Declassified docs reveal closeted actor Dirk Bogarde was the target of a Russian gay entrapment plot
Doctor film series.Amidst his fame and acclaim, it was something of an open secret that Bogarde was gay, despite never publicly coming out, and he spent his latter years living with his “business manager” partner Anthony Forwood.Even though many of his most notable roles had an unmistakably gay sensibility—from neo-noir Victim (the first film to use the word “homosexual”) to the subtextual The Servant to 1971’s Death in Venice, which is all about queer desire—questions around the actor’s sexuality never appeared to impact his life or career in any major way.That is, except for the time Russian spies targeted him in a gay entrapment plot…This week, documents from British intelligence agency MI5 were unveiled which detail an instance in the ’70s in which Bogarde was informed he may have been the target of a sting orchestrated by Soviet organization the KGB.The newly declassified files reveal that the actor’s name was on a list of “six practicing British homosexuals” that was given to the Russians by an unnamed source who had himself been “sexually compromised” while visiting Moscow in the late ’50s.Completely separately, a KGB defector codenamed Kago had at one point informed MI5 that a “young British actor” who had appeared in a movie with a name like “the kingdom of something” was the subject of a Russian recruitment attempt in Moscow in ’58 and ’59.
With little else to go off of, British intelligence speculated he could be referring to Bogarde, who had the title role in 1957’s Campbell’s Kingdom.In other words, due to his sexuality, Bogarde was targeted by the KGB, and an attempt was made to arouse suspicion that he was a covert Soviet agent.Because of this, MI5 secretly investigated the actor for a period of time, examining press clippings and other media mentions—anything that might hint if he had, indeed, visited Moscow.
