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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.
