The journalist who broke the Profumo scandal was a Communist Party member and an informant for the Czech secret police, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Peter Earle was the chief crime reporter for the News of the World when he revealed that showgirl Christine Keeler had simultaneous affairs with both Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov.
The controversy triggered the collapse of Harold Macmillan’s Tory government and the introduction of Harold Wilson’s first Labour administration in 1964.
Now, an extraordinary collection of Cold War intelligence files held in Prague’s secret police archive cast a new light on Mr Earle, who died in 1997 aged 71.
Documents unearthed by the MoS show that he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1947 and retained his membership for at least 20 years.
They also reveal that from at least 1966 to 1968, Mr Earle was a secret informant, codenamed ‘LON’, of Czechoslovakia’s brutal StB (Statni bezpecnost) spy agency.
He supplied information on politicians’ sexual predilections and details about the Profumo-linked femme fatale hostess Mariella Novotny, according to the files.
Mr Earle had regular meetings with his handler Karel Pravec, codenamed Comrade Pelnar, who was based in Czechoslovakia’s London embassy.
Peter Earle (right), the News of the World hack who broke the Profumo scandal, was a Communist Party member and an informant for the Czech secret police
The files show Major Pravec, then aged 35, first met Mr Earle at an embassy cocktail party in April 1966, before arranging a lunch meeting at Rules in Covent Garden, London’s oldest restaurant.
The files indicate they struck up a rapport, prompting Major Pravec to ‘recruit [Earle] as an asset and extract information from him’.
By their third meeting in June, Major Pravec was asking the reporter to gather information, including intelligence on Harold Wilson’s trip to America, as well as details of meetings in Parliament.
He later supplied details of the gambling habits of politicians after a request from Major Pravec, which Mr Earle ‘promised to satisfy’.
He also reported to his handler that an arrest warrant had been issued for a ‘gay man’ in Lisbon who allegedly ‘provided underage cadets and girls, among other things, to [Labour] MPs [Tom] Driberg, [Marcus] Lipton (only girls) and one Conservative MP’.
It was at a meeting in Soho in March 1967 that Mr Earle spoke of his political affiliations and, according to the files, described how ‘he himself is secretly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and has been since 1947’.
Immediately suspicious of the claims, the Czech agent asked his superiors to check out Mr Earle and a report came back confirming his party membership. But the StB’s HQ report also cautioned Major Pravec to be wary in case Mr Earle’s aim was to ‘unmask you as a spy’.
They also provided comments on how Major Pravec should approach another top target, former MP and paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson, then a Labour researcher.
The Mail on Sunday revealed in 2019 how Czech intelligence files alleged that Mr Robinson passed on more than 80 pieces of information to Communist agents at the height of the Cold War – a claim he strenuously denies.
Mr Earle spent the last 25 years of his career at the News of the World and in 1978 also revealed the poison umbrella assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge.
Described as an eccentric ‘who consumed 60 cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch each day’, he died of cancer in April 1997 and was survived by his four children.
Tom Mangold, a former BBC Panorama reporter who last year produced a BBC documentary on the Profumo affair, said: ‘I am surprised to hear Peter was still a Communist [in the 1960s], but my own feeling is that he was about as political as a dead log – I don’t think it was big for him.
‘It’s [1947] a very odd time to join the Communist Party and be a Communist, it’s a time when Moscow was beginning to show its teeth.
‘I don’t think that [Communism] was a big issue in the story [Profumo] but of course at the time we tried to make it a big issue because to have spies, Communists, CIA, MI5, MI6, and Christine Keeler – it was a dream.
‘That being said, the Czechs kept a close eye on all this and they must have been very good at picking up items that could be used for blackmail later on. The StB thing, we all knew they had the brief to run Fleet Street on behalf of the KGB.’
Last night, Mr Earle’s eldest daughter, Valerie Carrier, a retired primary school headteacher, 67, from Sydenham, South-East London, said: ‘It had to have been a front – he was always a true-blue Tory.
‘If he saw anyone from the Labour Party on the TV, he would go crazy. To say he would do anything against his country would be untrue.
‘He always kept his family life and his work life separate, but he was a patriot and a royalist.
‘Any secret life he may have had was to protect king and country.’
Three double brandies, fifteen furtive meetings in London’s finest restaurants – and a showgirl who had a fling with JFK
Standing alone with a cocktail, his face obscured by cigarette smoke, Peter Earle cut an intriguing figure.
That at least is what Czech spymaster Major Karel Pravec thought as he glided across the room with his hand outstretched. Mr Earle was someone he had to meet.
It was April 26, 1966. The occasion: a party at the Czech Embassy in one of the Italianate-style mansions of Kensington Palace Gardens in London.
To Pravec, what distinguished 41-year-old Earle from the other invited journalists was that he had broken the story of the Profumo affair three years earlier, a scandal that had not only toppled War Minister John Profumo but wounded the Establishment, led to the fall of Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government and helped hasten the end of British notions of deference towards authority.
All this was noted with fascination in Communist Czechoslovakia. Now, Earle was mingling with its agents at a party.
What type of man would inflict such damage upon his own country? What were his motivations?
With or without Earle’s input, the biggest political scandal of the century would have broken sooner rather than later.
Peter Earle (left) was the chief crime reporter for the News of the World when he revealed that showgirl Christine Keeler (right) had simultaneous affairs with both Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov
But as Pravec would later discover, the News of the World’s top investigator was hiding something that would cast the affair in an intriguing light: he was a secret member of the Communist Party.
Eliciting this admission from his chain-smoking new acquaintance would take months.
For now, Pravec was content to gently probe and try to determine whether the tall man before him might be someone worth cultivating as an informant.
In a report of their embassy encounter, Pravec observed that Earle, married with four children, was a political realist and ‘quite’ anti-American.
He did not think much of West Germany and was able to ‘evaluate the shortcomings in the capitalist system’.
The two men also chatted about a shared interest in classical music.
Pravec noted approvingly that ‘he even knows about Eugen Suchon’ the Slovak composer, and claimed Earle was an ‘aficionado’ of gourmet cuisine and fine wine ‘which he prioritises over hard liquor’.
In reality, it was Pravec who relished the high-life, probably even more than amiable Earle, a 60-cigarette and a bottle of Scotch a day man – a rakish character even by the louche standards of 1960s Fleet Street.
A former colleague of Earle’s recalled that ‘he loudly declaimed his views in a manner that was straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel.
He was unfailingly courteous to ladies... and his conversation was peppered with phrases such as “I say, my dear fellow”.’
After the cocktail party, Pravec waited nine days before contacting his new acquaintance.
Pravec called from a telephone box, inviting Earle to Rules (pictured), a quintessentially British restaurant
