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Sept. 13, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:03
Edition 482 - Trevor Barnes

Writer/researcher Trevor Barnes on a spy case that shook the UK in the 1960s - the Portland spy-ring...involving a group of people who seemed ordinary but led dangerous double-lives...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Still Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you as ever for all of your nice communications.
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As many people have told me, through this very trying period of lockdown, and I have to say that, you know, in recent months I've had my own challenges that you've known about.
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There always is for mankind.
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Now, the story we're going to tell you on this edition of The Unexplained is a story that has to be told and has been told brilliantly by a researcher and author and broadcaster, Trevor Barnes, has written a book called Dead Doubles.
It is about one of the most notorious spy cases the world has ever seen.
Happened right here in the United Kingdom, just as the 1950s became the 1960s.
The Portland spy ring and the stealing of secrets, among other things, about our submarine program in the UK, of course, involving NATO and the US, other security services, but the network of apparently ordinary people involved in this extraordinary effort and the subsequent trial and the aftermath is going to amaze you.
So we'll be talking about the Portland spy ring on this edition of The Unexplained with Trevor Barnes.
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Okay, let's get to the guest now in London, not very far from me, Trevor Barnes.
And we're going to talk about the Portland spy ring.
Trevor, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
A pleasure.
So I think, Trevor, what we need to do is to get a little bit of an idea of the context and just a little general impression of the story here.
I said it was one of the most notorious spy cases in the UK.
Possibly not the most notorious, but it's up there with the top two or three.
Would I be right in saying that?
You would absolutely be right in saying that, Howard.
Obviously, there are the cases of the Cambridge Five, or the Magnificent Five, as the KGB called them, the Burgess Philby and MacLean ring of spies.
And these were spies who were recruited by Moscow in the 1930s when there was a strong sense of worry about the rise of Nazism and Hitler and the threat to the Soviet Union, which indeed was attacked, as you know, in 1941 by Hitler in Operation Barbarossa.
And so that was one particular wave of British spies.
But then you've got the beginning of the Cold War after World War II and a permafrost kind of went through Europe with the building of the Iron Curtain in the, well, not the building actually of an Iron Curtain, but a notional one, ending up, of course, in the building of the real Iron Curtain with the Berlin Wall in 1960.
And so it was a time of great international tension between the different sides.
And it was into that rather explosive, volatile atmosphere that the Portland spy ring exploded when the Ring of Five Spies were arrested in January 1961.
There's always been spying.
There's been spying back to the days of Napoleon and probably well before that.
But the nature of this spying, I think, is the thing that shocks because the people involved in it on the surface, and only on the surface, because in the world of spying nothing is as it seems, appear to be ordinary and in some cases quite innocuous.
Well, what's interesting by way of background to remember is that the Russians and indeed other intelligence services around the world operate two types of spies.
You have what we call the legal spies.
So let's stick with the KGB for the moment.
These are the spies who are based in the Russian embassy.
And they obviously working out of the Russian embassy have the great advantage of what's called diplomatic cover.
So if they're caught at any stage, there's nothing that Britain can do about them apart from expel them.
And the whole thing is played like some kind of public schoolyard game, isn't it?
At that level.
If you're caught, then you get a slap on the wrist, you pack your diplomatic bag, you're on the plane red-faced.
Exactly.
And the most recent example of this that was very high profile, and I'm sure a number of your listeners will remember, was in 2018 after the Salisbury poisonings of Yuri Skripal and his daughter, when Britain coordinated a mass expulsion of legal KGB.
Well, they're not called the KGB anymore, but modern Russian intelligence service spies.
Over 100 were expelled from America, the UK and elsewhere.
But there's the other type of spies, which the Russians have always valued even more than the legal spies.
And these are the illegal spies.
These are the ones who have to build what's called a legend, in other words, a deep cover.
And they have to swim with all the other fishers.
They have to be one of the normal people.
And their aim is to disappear in the society in which they're living.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think it's important just to put a time context on this.
When did that kind of spying begin?
You know, evidence through history, you must have looked back.
When did that kind of putting people who are almost implants into a society in in order to divine information?
When did that start?
Well, that started with the Russians immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
Because after the revolution, when Lenin created the first mass communist state in the world, a lot of countries refused to recognize it diplomatically.
And so Russia created its first intelligence service called the Cheka back in 1917 under a renowned, infamous, and very cruel man called Felix Dzinsky.
They decided they would start having these deep cover spies then in order for them to get into and penetrate and get secrets from the European countries.
So that started right back in the 1920s, Howard.
And then of course it's carried on ever since.
And the Russians have made a speciality of this.
They had in the KGB a special directorate called Directorate S, S for secret in Russian.
And that specialized in getting the false passports, getting the cover stories prepared, training and then sending these deep cover spies into largely Western countries, particularly the UK, Europe and the United States.
Right.
So it is something that's got a bit of a history.
