Free Republic

I'm an over-the-road truck driver. That means I have lots of time to indulge myself in activities not given to ordinary mortals, such as listening gavel-to-gavel to the Senate's impeachment process (still in progress as of this writing). Most ordinary mortals do not enjoy (?) this luxury, because they have lives of their own: things like home, family, hobbies, jobs that don't permit radio or TV listening. But me, I'm a captive audience in my truck, so if I feel like listening, then listening is what I do. It makes the miles go by. In the course of my tuning...

The woman at the centre of the Profumo affair that helped define a decade, has died aged 75. Often presented her as a femme fatale behind the downfall of two powerful men, she spent much of her life trying to shake off that image. In 1963, she rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister, John Profumo while also having a relationship with the Russian diplomat Yevgeny Ivanov at the height of the Cold War. Her life is the subject of a BBC series which will be filmed next year and outlines her upbringing in...

...Fifty years after the Profumo affair erupted, Christine Keeler, now 71, has confessed she played a role in a high-placed spy ring... ...she says: 'However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. The truth is that I betrayed my country. ...The scandal hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler in December 1962. It then emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with former Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then 48, and a handsome Russian...

Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the 'Ace of Spies,' planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918 An MI6 agent became a serial killer as he used pretty young women to lure Russians to their deaths with the promise of sex, new documents reveal. A Cossack colonel called Mohammed Bek Hadji Lashet, and his gang used the women to attract communists to a lakeside villa where they were tortured and then killed, according to a new history of the intelligence service. The book, Six, by former military intelligence officer Michael Smith, reveals...

John Profumo, the cabinet minister at the centre of one of Britain's biggest political scandals, has died aged 91. Mr Profumo was forced to resign in 1963 as minister of war over his extramarital affair with a 19-year-old model, who had also slept with a Soviet diplomat. Breaking at the height of the Cold War, the scandal led to accusations that British security had been at risk. It damaged the Conservative government of the time and contributed to its election defeat in 1964. Mr Profumo quit after confessing he had lied to Parliament about his relationship with the model, Christine...