Cold War may be over, but Russian spies are still here

Personal belongings of British KGB agent Kim Philby at an exhibition at the Russian Historical Society in Moscow. Newly-released secret files have revealed fresh details of Britain's Cold War spy scandals
AFP/Getty Images
Trevor Barnes24 September 2019
WEST END FINAL

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This morning a raft of MI5 files were released into the National Archives at Kew, crammed with revelations about the Portland Spy Ring. It was one of the most renowned espionage cases of the Cold War. But the story of the ring is not just riveting history. It holds important lessons for us now.

Two of the spies were British. Harry Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee worked at the highly sensitive naval research base at Portland in Dorset. They fed crucial secrets about the Royal Navy and the UK’s research on sonar and torpedoes to three KGB deep cover (or “illegal”) spies based in London.

One lived near Regent’s Park under the name Gordon Lonsdale. He was really a Russian, Konon Molody. The other two, Peter and Helen Kroger, lived in a bungalow in suburban Ruislip and were Lonsdale’s communications experts. In reality they were Morris and Lona Cohen, who had been KGB spies since the Second World War.

Lonsdale used to have covert meetings with Houghton outside the Old Vic theatre, and it was here in January 1961 that three of the spies were arrested. Later that year all five agents were sentenced at the Old Bailey to long spells in prison.

The newly declassified UK documents are remarkable. They read like a real-life John Le Carré novel: the CIA agent code-named LAVINIA who provides the first tip-off; MI5 “watchers” shadowing the spies; encoded messages and microdots; the security service bugging Lonsdale’s flat); MI5 asking the FBI to leak Lonsdale’s real identity to the media while in prison to help persuade him to work for the West; the culmination of the Lonsdale and Kroger spy swaps with the Russians in 1964 and 1969.

My new book about the ring has led me all over England and to the USA and Russia. Not surprisingly the KGB archives are slammed shut. Even in America there has been no equivalent release of secret documents detailing the whole course of a Cold War spy ring counter-espionage case.

Russian spies are not just Cold War history however. The West must beware. In 2017 SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, celebrated its 95th anniversary. President Vladimir Putin, no less, gave the keynote speech, extolling “legends” of the service like Konon Molody.

Molody himself while in prison boasted to MI5 that there were 300 KGB “illegals” posted abroad. After the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018 the West expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats suspected of involvement with spying. But a Nato source confided to me recently that the effects on Russian espionage would be limited because of its network of illegal spies. No one knows their true number. When interviewed last year the head of the SVR simply replied: “Enough to do the job well.”

Trevor Barnes’s Dead Doubles, a history of the Portland Spy Ring, will be published in mid-2020 (Weidenfeld)

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