Portland spy ring

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.

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 were exchanged in October 1969 as part of a swap with Gerald Brooke, a British national held on largely falsified claims.

[8] 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.

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.

[17] 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.

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.

[25][26][27] 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.

[29] 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.

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.

At agreed points Houghton drove to pubs in the Kingston upon Thames area at weekends, taking camera film with naval documents.

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.

[46] 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",[45] and that the claim was probably "made on the spur of the moment and out of pure spite".

[47][f] Wanting to start earning his bonus payments again, Houghton suggested to Lonsdale that he inform Gee of his activities and use her to obtain the classified documents he no longer had access to.

[75] Police and MI5 search teams entered the premises of Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale where they found further incriminating evidence, including miniature cameras, large amounts of money, cypher pads, material to make microdots and more classified information.

Among the finds were New Zealand passports in the names of Helen and Peter Kroger, a tin of talcum powder, with hollow compartments, one of which held a microdot reader, a battery with a removable top, containing US$6,000, and the radio transmitter concealed beneath the kitchen floor.

Leading for the prosecution was the attorney general, Reginald Manningham-Buller, whose opening statement lasted two hours, during which he gave details of the spy ring, how it worked and the equipment they used to encode and transmit the information to Moscow.

[87] The journalist Trevor Barnes, in his history of the Portland spy ring, describes Gee's evidence as an "unconvincing narrative ... riddled with lies".

[89][90] At the end of March 1961 Rab Butler, the Home Secretary, announced the formation of a committee of inquiry under Sir Charles Romer, the former Lord Justice of Appeal.

Hollis criticised the security arrangements at AUWE, where it was common practice to allow senior staff to take classified information off the premises to work on them overnight.

[97] Elwell wrote a preliminary report he presented to the committee, in which he described Lonsdale as "a man of considerable charm ... humorous and ironical, rather than witty, ready to talk fluently and trenchantly on most subjects".

[98] His views on the Krogers were more damning: he described Peter as "a sententious bore ... a man whose life appears to be governed by rancid idealism"[98] and Helen as "even less alluring ... she looks and probably behaves like an embittered crazy fanatic".

The main responsibility for the failure to make a proper investigation of Houghton in 1956 rests, therefore, with the authorities in the Underwater Detection Establishment at that time.

But the Admiralty, and the Security Service, although they received only an incomplete and misleading report from Portland, cannot escape criticism for failing to press the matter to a positive conclusion.

Russian overtures on a spy swap were discussed in secret by the British government and on 21 April 1964 Lonsdale was removed from Winson Green prison in Birmingham, flown to West Germany and exchanged for Wynne.

[113] Although Houghton and Gee received the shortest prison sentences of any of the Portland spy ring, they spent the longest time incarcerated; they were released on the same day in May 1970.

[114][115][116] Houghton wrote Operation Portland in 1972; Barnes notes numerous inaccuracies in the book and described it as a "tiresome volume ... a book-length whine of complaint about the alleged incompetence of the Security Service, the unfairness of his trial and his harsh treatment in prison".

[117] In addition to news and historical coverage, the Portland Spy Ring and its aftermath have been described in books, including histories of what happened, personal memoirs from those involved and on stage and screen.

[124] The papers contained a comment from the former director general of MI5, Martin Furnival Jones, highlighting the correspondence from Houghton's ex-wife: It is clear that we ought to have carried out some investigation in 1956.

If we had done so there is a fair chance that we would have unearthed Houghton's espionage and the probability is that we would have discovered that he was being controlled as a spy by a member of the Soviet embassy.