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Spy network12/20/2023 Lonsdale and the Krogers were all exchanged in prisoner swaps with Russia before serving their full sentences. However, Lonsdale claimed that Houghton had passed 350 test pamphlets on anti-submarine equipment, including some relating to the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet, which gives some indication of the volume and nature of the compromised material. Ultimately, the Admiralty believe the intelligence passed to Moscow from Portland helped in the manufacture of a new and more silent generation of Soviet submarines.īoth Houghton and Gee were tried and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment each. They married in prison and were eventually released early. It is not clear just how much sensitive information had been leaked to the Russians by this group over the years. Simultaneously two others, Helen and Peter Kroger, were arrested in Ruislip. The Krogers, also Russian ‘illegals’, had been living under deep cover as antiquarian booksellers, and sending the material Lonsdale gathered back to Moscow from their bungalow – the network’s communications hub. On January 7th 1960, a sustained MI5 surveillance operation culminated in the arrest by SB officers of Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale near the Old Vic theatre in London. All three were found to be in possession of secret naval documents. When this all came to light in 1960, thanks to a Polish defector, their contact was found to be one Gordon Lonsdale, ostensibly a small-scale Canadian businessman whose real name was Konon Molody, a KGB illegal operating under an adopted identity. Houghton and Gee would travel up to London at weekends together as husband and wife, often taking in a show, to meet their KGB contact and hand over naval plans and film of other material they had stolen. Both lived off the proceeds of spying for many years before they were discovered. In 1953, having returned to the UK, Houghton began work in the Navy’s Underwater Detection Establishment (UDE) in Portland and picked up his spying career with the help of a work colleague, Ethel Gee, who had access to material of a higher classification. Once recruited he was prolific in what he passed on to his controllers: between January and November 1952 alone he passed 99 secret documents including a Manual of Naval Intelligence. Investigation some years later indicated that he became a spy in 1951, probably having made the first contact himself. Harry Houghton was a former Royal Navy master-at-arms who in the 1950s worked as clerk to the British Naval Attaché in Warsaw. While there, Polish Intelligence recruited him as a spy, later to pass on his case to the Russians. The arrest, trial and conviction in 1961 of five Soviet spies, three of whom were ‘illegals’ living in London under deep cover, marked one of the Service’s most significant post-war counter espionage successes.
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