Like some of the illegals chosen for postings in the United States, Molody began by establishing his cover in Canada, where he arrived in 1954 using the identity of a Canadian Communist “live double.” MICK, a member of the Central Committee of the Canadian Communist Party, had persuaded the Party member to give him his passport in the previous year when he discovered that it had never been used for foreign travel. Though the live double was told that his passport would be for Party use, MICK passed it to Vladimir Pavlovich Burdin of the Ottawa residency via a senior member of the Canadian—Soviet Friendship Society codenamed SVYASHCHEN-NIK (“Clergyman”).64 The Centre replaced the photograph on the passport with that of Molody and gave it to him for his journey to Canada. Once in Canada, Molody obtained a new passport in the name of a “dead double,” Gordon Arnold Lonsdale (codenamed KIZH), who had been born in Cobalt, Ontario, in 1924, emigrated as a child to the Soviet Union with his Finnish mother and died in 1943.65 A Canadian Royal Commission later concluded:
Canada has acquired a dubious international reputation with regard to her passports, and there is evidence that hostile intelligence services have concentrated on the acquisition of Canadian documentation because of this relative ease of procurement.66
In March 1955, Molody traveled to London using his new identity as “Gordon Lonsdale” and enrolled as a student on a Chinese course at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Centre selected SOAS for two main reasons. First, since the course taken by Molody did not lead to a degree, he was not asked to provide the documentation on his previous education normally required of British university students. Secondly, as a qualified lecturer in Chinese and the author of a Russian—Chinese textbook, Molody found little difficulty in coping with the course requirements while spending most of his time establishing the KGB’s first post-war illegal residency in Britain. His main problem at SOAS was the need to conceal from his tutors the fact that they had little, if anything, to teach him.67 Molody’s contact in the legal London residency was the Line N (Illegal Support) officer, V. A. Dmitriyev, who provided him with money and instructions from the Centre, as well as microdot letters from his family in Moscow, delivered via dead letter-boxes and at face-to-face meetings.68 “When is Daddy coming, and why has he gone away?” asked Molody’s small son Trofim in one letter. “…What a stupid job Daddy has got.”69
While at SOAS, Molody began, with the Centre’s approval, to establish a cover profession as a London businessman. Using KGB funds, he set himself up as the director of several companies operating juke boxes, vending machines and onearmed bandits. According to a KGB file, the vending machines included chewinggum dispensers at no fewer than two hundred different sites, thus offering Molody frequent pretexts for journeys in the Greater London area to meet Dmitriyev, the two other members of his residency and his agents. An electronic locking device produced by one of the firms in which Molody was a partner won a gold medal at the 1960 International Inventors Exhibition in Brussels.70 In retirement, Molody made the wildly exaggerated claim that he had been the KGB’s first multimillionaire illegal resident. He boasted to a Soviet interviewer:
Let me remind you that all the working capital and profits from my four companies (millions of pounds sterling) which were increasing year by year without any help from me, were “socialist property.” Strange but true!71
The radio operators and technical support team in Molody’s illegal residency were the veteran American agents Morris and Lona Cohen (LUIS and LESLEY, collectively known as the DACHNIKI), who had been hastily recalled to Moscow after the arrest of the Rosenbergs.72 In May 1954 the Cohens were issued with passports in the name of Peter and Helen Kroger by a Soviet agent at the New Zealand consulate in Paris, Paddy Costello (codenamed LONG), who later became professor of Russian at Manchester University.73 “Peter Kroger’s” cover profession in London was that of antiquarian bookseller. Like BEN, LUIS and LESLEY were extroverts with an active social life. One of their friends in the London book trade later recalled many convivial evenings at their house in Ruislip:
Here you received good food, good wine, and the most wonderful hospitality… Peter cultivated the acquaintance of everyone he could, and he and his wife were liked by all. He attended the Bibliomites’ darts matches and drank pint for pint. He played for the Guv’nors versus the Bibs, in their annual cricket match, wielding his willow like a baseball bat, and trying to knock home runs, to everybody’s amusement.74
George Blake, who was to meet Konon Molody while both were imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs, later eulogized him as “a perfect example of what an ‘illegal resident’ should be… a man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great cause.”75 During his years in London, however, Molody became cynical about the prospects of recruiting a new generation of ideological spies like Blake, inspired by working for a great cause. He later told a Soviet interviewer:
The average Englishman is apolitical and indifferent. He really couldn’t care less who is governing him, where the country is going or whether the Common Market is a good or bad thing. All that interests him is his own wage packet, his job and keeping the wife happy.
Molody also took a jaundiced view of the kind of Cold War recruits on whom he believed the KGB should concentrate in Britain:
A good agent is one whose vital statistics are the following: he works, for example, in a military department and holds a middle-ranking but key position giving him access to information; he doesn’t aspire to a higher office, has a chip on his shoulder about being a failure (let’s say that ill-health prevented him finishing studies at the general staff college); he drinks (an expensive habit); he has a weakness for the fair sex (which is also not cheap); he is critical of his own government and loyal to the resident’s government.76
The accounts of Molody’s career released by the KGB and SVR carefully conceal the fact that late in 1958 he was given control of the KGB’s longest-serving British agent, Melita Norwood (HOLA), whose ideological commitment seems never to have wavered over more than forty years. Molody met Norwood for the first time on December 23 and received from her the usual batch of documents from the safes of the Non-Ferrous Metals Association. For reasons not recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes, however, Norwood was returned only two months later to the control of the legal London residency.77 Perhaps Norwood was repelled by the signs of Molody’s highliving, womanizing lifestyle. Or perhaps Molody simply lacked the ability to control an ideological agent.
