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OPERATION WHISPER
THE CAPTURE OF SOVIET SPIES MORRIS AND LONA COHEN
By BARNES CARR
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If one has read The Illegals, one is generally familiar with the Cohen couple and their story, but even reading a sample of this book makes it clear this would be a worth read, telling far more than about just Cohen couple.
For example, having seen the very thrilling teleseries about Sidney Reilly it's a disappointment reading the book about him by Lockhart - and here one realises why!
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"Morris and Lona Cohen were forced to flee the United States in 1950 as the Rosenberg spy ring was being rolled up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Cohens were a New York couple who ran a North American spy network that in 1945 was the first to deliver a complete diagram and description of the Allied atomic bomb to the Russians. That made them members of a select society of spies, the crème de la crème of espionage. They continued spying for the Soviets into the sixties, through some of the most turbulent decades in espionage history.
"The Soviets gave the Rosenbergs money and ordered them to leave the United States just before they were formally charged. They took the money and refused to go. With that, the Soviets wrote them off and moved on to save the Cohens. The Rosenbergs were assigned to the scientific/industrial—not the atomic—line of Soviet spying in North America. Ethel did recruit her brother David Greenglass to steal product from the Manhattan Project, the Allied atomic bomb program, but he delivered only pieces of the puzzle. The Cohens ran the only Soviet network dedicated to atomic spying, and the product they turned in completed the puzzle, allowing the Russians to save years in the development of their own A-bomb. That made the Cohens eminently more valuable."
"The Cohens maintained that they did not spy on the Manhattan Project in order to harm their homeland but rather to assist a wartime ally, Russia, in attaining nuclear parity so that a balance of power could be assured and another world war prevented. The atomic bomb was the most fearsome weapon ever devised. Stealing its secrets was the holy grail of espionage.
"But the spy war between East and West did not end with the theft of the Bomb, or the capture of the Cohens or Blake or dozens of other spies, or with the implosion of Soviet Communism in 1991. This quiet war of lies, denials, and murder is still going on. The United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand operate a worldwide satellite surveillance system called Echelon that vacuums in data from phone calls and Internet traffic. Paris uses a similar program, Frenchelon, and Germany has Project 6, coordinated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Russia relies on its SORM (System of Operative Investigative Measures), and China conducts spying and hacking through Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army.
"“Nothing has changed,” cautioned Sergei Tretyakov, who defected in 2000 after running Russian intelligence operations out of New York. “The SVR [Russian foreign intelligence] rezidenturas in the U.S. are not less but in some respects even more active.” Rezidenturas are spy stations in countries outside Russia. The one in New York has traditionally been called Station One.
"Tretyakov’s warning means billions of dollars are being spent by each of those countries, every year, on spying. And each new year brings ever larger budgets, with no end in sight."
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"The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (March in the Western calendar) saw Imperial Army generals forcing the abdication of Nicholas II and a provisional government being formed to rule Russia until a constituent assembly could meet to decide the nation’s future. The new premier was Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, a moderate socialist revolutionary. Kerensky called the new government the Russian Revolutionary Republic and kept the country in the war on the side of the Allies.
"Lenin had other plans. He had secretly financed his Bolshevik Party with German money as far back as 1915, and he had cut a deal with Berlin to take Russia out of the war if he could seize power. Lenin was not in Russia for the February Revolution; nor was Trotsky or Stalin. In April 1917 the Germans delivered Lenin back to his homeland in a so-called sealed train, and in July he attempted a Bolshevik coup d’état with a street mob. But Lenin, like Kerensky, was a great talker who possessed few realistic skills in military strategy. Lenin’s “July Days” operation failed miserably, and he was forced to flee the country disguised as a woman wearing a poorly fitting wig after the provisional government publicized his ties with Germany.
"Lenin sneaked back into Russia for a second act, in October 1917. This time he was successful. Millions of Russian soldiers were deserting the eastern front and killing their officers, and the Russian Provisional Government was on the brink of collapse. Kerensky dropped the ball and Lenin scooped it up. He called it the Great October Socialist Revolution, though it was not a general uprising of the Russian people but simply a coup staged by a few hundred street fighters. In Petrograd, the capital, some Red Guards landed two artillery shells on the Winter Palace, defended in part by Colonel Maria Leontievna Botchkareva and her First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death.
"After that “bombardment,” the provisional government ministers and the women soldiers surrendered, and a mob looted the palace, leaving feces in the bathtubs as calling cards. Russia was then in the hands of the Bolsheviks. There was little loss of life in Petrograd; eight Bolsheviks were killed, six of them by bullets fired by their own comrades. Lenin later admitted that his Red Guards mostly argued the opposition out of business. The Red Guards were replaced by the Red Army, later called the Soviet Army.
"Lenin kept his bargain with Berlin by signing a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus) on March 3, 1918. That shut down the eastern front, taking Russia and eight million of her soldiers out of the war. Germany and Austria-Hungary were then free to start shifting divisions over to France. The result was the Russian Civil War, with Lenin and the Bolsheviks defending their shaky new government against a mélange of Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, Czechs, Poles, tsarist White armies, Allied and German agents, and roaming gangs of highwaymen."
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"The Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, as it is popularly known, was actually a two-pronged operation. The second part was to kidnap Lenin, ferry him off to England to stand trial for treason, and install a pro-Allied government in Moscow. London’s top conspirators in the plot were Robert Bruce Lockhart, British consul in Moscow and a special agent for the intelligence section of the British Foreign Office, and Sidney Reilly, an agent for MI1C, the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. Washington was represented by Xenophon Dmitrevich deBlumenthal Kalamatiano, an American agent for the Bureau of Secret Intelligence of the Diplomatic Service of the U.S. State Department."
"The Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, as it is popularly known, was actually a two-pronged operation. The second part was to kidnap Lenin, ferry him off to England to stand trial for treason, and install a pro-Allied government in Moscow. London’s top conspirators in the plot were Robert Bruce Lockhart, British consul in Moscow and a special agent for the intelligence section of the British Foreign Office, and Sidney Reilly, an agent for MI1C, the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. Washington was represented by Xenophon Dmitrevich deBlumenthal Kalamatiano, an American agent for the Bureau of Secret Intelligence of the Diplomatic Service of the U.S. State Department."
"The British would later call their Moscow coup attempt the Lockhart Conspiracy. The Russians saw it as the Envoys’ Plot. Then there are those who say it was the Reilly Plot because Sidney might have been secretly planning his own coup in Moscow, which would allow him to do some browsing in the captured Soviet treasury. Taking all that into consideration, a more equitable term would be simply the Lenin Plot."
"As it turned out, the Allies’ Lenin Plot was a sting operation set up by Lenin and Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka. ... "
"The Lenin Plot was a colossal embarrassment to Washington, Paris, and London. They had gone to war against a former ally and tried to murder her leader. Worse yet, their sophisticated, modern invasion force was defeated by Trotsky’s ragged Red Army at the battle of Shenkursk in January 1919 and driven out of Russia in shame.
"Lockhart was praised and promoted in London, and later knighted. Kalamatiano was dismissed by Washington as a failure, a relic from another time. His controllers paid him off and put him on a train for Illinois. Two years later, his health broken, he died in obscurity.
