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Spying

Among the diplomats that attended Stephen Ward's parties was a Russian naval attaché Eugene (Yevgeny) Ivanov.  Yevgeny used Stephen’s desire to draw Khrushchev to strengthen their friendship and they spent a lot of time together, leavened by Stephen’s apparent willingness to pass on any information about British foreign policy that he may happen upon.

According to secret papers, now public, in 1961 this became a specific request from Yevgeny to obtain information about disposition of western nuclear weapons in Germany.  Stephen duly arranged for Christine to meet John Profumo, Minister for War, at an infamous pool party, and a brief affair began. 

It is claimed by all concerned that this failed to elicit the information requested by Ivanov.

Until her death Christine maintained that she refused to ask what was requested of her and until his death in 2006, Profumo maintained that no such information was either elicited or provided.  Both were proven liars but the secret papers generally supported the view that this was not the sort of information that would make good pillow talk and that while Profumo may have been foolish, he was no traitor. You can read Yevgeny's Wikipedia entry here...

MI5 already knew Yevgeny was actually a GRU (Soviet Secret Service) spy but it seems that they failed to warn Profumo.  A year after the infamous Profumo/Keeler affair was over, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Ward is said to have acted as a middle-man, putting the Russians in touch with the British establishment on Khrushchev’s behalf to see if there was a way of breaking the standoff with the Americans.

 

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Travel

Hong Kong and Shenzhen China

 

 

 

 

 

Following our Japan trip in May 2017 we all returned to Hong Kong, after which Craig and Sonia headed home and Wendy and I headed to Shenzhen in China. 

I have mentioned both these locations as a result of previous travels.  They form what is effectively a single conurbation divided by the Hong Kong/Mainland border and this line also divides the population economically and in terms of population density.

These days there is a great deal of two way traffic between the two.  It's very easy if one has the appropriate passes; and just a little less so for foreign tourists like us.  Australians don't need a visa to Hong Kong but do need one to go into China unless flying through and stopping at certain locations for less than 72 hours.  Getting a visa requires a visit to the Chinese consulate at home or sitting around in a reception room on the Hong Kong side of the border, for about an hour in a ticket-queue, waiting for a (less expensive) temporary visa to be issued.

With documents in hand it's no more difficult than walking from one metro platform to the next, a five minute walk, interrupted in this case by queues at the immigration desks.  Both metros are world class and very similar, with the metro on the Chinese side a little more modern. It's also considerably less expensive. From here you can also take a very fast train to Guangzhou (see our recent visit there on this website) and from there to other major cities in China. 

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Fiction, Recollections & News

A Womens' view

 

Introduction

 

The following article presents a report by Jordan Baker, as part of her history assignment when she was in year 10 at North Sydney Girls’ High School.   For this assignment she interviewed her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother about their lives as girls; and the changes they had experienced; particularly in respect of the freedoms they were allowed.

Read more: A Womens' view

Opinions and Philosophy

Jihad

  

 

In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.

Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).

That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'. 

Read more: Jihad

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