BOOK REVIEW: Dead Doubles: The Extraordinary Worldwide Hunt for One of the Cold War’s Most Notorious Spy Rings
by Trevor Barnes
Reviewed by Nick Fishwick
Nick Fishwick CMG retired in 2012 after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. He did postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, director for counterterrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations. Fishwick also spent three years on a secondment to UK Customs, specialising iexcln international drug enforcement and tax evasion issues.
BOOK REVIEW — Britain in the early 1960s, experienced a rapid succession of espionage cases that changed press, public and politicians’ attitudes to secret intelligence work. In 1961, there was the arrest of the Portland Spy Ring; then George Blake, an MI6 officer, confessed to being a Soviet spy. In 1962, a junior civil servant in the Admiralty, John Vassall, was revealed to have been a long-term Soviet spy; later, the Soviets arrested a GRU officer, Oleg Penkovsky, as a western traitor and grabbed a British accomplice, Greville Wynne, at the same time. In 1963, the British war minister, John Profumo, first denied and then admitted to sharing a girlfriend with a London-based GRU officer; and another MI6 officer, Kim Philby, was revealed to have defected to the Soviet Union. By then, the first James Bond film (Dr No, 1962) had been an instant success; the advance publicity had clearly helped.
Philby and his friends Burgess and Maclean, who had defected from Britain in 1951, gave the impression that treason was an upper-class pursuit, like polo or cross-dressing. But the Portland Spy Ring was located in a more humdrum Britain that most Britons would recognise personally. The traitors were Harry Houghton and “Bunty” Gee. Houghton was the sort of seedy and rather disgusting character you would have come across in most English provincial pubs in about 1960: a liar, a cynic, small-town adulterer, a boozer, a wife-beater, fond of a bit of pornography and always on the lookout to make a few quid. Gee, in her forties, was still sharing a bedroom with her mum. She seems to have started an affair with Houghton after his wife left him. They worked at a naval base in Portland, on the English south coast, on Underwater Detection Equipment (UDE).
As it happened, Houghton’s interest in making a few quid had led him to offer his services to Polish intelligence when he was posted to Warsaw in 1952. The Poles ran him, then passed him onto the KGB when Houghton returned to the UK in 1953. Houghton was perfectly happy to work for the Soviets. He persuaded Gee to spy with him; she agreed at first with some trepidation, but latterly seems to have been a very productive Soviet spy. They sold thousands of sensitive documents to the KGB.
At first, the KGB ran Houghton in London through officers under diplomatic cover, but when the level of MI5 surveillance became a problem, they turned to their illegal resident, Konon Molody, who posed as a small-time Canadian businessman called Gordon Lonsdale. Lonsdale received the intelligence from Gee and Houghton, paid and welfared them, and passed the product on to two other illegals for transmission to the Centre. These were Morris and Lona Cohen, using the identities Peter and Helen Kroger. There was no James Bond or Cambridge Five glamour in this arrangement. The Krogers lived in Ruislip on the outskirts of London, a numbingly dull area favoured by the non-aspirational lower middle class, and it was from there, from their bungalow on Cranley Drive, that the intelligence reached Moscow.
In Dead Doubles, Trevor Barnes has written an excellent book on the Portland affair. Its strength comes not only from its use of vivid primary sources — for example, the MI5 records of the investigations before and after the arrests of these five people in January 1961. It comes additionally from the research he has done on the back stories of Lonsdale/Molody and the Krogers/Cohens. As a reader, you find it difficult not to admire Molody: he was a true communist believer and a dedicated enemy of the west but still, a charming and brave man with a twinkle in the eye. The Krogers were in fact anything but Mr. and Mrs. Boring from Ruislip. Morris Cohen, a dedicated American communist, had fought for the republic in Spain, where he was recruited for the NKVD. His wife Lona played a very active role in the Soviet penetration of the Los Alamos project in the 1940s. They worked with Rudolf Abel. They fled the US in the early 50s, with the FBI looking for them: it was FBI fingerprints that revealed their true identity to the British. The British tried to do a deal with Molody and the Cohens in prison. Make full and frank confessions, they told them, and we’ll cut your sentences. Molody may have been tempted. The Cohens were not. Morris spent his time in prison reading thick tomes on dialectical materialism.
A spy swap in 1964 saw the Soviets release Wynne and a human rights activist in return for Molody and the Cohens. A knight and a pawn for a rook and two bishops. The British Prime Minister, Sir Alex Douglas-Home, worried that the Soviets might inject Wynne with some slow-working poison that would kill him after his release. But in the 60s, the Russians honoured their spy swaps.
What difference did it make? Mr. Barnes reminds us that submarine strength was an area in the 50s where the Soviets were desperate to close the gap with the west, as they had been over the A-bomb ten years before. He thinks the damage to the west was less history-changing than the impact of the Walker spy ring, and Houghton/Gee’s treachery “had no long-term effect on the balance of power between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces”. But it certainly helped the Soviets close some of the gaps and save a lot of resources in doing so.
This is a very readable book, even if there is a bit too much imaginative background description (“As railway porters in claret and mustard uniforms bustled on the platform to carry holidaymakers’ luggage…Seagulls wheeled and cawed in the sky”) for this reviewer. Still, it’s well written and well argued. It forms a good complement to Gordon Corera’s book on more recent Russian illegal operations, Russians Among Us. What extraordinary lives illegals must lead, and what fear they must have of a leak from their own side.
This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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