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Denning went to particular pains to investigate widespread rumors about other government ministers, even tried to get corroboration from a French paper that purported to list the officials and their peccadilloes. (The French editor did not reply to Denning's request.) The judge found "a great deal of evidence" about fashionable parties at which "the man who serves the dinner is nearly naked except for a small square lace apron round his waist" and a black mask over his head so he "cannot be recognized." The dinner, it appears, is "followed by perverted sex orgies; the guests undress and engage in sexual intercourse one with the other, and indulge in other sexual activities of a vile and revolting nature."
Added Denning: "My only concern was to see whether any Minister or other person prominent in public life was present at these parties." The judge, who found that no Top Person had even attended the orgies, actually unmasked the masked man as an unimportant fellow who is "now grievously ashamed of what he did."
In the course of his investigation, Denning reports, one Cabinet minister asked him to track down "damaging rumors" naming him as the "headless man," an otherwise unidentified corespondent in the Argyll divorce case, who reportedly paid to have his face cropped from pornographic pictures introduced at the trial. The minister in question submitted to an examination by a doctor "of the highest eminence," proving that his "physical characteristics differed in unmistakable and significant respects" from those of the duchess' nude friend. Lord Denning could hardly resist adding that he had obtained new evidence that "indicated who the 'unknown man' was. But I need not go into it here."
On to A.D. Thus, despite Profumo's famous fall, Denning concludes that there has been no "decline in the integrity of public life." To many critics, however, the judge's verdict on the main issue he was supposed to investigate, the security question, was far from reassuring. The report concedes that Profumo "disclosed a character defect which pointed to his being a security risk," adding that Christine might well have tried to "blackmail him or bring pressure on him to disclose secret information." Indeed, suggests Denning, Ivanov may have been under express orders from the Soviet government to blow up a scandal involving Profumo, in the hope that it would weaken U.S. trust in the government—and "he succeeded only too well."
Yet the report notes that the Security Service did not even know of Chris tine's affair with Profumo until 18 months later. Then, when it was finally discovered, the anonymous head of Britain's security decided "it was not within the proper scope of the Security Service to inquire into these matters," since "it was not a case of a security risk but of moral misbehavior by a Minister."
The judge supports this decision as well as the gentlemanly tradition that British Cabinet ministers—unlike civil servants—should be exempt from surveillance save in dire national emer gencies. Concludes Denning: "It would be intolerable to us to have anything in the nature of a Gestapo or Secret Police to snoop into all that we do, let alone into our morals."