The Portland spy ring was an espionage group active in the UK between 1953 and 1961. It comprised five people who obtained classified research documents from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment (AUWE) on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, and passed them to the Soviet Union.
Two of the group's members, Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, were British. They worked at the AUWE and had access to the areas where the research was stored. After they obtained the information it was passed to their handler, Konon Molody—who was acting under the name Gordon Lonsdale. He was a KGB agent acting in the UK under a Canadian passport. Lonsdale would pass the documents in microdot format to Lona and Morris Cohen, two American communists who had moved to the UK using New Zealand passports in the names Helen and Peter Kroger. The Krogers would get the information to Moscow, often by using the cover of an antiquarian book dealer.
The ring was exposed in 1960 following a tip-off from the Polish spy Michael Goleniewski about a mole in the Admiralty. The information he supplied was enough to identify Houghton. Surveillance by MI5—the UK's domestic counter-intelligence service—established the connection between Houghton and Gee, and then between them and Lonsdale and finally the Krogers. All five were arrested in January 1961 and put on trial that March. Sentences for the group ranged from fifteen years (for Houghton and Gee) to twenty years (for the Krogers) to twenty-five years (for Lonsdale).
Lonsdale was released in 1964 in a spy swap for the British businessman Greville Wynne. The Krogers were exchanged in October 1969 as part of a swap with Gerald Brooke, a British national held on largely falsified claims. The last to be freed were Houghton and Gee, who were given early release in May 1970.
Background HMS Osprey and the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment
By the late 1950s British military underwater research and development had established itself on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. A series of amalgamations of specialist units took place in 1959 and 1960; one of these comprised the merger of the Underwater Weapons Establishment and the Underwater Countermeasures & Weapons Establishment to form the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment (AUWE).
Much of the development work for was undertaken on Portland in the 1950s. Dreadnought, launched in 1960, was the UK's first nuclear-powered submarine. It contained a type 2001 sonar, described by the naval historian Iain Ballantyne as "immensely powerful", because the nuclear power from the reactor could "detect threats using active sonar at unprecedented ranges for both ships and submarines". During that time, researchers at the AUWE were refining the stealth capacity of submarines, and developing a new generation of submarines to be armed with nuclear ballistic missiles.
HMS Osprey was an anti-submarine training establishment located at the northern end of Portland. The base researched and developed methods and equipment for submarine detection. From 1957 onwards anti-submarine helicopter units also used Osprey as a training base.
Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale; 1922–1970) Konon Trofimovich Molody () was a Soviet intelligence officer. He was educated in the US from the age of seven, spending nine years in the country, before returning to Russia in 1938. He was recruited by the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) in 1940 and in 1949 he joined the political intelligence wing and trained as an illegal agent—a spy working undercover in a foreign territory with no diplomatic immunity. He was given the identity of the Canadian national Gordon Lonsdale and in 1954 he travelled from Russia to Canada, where he worked as a salesman. In February 1955 he crossed into the United States where he contacted his fellow agent Rudolf Abel and then sailed to Britain. He enrolled at the School of Oriental & African Studies for a course in Chinese. As a cover for his role as an agent, in 1956 he became the export director of a business that leased jukeboxes and vending machines. As export director he undertook visits to the European mainland, travelling as far as Poland on one visit. He was able to meet KGB officers when abroad.
Lona and Morris Cohen (Helen and Peter Kroger; 1913–1992 and 1910–1995)
Lona and Morris Cohen were American communists. Morris fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; after he had been wounded in the legs, he was recruited into Soviet intelligence, possibly by the NKVD colonel Alexander Orlov. He returned to the US in November 1938. He met Lona () and they married in July 1941; at the time she did not know Morris was a Soviet agent, but he told her soon after their wedding. Lona worked as a courier, transporting classified documents from Theodore Hall and Saville Sax at the Manhattan Project to the Soviet consulate in New York. One of the documents she carried was a complete diagram of the US atomic bomb. Information on the American weapon was in Moscow twelve days before the American test. Based on the intelligence provided, the USSR was able to test their first nuclear device four years later.
When the Venona decryption project began uncovering Russian spies acting in the US, the Cohens realised they were in danger of being uncovered and fled the country in June 1950, first to Moscow and then Poland. In 1954 they moved to Cranley Drive, Ruislip, just outside London, under the cover of two New Zealanders: Helen and Peter Kroger. Peter opened an antiquarian book business in the Strand, London. After settling into their new life, the Krogers made contact with Lonsdale. He assisted the couple when they dug out the rubble in the cellar under the kitchen to hide a radio transmitter to contact Moscow.