But that history starts in what became the Eastern Bloc.
The Russians became the experts in this thing.
And we've only got to look at their exploits or alleged exploits today to see that dirty deeds are a speciality.
Well, the building of these illegal networks and the training of these illegals was very much a Russian speciality.
And it's interesting how a number of other intelligence agencies around the world have copied the Russians.
In particular, the Chinese.
They're very, very adept at using illegals as well.
And also Mossad, the famous Israeli Secret Service, also use illegals.
But the Russians were the first ones in the game, and they are the specialists in it.
Okay, so fast forward to the late 1950s, very much the dawning of the 1960s, a very different world.
What is it in this dawning Cold War era, what is it that we had that the Russians wanted?
Well, what you've got to remember was that Britain back in 1960, and it's hard for people like me today, I mean, I'm in my mid-60s even to remember it.
Back in 1960, Britain had the world's third largest navy after the United States and after the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union, even though it had got this massive coastline, had never really developed its navy as much as it could have done, in particular its submarine and underwater forces.
And although in 1960 they had the world's second largest navy, it was very outdated.
But in 1956, Khrushchev, who was the newly appointed Russian leader, appointed this relatively young admiral of the fleet.
His name was Gorshkov.
And he was determined to modernize the whole of the Soviet fleet, whether it be submarine or above water.
And so the KGB was missioned to get as many Western secrets as they possibly could.
They were hungry for information from the US and from the UK about, in particular, underwater technology.
Because by 1960, Britain had already started building its first nuclear submarine, the famous one called Dreadnought.
The Americans had the world's first nuclear submarine called Nautilus, which was launched in the mid-1950s.
And the Americans agreed to share the secrets of the engine, you know, the motor that was nuclear-powered, which meant that for the first time ever, a submarine could remain submerged for months.
Now, the Russians, understandably, were absolutely desperate to get that information.
And at that time, in 1960, late 50s, Britain centered all its underwater research down in Portland, near Weymouth on the Dorset coast.
It's a very interesting place.
I went down to visit it to research Dead Devils.
And it hangs like a teardrop into the English Channel.
It's a peninsula.
So very, very isolated.
Great place to have as your top secret research centre.
And there, again, quite hard to imagine for us now in 2020, Britain had developed a revolutionary world-beating sonar for that nuclear submarine.
And that clearly was a top target for the Russians, as well as other information, political information.
It wasn't all that long after the Suez crisis.
They wanted information as well, particularly from Port and Down, Britain's chemical and biological search centre not far from Salisbury.
Right.
So we will explain thereby the involvement of Dorset and the subsequent involvement of the good people at Dorset Constabulary in this case.
The investigation itself, we have to go into in some detail because it is fascinating.
It's an interleaving web, if that is a way of putting it.
Okay, I think what we need to do then is to introduce the principles here.
The Russians clearly identified a naval base and another center that they wanted to target.
How would they have gone about finding persons or people that they wanted to use to do that?
Well, the Russians were very, very lucky.
The MI5 investigation started in 1960 down in Portland, strangely, with the sending of an anti-Semitic letter to a man who worked down in the Portland underwater research base.
And he received it and understands me was distressed.
I want anyone getting an anti-Semitic letter, a swastika with a Jew on it.
Very, very upsetting.
So he reported this.
But the interesting thing was that he said, I think this man working down here, and here we're introducing the first principal, the first actor, if you like, he's going to appear in this play.
His name was Harry Houghton.
And so this is the first time that Harry Houghton comes onto the radar screen, so to speak.
And MI5 started to look into his background because the man who received the letter said Harry Houghton was accused a few years before down here in Porton of taking secret files from the strong room without permission.
And that was really what set the alarm bells ringing in MI5 headquarters, which was at that stage in Curzon Street in Mayfair.
You can still see the building if you walk down there, Howard.
It's called Leconfield House.
It's now a normal office block.
But at that stage, the ground floor was wreathed in curtains.
If you walk past, there'd have been a screen at the front door.
The people would have just scurried in and out secretly.
That was MI5's headquarters.
You would have expected them to have an office block, wouldn't you?
But, you know, here is, I mean, if people know, I don't know, if people know some of the houses around the BBC, for example, you know, Portland Place, it's that kind of environment, isn't it?
It was very much, you know, Britain was just emerging from the period of real austerity which followed World War II.
Rationing, you've got to remember, was only scrapped in Britain in 1955.
And the consumer boom was only just starting to move in the late 50s.
Britain was very much at a crossroads.
But just to revert to Harry Houghton, he was the first person to get onto their radar screen.
And it took quite a while for MI5 to get extra evidence to confirm that he really was spying for the Russians.
And that involved them tapping his phone, real old-style gumshoe stuff, as you might say.
They would have made sure that there was a fault put on Harry Houghton's line in his cossage down near Weymouth.
And then they'd have sent in one of the old post office engineers.
It was called the GPO in those days.
