From The Sunday Times
May 18, 2008
David Leppard
An MI5 officer has been forced to resign after admitting that his wife was a prostitute who took part in a notorious “Nazi-style orgy” with Max Mosley, the Formula One racing chief.
The intelligence officer, who cannot be named for security reasons, left the service last month after it emerged that his wife was one of the five call girls who took part in the sadomasochistic sex session with Mosley.
Exposure of the lurid orgy led to calls for Mosley, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the wartime British fascist leader, to step down from his post as president of the FIA, the governing body of world motor sport.
In an extraordinary turn of events yesterday, MI5 was forced to deny through Whitehall channels that the orgy had been a “sting” that it had set up to discredit Mosley. “Any suggestion that the service was involved in setting up Mosley is total nonsense,” a senior Whitehall official said.
The official did disclose, however, that one of MI5’s officers had left the agency after his wife’s involvement as a call girl in the orgy became known. “I cannot talk about individual cases, but we do expect high standards of behaviour from all staff at all times, both professionally and privately,” the official said.
“In any case where a member of staff is believed to have fallen below those standards, action will be taken.”
The officer is understood to be in his forties and to have served in the military before joining MI5, where he was involved in surveillance operations.
The disclosure is a severe embarrassment to Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, who is understood to have informed Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, and assured them the agency was not involved in any sting.
Questions will now be asked about why the service’s vetting procedures failed to expose the secret, which could have made the officer vulnerable to blackmail.
Mosley, who is 68 and has been married since 1960, is one of the most powerful men in world sport. His father was a hate figure who led the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was the society beauty Diana Mitford, a great admirer of Adolf Hitler.
When the story broke, Mosley said he had been told by a source close to the security services that he had been targeted in a covert investigation of his private life “by a group specialising in such things for reasons and clients as yet unknown”.
The F1 boss’s five-hour sex session with the five call girls took place in an underground “torture chamber” in Chelsea, west London. The Oxford-educated former barrister is alleged to have re-enacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.
The session is alleged to have involved prostitutes dressed as German officers and camp inmates. It was secretly caught on video by one of the call girls, who used the name Mistress Abi. Sources said it was Abi’s husband who worked for MI5 and that she sold the story to the News of the World newspaper for an undisclosed sum. According to the paper, Mistress Abi wore a Luftwaffe uniform during the session and oversaw beatings of Mosley.
In the video Mosley can be seen standing naked as Abi ties him up with chains before ordering him to lie face down on the bed. Later she screams: “Face down! Did I say move? We don’t want you comfortable.”
Mosley was condemned by Jewish groups and leading figures in the motor racing world. He was snubbed by the crown prince of Bahrain, who told him not to attend the Bahrain Grand Prix last month.
Sir Jackie Stewart, the former world motor racing champion, said that Mosley’s position was “untenable”. The Monaco royal family, the Grimaldis, have made it clear that he is not welcome at next Sunday’s showpiece grand prix in the principality.
Mosley has been unapologetic and has claimed that he needs to stay on to fight the Nazi allegations in a libel action. He denied the orgy had any Nazi theme and said it was “harmless” and “completely legal”. Disclosure of the MI5 officer’s role appears to be his latest tactic in a desperate attempt to save his job. “This is an astonishing piece of information, which I will pass on to my legal advisers,” he said last night.
The News of the World denies there was any collusion between itself and the secret services.
MI5 employs 3,500 people in the fight against Al-Qaeda and hostile powers and prides itself on its discretion. It has been horrified to discover that an officer has become involved, even indirectly, in a high-profile sex scandal.
The service will have been forced to conduct a thorough review of the officer’s work and personal life to establish whether he has put any state secrets at risk.
Security sources say that in any case where an MI5 officer or a close family member is involved in prostitution there is a risk that their integrity — and hence national security — could be compromised.
One official said: “Clearly there would be a conflict there for any member of the service. Prostitutes by the very nature of their business will be connected to people who are probably in the criminal fraternity.”
An internal MI5 investigation is trying to establish whether the officer knew his wife was involved in prostitution and whether he was involved in her business affairs.
The matter is also being examined by the Quest security company, run by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, the former Metropolitan police commissioner who investigated the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Quest was already working for the FIA when it was asked to investigate the Mosley affair.
Mosley is facing a confidence vote in a secret ballot of the 220 members of the FIA assembly in Paris on June 3. He has written to the presidents of member clubs painting a doomsday scenario if he is forced out of office. He says he needs to stay at the helm of the Formula One governing body until October next year in the interests of the sport.
The suggestion of MI5 involvement in the Mosley scandal will bring back echoes of the role that the spy service had in monitoring his father. Documents released by the Public Records Office in 2002 showed how the intelligence agency had planted unnamed informants inside the British Union of Fascists. They reported on him until his arrest and detention in 1940.
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