Harry Houghton (1905–1985) and Ethel Gee (1914–1984) Harry Houghton was honourably discharged from the Royal Navy in 1945 as a master at arms and took a clerical job at HMS Osprey. He stayed there until 1951 when he joined the staff of the British embassy in Warsaw, Poland, as a pay clerk in the naval attaché's department. He was accompanied on his posting by his wife, Peggy. He met a Polish woman, Katarina, and soon fell in love and began having an affair; he was unaware that she was a member of the Polish intelligence services. He began partying and drinking heavily and running short of money as a result. Katarina suggested he begin trading coffee on the black market, and he began ordering goods from Britain to sell at inflated prices to the Poles. Marital relations declined and Houghton beat Peggy during their frequent rows, particularly when he was drunk. According to Peggy, Houghton threatened to kill her on several occasions, threw her over a wall on one occasion, burnt her with a cigarette and once attempted to push her off a cliff.
According to MI5 and the KGB Houghton made the first move in his recruitment, writing to the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1951, offering to provide secrets for money. When a Polish intelligence officer spoke to him, Houghton explained that he thought "Britain's present rulers had sold the country to the Americans and turned it into an American colony". He was given the codename Miron and began sending sensitive documents through to his handlers. In May 1952 he gave them 715 documents; in August it rose to 1,167, including details of a British spy in Murmansk and the structure of British Naval Intelligence. Houghton's drinking was causing concern at the embassy, and instead of spending three years in his role, he was sent back to the UK in October 1952, after fifteen months. He took a job at the AUWE on his return. In his autobiography, he claimed that he was blackmailed into spying only once he had returned to the UK, with threats against Katarina if he failed to help.
Ethel Gee—nicknamed Bunty—lived on Portland with her elderly mother, aunt and uncle. In October 1950, she became a filing clerk at the AUWE, where she handled top secret documents; she had access to areas where classified drawings of prototype or experimental projects were in progress. She was single, had no close friends and had been living a quiet life when she met Houghton in the early- to mid-1950s. In his memoirs, Houghton described Gee as "a woman in a million". What started as a friendship developed into an affair after Houghton explained that his marriage was breaking up.
Spying activities
Soon after Houghton returned to Portland in 1953, he was contacted by Russian intelligence to continue his spying. To copy the documents, he was given a Minox camera measuring which he said "would easily pass as a cigarette lighter at a glance". Although he did not have access to sensitive information at first, he soon managed to access the sensitive records room by covering for staff over lunchtimes. He began providing documents to the Russians at what MI5 describe as a "prolific" rate: 1,927 pages of documents in 1954 and 1,768 in 1955. These included details of mechanisms to conceal the noise of propellers and detect high-speed submarines, details of HMS Dreadnought and the navy's ship-building programme. Houghton had been instructed by Lonsdale not to tell Gee about his activities. At agreed points Houghton drove to pubs in the Kingston upon Thames area at weekends, taking camera film with naval documents. He was often asked for specific areas needed, such as homing torpedoes and submarine detection. Houghton was paid bonuses for the amount of information he passed over; in December 1955, he was given £500. His annual salary that year was £741. Houghton was profligate with his money. Despite a salary of less than £15 a week, he spent approximately £20 a week on drink in various local pubs, paid cash for a Renault Dauphine and £150 for a radiogram.
Before his marriage to Peggy broke up, Houghton made potentially serious errors that could have led to his being exposed as a spy. One evening he left a brown paper parcel on the bedroom table; his wife, thinking it could contain evidence of an affair, opened it and found a stack of Admiralty documents—all classified. He had also shown her a bundle of bank notes that she estimated was about £150. She was suspicious enough to raise the matter three times with the Admiralty in 1955. They contacted MI5 the following year, reporting that Houghton's wife had told them "her husband was divulging secret information to people who ought not to get it". The Admiralty—aware of the split between the couple—also advised "It is considered not impossible that the whole of these allegations may be nothing more than outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife", and that the claim was probably "made on the spur of the moment and out of pure spite". Although no investigation was undertaken into the accusations, in late 1956 Houghton was moved from AUWE to HMS Osprey, where there was less access to classified information.