Jeremy Wolfenden

A short biography of Wolfenden appears in the book The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks. Julian Mitchell's play Consenting Adults (2007), screened by BBC Four, is based on the relationship of father and son, played by Charles Dance and Sean Biggerstaff respectively. Biggerstaff won a BAFTA Scotland award for Best Television Actor for his performance.

Wolfenden's own views survive. For instance, in a letter to Michael Parsons, an Oxford friend, from Paris, January 1961:

He became night news editor of The Times in 1959 and the newspaper's Paris correspondent the following year. Wolfenden was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) before becoming The Daily Telegraph's foreign correspondent in Moscow (in 1961) where he indulged in his twin passions for sex and alcohol and was eventually compromised by the KGB. He struck up friendships with Guy Burgess, the British defector, and Martina Browne, the nanny employed by Ruari and Janet Chisholm, who were working for SIS and were instrumental in the defection of Oleg Penkovsky – a colonel in Soviet military intelligence – who was responsible for disabusing the Kennedy administration of the myth that the "missile gap" was in the Soviet's favour. Wolfenden subsequently came under pressure from both the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the KGB while in Moscow. According to Neal Ascherson in 1996, he was being blackmailed by both services. He had been photographed by the KGB having sex with another man, while MI6 tried to turn him into a double agent. In 1964, he swapped roles with the Telegraph's Washington D.C. correspondent, where he married Martina Browne.

Jeremy John Le Mesurier Wolfenden (26 June 1934, England – 28 December 1965) was a foreign correspondent and British spy at the height of the Cold War.