Calder Walton is an Ernest May Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Follow him on twitter @calder_walton.

A quiet residential street, like any other, in northwest London. Neighbors say the occupants of 45 Cranley Drive, in Ruislip, are friendly and host good parties. They are antiquarian booksellers in London, owning a shop on the Strand. But their home is not ordinary, it is a house of secrets: Under cover of bland suburbia, they are using it to run a sophisticated deep-cover Russian spy ring, which has penetrated to the heart of a highly sensitive British government research establishment, which shares military secrets with the United States. Their spy network is even linked to deep-cover Kremlin agents in the United States stealing atomic secrets.

This is not a new bombshell revelation from the on-going Trump-Russia saga, nor a scene from the TV series The Americans, nor is it taken from a John Le Carré novel— though Russian spies posing as London antiquarian booksellers is like something from the pages of Le Carré. This is fact, not fiction— and the facts are important to understand Russia’s intelligence operations today.


This story is revealed in remarkable tranche of records declassified on Tuesday by the British Security Service, better known as MI5, about a major Russian spy network that operated in Britain in the post-war years, known as the Portland Spy Ring. Its discovery in the early 1960s set off alarm bells in capitals across the Western world. Unlike all previous post-war Soviet espionage cases investigated by MI5 in Britain, the Portland spy ring did not involve Soviet KGB and GRU (military) intelligence officers using official (“legal”) diplomatic cover. Instead, more alarmingly for British and Western intelligence agencies, it involved a deep-cover Soviet “illegal,” with no diplomatic cover, living out in the cold, under a false name and nationality— and almost impossible to detect. As British and U.S. intelligence were to discover, the spy network they uncovered was linked to some of the most important Soviet illegals operating in the United States, including Rudolf Abel, who was recently depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.



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MI5’s multi-volume declassified files on the Portland Spy Ring are the first records from the archives of British intelligence to reveal how it was detected. They show that the tip-off for British intelligence came from a well-placed agent the CIA was running in Polish intelligence, Michal Goleniewski, codenamed “SNIPER” (Goleniewski later defected to the U.S.). In April 1960, Goleniewski reported that Polish intelligence had recruited an agent in the British naval attache’s office in Warsaw, but when the agent returned to Britain, he had been handed over to Soviet intelligence, the KGB.

MI5 was soon on the case. The prime suspect was quickly identified as Harry Houghton, a clerical officer at Britain’s Underwater Detection Establishment (UDE) in Portland, Dorset, on England’s south coast. Houghton had previously served in Warsaw, until being sent home for alcohol abuse. Embarrassingly for MI5, the agency discovered that Houghton had previously been on its radar and it had made serious errors about him. In 1956, MI5 had been asked for security concerns about Houghton working at the UDE and was even sent a report from Houghton’s wife warning that he was revealing classified information. At the time, MI5’s vetting section had erroneously concluded, without serious investigation, that Mrs. Houghton was claiming this out of spite because their marriage was breaking up— a striking failure for MI5. When it later questioned Mrs. Houghton, who had since remarried, in 1960, she revealed that he used to bring classified papers home with him from work at the UDE and took them to London at the weekends, sometimes returning with bundles of cash. Mrs Houghton had been too afraid to report this to the police because Mr. Houghton was violent.

Surveillance on Houghton soon showed that was having an affair with a record-keeper at UDE, Ethel “Bunty” Gee, who had considerably more access to classified documents than he did, including sensitive U.S. information on underwater technology. On both sides of the Cold War conflict, it was a well-practiced intelligence technique not to recruit senior officials, who were hard to get, but instead aim for lower-level secretarial staff with wide access to records. Houghton and Gee’s thick MI5 files, now available at the National Archives in London, show that in July 1960 MI5’s plain-clothed officers followed the couple on a weekend trip to London and observed them meeting a man, called “A” in the initial surveillance reports, who was believed to be “an illegal agent working for either the Russian or Polish intelligence service.” The man drove off after the meeting in a car registered in the name of “Gordon Lonsdale.” MI5 soon set to work finding out all it could about Lonsdale, even placing a listening device in his apartment in central London. He was revealed to have an exciting playboy lifestyle in London’s swinging early 1960s, with fast cars and faster women. He was a successful businessman, directing several companies that installed juke boxes and bubble-gum machines. Conspicuously, he drove a large, U.S.-imported Studebaker car.

It was all a smokescreen. Only later, after his espionage trial and conviction, did MI5 discover that Lonsdale was really Konon Molody, a KGB illegal using bogus identity documents. He was run by the KGB’s Directorate S, responsible for illegals overseas, whose cover lives, “legends,” were some of the most closely guarded KGB secrets. KGB illegals were responsible for running agents and also acted as sleeper-agents, to be activated when war between the West and the Soviet Union—World War Three— broke out.

Molody, the son of two Soviet scientists, seems to have been selected in childhood as a KGB foreign intelligence officer. In 1932, aged only 10, he was sent to live with an aunt in California, where he became bilingual in English. After returning to Moscow and serving the NKVD (later known as the KGB) during the war, he was then sent to Canada, where he trained as an illegal. There he obtained the passport of what’s known in the spy trade as a “dead double”—Gordon Lonsdale, who had been born in Canada but emigrated to the Soviet Union as a child, where he died. Assuming Lonsdale’s identity, Molody travelled to London, where he established the KGB’s first post-war illegal “residency.” He used KGB funds to set up his juke box and bubble gum companies and later claimed they were so successful that he became the KGB’s first multi-millionaire illegal operator.



