World Notes BRITAIN

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 time engaged in homosexual activities." Thatcher stressed that "there was no reason whatsoever to suggest that security had ever been compromised."