"But during his incarceration, Kalamatiano had continued to collect information about the Communists, the name the Bolsheviks had adopted in 1918, and when he was debriefed in Washington he warned that America had replaced Britain as the main adversary of Soviet Russia. It was both a prediction and a warning. And it turned out to be accurate.
"Western intelligence agencies dismissed the Lenin Plot as just a sideshow that had gone bad. They tied it off and moved on. But the Russians saw it as proof that the West was out to destroy the Soviet state. Dzerzhinsky made the case a part of the curriculum at his spy school in Moscow. Succeeding generations of Soviet bosses used it to justify whatever mischief they could cook up against the West.
"If the term “Cold War” can be defined as an attempt to defeat another nation politically, economically, or militarily without a formal declaration of war, then the Lenin Plot was the true beginning of what President John F. Kennedy would call the “long twilight struggle.”"
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"THE COHENS AND THEIR SPY RING were rounded up in London in 1961 and convicted of conspiring to violate the British Official Secrets Act. It was one of the high-profile spy cases of the sixties, a decade that would bring George Blake, Kim Philby, John Vassall, Robert Soblen, the Christine Keeler affair, and the U-2 incident into living rooms everywhere. And those were only the cases that intelligence agencies allowed the public to know about.
"Morris and Lona had finally been tracked down by the British Security Service (MI5), assisted by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the CIA, the FBI, and the counterintelligence agencies of several other nations. The Cohens had once again been plying the trade they knew best—stealing atomic secrets for Russia, this time by operating a spy network inside a North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Britain. The media dubbed it the “Portland Spy Ring” and the “Naval Secrets Case.” The roll-up of the Cohens’ organization was called Operation Whisper first by Scotland Yard, then by the other agencies involved in the investigation."
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"GOVERNMENTAL SUSPICION of Soviet intentions in the United States dates back at least to January 1919, the same month that Allied forces were defeated at Shenkursk in North Russia. On the twenty-first of that month, a New York City police inspector and former military intelligence officer named Thomas J. Tunney told a U.S. Senate subcommittee a revealing story about Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had lived in New York for a while in 1917, editing a Russian newspaper and giving lectures on revolutionary socialism before going back to Russia to convert to Bolshevism and raise the Red Army. As Trotsky was leaving New York, Tunney said, he left instructions to his American followers: “I want you people here to organize and keep on organizing until you are able to overthrow the damned, rotten capitalistic government of this country.”
"GOVERNMENTAL SUSPICION of Soviet intentions in the United States dates back at least to January 1919, the same month that Allied forces were defeated at Shenkursk in North Russia. On the twenty-first of that month, a New York City police inspector and former military intelligence officer named Thomas J. Tunney told a U.S. Senate subcommittee a revealing story about Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had lived in New York for a while in 1917, editing a Russian newspaper and giving lectures on revolutionary socialism before going back to Russia to convert to Bolshevism and raise the Red Army. As Trotsky was leaving New York, Tunney said, he left instructions to his American followers: “I want you people here to organize and keep on organizing until you are able to overthrow the damned, rotten capitalistic government of this country.”
"Two months after Tunney’s testimony, the Communist International (Comintern) was founded in Moscow. This was during the time when the defeated Allied force in North Russia was waiting for a fresh troop surge from Britain and while Kalamatiano was being tortured in prison in Moscow. The Comintern was a Soviet-sponsored association of international Communist parties set up to stoke violent revolution throughout the world. “Setting off Red fireworks” was the expression used. The preferred method was to stage a propagande par le fait, a propaganda by the deed, against an established government. This involved committing a high-profile political crime in order to provoke an even harsher response from the state. Theoretically, it in turn would radicalize the population and catalyze a revolution, counterrevolution, civil war, or coup."
"In June, bombs were detonated in eight more cities. Again the targets were government officials who had opposed anarchism and supported deportation of radicals. This time Palmer’s house was hit. He was not injured, but the bomber, an anarchist newspaper editor named Carlo Valdinoli, was killed in the blast. Apparently the overweight Valdinoli had tripped on Palmer’s doorstep with the bomb in his hands. One of his body parts landed across the street in the yard of Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Two more inept bombers, along with a night watchman, were killed that night in New York in the bombing of a judge’s home. Anarchists openly claimed responsibility for those attacks, but because of a lack of evidence, no arrests were ever made."
"Two months after the second round of bombings, Palmer established a new Radical Division within the Justice Department. It was closely aligned with the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, forerunner to the FBI. The Bureau of Investigation had been created in 1908 by Charles Joseph Bonaparte, secretary of the navy and attorney general in President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet. Known variously as the Imperial Peacock and Souphouse Charlie, Bonaparte was a grandson of Jerome, younger brother of Napoléon I, making him probably the only member of royalty to ever reach high office in the U.S. government."
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Having read some writings of Upton Sinclair, it's interesting now to find description of the era and some of the events - anarchists bombings in U.S., quoted above and more - here from another, possibly impartial, source.
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The background story of Morris Cohen's parents, both immigrants from various parts of Russia of Nicholas II, is very interesting.
"When Morris went to work for the Press-Scimitar, Meeman had just returned from a fact-finding tour of Nazi Germany with other American editors. What he saw over there appalled him, and the Press-Scimitar became one of America’s crusading antifascist papers, a situation that undoubtedly was not lost on Morris."
The background story of Morris Cohen's parents, both immigrants from various parts of Russia of Nicholas II, is very interesting.
"When Morris went to work for the Press-Scimitar, Meeman had just returned from a fact-finding tour of Nazi Germany with other American editors. What he saw over there appalled him, and the Press-Scimitar became one of America’s crusading antifascist papers, a situation that undoubtedly was not lost on Morris."
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"BEFORE THE RALLY, Morris and some friends had gone to a cafeteria to have coffee and talk about Spain. There they met some other party members who were going to the rally. Morris was introduced to Leontina Petka, who used the diminutive Lona. She was twenty-four years old, in the pink of young womanhood, and Morris was smitten by her honey-blonde hair, her dazzling blue eyes, her trim and alluring figure."
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"Orlov spoke French, Spanish, English, and German, and wore Western clothes. He was thought by many to be a charming man, as killers often are. Like Sidney Reilly, he trusted no one, including his own NKVD chiefs in Moscow, and so he carried a concealed pistol. Orlov and Hemingway became instant friends in Spain. They dined together and Hem took a tour of one of Orlov’s training schools where they tried to outshoot one another on the firing range while knocking back shots of vodka. Orlov later said he was the inspiration for the character Varloff in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War.
"Orlov always claimed he was merely a Soviet advisor to Loyalist forces in Spain.2 In reality, he was operational head of the NKVD in Spain and ruthlessly targeted not only fascist spies but also Trotskyites, anarchists, and any other kind of political deviants he found inside or outside the international brigades.3 General Jan Berzin, former head of Red Army intelligence, charged that Orlov and the NKVD treated Spain as if it were already a Soviet colony.4 Orlov assigned Soviet “advisers” to help the Loyalists set up SIM. After that, SIM agents ran concentration camps, torture chambers, and execution rooms in the NKVD tradition.5 Their headquarters was at La Tamarita, a small villa that backed up to the Soviet consulate in Barcelona. Both SIM and the NKVD used terror in Spain the way Stalin used it in Russia: government by firing squad."