And the engineer would then have crept in, pretending to repair the phone, but actually put a bug inside the phone.
And also they intercepted all the correspondence of this man, Harry Houghton.
And by following him at that stage, MI5 discovered he had a girlfriend.
Her name was Ethel Bunty G, and she worked in the Portland base, not in the same office, but also worked in the same base as Harry Houghton.
But the important point was that she had pretty much unrestricted access to many of the really important secrets down in Portland.
Now, look, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
But you say that Harry Houghton had been already, in a small way, under the spotlight for taking out files that he shouldn't have taken or in a way that he shouldn't have taken them.
And he was having an illicit relationship with somebody he worked with, which in a secret institution is something that should have flagged him up and flagged them up.
That didn't happen, did it?
Not immediately.
No, you're absolutely right to spot that point.
This is back in 1956.
And not only was there this sort of small investigation into Houghton, but Harry Houghton's former wife was in an unhappy marriage with Harry Houghton.
She went to the authorities and she alleged that she was being abused physically and mentally and verbally abused by Harry Houghton.
And she said that she also believed that he was taking secret documents, which he took out of the Portland base, up to London every few weekends to meet strange foreigners, as she put it.
And she made all these allegations to the Admiralty Police.
And they investigated them, but not frankly very seriously.
Their attitude to the former Mrs. Houghton was that she was a scorned woman.
She was jealous and angry because of the fact that Harry Houghton had started this relationship with Ethel G. And when the Admiralty down in Portland decided to ask whether or not Harry Houghton had actually been vetted when he started work at this Portland base down in Dorset, they wrote to MI5 just asking, have you got a file on this guy Houghton, MI5?
And this came into the registry that was right down in the bowels of MI5's headquarters to a junior officer.
But the Admiralty accompanied this request for information with saying, we don't think there's anything in this.
We think it's just the allegations of a scorned woman.
And so the guy in the registry went to look for a file.
There was no file on Harry Helton.
He wasn't on the radar screen of MI5 at all.
And he made a minor error with the benefit of hindsight, but a silly one and an unacceptable one, certainly in today's environment where we're much more sensitive to allegations of abuse.
He wrote back saying, you know, we've not got a file on him.
And we tend to agree with you that these might well be the allegations of a scorned wife.
Trevor Burrus, the man who wrote the book about all of this that I definitely recommend to you, Dead Doubles.
It was out this week.
Well worth checking out.
And Trevor, you know, the book, just very briefly, I think does an excellent thing because it reads partly almost like a novel in the way that you've written it.
But all the information, the relevant questions and the new information that's come out are all in there.
So, you know, well done for weaving that together.
Well, thank you.
I can tell you, structuring and working out how to tell the story to keep the interest of readers up and indeed the listeners to this program, because they're having to keep up and follow the tale was really a challenge.
And in the end, I sort of adopted, if you like, one comparison would be with one of those wonderful Russian dolls, you know, that you open up called a matushka and you open one up and there's something else inside.
And that was what was happening when I was researching this book.
It was absolutely unbelievable.
Unless it was layers within layers.
Well, it was, absolutely.
Okay, now, Harry Houghton, Harry Houghton, the principal, the tip of the spear here, and his illicit affair that he was having with somebody at that Portland base.
And in an unlikely way, the authorities' attention was alerted to this.
But there was also another, and one of the things we haven't brought out is the fact that this story is replete with Cold War code names like Sniper and Reverberate, just to name two.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But there was somebody who alerted the Americans to something going on, wasn't there?
This was Sniper.
Yeah, what happened was that, as we said in the earlier section, Harry Howlton first came to the attention of MI5 at the start of 1960, but there was no real evidence against him at all.
So the MI5 investigation was ambling along at a, you know, a meandering, ambling pace.
And suddenly, at the end of April 1960, there was an explosive development, and this was with this agent code name of Sniper.
Now, no one knew what the sex of this agent was or the name, the real name of this agent, but for about two years before 1960, this agent has started sending really, really crucial, valuable intelligence to the CIA.
And because the CIA and America is part of this amazing Five Eyes intelligence network together with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, this information was shared, obviously immensely secret.
So what Sniper said at the end of 1960 in April was, look, there is a spy in the British Admiralty.
This spy was recruited in Poland, in Warsaw, working in the naval attaché's office there back in 1951.
This agent then came back to Britain and was taken over by the KGB and is still active.
And this person's name begins with an H. The agent sniper said it was something like Hoopkenna.
Now, when MI5 followed this through, there was only one prime suspect, and that was Harry Houghton.
So at that moment, it was as though a rocket was put underneath the MI5 investigation, and they roared off to the Admiralty, got all the files.
They obviously intensified the surveillance of Houghton, really, really got it moving.
And that was what led them to the next actor in the story, the next principal, whose name is Gordon Lonsdale.
Right.
Now, the two of them tie in very neatly because they're both unlikely people.
