Roger Hollis in 1956 and remaining in that post until his retirement in 1965. After Kim Philby's flight from Beirut to Moscow in 1963, rumours began to circulate that Hollis had alerted him to his impending arrest. Hollis was criticised for not alerting John Profumo, the War Secretary in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, that he might have become entangled with a Soviet spy ring through his friendship with Stephen Ward, and his affair with showgirl Christine Keeler, who was introduced by Ward to Profumo. Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov was also involved with Keeler at this time, in the early
Profumo affair to reveal their sources for sensational and uncorroborated stories about Vassall's private life. The imprisonment severely damaged relations between the press and the Macmillan government; the "New Statesman"s columnist Paul Johnson warned: "[A]ny Tory minister or MP ... who gets involved in a scandal during the next year or so must expect—I regret to say—the full treatment". Brigadier John, 5th Baron Profumo (1915–2006), was born in 1915, of Italian descent. His family, on his father's side, were minor Italian aristocracy, and were awarded a low-ranking Italian peerage by the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1843. 'Jack' Profumo inherited this peerage, the