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" ... Merriman refused to see the current fighting in Spain as a civil war. Like Hemingway, he saw Spain as a prelude to something far more sinister. “Hitler is blooding his troops in Spain for a larger world war,” Merriman told a friend.9"
" ... Merriman refused to see the current fighting in Spain as a civil war. Like Hemingway, he saw Spain as a prelude to something far more sinister. “Hitler is blooding his troops in Spain for a larger world war,” Merriman told a friend.9"
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"Morris would operate as a nelegal (illegal) agent for the NKVD in America. ... "
"Orlov is often credited with originating the idea of illegals. As an important section chief of the intelligence directorate in Moscow, he had concluded early on that the main reason why Russian legals got caught abroad was because they worked out of Soviet offices, which were under surveillance by counterintelligence agents."
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" ... At one time, many Cheka headhunters were Jews, recruited because of their hatred of tsarism. In time, though, Jews would be purged from the Russian intelligence and security services, and new recruits carefully screened.6 Exceptions were made in the thirties and forties because Jewish agents such as Semyonov were useful in recruiting American Jews, who were fiercely opposed to fascism."
" ... At one time, many Cheka headhunters were Jews, recruited because of their hatred of tsarism. In time, though, Jews would be purged from the Russian intelligence and security services, and new recruits carefully screened.6 Exceptions were made in the thirties and forties because Jewish agents such as Semyonov were useful in recruiting American Jews, who were fiercely opposed to fascism."
"Despite all that, some of the NKVD officers who trained in the Lubyanka carried reputations as gentlemen. Semyonov was one of them. So was Ovakimian, his station chief in New York.
"Before they left Spain, Alexander Orlov instructed Morris Cohen to stay in touch with fellow veterans who might have access to U.S. military or economic information after they returned home. In a later report to Moscow, Semyonov confirmed that Morris did that, though he didn’t name any assets that Cohen recruited.8 Cohen was also instructed to gather information on the local German colony in New York.9 Morris didn’t say much about that in later interviews. It probably wasn’t a good idea to begin with, since the FBI had infiltrated most pro-Nazi groups in the tristate area, and Morris might have drawn the attention of a bureau operative."
"On September 1, 1939, nine days after the nonaggression treaty was signed, Hitler invaded Poland from the west. Stalin invaded Poland from the east on the seventeenth. Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand quickly declared war on Germany. But Roosevelt kept his distance, merely condemning the USSR as an absolute dictatorship and imposing what he called a moral embargo on certain goods to Russia. If Spain had been the dress rehearsal for a new world war, then Poland was the first act of the main show. And that’s where the orders to New York for that urgent assignment came in."
"A good part of U.S. military and industrial research and production was done in the manufacturing corridor running from Maryland to Massachusetts. Station One was geographically in the middle of that, and all hands were sent out on wide-ranging fishing expeditions. In 1940, Cohen began working the New York waterfront and defense plants up and down the East Coast."
" ... A favorite Soviet place for a pass was out on the busy sidewalk in front of Madison Square Garden during Friday night fights. ... "
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"Having chopped up Poland together, Stalin and Hitler pursued their secret protocol to conquer Europe. Russia overran Finland in 1939, followed by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia in 1940. Also in 1940, Germany seized France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. Britain was still standing, but no one knew for how long. It was becoming imperative that the United States enter the war on the side of Britain and France. The FBI turned its counterintelligence focus more sharply on both Soviet and Axis activities in America."
"Lona sought the advice of a party official she trusted. He told her that if she married the lawyer she would have everything she needed and she would forget about Communism. Marry the poor guy, he suggested, and work together with him for Communism. ... "
"They got married July 13, 1941, in a civil ceremony at Norwich, Connecticut, ... "
"Hitler had suddenly turned on Stalin like a starved wolf and invaded Russia on June 22. ... "
"The Soviets hit the radar jackpot after a recently recruited asset working in a U.S. defense plant was turned over to a newly arrived Station One control officer, Alexander Feklisov. The source that Feklisov inherited was a French electrical engineer who had fled to America following the fall of France in June 1940. Moscow Center assigned him the code name Antelope."
"The American agent working out of Station One who had first recruited Antelope was later identified as Morris Cohen."
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"LONA COHEN TOOK OVER the Volunteer network after Morris went into the army. The technical, scientific, and industrial espionage the Cohens had been conducting was categorized by the Soviets as Line X work. Lona ran seven main agents in the eastern states, taking buses and trains as far south as Baltimore and north to Rochester to pick up documents. Then she brought them back to New York and turned them over to Sam Semyonov in meets at various locations, including their old favorite, the Bronx Zoo.
"LONA COHEN TOOK OVER the Volunteer network after Morris went into the army. The technical, scientific, and industrial espionage the Cohens had been conducting was categorized by the Soviets as Line X work. Lona ran seven main agents in the eastern states, taking buses and trains as far south as Baltimore and north to Rochester to pick up documents. Then she brought them back to New York and turned them over to Sam Semyonov in meets at various locations, including their old favorite, the Bronx Zoo.
"Lona was also assigned to go down to the docks and make contact with seamen from Europe and South America smuggling film or paper documents into the United States for Station One. Sometimes a guard at the gate would stop her. Then she had to turn on the charm to get past him, pleading that she wanted to see her boyfriend on a certain ship. Just for two minutes."
"Lona Cohen made mistakes the way all novices do, but when Sam Semyonov later wrote an appraisal of her, he praised her devotion to Soviet spying and noted that she had been used for maintaining contact with an agent code-named Link.
"As it turned out, Link was undoubtedly the most successful Soviet mole to ever penetrate American intelligence. The damage Link did was so catastrophic and embarrassing that U.S. intelligence agencies would spend half a century refusing to comment on him. As far as they were concerned, he was the agent who never was."
"LINK WAS WILLIAM WOLFE WEISBAND. ... William worked at the family jewelry store at 8016 Third Avenue (later at 8320 Fifth Avenue) in Brooklyn. He also worked for the Stork Club and several hotels, including the Waldorf Astoria, apparently as a bookkeeper. The Waldorf Astoria did not allow Jews in. When William told management that he was a Jew, they fired him."
"In 1943, Second Lieutenant Weisband was deployed to the Mediterranean as a cryptologist for the Army Signal Corps. He sharpened his skills under Colonel Harold Hayes, a top signals intelligence officer. Weisband was a polyglot, speaking German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and French in addition to his native English and Russian. He was assigned as a liaison officer with the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy, monitoring their radio messages for security violations. While he was doing that, the U.S. Army gave him an assignment that debunked the old adage that gentlemen (or at least wartime allies) do not read one another’s mail: he was told to steal the French military codes, which he did."