The files on the Molody residency seen by Mitrokhin suggest that it successfully ran only two agents: Harry Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee (codenamed SHAH and ASYA).78 Houghton, a former NCO in the Royal Navy, closely resembled Molody’s jaundiced stereotype of the British agent. He worked as a civilian clerk in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, where, helped by Gee, who was employed as a filing clerk, he had easy access to top secret information on antisubmarine warfare and nuclear submarines. Houghton’s later memoirs provide striking evidence of how successfully his controller concealed his low opinion of him. Though Molody, as his Moscow interviews make clear, regarded agents such as Houghton as mildly contemptible moral inadequates, Houghton was pathetically convinced that, from their first meeting, “[t]here was a real camaraderie between us.” Molody deceived Houghton so successfully that he even persuaded him that he regarded going to bed with any of his many girlfriends as “absolutely out.”79
Like Blake, Houghton was identified by MI5 as a result of information from the defector Michał Goleniewski. Surveillance of Houghton led to the discovery of “Lonsdale,” who was then followed on a visit to the “Krogers” in Ruislip. A search of the “Krogers’” house uncovered a powerful high-speed radio transmitter used for communications with the Centre and a short-wave radio used for receiving messages from Moscow on high-frequency bands, both hidden in a cavity beneath the kitchen floor; one-time cipher pads hidden in flashlights and a cigarette lighter; a microdot reader concealed in a box of face powder; equipment for
microdot construction; a cookery jar containing magnetic iron oxide used for printing high-speed morse messages on to tape; thousands of pounds, dollars and travelers checks; and seven passports.80 At their trial in 1961 Molody was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, the Cohens to twenty, Houghton and Gee to fifteen.
Molody was freed in a spy exchange in 1964. His misleading memoirs, published a year later under his alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” with the approval of the CPSU Central Committee, contained a variety of disinformation—including the pretense that the “Krogers” were entirely innocent. The London residency reported a “negative reaction” to the memoirs by the British Communist Party leadership, on the grounds that they amounted to a formal admission that the Soviet Union engaged in espionage against the West.81 In 1969 the Cohens were exchanged for the imprisoned British lecturer Gerald Brooke. At a dinner in their honor at a KGB dacha on November 25, 1969, Andropov personally presented them with the Order of the Red Star. Other top brass from the Centre present at the dinner included Sakharovsky, the FCD chief, and Lazarev, the head of the illegals directorate. 5,000 roubles were spent furnishing a Moscow apartment for the Cohens on Malaya Bronnaya, where the same KGB top brass attended a flat-warming party in April 1970.82
The Centre remained anxious, however, to keep the Cohens away from other Western defectors in Moscow—partly because it clung to the fiction that they were Polish and had gone to live in Poland. On June 7, 1971, while returning to his flat from a shopping expedition, Morris Cohen accidentally bumped into George Blake, whom he had first met several years earlier when they were both imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs. The KGB file on the meeting notes that both expressed “genuine joy” at their reunion, exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to arrange another meeting. The Centre, however, separately instructed both Blake and the Cohens to devise pretexts to cancel their arrangement. According to the KGB record of a bugged telephone conversation, Cohen rang Blake to tell him that he was about to go on holiday and would, after all, not be able to meet him in the near future. Blake replied that he quite understood and would himself be leaving for his dacha in a few days’ time. The two men never met again.83 The Cohens, however, retained an honored place in the KGB pantheon. Lona died in 1993 at the age of eighty, Morris two years later at the age of ninety. By order of President Yeltsin, Morris Cohen was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation.84
Molody’s career ended less happily. Once back in Moscow, his experience of life in the West made him, like a number of other former illegals, increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. According to Blake:
He was particularly critical of the inefficient and often incompetent way Soviet industrial enterprises were run and international trade was conducted. Being an outspoken man who had the good of his country at heart, he made his views known. Criticism of any kind was not appreciated in those days and he soon fell from favor and found himself relegated to a position of relatively minor importance.85
Molody also took to drink. One Saturday in October 1970 he went on a mushroomcollecting expedition near the town of Medyi with his wife and two friends from the air force. Immediately after his second glass of vodka, he suffered a stroke, lost the power of speech and died a few days later in hospital at the age of only forty-eight.86 He lay in state on a funeral bier in the KGB officers’ club while colleagues displayed his large collection of medals on velvet cushions and Andropov and other top brass came to pay their respects.87 Shortly before his death, a team of writers commissioned by the Centre had completed, with Molody’s assistance, a new biography of him entitled Special Mission, some extracts of which were published in the Soviet press. In 1972, however, it was decided, with Andropov’s approval, not to publish the book abroad and to suspend publication in the Soviet Union for fear that it would “fan the flames of spymania” in the West.88
