Britain’s deputy consul general in Yekaterinburg resigned after a video surfaced of a man who resembles him having sex with two prostitutes, the Foreign Office said Thursday.
“We’re confirming that James Hudson has resigned from the Foreign Office,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said by telephone from London on Thursday.
She declined further comment on the 4-minute, 18-second video that first appeared on a muckraking web site called Informacia.ru on Monday and was picked up by Komsomolskaya Pravda in Yekaterinburg and the tabloid web site Life.ru. British tabloid The Sun published a story about it Thursday.
Excerpts from the video published on Life.ru show a man in glasses sitting with a woman in a bra while another woman dances in front of him and lies across him. Then it cuts to the man naked in bed with a woman, who can be heard speaking in English.
The black-and-white footage has different camera angles and good sound and picture quality. There’s no indication that the man knows that he is being filmed.
Hudson, who joined the Foreign Office in 1994 and whose postings included Sarajevo, Havana and Budapest, could not be reached for comment Thursday. He is divorced, The Sun reported.
British Embassy officials declined to comment on the video.
“We are not in a position to confirm or deny the story,” said a spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Moscow. “We don’t generally comment on individual members of staff or individual personal matters.”
A spokeswoman for the consulate in Yekaterinburg said: “We aren’t giving comments on this question. That is the official line.”
It was unclear why the video was recorded or leaked. The Sun report speculated that the Federal Security Service might have been involved.
“Russian intelligence has a long history of making sex films and taking compromising photos to control people or further its aims,” an unidentified security source told The Sun. “It is also virtually unthinkable that this could have been widely published online without some sort of tacit official approval.”
Terrorism and security expert Andrei Soldatov said he was puzzled by the notion that the security services might have played a role.
“In the time of the KGB, honey traps were used to recruit a guy, not discredit him,” Soldatov told The Moscow Times. “I don’t understand why they would film it and then show it on YouTube.”
He added that he needed more information about Hudson’s activities in the region to come to a conclusion.
Yekaterinburg is a center for defense production, including Ural Vagon Zavod, which makes tanks.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist in Yekaterinburg who covered the story, Oksana Ponomaryova, said Hudson appeared at official functions but “isn’t a very well-known figure” in the city.
The Informacia.ru article, written by a reporter identified as Vladimir Alexandrov, says the video is only “one of several videos about Mr. Hudson that are circulating on the Internet.”
The web site quotes an unidentified police source as “confirming” that the man in the video is Hudson.
The Informacia.ru web site lists no telephone number. It says that it has about 200,000 readers per month. An e-mailed request for comment went unanswered Thursday.
The site is registered under the name Anatoly Babushkin and lists a cell phone number that wasn’t being answered Thursday afternoon.
The web site is subtitled “Secret Materials about Russia” and carries stories with naked photos of people such as It Girl Ksenia Sobchak.
The video flap follows a “spy rock” scandal in 2006 when the Federal Security Service said it had uncovered British Embassy officials spying on Russia with a transmitter hidden in a fake rock.
The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, left his wife for a lap dancer, Nadira Alieyva, who later told the British press about her experiences.
In 2006, Belarussian national television aired footage allegedly showing a Latvian diplomat in Minsk having gay sex. The diplomat was later accused of possessing pornography, but the charge was dropped.
But sex scandals are relatively rare in Russian politics. In 1999, a man resembling then-Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov was filmed with two prostitutes and the footage was shown on national television.
Comments by Russian bloggers were quite supportive of Hudson.
“Lots of people use prostitutes. Why did they follow him and film it, and secretly as well?” wrote a user on JustMedia.ru who identified himself only as Marat.
On the same site, another user, Altxander, quoted Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who railed at journalists with “snotty noses” last year for spreading rumors that he was having an affair with ex-gymnast Alina Kabayeva.
“Even reading and watching something like this is vile,” he wrote. “V.V. Putin said they poke around with their snotty noses. Think about it.”
“We’re confirming that James Hudson has resigned from the Foreign Office,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said by telephone from London on Thursday.
She declined further comment on the 4-minute, 18-second video that first appeared on a muckraking web site called Informacia.ru on Monday and was picked up by Komsomolskaya Pravda in Yekaterinburg and the tabloid web site Life.ru. British tabloid The Sun published a story about it Thursday.
Excerpts from the video published on Life.ru show a man in glasses sitting with a woman in a bra while another woman dances in front of him and lies across him. Then it cuts to the man naked in bed with a woman, who can be heard speaking in English.
The black-and-white footage has different camera angles and good sound and picture quality. There’s no indication that the man knows that he is being filmed.
Hudson, who joined the Foreign Office in 1994 and whose postings included Sarajevo, Havana and Budapest, could not be reached for comment Thursday. He is divorced, The Sun reported.
British Embassy officials declined to comment on the video.
“We are not in a position to confirm or deny the story,” said a spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Moscow. “We don’t generally comment on individual members of staff or individual personal matters.”
A spokeswoman for the consulate in Yekaterinburg said: “We aren’t giving comments on this question. That is the official line.”
It was unclear why the video was recorded or leaked. The Sun report speculated that the Federal Security Service might have been involved.
“Russian intelligence has a long history of making sex films and taking compromising photos to control people or further its aims,” an unidentified security source told The Sun. “It is also virtually unthinkable that this could have been widely published online without some sort of tacit official approval.”
Terrorism and security expert Andrei Soldatov said he was puzzled by the notion that the security services might have played a role.
“In the time of the KGB, honey traps were used to recruit a guy, not discredit him,” Soldatov told The Moscow Times. “I don’t understand why they would film it and then show it on YouTube.”
He added that he needed more information about Hudson’s activities in the region to come to a conclusion.
Yekaterinburg is a center for defense production, including Ural Vagon Zavod, which makes tanks.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist in Yekaterinburg who covered the story, Oksana Ponomaryova, said Hudson appeared at official functions but “isn’t a very well-known figure” in the city.
The Informacia.ru article, written by a reporter identified as Vladimir Alexandrov, says the video is only “one of several videos about Mr. Hudson that are circulating on the Internet.”
The web site quotes an unidentified police source as “confirming” that the man in the video is Hudson.
The Informacia.ru web site lists no telephone number. It says that it has about 200,000 readers per month. An e-mailed request for comment went unanswered Thursday.
The site is registered under the name Anatoly Babushkin and lists a cell phone number that wasn’t being answered Thursday afternoon.
The web site is subtitled “Secret Materials about Russia” and carries stories with naked photos of people such as It Girl Ksenia Sobchak.
The video flap follows a “spy rock” scandal in 2006 when the Federal Security Service said it had uncovered British Embassy officials spying on Russia with a transmitter hidden in a fake rock.
The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, left his wife for a lap dancer, Nadira Alieyva, who later told the British press about her experiences.
In 2006, Belarussian national television aired footage allegedly showing a Latvian diplomat in Minsk having gay sex. The diplomat was later accused of possessing pornography, but the charge was dropped.
But sex scandals are relatively rare in Russian politics. In 1999, a man resembling then-Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov was filmed with two prostitutes and the footage was shown on national television.
Comments by Russian bloggers were quite supportive of Hudson.
“Lots of people use prostitutes. Why did they follow him and film it, and secretly as well?” wrote a user on JustMedia.ru who identified himself only as Marat.
On the same site, another user, Altxander, quoted Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who railed at journalists with “snotty noses” last year for spreading rumors that he was having an affair with ex-gymnast Alina Kabayeva.
“Even reading and watching something like this is vile,” he wrote. “V.V. Putin said they poke around with their snotty noses. Think about it.”