Konon Trofimovich Molody (Russian: Ко́нон Трофи́мович Моло́дый; 17 January 1922 – 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale.

Posing as a Canadian businessman during the Cold War, he was a non-official (illegal) KGB intelligence agent and the mastermind of the Portland spy ring, which operated in Britain from 1953 until 1961.

Konon's father, Trofim Kononovich Molody became a renowned physicist in Russia (born 1889) who studied in Khabarovsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow.

[5][6] In 1934 the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda helped Konon's mother get a foreign passport for him to leave for the US to study in California and live there with his aunt,[7] dance teacher Tatiana Piankova.

He begins to work with a Polish underground resistance group and obtains papers as a Volksdeutscher[10] Lonsdale continues to describe the situation in Warsaw which after September 1939 fell was conquered and divided between the Soviets and Nazi Germany.

Molody (as Lonsdale) was also receiving training using passwords, dead drops, safehouses and learned how to escape a surveillance tail from enemy intelligence agents.

[11] The next part of his GRU work during WWII was spent with the renowned William Fisher (the famous illegal better known by his U.S. identity of Colonel Abel).

[12] Molody wrote of Fisher (in the Lonsdale memoir), "This was my first introduction to one of the most remarkable men I have ever met in my life, who is also indeed one of the most astute intelligence officers of all time.

[6] From Canada, "Gordon Lonsdale" illegally travelled without a visa to the US, where he started his operations as an aid to atomic spy Rudolph Abel.

Using business as a cover, Molody headed a London KGB front company manufacturing and trading in jukeboxes, bubble-gum and gambling machines.

[6] In 1959, Molody began receiving British military secrets from Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment clerk Harry Houghton.

[20] On 7 January 1961,[20] Metropolitan Police Special Branch team of Detective Superintendent George Gordon Smith arrested five people, all members of the Portland spy ring.

MI5, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigators' team had to resort to extensive enquiries.

On 13 March 1961 at the Old Bailey, Molody was charged with spying, along with associates Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee and Morris and Lona Cohen (Peter and Helen Kroger).

[6] In due course, the British and American security services managed to establish his true identity as Russian citizen Konon Molody.

[23] A year after his return to the Soviet Union he published a book Spy: Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale with the author still maintaining he was born in Canada.

Konon's youth friend and retired KGB intelligence agent Leonid Kolosov co-wrote The Dead Season: End of the Legend.

He maintained that Konon was healthy upon his return from the UK but began complaining about KGB doctors giving him injections against high blood pressure.