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MI5’s undercover team kept Houghton and Lonsdale (who was actually Molody) under close surveillance through the summer of 1960. Their indiscretions simplified matters: A report in the declassified files notes that, after Houghton met Lonsdale near London’s Old Vic Theatre in August 1960, “they went into a cheap café and the [MI5] watchers were in a position to overhead some of the conversation. Lonsdale spoke in a low voice but Houghton was loud mouthed. The conversation included reference to future meetings on the first Saturday of each month.” On another occasion, Lonsdale was seen handing Houghton and Gee tickets to—what else?—the Bolshoi ballet, which was visiting London.

After a meeting with Houghton in November, MI5 tailed to Lonsdale to a bungalow in Ruislip belonging to Peter and Helen Kroger. MI5 set up an observation post in the house opposite. They watched the Krogers—the couple claiming to be antiquarian booksellers—go about their lives.

Matters changed in January 1961, when the CIA’s agent in Polish intelligence, Goleniewski, defected to the CIA in Berlin. MI5 feared that, if the KGB discovered that he knew about Houghton’s espionage, they would withdraw Houghton. The London Special Branch arrested Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale on Waterloo Road after observing Gee hand over what turned out to be classified documents relating to British submarine technology. MI5 also decided to move on the Krogers, who were arrested in their home. It was found to be packed full of espionage equipment: seven passports, secret writing material, facilities to make and read microdots, and a cigarette lighter with a secret compartment containing cipher pads for encrypting radio transmissions. The Krogers were Lonsdale’s radio operators and technical support team. As they were being arrested, Mrs. Kroger asked to stoke the fire, but a vigilant police offer searched her handbag and found letters from Lonsdale with microdots, which she was trying to destroy. Five days later, after tearing the house to pieces, MI5 discovered their high-speed radio transmission set, which they had used to send communicate with Moscow, hidden in a cavity under the floor. After the story publicly broke, the Kroger’s home was dubbed the “house of secrets.”

After their arrest, the Krogers’ fingerprints were sent to the FBI, who established their real identity as Morris and Lona Cohen, known to be two of the Kremlin’s most important underground assets in the Cold War. The Cohens were American-born KGB illegals in the United States, who had operated with an array of key underground Soviet agents, including the celebrated illegal William Fisher, who lived under an alias, “Rudolf Abel.” They had also acted as KGB couriers, passing top-secret intelligence on U.S. atomic research from agents including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After the Rosenbergs’ arrest, followed by their trial and execution for espionage in the U.S. in 1952, the KGB spirited the Cohens out of the United States, slipping through the FBI’s hands. Now-available Soviet intelligence material shows the KGB gave them New Zealand passports. In 1954 the Cohens arrived in Britain to begin their new life, and espionage career, as the Krogers.

At their trial in London in March 1961, all five of the “Portland spies” were convicted. The presiding judge, Lord Parker, sentenced Lonsdale to 25 years’ imprisonment, the Krogers to 20 years each, and Houghton and Gee to 15. Britain’s Royal Navy later assessed that the intelligence Lonsdale passed to Moscow from Portland had helped the Soviet Union manufacture a new and more silent generation of submarines. It included advanced sonar technology from Britain’s first nuclear submarine, the Dreadnought.

The newly declassified files show that one of the MI5 case officers on the Portland Spy Ring was Peter Wright, who later published a controversial account of his MI5 career, Spycatcher, in which he claimed—without any firm evidence—that MI5’s director-general at the time, Roger Hollis, was himself a Soviet agent. In fact, the newly available MI5 files on Portland strongly suggest Hollis was not a Soviet agent. If he had been, it seems inconceivable that Hollis, who oversaw MI5’s handling of the Portland case, would not have warned the KGB’s prize agent in Britain, Lonsdale, he was compromised. We know from other declassified records that genuine Soviet moles in British intelligence, like Kim Philby in MI6, managed to warn Soviet agents when the net was closing on them.



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The Portland Spy Ring lies in the hall of fame for Russia’s foreign intelligence service today, the SVR. It regards itself as the proud heir of the KGB, emulates its traditions, and still uses “illegals” overseas as the KGB did. To understand the Kremlin today, it is essential to understand this history. The Cohens were released in 1969 in a spy swap and returned to a heroes’ welcome in the Soviet Union, with dinners in their honor, and received one of the USSR’s highest awards, the Order of the Red Star. After his death in the 1990s, Morris Cohen was given the posthumous title “Hero of the Russian Federation” by President Boris Yeltsin. Meanwhile, Molody was released in 1964 in another spy swap, but died not long after he returned to Russia, in 1970, after picking wild mushrooms, in what some regarded as suspicious circumstances. At least publicly, the SVR still praises Molody, glossing over on its website that his detection was really a British and U.S. counter-espionage success.

The SVR’s hagiography of Molody is unsurprising considering that President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, views illegals as Russian “patriots” in a class of their own. In 2010, the FBI revealed a Russian illegal spy program operating in the United States, codenamed GHOST STORIES, straight from the KGB playbook. Earlier this year, Putin admitted that while in the KGB, he had worked with illegals, and he also praised Russia’s spies today continuing the KGB practice, living and working deep undercover overseas.

For Putin, the history of the KGB is alive in a new Cold War.