. The Laborists said that McMillan and colleagues reacted irresponsibly to the threat of national security, which could come from the communication of Profumo with the circle of Ward (and from the fact that the killer slept simultaneously with Profumo and Ivanov); In the debates, politics, in particular, called the girl a “prostitute” and “whore” on this subject. In the end, a special investigation did not find any evidence that Profumo told anyone British secrets or was disloyal to the authorities, and Macmillan at first remained at his post-but then he fell ill, decided that he had a cancer, and resigned. In October 1964, the Labor came to power in the UK.

Evgeny Ivanov, returning to the USSR, broke up with his wife and spent the rest of his life alone, having worked for almost twenty years to the head of the GRU analysis department. In 1993, according to Kiler, she came to Moscow and met with a former lover, who by that time was supposedly a “lonely unhappy person” who was shy about showing the English woman her poor apartment.

Kristin Kiler himself was difficult. In June 1963, she participated in the process against another former lover, who allegedly attacked her - that very Aloisius Gordon; He was found guilty mainly on the basis of the testimony of the girl - and then it turned out that she lied under the oath. For the cottage of false testimony, Kiler spent six months in prison - and almost all the money she earned, selling her story to reporters, went to lawyers.

The killer became a symbol of his time (her portrait made in 1963 by Luss Morley, one of the most famous British photographs of the 1960s), but did not make a career as a model. As always happens in such cases, the profession of profession completely determined her life. For the next decades, she, according to her own later memories, interrupted from bread to water. She worked in restaurants and laundries, hiding her real name; She got married twice, gave birth twice and quickly divorced twice. Sometimes they remembered her-in the late 1980s, when Brian Ferry shot her in his video “Kiss and Tell”, and Joanna Welly played her in the film “Scandal” based on the Profummo case; In 2013, when the musical Andrew Lloyd Webber “Stephen Ward” came out in London. Sometimes she reminded of herself-for example, when in the early 2000s she released memoirs, in which she stated that she had an abortion from Profumo and that Stephen Ward was an agent of Soviet intelligence and tried to kill her. Of course, no one believed her.

Christina Kiler died on December 4, 2017, having long survived all the main participants in the Profumo case. She was 75 years old. She spent most of her life alone.

Alexander Gorbachev