Harry Houghton, in your book, you describe him, somebody reported him, I think, under the influence of drink when he was in Warsaw, shooting his mouth off.
You know, a most unlikely spy if that is the case, you know, talking about things he shouldn't have been talking about.
And then Gordon Lonsdale, let's talk about both of them.
Gordon Lonsdale, the contact, because here was somebody who was purportedly a Canadian businessman dealing, I think, in what the Americans call gumball machines, bubblegum machines, and jukeboxes.
Absolutely.
And how he came onto the MI5 radar screen, again, is classic old-style surveillance.
And this was very much analog surveillance in an analog age, you know, long, long, long way from digital and CCTV cameras everywhere and microwave masts.
And what happened was that they, MI5, came across Gordon Lonsdale for the first time when they followed Harry Houghton and Ethel G up to London in July 1960 because they intercepted phone calls and knew that the couple were coming up to London for that weekend.
They didn't know what they're going to do, who they're going to meet.
But they followed them and they went to the old Vic Theatre nearby to Waterloo Station.
And there the couple, Harry Halton and Nezel G, were seen to meet a mysterious unknown man.
Now MI5 first of all thought this man they met was a Polish intelligence officer called Gowalski and so they placed some people outside the Polish embassy to see if it was him and two days later they realized they'd made a mistake.
So the only clue they had to the identity of this mysterious man, they had no photograph of him, was the number plate of his car.
And when MI5 tracked that through they discovered it belonged to, as you just said, this Canadian businessman, Gordon Lonsdale, or at least he appeared to be a Canadian businessman selling jukeboxes and gun machines and that sort of thing.
But of course the real story, the real identity of him was going to take a long, long while before that emerged.
I think some people who don't understand intelligence operations, and that includes me, would have asked initially, and I understand why now, why at that sort of stage MI5 and the police who were involved did not swoop on these people and then try and interrogate them to find out who they were connected to.
And of course, there are very good reasons why you don't do that.
Absolutely, Howard.
And the real reason in this case was exemplified by the tension between the interests of MI5 and the interest of the Admiralty.
Because on the one hand, MI5, and this is the reason why they didn't swoop immediately, wanted to follow these spies because you're not sure how big the network is.
You don't know who else they're involved with.
So what you try and do normally is play the surveillance operation along to capture as many different people in a net as you possibly can.
If you move too early, then you will not capture all the spies.
And indeed, this would have happened in 1956.
We've already talked about the missed opportunity MI5 had potentially to capture and arrest Harry Houghton in 56.
But of course, if they had arrested him in 1956, they would have missed at least Gordon Lonsdale.
And on the other side of the balance, you've got the Admiralty, which was in charge of the Portland base, that all the time was saying, oh my God, the longer this thing goes on, we're leaking secrets.
And of course, if the Admiralty started to restrict the access to secrets of Ethel G and Harry Houghton and started to treat them differently, restricted their movements and that sort of thing at Portland, that immediately would have set the alarm bell ringing for Harry Houghton and Ethel G. And that again would have put an end to the spying operation.
Was there any attempt to feed Harry Houghton and Gordon Lonsdale with duff information, with information that actually wasn't true, once it was known what they were there to do?
There's no evidence in the files that this happened.
There was some discussion in the run-up to the arrest that we'll talk about a little bit later.
Having decided that the arrests were going to take place, then it was very important to ensure, obviously, when they were arrested, that they had some confidential documents on them.
The last thing you wanted to do was arrest them and discover they basically were carrying the day's newspapers and that's it.
So there was some discussion about whether they would feed certain documents to them deliberately to ensure that they were on them.
But in fact, that wasn't necessary.
When they were arrested, they did have necessary documents on them.
So at no point during the investigation, indeed, were fake or unimportant documents fed.
It wasn't necessary.
Okay, so you've said that there's a complicated network of people who had an interest in this.
You've got the Admiralty worried about leaking further secrets.
The Secret Services wanting to find out exactly what this spy web looked like and who was involved in it and where all the material was going to, because that would have given them a much bigger picture, which they eventually got.
But it is a complicated investigation, isn't it?
Because it involves MI5 and two principals there.
There's also an old-fashioned police officer involved in this.
Plus, of course, overlaid on that, you've got the Dorset Constabulary who are involved as well, because the Portland Naval Base and Portandown was within their territory.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to look at the relationship between the police and MI5, because at this time, back in 1960, MI5 did not officially exist.
It was just not on the radar screen of any organogram of Whitehall.
It was going to be decades before legislation was passed to officially recognize MI5 and MI6 and put an oversight system in place.
When people referred to MI5, it was called the War Office.
So when new secretaries were recruited, and I interviewed some former MI5 secretaries as part of my research for dead doubles, they were just told at the beginning they were going to work for the War Office.
Of course, they discovered the truth somewhat later.
And the job of MI5 was to counter subversion and counter any attempts by foreign powers to subvert the UK.