"In 1945, after the war, Weisband returned to Arlington Hall, ... "
"Arlington Hall was an important target of Soviet spying. Moscow Center knew the Americans and British were deciphering Russian messages but they had no idea how extensive and damaging the Venona program really was. Indeed, Arlington Hall cryptanalysts were looking at all Soviet diplomatic cables that had been sent between the United States and Russia by telegraph companies such as Western Union and RCA. Authority for that had come from President Roosevelt the day after Pearl Harbor. He had ordered that a copy of every cable sent in or out of the United States be delivered to a government censor. If they were in code, they were forwarded to Arlington Hall. Soon warehouses were required for storing all the paper."
"Weisband was assigned to the Russian Section as a linguist adviser. ... "
"It took a while for the army and the FBI to figure it out, but clearly somebody inside Arlington Hall had tipped off the Russians. They had a clue that the mole spoke Arabic. Weisband was interviewed by the bureau on April 28, May 9, May 11, and May 13, 1950, and denied spying for the Soviets. A Soviet agent named James Orin York (Needle) had already been questioned by the FBI, on April 10, and said he had dealt with a Soviet agent known only as “Bill” about ten times in Los Angeles, in 1941–42. York said he received around fifteen hundred dollars for photographing documents at Northrup Aircraft. Then in August 1950, while in the custody of FBI agents in Los Angeles, York saw “Bill” on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. It was William Weisband."
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"A team in France—Fréderick Joliot, Hans von Halban, Lew Kowarski, and Francis Perrin—had first designed an atomic bomb in the thirties. They called themselves the Paris Group, and they obtained a bomb patent that they secretly transferred to the British Royal Navy ahead of the fall of France. In England the A-bomb project was called Tube Alloys, a code name for uranium. But the British, too, feared a German invasion, and began moving their project over to their Commonwealth partner of Canada. That was why the French, British, and Canadians were ahead of the United States and Russia in the early race to build an A-bomb. ... "
" ... Security was so tight that the U.S. government did not admit the existence of the Manhattan Project. Various excuses were given for all the land bought and construction done, all the scientists hired away from their regular jobs. Folks who lived around Los Alamos watched as heavily loaded trucks lumbered up to the site every day, but came back empty. One rumor had it that a pregnancy camp for unwed WACs was being built."
"Ideological recruits didn’t cost much. That made them the best kind of agents, Alexander Orlov always said. The most helpful volunteers turned out to be Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Alvin Hall. Hall would soon work in the Cohens’ Volunteer network, with Lona as his field officer and courier. He would be their main contact inside Los Alamos, the first agent to give the Soviets a complete diagram of the first A-bomb."
"But the Fuchs affair was a little bit down the road. For the moment, Ted Hall had the highway all to himself."
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"In January 1943, Ted’s second semester at Harvard, he took advanced courses in math, physics, and quantum mechanics. For the first time, he felt he was firing on all cylinders. ... "
"In January 1943, Ted’s second semester at Harvard, he took advanced courses in math, physics, and quantum mechanics. For the first time, he felt he was firing on all cylinders. ... "
"At the beginning of Ted’s senior year, in September 1943, he roomed with Roy Glauber, a physics student from the Bronx who would later win a Nobel Prize. Soon another student, Saville Sax, moved in with them. There were only two bedrooms in the dorm suite, so Savy slept on the sofa."
" ... Savy had grown up in an insular Jewish family that, like Ted’s folks, had fled to New York from Nicholas II’s Russia. Savy’s parents spoke Yiddish, idealized Russia and communism, and had little interest in assimilating into the American mainstream."
"Savy was the one who suggested to Hall that if his work at Los Alamos turned out to be some kind of terrible weapon, then he should tell the Russians about it.
"Ted agreed. But he warned Savy never to mention it to anyone."
"TED HALL WENT DOWN to Los Alamos as a junior physicist. He was eighteen years old and still technically a senior at Harvard. But he had finished his academic work, and that left him free to leave six months ahead of graduation. ... "
"Hall was the youngest scientist working at Los Alamos. He was assigned to the laboratory of Bruno Rossi, an Italian experimental physicist. Ted helped build a radiation counter for measuring the fission of plutonium when bombarded by fast neutrons. Fission was essential to creating an atomic explosion, and the work in the Rossi lab might have been the most important single experiment leading directly to the design of the Gadget, the first atomic bomb, an implosion device with a plutonium core. The implosion bomb was the one that Hall would describe in the diagram he gave to Lona Cohen."
"Klaus Fuchs, a German closet Communist working on Tube Alloys in England, had first offered to give British atomic secrets to the Soviets in London in 1941 after the invasion of Russia by Germany. He was sent to America in ’43 to work in the Manhattan Project, and was turned over to Station One in New York. Then he seemed to have disappeared. Until he surfaced again, Russell McNutt (Fogel and later Persian) was the only source Moscow had in the Manhattan Project. McNutt was a Communist who had been recruited for spying by his friend Julius Rosenberg (Antenna and Liberal). But McNutt was an obscure civil engineer working in New York for Kellex, a contractor building a gas diffusion plant at Oak Ridge. He had given Station One some information about equipment being used in the Manhattan Project, but it was mostly chicken feed."
"Ted Hall had given Lona a complete diagram of the first A-bomb. Other agents such as David Greenglass had contributed crude drawings of parts of the bomb, but Hall’s schematic contained all the parts of the puzzle. Fuchs would later verify its accuracy."
"Considering that, it would probably be safe to say that Ted Hall and Lona Cohen scored what undoubtedly was one of the greatest intelligence coups in history."
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" ... Morris Cohen’s quartermaster company finally got their chance to see frontline action in the spring of 1944. ... "
"Destination: Operation Overlord, the invasion of France."
"He and his unit finally landed in the eastern city of Weimar. It was a curious place. On one hand, Weimar was a symbol of Germany’s highest cultural achievements. Artists who had worked there included Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Liszt, Weber, and Nietzsche. But the hills north of the city hid a nightmare of Gothic proportions—Buchenwald."
" ... After Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Third Army, Patton rounded up the citizens of Weimar and marched them through the camp so they could see for themselves what had gone on there. ... "
"The 3233rd helped out in the big army field kitchen and hospital that Patton had set up for the survivors in Buchenwald. The battalion was headquartered at Weimar when Germany surrendered. After being assigned next to the Ninth and then the Seventh armies, Morris and the 3233rd moved on to Potsdam for duties at the Big Three Conference on July 17, 1945."
"Truman had intended for the A-bomb to be a crucial factor in negotiations with Stalin for postwar concessions.2 The first atomic bomb, Trinity, was tested the day before the Potsdam Conference began, and Little Boy would be dropped on Hiroshima a few days after Truman left Potsdam. Truman considered the A-bomb “the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” But when he told Stalin about it, Uncle Joe didn’t seem interested, and the moment passed. Stalin, of course, knew all about the Manhattan Project through his North American spies. Lona Cohen had just arrived in Albuquerque to pick up a complete schematic of the first bomb from Ted Hall, and the American who had set up Stalin’s only spy network in North America dedicated to atomic espionage was there at Potsdam as a U.S. Army guard—Morris Cohen."
