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In 1962, while working as a clerk in the British Embassy in Moscow, homosexual civil servant John Vassall was caught in a \u2018honey trap\u2019 sprung by the Soviet Secret Service. He was blackmailed into passing secrets to the Soviet Union and as a result sentenced to 18 years\u2019 imprisonment for espionage.

Our contemporary records specialist Mark Dunton delves deeper into this scandal \u2013 one of a series that rocked the Macmillan government in the early 1960s, feeding into a national obsession with spy culture at the time.

This podcast was recorded as part of The National Archives\u2019 Cold War season, a programme of events to coincide with the exhibition, \u2018Protect and Survive: Britain\u2019s Cold War Revealed\u2019.