And so they operated very much undercover.
But there were some important roles that the police had to play, and these were carried out in this Portland spy investigation.
One role was when it came to the end of the investigation and arrests had to be made and a criminal trial put together, then the special branch of the Metropolitan Police were called in and they would carry out the arrests and, as I said, prepare the evidence and they would appear in court.
And the main protagonist from New Scotland Yard in this case was a rather interesting special branch officer called Superintendent George Gordon Smith.
He was a bit of a self-publicist in that he had his friends in Fleet Street and used to like leaking stories to them, but was a very, very good and determined and dedicated officer.
But then the second role of the police was that all around the country, individual constabularies had special branches.
This is just a handful of officers whose job was to keep a watch on any local subversive activity.
So this might be the local branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain or local fascists who might be operating undercover.
They might be going and attending demonstrations, collecting evidence on any, as I said, local activity which was regarded as subversive, and that would be fed up to MI5.
Right.
And so how well?
It's a headache-inducing network.
How did these various elements then coordinate?
Well, it was done in a good old-fashioned way by phone and by meetings.
And, you know, there would be secure memos passed.
You know, there'd be a bag of secret documents, confidential documents, that would be sent from regional constabularies from my five headquarters to their post-PO box number in Curzon Street that would be opened.
And that was how it all worked.
Boy, today, of course, it would all be by super secret email and various other things.
Well, it would these days.
But I mean, what happened was the local Dorset Constabulary, there was a young, at the time, dynamic, energetic, very effective detective constable called Leonard Burt.
He later rose right up the police hierarchy and became a chief constable.
And in fact, he later led an investigation into alleged corruption in the Metropolitan Police.
This was his first outing and really made his career because his job was to organise the surveillance of Harry Houghton.
And they even recruited a neighbour down in Dorset whose cottage overlooked the cottage of Harry Houghton.
He was a man called Cyril Bogust, and he was a special constable and he kept watch through the net curtains.
You know, he'd flick and then he would write reports up about the time Harry Houghton left when his girlfriend Ethel G came to see him.
And by the way, there's no evidence at all at any stage that Ethel G ever spent the night with Harry Houghton.
It was a strange sort of relationship, which, you know, things were obviously different in the 1950s and early 60s.
There's no evidence that she stayed overnight with him and, you know, to have sex.
The only time they seem to spend time together was when Ethel G would come up to London with Harry Houghton and then they would book in together as a man and wife in the hotel.
I think one of the reasons for that was that Ethel G still lived at home with her mother who was aged 86.
Incredibly, she still shared a bedroom with her mum.
She was aged 46.
And there were also two other elderly relatives.
So it was a pretty limited and restricted life that Ethel G led.
And they'd all obviously been picked very carefully by their spy masters.
What was in it for them?
Presumably they were paid, but that can't have been all of it.
Well, we've got to sort of look at the whole spy ring, I think, Howard, because the two British spies, Harry Houghton and Ethel G, were doing it for money.
There's no doubt about that.
And after the trial, the Lord Chief Justice, this is the trial that took place in March 1961, said that they were motivated by greed.
But the other three spies, the KGB deep cover illegals, we've only talked about one of them so far, Gordon Lonsdale, they were motivated by a love of communism and devotion to the Soviet Union and Russia and the ideals that they thought the USSR embodied at that time.
So they were ideological, patriotic spies.
And that goes for the other two, the Krugers, who have always fascinated me.
In fact, they were the only two really that when I first started to look at this a few days ago, I could remember.
You know, they were an apparently suburban couple, on the face of it, I think, Canadian.
But they were agents living in plain sight.
An astonishing thing, even by today's standards.
It was.
And those three spies, you've got Gordon Lonsdale and Peter and Helen Kroger living undercover in a bungalow in Ryslip, which is this suburb to the northwest of London.
Not far from Heathrow Airport, yeah.
Well, absolutely, and next door actually to RAF Northolt, which then was an airbase used by the Americans.
And their bungalow was actually chosen expressly to be there and bought by them with KGB money because they were the communications operators for Gordon Lonsdale, sending radio messages back to Moscow.
And of course, if you're next to a big airport, busy airport, with planes coming and going all the time, that would help disguise the radio messages incoming from Moscow and outgoing out to Moscow from Ryslip.
But, I mean, the story of how MI5 locked onto the Krogers and found them in Ryslip is itself an interesting one as well.
Well, please, let's try and tell a truncated version of it.
Well, so far, we've got two British spies down in Portland, and they've led MI5 to Gordon Lonsdale.
And Lonsdale himself was then tracked and followed by MI5.
He then disappeared off the radar screen at the end of August.
MI5 had a bit of a panic because they didn't know where he'd gone.
But from intercepted phone calls, they gathered he'd left the country for six weeks or so.
And while he was away, they actually went into Lonsdale's safety deposit box in a bank in central London, in Great Portland Street.
And they did this twice, the first time without a search warrant.