"Operation Keelhaul resulted in the forced return of more than two million people to Russia. Some were delivered in cattle trucks, trains, and ships. Others were forcibly marched across the frontier. In one case, Russian POWs in Germany resisting return had to be evicted from their barracks by American soldiers firing tear gas. Some of those POWs committed suicide by cutting or hanging themselves. In Russia, the returnees were considered to have been tainted by Western ideas, a dangerous thing in the Soviet state, and many were tortured and shot. One British observer reported 150 arrivals at Murmansk were taken into warehouses and behind sheds, and machine-gunned by executioners who appeared to be fourteen to sixteen years old.
"When Morris Cohen was assigned to Keelhaul his army group was given a list of Russian subjects in their sector to seize. Most of them were working on farms and at businesses in local towns. It took Cohen and his squad several days to arrest them all and load them into trucks for delivery to a Soviet colonel. Repatriation was a “good idea,” Cohen later said. He praised it as a “concrete example of cooperation” with the Soviets."
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"It could be called the great Soviet intelligence disaster of 1945 and it was caused by two very important defections.
"It could be called the great Soviet intelligence disaster of 1945 and it was caused by two very important defections.
"Defector number one was Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. ... "
After two hectic days of running around and attempting to convince various officials, and a night when Russians broke into his apartment after he had taken refuge with neighbours, he finally had protection.
"By that time, word of the Gouzenko documents had swept through high circles. William Stephenson, the Canadian code-named Intrepid who ran the British Security Coordination Office in New York, phoned Norman Robertson, Canadian under secretary of state for external affairs, and advised him to ignore the prime minister and protect the Gouzenkos at all costs. Next morning, Igor met with Inspector Leopold and representatives of British MI5 and the FBI. He showed them documents that revealed the Soviets were stealing important defense documents from Canada. The Gouzenkos were secretly whisked away under guard to a distant safe house for protection. An investigation was begun, code-named Corby, named after the brand of Canadian rye whisky the RCMP officers liked."
"DEFECTOR NUMBER TWO was Elizabeth Bentley. She had grown up in Milford, Connecticut, and Rochester, New York, the daughter of strict puritanical parents.11 Her interest in leftist politics had first been stirred up in the early twenties when she was outraged by the treatment of rioting steelworkers on strike in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and by the Sacco-Vanzetti case. At Vassar College she briefly joined the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the Socialist Party activist group run nationally by Morris Cohen’s friend Joseph Lash."
" ... But she quickly discovered the seamy side of Communism. A Soviet agent, Juliet Stuart Poyntz, tried to pressure Elizabeth into doing some “special work” as an undercover operative in Italy. That meant running a honey trap—sleeping around to obtain information. When Elizabeth refused, Poyntz then accused her of being a Trotskyite and threatened to put her “six feet under.” Poyntz was later accused of being a German agent, and disappeared."
" ... In November 1945 she turned herself in to the FBI as a Soviet spy."
"Alexander Feklisov, an assistant to controller Anatoli Yatskov at Station One during this period, later wrote that more than one hundred Soviet sources were exposed in 1945 because of the Bentley defection alone. All networks were shut down indefinitely, including those run by the Cohens and the Rosenbergs.
"It would be remembered as the year of the NKGB’s greatest success, the theft of the secrets of the atomic bomb, and its greatest disaster."
December 12, 2020 -
April 26, 2020 - May 27, 2021.
Purchased January 24, 2021
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" ... Under the new GI Bill, veterans were offered unemployment compensation at the rate of $20 a week for 52 weeks—the 52/20 club—along with free college tuition. Morris chose Columbia University Teachers College and began work there on his master’s degree in education in February. Most of the women who had worked in defense industries were being laid off as veterans returned, and Lona found a part-time job in a library. Morris and Lona lived frugally but were comfortable."
"Alan Belmont was a rising star in the bureau. He was born January 22, 1907, in the Bronx, ... "
"Belmont transferred to Stanford University for his senior year, and cut grass and waxed floors to pay his tuition before receiving a bachelor’s degree in accounting in 1931. Alan loved the West. During summers he panned for gold in the Rockies, managed a trading post in Alaska, and drove a bus at Glacier National Park. ... "
"During the war, Belmont worked as an investigator in the FBI’s National Defense Division, monitoring Nazis, Fascists, Communists, and civil rights cases. ... "
"Dozens of Nazi spies and saboteurs in America had been neutralized during the war. The biggest haul was in December 1941, when thirty-three members of the William Sebold Duquesne spy ring in New York and Florida were nabbed and sent to prison. One of their assignments had been to plant suitcase bombs in Jewish shops. Then in 1942, six members of the George John Dasch ring were executed in Washington. Now that the war was over, the FBI shifted its focus back to Soviet espionage."
" ... As the man responsible for all major investigations by the bureau, he would spend years tracking the Cohens after they fled New York. ... "
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"In the summer of ’47 the Cohens were sent to Paris at Russian expense to meet with Yatskov, who was now assigned to the Soviet embassy there, and with Sam Semyonov, their first controller. They arrived in time for the Bastille Day celebration on July 14. ..."
"In the summer of ’47 the Cohens were sent to Paris at Russian expense to meet with Yatskov, who was now assigned to the Soviet embassy there, and with Sam Semyonov, their first controller. They arrived in time for the Bastille Day celebration on July 14. ..."
"Ted Hall, with his Los Alamos contacts, would have been a natural for penetration of the H-bomb project. But he was out of the army and living in Chicago with his new wife while working on a PhD at the University of Chicago. How did Hall feel now about the work he had done for Station One during the war? Was he still loyal to the Soviet Union? Would he do some more work for Mother Russia? Soon the Cohens would be assigned to reestablish contact with him."
" ... Moscow wanted Hall to go back to work at Los Alamos after he picked up his doctoral degree in May."
" ... In an October communiqué, Moscow complained that the activities of Hall and Sax after deactivation had caused a “significant weakening of their position” as agents for Russia.14 That was a reference to their dabbling in leftist politics, including the campaign to get the name of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, an admirer of the Soviet Union, on the ballot for the presidency. ... "
"Sokolov was replaced as the Cohens’ control officer, apparently because of his alleged poor performance. Their new supervisor was William August Fisher, an agent older and more experienced than Sokolov. But in time, Willie Fisher’s new American network would also get rolled up by federal authorities. And when that happened, Alan Belmont and the FBI would find the smoking gun that confirmed the Cohens were indeed Soviet spies."
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"FROM THE DAY that Klaus Fuchs was charged to the day that Ethel Rosenberg was arrested, a little over six months had elapsed. Some other members of the Rosenberg network were also blown—Joel Barr, William Perl, Alfred Sarant, Morton and Helen Sobell, and Yatskov himself. It was an extraordinarily short period of time for a roll-up of that magnitude.
"After Gold had been arrested and his picture plastered on the front page of newspapers, Station One tried to go into damage control by giving ten thousand dollars to the Rosenbergs and Greenglasses and telling them to leave the country. They took the money but refused to go, even though Julius had told David earlier that in the spy game it was acceptable to abandon one’s family and go on the run. Moscow then wrote them off the way Washington had abandoned Xenophon Kalamatiano in 1918. Station One moved on to save the Cohens."
