Sir Maurice Oldfield, the late chief of MI6, Britain's supersecret intelligence service, was a scholarly, chubby and unprepossessing bachelor. He enjoyed an impeccable reputation, and was said to be the prototype for Novelist John le Carre's spy master, George Smiley. But unlike Smiley, Oldfield had a dark secret that has posthumously cast a shadow over his career.
Author Chapman Pincher charges in a new book, Traitors: The Labyrinth of Treason, that Oldfield was a homosexual. Last week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed that the spy chief had admitted to her before his death in 1981 "that he had from time to...