So in today's law, that would be regarded as burglary, but they got permission from the bank to do it.
But the second time with a search warrant in order to ensure that the evidence, if they collected any, could be used in a trial.
And indeed, there was a treasure trove of KGB spy Cold War paraphernalia in that safety deposit box, hidden in particular in an old-style cigarette lighter, which you opened up, and inside were all these code books and things.
But the main point was that when Lonsdale came back to this country in mid-October 1960, he was tracked out to Ryslip by MI5.
And he led MI5 to this road in Ryslip called Cranley Drive.
And MI5 at the beginning didn't know where he was going.
They were very cherry of following him too closely because they were aware he was a highly trained illegal and he would have his suspicions aroused if they were too close.
So they set up, and this is where I think you probably, Howard, came across the story of the Krogers, because there was a famous play written about it called Pack of Lies.
What MI5 did was go to a neighbour whose house overlooked the street.
The family was called the Searchers.
It was Ruth and Bill Search.
And they said, can we set up an observation post in your house to keep watch over the road?
And the searchers said yes.
And so these two young female agents, they were called watchers from MI5, set up base in the bedroom of the daughter of the searchers.
And then a few days later, one Sunday afternoon, one of the agents went to the front room of the searchers' house and out of the front door of the bungalow opposite number 45 Cranley Drive emerged Gordon Lonsdale.
Boy.
So that was that co-ching moment.
Right.
This is where he is gone.
This is where he is visiting to do something.
And immediately in my five thought, this couple, the Krogers, have to be investigated.
We've got to find out more about them.
But at least we now have got two more spies in the Portland spy ring net.
Okay, let's park it there.
We'll come back to the story, then talk about, so we've got a lot of ground to cover, about the arrests and trial and the aftermath and some brand new information about this case.
Trevor Burrus is here.
We're talking about the Portland spy ring that rocked the early 1960s in this country and how it all came together.
Harry Houghton at the Portland Naval Base, his accomplice there, the woman he was having a strange kind of affair with, a contact called Gordon Lonsdale, and a couple on the surface of it, perfectly ordinary in Ryslip, ferrying messages by radio from their home, their perfectly ordinary home, by radio back to the Russians.
What an astonishing thing.
But it was all to come unstuck for them, and it was all to come out in the trial.
Trevor Barnes has written a book that's been released this week.
It's called Dead Doubles.
It's about this case.
And so, Trevor, the Krugers were vital to the operation, obviously.
But they must have had quite complex radio transmitting equipment in their home, close to North Old Air Base, so the radio signals could be hidden among the radio traffic of the airbase.
But nevertheless, that place must have been festooned with equipment.
Well, it was indeed.
But of course, MI5 didn't know this until after the arrests.
It was going to be much too risky for them to break in and organise a burglary while the Krugers were living there.
So none of this was known at the time.
Boy, so is it the way that it worked, have I got this right from the book, that MI5 and the police organized a call on the Krugers ostensibly to investigate local burglaries?
Exactly.
That was how they finally found this equipment.
But we've got to just track back just for a moment, I think, to the arrests to work out why the ring were suddenly captured on the 7th of January 1961.
And this, in turn, goes back to the amazing CIA agent whose name was Sniper.
And he, at the very beginning of 1961, told the CIA in Berlin, I am going to defect in 24 hours' time.
Get ready to receive me.
So this was like an electric charge, another one going through the investigation, because the CIA realized, and as soon as they passed the information to MI5, MI5 realised that when this man defected, the KGB in Moscow would immediately go over all his tracks, all the people he would have met and information he may have given to the West.
And clearly, there was a massive risk that the defection of Sniper would cause the two Krogers and Gordon Lonsdale to flick their tails and just disappear in a big exfiltration exercise by the KGB.
So they had to be arrested.
And so the arrests took place on the 7th of January.
First of all, Harry Houghton and G, fortunately in terms of timing for MI5, were coming up to London that Saturday.
So Gordon Lonsdale was arrested with the two British spies outside the Old Vic.
And then there was a small convoy of cars that drove out on the Westway to Ryslip to the house which was lived in by the Krogers.
And as you just said, about seven o'clock in the evening, which was the time when MI5 thought that Gordon Lonsdale would normally arrive with his bag of secrets, George Smith, the superintendent of Special Branch, knocked on the door and said he wanted to worb at them because he wanted to suggest that there were some burglaries in the area.
The Krogers showed them in and what Smith's strategy was, was to ask them the names of the people who came to stay with them at weekends and visit them.
But they didn't mention Lonsdale's name.
So he said, I'm arresting you.
At that moment, Helen Kroger, who was a very quick-thinking spy, said, oh, I've just got to stoke the boiler before we leave and go to the police station.
But then there was a very sharp-eyed young policewoman who was with Smith who followed Kroger, Mrs. Kroger, into the bedroom where she picked up a handbag and then started moving towards the kitchen to stoke the boiler.