"Sokolov told Morris and Lona they had to leave the country. Best to do it now, he said, before they got arrested. ... "
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Next part begins with the bits familar to those who have read The Illegals. Harry Houghton's wife had gone to authorities with her suspicions about his being a spy, which were ignored by them.
Next part begins with the bits familar to those who have read The Illegals. Harry Houghton's wife had gone to authorities with her suspicions about his being a spy, which were ignored by them.
" ... His early naval duties had included chasing opium smugglers in China (while secretly engaging in the trade himself). But officially his record was honorable during the war—his ships were bombed and torpedoed, and several of them were sunk with him on board. Harry had a surly, boastful side. He liked to tell the story of being on watch on a battleship with Prince Philip, who asked him to make some hot cocoa for the crew.
"“I made the cocoa last night,” Houghton replied. “Make it your bloody self.”"
"And at a party given by the Krogers’ friend Frank Doel, a bookseller with Marks and Company and the subject of 84 Charing Cross Road, Helen Kroger had arrived looking exotic in a long black evening gown, which prompted Doel’s wife Nora to remark:
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"But when Wright described Peter and Helen Kroger, their approximate ages, and their New York accents, Belmont sat up.
"Maybe they’re the Cohens, Belmont said. Check the flyer we sent you in ’57.
"Wright made a note of that, and failed to follow up on it."
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"Wright reported that some residents of the neighborhood had complained of some kind of strange interference to their radio and television sets. Investigators from the General Post Office, the agency that regulated broadcasting, had visited the complainants and listened to the loud squeals blasting out from their speakers. They knew immediately what they were—oscillator interference. An illegal radio transmitter was operating somewhere in Ruislip. Its signals were so powerful that they were stepping on the regular broadcast bands. The GPO had sent a detector van with signal tracers to Ruislip and was trying to locate the source of the illegal transmissions. Wright was betting that the transmitter was Lonsdale’s secret link with Moscow, and that it was hidden inside the Krogers’ house."
"Wright reported that some residents of the neighborhood had complained of some kind of strange interference to their radio and television sets. Investigators from the General Post Office, the agency that regulated broadcasting, had visited the complainants and listened to the loud squeals blasting out from their speakers. They knew immediately what they were—oscillator interference. An illegal radio transmitter was operating somewhere in Ruislip. Its signals were so powerful that they were stepping on the regular broadcast bands. The GPO had sent a detector van with signal tracers to Ruislip and was trying to locate the source of the illegal transmissions. Wright was betting that the transmitter was Lonsdale’s secret link with Moscow, and that it was hidden inside the Krogers’ house."
"And at a party given by the Krogers’ friend Frank Doel, a bookseller with Marks and Company and the subject of 84 Charing Cross Road, Helen Kroger had arrived looking exotic in a long black evening gown, which prompted Doel’s wife Nora to remark:
"“Helen, you look just like a Russian spy!”"
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"But the pressure to do something had arrived at Hollis’s desk in a sealed envelope. The message was from Cleveland Cram, PhD, the plump, amiable CIA deputy station chief in London. Cram was a Harvard man and Anglophile who worked as CIA liaison officer with Britain’s intelligence services. Later on, he would find himself part of a CIA plot to render MI5 irrelevant by flooding London with American agents, money, and computers.8 But his communiqué to Hollis was about to save Operation Whisper.
"Cram’s note concerned Sniper, the CIA’s Polish source in Warsaw whose tip had led to the discovery of the Portland spy ring. The British had given him the code name Lavinia. Cram reported that a Soviet double agent somewhere in the West had alerted Moscow Center to the leaks that Sniper had been providing the CIA. The KGB had assigned Sniper himself to root out the pig (traitor) on the rusty side of the Iron Curtain. Fearing for his life, Sniper and his wife had defected to the U.S. military mission in West Berlin.
"Sniper had finally identified himself. He was Michael Goleniewski, vice chairman of Polish military intelligence, and he said that the Soviet mole who had blown the whistle on him was in the CIA. But then he announced that Goleniewski was not his real name. To everyone’s astonishment, he claimed he was actually Grand Duke Aleksei Nicholaevich Romanov, son of the late Nicholas II."
"They would find out later, just as Jim Skardon had expected, that today’s raid was coming just in time. Up in Ruislip, the pressure of deceiving the Krogers had turned Ruth Search almost hysterical. After each visit by Helen, Ruth would sit down and cry.
"Ruth had almost blown the operation at a holiday party. She baked a pie for the Krogers, and then considered, but rejected, tucking a note inside with a warning to Peter and Helen:"
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"An impressive amount of spy paraphernalia was found: a microscope that could be used for reading microfilm, a flashlight containing 500 U.S. dollars, and a piece of Cellophane coated with silver bromide, suitable for making microfilm. Inside the base of a heavy cigarette lighter, more microdots and pages from a one-time pad were discovered. Also, a list of radio frequencies, days and times of broadcasts, and Russian call signs.
"An impressive amount of spy paraphernalia was found: a microscope that could be used for reading microfilm, a flashlight containing 500 U.S. dollars, and a piece of Cellophane coated with silver bromide, suitable for making microfilm. Inside the base of a heavy cigarette lighter, more microdots and pages from a one-time pad were discovered. Also, a list of radio frequencies, days and times of broadcasts, and Russian call signs.
"It got better. In the bathroom, another microdot reader was found in a secret compartment in a can of talcum powder. Hidden in the bedroom was a collection of passports from the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, all of them apparently legal, but in different names, and with the Krogers’ pictures in them. In the attic, more money: $6,000 in twenties, $2,000 in small bills, and a fat supply of traveler’s cheques.
"A powerful shortwave transmitter was discovered hidden beneath a concrete slab under the house, accessible via a trapdoor under the refrigerator in the kitchen. A burst encoder was found with it. A long wire strung under the rafters in the attic turned out to be the antenna for the radio. Years later, new owners of the house would dig up a second transmitter, buried in the garden."
"The sleepers had their own fronts, in countries like Switzerland and Austria, where a crosscurrent of mail between East and West was common and attracted little notice. After receiving the books, the sleepers cleaned them of identity by taking the wrappings off and sealing them in new mailers. Then they mailed them to a post office box in Moscow, where they were picked up by KGB agents. It was a system brilliant in its simplicity. It had worked perfectly for years."
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"“They also include details of the naval building program and details of HMS Dreadnought, the navy’s first nuclear submarine.”
"There it was. Nuclear secrets were being stolen. Building nuclear submarines was a key part of the Cold War arms race. The United States had begun research on nuclear-powered submarines in the late forties and launched the world’s first one, the USS Nautilus, in 1954. The American government then began sharing its research with Britain. The Soviet Union didn’t launch their first atomic sub, the K-3 Leninsky Komsomol, until 1958.
"Russia planned to build a large fleet of nuclear subs to compensate for America’s increased production of intercontinental nuclear missiles. But Russia’s nuclear subs were built in a hurry and were plagued with problems from the very beginning—radiation leaks, fires, and contamination—which in time would lead to many deaths.3 By contrast, the HMS Dreadnought was being fitted with a reliable American Westinghouse reactor. The Soviets wanted to find out all they could about it.