After Molody’s death, his long-suffering wife, Galina Ivanovna, who had seen very little of him during his career as an illegal, also took to drink. Over the next few years she was treated several times for alcoholism. In 1976 a monument to Molody costing 2,000 roubles was erected on his grave in Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery, next to that of another well known illegal of the 1950s, William Fisher (alias “Abel”). In the same year, the CPSU Central Committee awarded his widow a pension of 120 roubles.89
Mitrokhin saw frequent references in KGB files to visits to Britain made by other Soviet illegals during the twenty years after Molody’s arrest but found no evidence that any fully functioning illegal KGB residency to replace BEN’s was established during that period—though it is possible that such evidence exists in files he did not see. One of the principal candidates chosen to succeed BEN in London appears to have been the comparatively youthful Eduard Ivanovich Koslov (codenamed YEVDOKI-MOV), born in 1934. With the help of the agent RAG, an official in a Belgian commune, 90 Koslov obtained identity documents in the name of the non-existent Jean-Louis de Mol, which he used to obtain a Belgian passport in 1961. Over the next few years, he went through an elaborate acclimatization period to strengthen his cover, studying at a Swiss foreign language school, working as an electronic machine operator in Zurich, then in a Stuttgart insurance company. In 1966 he returned to Belgium, took up residence in Dinant and obtained a new passport valid until 1970. Before he could move on to Britain or the United States, however, Koslov aroused the suspicions of the Belgian security service and was hurriedly recalled to Moscow. At the time of his recall, his account in the Banque de Bruxelles (no. A-04-18295) contained 39,000 Belgian francs; the Centre considered it too dangerous to withdraw the money and wrote it off. Unable henceforth to travel in the West, Koslov worked instead on PROGRESS operations in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union, posing as a British, American or Belgian tourist.91
DESPITE THE APPARENT failure of its attempts to establish a new illegal residency after the arrest of Molody and the Cohens, the KGB’s British operations achieved a series of significant successes during the following decade. The Centre discovered a simple but effective method of making life easier for the London legal residency. Under four successive residents—Nikolai Grigoryevich Bagrichev (1962-4),92 Mikhail Timofeyevich Chizhov (1964-6), Mikhail Ivanovich Lopatin (acting resident, 1966-7)93 and Yuri Nikolayevich Voronin (1967-71)—the size of the residency steadily increased. Between 1960 and 1970, KGB and GRU personnel in London grew from about fifty to over 120—more than in Washington or any other Western capital. The intelligence services of other Soviet Bloc countries also rapidly expanded their British operations. The aim, which was partially successful, was to swamp the overstretched MI5 with more intelligence officers than they could hope to keep under effective surveillance.94
When the Czechoslovak StB officer Josef Frolik was posted to London in 1964, he was told that “the British service was so short of funds and men that it would be relatively easy to throw off their tails.”95 MI5’s job became even harder at the beginning of Voronin’s term as resident, in 1967, when one of his operations officers, Aleksei Nikolayevich Savin (codenamed RUSLAN),96 recruited a clerk in the Greater London Council (GLC) motor licensing department, Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, who had access to the registration numbers of all Security Service and Special Branch vehicles. A series of sophisticated MI5 mobile surveillance operations was compromised by the ability of the London residency to identify the vehicles used.97
The London residency’s greatest successes during the Brezhnev era were in scientific and technological intelligence (ST), particularly in the defense field. In 1967 Lopatin, the residency’s main ST expert in the mid-1960s, became one of the founders of a new FCD Directorate T, specializing in this field and serviced by Line X (ST) officers in residencies abroad. The head of Line X in London from the beginning of 1968 until his expulsion in the summer of 1971 was Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev, a tough but amiable engineer who spoke almost flawless English with a Canadian accent and had a passion for Western hi-fi.98
In addition to the vet
eran Norwood, Mitrokhin’s notes identify at least ten other Line X agents active in the late 1960s: MERCURY, a chemist recruited in 1958;99 SAKS, an employee of a British aircraft company, recruited in Germany, probably in 1964, “for material reward;”100 YUNG, an aeronautical and computer engineer recruited in 1965;101 NAGIN, a chemical engineer recruited in 1966;102 ACE, an aeronautical engineer recruited in 1967, who supplied voluminous documentation on aero engines and flight simulators;103 HUNT, the civil servant recruited by Norwood in 1967;104 AKHURYAN, a nuclear physicist recruited in 1968;105 STARIK, an aeronautical design engineer recruited in 1968;106 DAN, an engineer in the British subsidiary of an American company, recruited in 1969 “for material reward;”107 and STEP, a laboratory assistant recruited in 1969 for a monthly salary of 150 dollars.108 Mitrokhin’s notes also identify four further Line X agents operating in the 1970s who may well have been recruited in the 1960s: a virologist, a research scientist in a pharmaceutical laboratory,109 an engineer at a nuclear reactor,110 and COOPER, who worked in the new products department of a pharmaceutical company.111
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