And then the detective woman, the constable, sort of nodded towards the superintendent who intervened, got in the way and said, I want to see what's in your handbag.
And there's a bit of a tussle over the handbag.
And then the superintendent grabbed it, opened it up, and inside were microdots, miniature photographs of something or other, but clearly spy stuff, and other material that clearly suggested that this was going to be stuff that Harold Helen Kroger was going to put in the stove and burn.
So more evidence that got into the net, and then they were arrested, and a couple of months later, the trial took place.
So that was how the five spies were arrested.
Trial, amazing, I think, partly because of the layers of information that came out about the Krogers.
You know, these people were seemingly just an ordinary suburban couple, but they were career intelligence operatives with multiple, I say multiple, three identities that we know about.
Howard, it was extraordinary because when MI5 arrested the Krogers, they just thought they were an antiquarian bookseller and his wife living in Sleepy Rieslet.
And when they were arrested, the Krogers refused resolutely to have their fingerprints taken.
So MI5 and Special Branch had to go to court to get an order for this, and they did.
But when the fingerprints were taken back to the fingerprint department at New Scotland Yard, there was a eureka moment because there was an exact match between the fingerprints of the Krogers and fingerprints which the FBI had circulated around the world two years before to police forces everywhere, including New Scotland Yard.
And these are the fingerprints of two long-standing KGB spies called Morris and Lona Cohen, which the FBI had been hunting, well, from 1953 originally, but very, very intensely from 1957.
So when MI5 thought they'd caught a couple of minnows in their net, they'd actually caught two pretty enormous mackerel.
But isn't it amazing that they were operating at a high level in America?
The net was closing in on them there, but not enough, so they were able to get away from there.
And then they were able to transplant themselves or be transplanted to the United Kingdom and operate under different identities here.
It was amazing.
They were originally exfiltrated out of America in 1950 by the KGB, false part sports.
All of this emerged much later, of course, that they were smuggled down to Mexico and then they were on a boat across the Atlantic and then they were smuggled covertly across Europe back to Moscow.
And back there, they were such ideologically strong communists, they said, well, we want to serve the cause.
And they'd obviously got the bug of spying.
Lona Cohen said later that for her and her husband, it was like a drug.
You know, the excitement, the buzz of spying, and spying for a cause, as they saw it, that they kept volunteering and saying, we want to go back onto active service.
And in the end, it was as being communications operators for Gordon Lonsdale, whose real identity emerged also only after the trial, that they were sent to Britain in 1955, and then they bought the bungalow in Ryslip.
And it became clear after the trial that they had, I think what I took to be an escape policy.
They had a couple of Canadian passports and yet another name hidden.
Yeah, I mean, when after the arrests, MI5 and the police went over the whole of that bungalow, the press at the time called it the House of Secrets, they found even more spy stuff.
So there was another tabletop cigarette lighter which had encoding pads in.
They found not only that the Krogers themselves had fake New Zealand passports, even though they were going around pretending to be Canadians, but found also were two completely fake Canadian passports in different names, which were going to be their escape passports if something went wrong and they were not arrested.
There was also watches of US dollars found up in the attic.
There was a long, long aerial for radio transmissions up in the attic.
But it took several days before MI5 down in the cellar found a jewel in the crown.
And that was this state-of-the-art transmitter, radio transmitter, which enabled the Krogers to transmit in a matter of seconds a message which if sent with Morse code would have taken 15 to 20 minutes.
Yes, I noticed that was a key part of what they did and how they got away with it for so long, that they were transmitting in really fast bursts, which as somebody who's interested in radio fascinates me, but it's quite routine today.
But for then it was pretty advanced.
So talk to me.
We don't have a lot of time to talk about this, but just some thoughts about the trial then.
Well, the trial took place in March 1961.
It was headline-making all around the world.
Every news agency tended, apart from surprise, surprise, the official Russian agency called TASS.
And Houghton basically put out a line in the witness box saying that Hetel G was completely innocent and he'd twisted her arm and persuaded her to spy and she didn't really know who Lonsba was.
Blah, exactly.
And the jury, however, were not convinced at all by the evidence that Houghton put forward.
And also they were not convinced by the statements made by Gordon Lonsdale or the Croakers.
And so they only took 45 minutes to convict them all of espionage.
And so the importance of the trial was signified by the fact that the Lord Chief Justice himself presided.
And he gave Gordon Lonsdale a whopping 25-year sentence, which led to gasps from the well of the court, 20 years each to the Krogers and 15 years each to Harry Houghton and Gee.
And then they were sent to various jails in the UK, starting off in Wormwood Scrubs, where remarkably Gordon Nonsdale, and it was clear by then that he was a Russian spy, was allowed to mix with the other very famous spy who emerged at this time, who's George Blake.
Remarkably, they were allowed to fraternise in Wormwood Scrubs Jail.
Wouldn't happen today.