"Symonds’s testimony confirmed that the Soviets were up to their old tricks again, infiltrating Western military installations for atomic secrets. It was 1945 all over again."
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"Gordon Lonsdale’s strategy was more interesting. He figured that if they all went to prison, he would get out first, in a swap arranged by the Soviet government. So, he tried to shift the blame onto himself and clear the Krogers. He and Peter agreed on this in talks before the trial."
"Gordon Lonsdale’s strategy was more interesting. He figured that if they all went to prison, he would get out first, in a swap arranged by the Soviet government. So, he tried to shift the blame onto himself and clear the Krogers. He and Peter agreed on this in talks before the trial."
"The Krogers were more lively. They followed the proceedings closely. They held hands and laughed about the evidence being given. They smiled at friends in the courtroom and waved at some of them, including their friend Nora Doel, wife of Frank Doel, the bookshop owner. That resulted in Mrs. Doel being dubbed the mysterious “Woman in Blue” by the press. This, despite the fact she was just an ordinary suburban housewife like Ruth Search, with no particular secrets to guard except perhaps a recipe or two handed down from her grandmother."
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"After their arrest, the Krogers had been told they would be fingerprinted, Smith said. They refused. Only after they were informed that they would be fingerprinted one way or another, did they reluctantly agree. The prints were then delivered to the FBI’s legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in London, who forwarded them to Washington.
"But why were the prints sent to the FBI?
"Superintendent Smith wasn’t clear on that. But Freddie Snelling wrote in his reminiscences that after the Krogers were arrested, the Toronto Star did some research and discovered they were the Cohens.5 Apparently the RCMP read that information in the paper and forwarded it to Scotland Yard. The Yard then contacted the U.S. embassy, and the embassy asked Alan Belmont for FBI verification.
"Moonraker waved the results of the fingerprint query.
"Peter and Helen Kroger, he announced, were, in fact, Morris and Lona Cohen, Americans who had spied for the Soviets in the United States and Canada during and after the war. Their spy network had stolen the secrets of the atomic bomb. Reporters noted that a collective gasp rose from the audience.
"Smith went on for twenty minutes. The Cohens had fled New York in 1950 as the spy ring of their associates Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was being rolled up. They had been under investigation by the FBI since 1953. The Soviets had placed them in Lublin, Poland, near the Soviet border, from 1951 to 1954, and Morris taught English there as a cover job.
"While based in Poland, Smith continued, the Cohens went on foreign missions for Moscow. They left an American Express paper trail as they traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In Paris they went to the New Zealand embassy with birth certificates and a marriage license from that country, and obtained dead double passports in the name of Kroger. They made two trips to Canada and acquired more dead double passports there, in the name of Smith."
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"If the Portland five had been charged with one act of spying, the maximum sentence would have been fourteen years. But they had committed their offenses over a period of years, so they were charged with conspiracy. There was no maximum sentence for conspiracy.
"If the Portland five had been charged with one act of spying, the maximum sentence would have been fourteen years. But they had committed their offenses over a period of years, so they were charged with conspiracy. There was no maximum sentence for conspiracy.
"EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE TRIAL, Lonsdale’s true identity was discovered by MI5 and the Yard. He was KGB Colonel Konon Trofimovich Molody, son of a famous Soviet scientist. In 1929, at the age of seven, his aunt took him to live with her in Berkeley, California. He was there nine years, going to school with local kids and immersing himself in American life. That’s how he learned English so well. His son later said that Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, had helped Konon get a passport to go to America, suggesting that he was being groomed for spy work at an early age. Konon went back to Russia in 1938 after being told he had to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union. He worked intelligence ops for the Red Army in the war, then signed on with the NKVD. His mentor was Willie Fisher, the Soviet agent who saved his skin during the war.
"Moscow Center had introduced Molody to the Cohens in 1954. The three were told they would be working together on an important new assignment. While Lona was abroad on missions, Morris helped Konon fine-tune his English, and gave him a refresher course in how to dress, walk, gesture, and order meals like a North American. All that was done at a dacha, a country house, outside Moscow. Thus, Moscow Center referred to the Cohens as Dachniki.
"Morris and Lona, posing as the Krogers, moved to England in December 1954. With Moscow’s financial backing, Morris set up his book business. Molody went to Canada in 1955 on a false passport and acquired a copy of the birth certificate for the real Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, born 1924 at Cobalt, a mining town in Ontario. Armed with that document, Molody then got a valid driver’s license and passport in the name Lonsdale. With funds supplied by Moscow Center, the resurrected Gordon Lonsdale entered England and set himself up as a Canadian businessman and a silver-tongued roué pursuing a James Bond lifestyle of cars, casinos, and girls.
"When the RCMP investigated, they interviewed two references Molody had given when he applied for his passport. Those Canadians said they had never heard of Gordon Lonsdale. And those weren’t their signatures on the application. Then the RCMP interviewed the doctor who had delivered the real Gordon Lonsdale. He told them the child had been circumcised."
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"HARRY HOUGHTON’S FIRST CONTROL OFFICER, the mysterious Nikki, was identified by MI5 as Nikolai B. Korovin, a KGB legal rezident whose cover job was first counsellor at the Russian embassy in London. Korovin was above Lonsdale. That meant other spy rings were probably operating in Britain, as Lord Parker had suspected. Korovin hastily left England in order to avoid the messy publicity of being identified and deported.
Still, the Portland spy case set off repercussions on both side of the Atlantic, resulting in more bad press for everyone involved.
"Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described the Portland spy case as a “terrible blow” to Britain. He set up a committee of inquiry, headed up by Sir Charles Romer, a retired lord justice of appeal, to find out what had happened. But first, a little whitewash: Macmillan claimed, contrary to evidence given in court, that there was no possibility that any information on nuclear research had been betrayed by the Portland spies. The opposition immediately jumped on him. So did the Guardian: “That something at Portland was badly wrong is clear,” a leader (editorial) said. “How else could Ethel Gee have taken away classified papers every weekend much as a housewife takes home groceries?”
"The Romer Committee attached no blame to the British immigration service for allowing Lonsdale and the Krogers into the country. They had entered on valid passports, and immigration officials had no way of knowing those documents had been fraudulently obtained. Nor was MI5 blamed for any failure of liaison with U.S. authorities."
"Criticism in the United States was more severe. Members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy cited the Portland spy case as reason why no more nuclear secrets should be shared with European allies. Four years before, Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico said, the committee had warned President Eisenhower against turning over information on the USS Nautilus to Britain, a nation with “chinks” in her security wall. The committee had further cautioned Eisenhower about his secret agreement to aid Britain in building the HMS Dreadnought and his plan to give NATO four submarines capable of firing Polaris nuclear missiles.
"And now a new agreement would allow President Kennedy to give information on nuclear weapons to Italy?
"The committee was aghast."
"Atomic subs were especially attractive to the Soviets because they could be positioned in international waters off the coast of the United States, Britain, and France as mobile launching pads for nuclear missiles in case of direct war. The West, at the same time, was trying to counter Moscow’s efforts at every turn. It was a classic case of intelligence versus counterintelligence. That was why the Portland spy case was such an embarrassment. The counterspies claimed victory in their roll-up, but the ring had been operating undetected for five years."
................................................................................................" ... Shortly after the trial, at a meeting in Washington of the National Security Council, the U.S. Navy sought to push through a complete break in the Anglo-American exchange of intelligence. Al Belmont of the FBI was one of those present who spoke up to defeat that notion. But then within months of the Portland spy trial, British intelligence suffered another humiliation as George Blake was exposed as a longtime Soviet mole in MI6."
"Blake (né Behar) was the son of a Turkish father and a Dutch mother, with some Jewish ancestry. ... After his father died he went to live with a rich aunt in Cairo. ... The daily contrasts that Blake saw between the wealth and poverty of Cairo influenced him deeply.
"Blake ran messages for a while for the Dutch Resistance during the Second World War, then escaped occupied Holland for England in 1943. He served with British Naval Intelligence and the SOE before joining MI6 in 1947. They sent him to study Russian for three years at Cambridge. There he came under additional communist influence from one of his language instructors. In 1948, MI6 sent Blake to their Seoul station. During the Korean War he was arrested by enemy forces and interned for three years. He later said that the sight of American warplanes bombing North Korean villages convinced him that he had been fighting on the wrong side. He offered his services to the Soviets."
"In the early fifties the CIA and MI6 hatched a plot, called Operation Gold by the Americans, and Operation Stopwatch by the British, to dig a tunnel from West Berlin into the Soviet zone of that city and tap the underground phone lines of the Soviet Army. Blake was assigned to keep the minutes of the planning session in London. He photocopied his notes and turned them over to his Soviet control officer. After the tunnel was dug successfully in 1955, the Soviets “discovered” it and exposed it to the world press. It was another embarrassment for the West.
"Blake had been under suspicion at MI6 for some time. Michael Goleniewski (Sniper), the Polish intelligence defector who led MI5 to Harry Houghton, said that an MI6 officer in Berlin—he called him Lambda 1—had given up British agents working in Poland. That tip led to the identification of Blake. He was recalled to London, and under questioning in 1961 he confessed to spying. He was convicted in a trial before Lord Parker in the Old Bailey and sentenced to an astonishing forty-two years in prison.
"Blake’s most catastrophic damage to MI6 had been his betrayal of British agents working in East Germany. When the Daily Telegraph ran the story in 1961 they printed silhouettes of 40 figures in trench coats across the top of the front page, one for each agent that Blake allegedly had identified. Blake himself claimed he blew “maybe 500, 600” agents. But in 2015 an intelligence researcher dug through the records of the Stasi, the East German secret police, and estimated the figure was more like 100."
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"When Konon Molody (still known as Gordon Lonsdale) was first taken to Brixton, he accused Moonraker of having stolen his gold lighter. Lona said the police swiped a diamond necklace of hers. Molody said he was told by policemen who were in prison for theft that the coppers routinely stole 10 to 15 percent of the value of a subject’s possessions.
"When Konon Molody (still known as Gordon Lonsdale) was first taken to Brixton, he accused Moonraker of having stolen his gold lighter. Lona said the police swiped a diamond necklace of hers. Molody said he was told by policemen who were in prison for theft that the coppers routinely stole 10 to 15 percent of the value of a subject’s possessions.
"After the trial, the three male prisoners were sent to Wormwood Scrubs in Hammersmith, London. “Did any house of detention bear a more suitable name?” Snelling wrote. By comparison, he said, Strangeways Prison in Manchester sounded “almost romantic.”"
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"When Konon Molody (still known as Gordon Lonsdale) was first taken to Brixton, he accused Moonraker of having stolen his gold lighter. Lona said the police swiped a diamond necklace of hers. Molody said he was told by policemen who were in prison for theft that the coppers routinely stole 10 to 15 percent of the value of a subject’s possessions."
"Molody was the first of the Portland spies to be released. On the morning of April 21, 1964, he was called from his job in the paint shop at Strangeways and told he was being exchanged for Greville Wynne, a forty-two-year-old British electrical engineer held by the Soviets. But before Molody left prison, he told Morris: “Our comrades will take care of you. It means you just have to wait.”
"Wynne, a short, balding, dapper dresser with an Errol Flynn mustache, had been doing business in the Soviet bloc for years. He had also been picking up papers from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of Soviet military intelligence and smuggling them out to MI6. Some of those documents had aided President Kennedy in his handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Wynne was arrested at a trade fair in Budapest, convicted of spying in Russia, and sentenced to eight years in prison. Penkovsky was shot."
"When the Portland spies first went to prison, security was lax. Snelling said it was a long-standing British tradition of locking up the stable after the horse has gone. That was illustrated by George Blake’s daring escape on October 22, 1966."
" ... His liberators smuggled him into East Germany in a false bottom built into a camper van."
"THE COHENS were freed in a swap for Gerald Brooke, a twenty-seven-year-old British lecturer arrested by the KGB in 1965 while leading what he called a discussion group of students and teachers in Moscow. The Brooke case was a revealing one, showing how frustrating East-West relations could be in the Cold War."
"Queen Elizabeth II signed the Cohens’ release papers and they were reunited back at Brixton Prison in London on October 21, 1969. “Hello, sweetie pie,” Lona said as she embraced her husband. After lunch together, they met with Tadeusz Piwinski, a Polish consul in Britain. The Soviet government for some time had been trotting out Polish citizens who swore they were long-lost relatives of the “Krogers” and that “Peter and Helen” were legal citizens of Poland. It was an attempt to block their possible extradition to America.
"In order to provide some privacy for the couple as they departed Britain, Piwinski announced that no Polish visas would be issued to Western journalists for the next few days. Nor would the Cohens’ flight number be revealed. It didn’t work. Journalists booked seats on every flight to Warsaw the day of the release. They planned to sit with the Cohens on the plane over, then take a return flight without going through immigration.
"But first, a glitch, as usually happens in an affair of this magnitude. Lona announced she did not want to go “home” to Poland. She didn’t want to be back in the USSR, either. She wanted to go to America. If that weren’t possible, she would stay in England. She liked it here.
"Morris said no. He had been working to establish their Polish “identity.” All that work would be lost. And he had no intention of sitting in prison for the remaining years of his term. The British government also weighed in. Gerald Brooke had been returned to England three months before. If the Cohens backed out now, that would queer the rest of the deal: to allow four Brits to marry Russians, which was usually taboo in those days, and to allow more consular visits to Western prisoners held by the Soviets."
"The Cohens knew they were historical figures who had pulled off what was undoubtedly one of the most damaging espionage coups of all time. But as their lives drew to a close they came to miss America and their families. It tugged at them like the cry of a sick child.
"They tried to regain their American souls. They wanted to be Americans again, to die as Americans, to be buried in America. But the time had long since passed when they could have gone home, under any circumstances. A sister came to visit Lona in the Moscow nursing home, but that was the only contact she had had with her family since she and Morris left New York forty-two years before."
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December 12, 2020 -
April 26, 2020 - May 27, 2021.
Purchased January 24, 2021
Publisher: ForeEdge,
1st edition, May 03, 2016
ASIN:- B07NN84YQ5
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