Gee, So what became of them then?
Because I think one of them was involved in a spy swap.
Well, the three long-term illegals were all swapped for British spies or British citizens.
And what happened was that once Gordon Nonsdale was in jail, the MI5 officer called Charles Elwell, he was the main investigator, remarkable man, super sleuth, counter-espionage man.
He was determined to track down the real identity of Gordon Nonsdale.
And with the help of the FBI, he succeeded.
And by the end of 1961, they found out that his real name was Conon Trofimovich Molody, born in Moscow, had spent his teenage years in California because he was invited there to escape poverty in the Soviet Union by his aunt.
But at the end of the 1930s, he elected to go back to the Soviet Union and he fought in the Great Patriotic War, the Second World War.
It's known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia.
And he was recruited by the KGB after the war.
And it was in that guise as an illegal that he came to the UK.
So that was found out.
And Elwell and MI5 tried to persuade him to either defect past information onto them or even go back potentially to the Soviet Union as a double agent.
But the offer that the British government in the end made just wasn't sufficiently generous.
And then everything went quiet because the Russians didn't have any assets, didn't have anything on the spy swap chessboard, so to speak, that they knew would persuade the British to do a spy swap.
But all of that changed in 1963 when there was an MI6 courier, a man who was taking Russian secrets out of Russia to the UK and America, who was arrested by the Russians.
His name was Greville Wynne, and he was put in a really, really tough prison.
His health deteriorated.
And in the end, Russians were very adept at manipulating public opinion and newspapers and everything else.
A spy swap was organized in April 1964.
So Lonsdale, real name Connor Mollody, went back to Moscow and Grebel Wynne came to the UK.
Meanwhile, of course, the Krogers, real name Cohen, were languishing in British jails.
But still, for several years, the Russians did not have any asset that they could use as a barter with the Brits for a spy swap.
And this situation only changed later in the 1960s when there was a young British man who was called Joel Brooke and his wife who were religiously inclined and they were smuggling religious literature into the Soviet Union.
And essentially they were trapped by the KGB, passing religious literature to a Russian couple.
It was clearly a setup.
Brooke was imprisoned after a show trial in Moscow and his health, he was put in a really, really tough labor camp, deteriorated.
And in the end, a spy swap was organized in 1969.
So ironically, actually, although Houghton and G had been sentenced to the shortest length of time in jail, 15 years, they actually spent more time in jail than the three long-term committed KGB agents who were all spy swapped.
Very quickly, what became of Houghton and G?
Well, they were released from prison in 1970.
Houghton published his autobiography, which is full of lies and stories.
It's just a book-length whine of complaint about the way he'd been treated and his trial wasn't fair.
But he made some money out of that.
And he and Ethel basically just disappeared off the public radar screen.
They ran a guest house down in Devon.
How brilliant.
And yeah, and then Harry Houghton lost Ethel G. The strange thing was they got married after they came out.
Although Ethel G at the very beginning said, I want nothing more to do with Harry Houghton, Harry Houghton caught at her.
He sent a message with a bottle of sherry.
And the truth was that I think Ethel G was a pretty lonely individual.
She had very few friends.
And of course, Harry Houghton was the only person she could share the secret of her espionage.
So they ended up together.
Time is always the problem with these things.
And I know that you have time constraints too.
You tell me that since you've been doing the research on the book, some new information has come your way.
Absolutely.
I was contacted out of the blue by relatives of Harry Houghton.
I knew that he had a daughter, but it was impossible to trace her.
Anyway, I now have, and I've been asked, in their words, to put the record straight about Harry Houghton, who they say was not a drunken abuser.
And in many ways, it was the former Mrs. Houghton who told as many lies as Harry Houghton himself.
So it'd be fascinating to find out the truth of that, go meet these relatives and possibly rewrite bits of the history.
Boy.
And that's part of the fun, part of the joy of doing investigations.
You never know what else you might unearth.
Trevor, we haven't done the book justice because there is so much detail in it.
I definitely recommend people look at it, read it, buy it, and congratulations on this research.
Dead Doubles is the book.
Trevor Burrus is the author.
And Trevor, thank you for giving me your time.
Thank you, Howard.
Trevor Burrus and the remarkable story of the Portland spy ring.
Straight out of the 1960s, but we know that spying goes on to this day.
Every side does it.
And even though the technicalities of it will be different, the individuals and the makeup of the individuals remains much the same, I would guess.
And as I say, all nations do this.
And it is something that always makes interesting reading whenever the cases are discovered and the tales are told about the various cases, including this one.
A great book.
Definitely recommended.
The book is called Dead Doubles: The Man, of Course, Trevor Barnes.
Dead Doubles: The Extraordinary Worldwide Hunt for one of the Cold War's most notorious spy rings.
You can say that again.
Thank you very much for being in touch.
If you want to email me, go to the website.
You can do it from there.
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And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you've been using this show.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, until we next meet, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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