Dead Doubles

Trevor Barnes

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062857019
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Intelligence et espionnage

The astonishing but true story of one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War—and the international manhunt that seized global attention as it revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB operatives. The dramatic arrest in London on January 7, 1961 of five Soviet spies made headlines worldwide and had repercussions around the globe. Alerted by the CIA, Britain's security service, MI5, had discovered two British spies stealing invaluable secrets from the highly sensitive submarine research center at Portland, UK. Their controller, Gordon Lonsdale, was a Canadian who frequently visited a middle-aged couple, the Krogers, in their sleepy London suburb. But the seemingly unassuming Krogers were revealed to be deep cover American KGB spies—infamous undercover agents the FBI had been hunting for years—and they were just one part of an extensive network of Soviet operatives in the UK.

In the wake of the spies' sensational trial, the FBI uncovered the true identity of the enigmatic Lonsdale—Konon Molody, a Russian who had lived in California before being recruited by the KGB. Molody opened secret talks with MI5 to betray Russia, but before he had the chance, the KGB blackmailed Britain into spy swaps for him and the Krogers.

Based on revelatory, newly-released archival material and inside sources from around the world, Dead Doubles follows the hunt for the highly damaging Portland Spy Ring. As gripping as a le Carré novel, this incredible narrative, layered with false identities, deceptions, and betrayal, crisscrosses from the UK to the USSR to the US, Canada, Europe and New Zealand, and brings to life one of the most extraordinary spy stories of the Cold War.

Part One

Investigation

1

Code-name ‘Reverberate’

I

One notable absentee at the MI5 laboratory on 12 September 1960 was Elwell’s boss at the Security Service, David Whyte. Until then it was he who had been heading the investigation involving Lonsdale for seven months, and it was only an event of momentous personal significance that had kept him away. Whyte worked with his friend Elwell in the counter-espionage branch of MI5. He headed section D2, which specialised in Polish and Czech counter-espionage. Back in February it was Whyte who had read a police report that first triggered the investigation.

The report was marked ‘Secret’ and was from Special Branch in Dorset.¹ The Security Service at this time had a limited number of personnel – only 174 ‘officers’, of whom thirty-five were stationed overseas to liaise with foreign and Commonwealth intelligence organisations. The Security Service relied on Special Branch – police officers in the 150 or so forces stretched across the country outside London – to hoover up and feed back information on potential threats of espionage and subversion of the state.²

The report, from a detective constable based in the seaside town of Weymouth, was dated 18 February 1960. It concerned a man working at a highly sensitive naval facility called the Underwater Detection Establishment (UDE) at Portland, near Weymouth. Alfred Watford had been sent by post ‘a sheet of foolscap paper on which was drawn in ink a swastika, with the word JEW written underneath’. Watford had complained about this distressing incident to the Admiralty police at the base and told them he suspected a man who also worked at the UDE, Harry Houghton, of sending the letter.

Anti-Semitism was not for the Security Service to investigate. Dorset Special Branch had lodged the report for other reasons. Watford alleged that around 1955 some secret files had disappeared from the strongroom at UDE ‘for some days’. According to Watford, Houghton admitted taking them, ‘saying he had nothing better to do at the time and that he took the files and read them’. Watford added that Houghton was a former master-at-arms (chief petty officer) in the Royal Navy, had previously worked at the British embassy in Poland and currently ‘lives beyond his salary, [and] drinks considerably’. The memo concluded by asking the Security Service for guidance.

The report had been forwarded to Whyte on 26 February by a colleague in the branch of MI5 that kept watch on communists in the UK. Although the allegations about the secret files being borrowed in 1955 were stale, Whyte decided his section was interested – but in a lukewarm way. There was no need to rush out a response.

Compared to the silence and smoke-free air of modern offices, in 1960 the corridors of MI5 resounded with the clacking of Imperial 66 manual typewriters and the air was often fuggy from cigarettes. Outside Whyte’s office were seated, as throughout the Security Service, a clutch of women typists. A handful were debutantes, living in Kensington or Bayswater, who treated the whole business with an air of flighty entitlement. The majority were from respectable middle-class families, recruited direct from secretarial college, who dutifully told friends they were employed by the ‘War Office’ and treated the often dull work with due seriousness but took little interest in its content. At that time, MI5 – like all Western institutions – was deeply sexist. From the late 1950s women had started to be involved in surveillance, but they were not included in the agent-running sections of the Service until 1969.³ In mid-March, Whyte asked his secretary to come into his room in MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House in Curzon Street, Mayfair. Dressed in a three-piece suit, sporting a bow-tie, and a couple of inches shy of six feet tall, he walked back and forth, as was his custom, while he dictated two notes in his educated baritone. He asked his colleagues in the ‘communism – home’ branch to extract for him from Admiralty archives details of Houghton’s work in Poland, but proposed they should keep charge of the case.

Whyte was a clever and cultivated man with an impish sense of humour. Born in 1915, he graduated from Cambridge in 1936 and served with Special Forces in Yugoslavia and Albania during the war, before being recruited by MI5 in 1947. An early posting for Whyte was to the Soviet counter-espionage section. He was no diehard conservative, reading both the liberal Guardian on weekdays and Observer on Sundays, as well as the then newspaper of the establishment, The Times, every day. He was slightly self-conscious of the ‘essential’ (uncontrollable) tremor in his right hand but concealed it well, joking that this was why he found it easier to pour out generous measures of spirits. Despite the tremor he was a skilled pianist, and adored listening to opera.⁴

The momentous event which was to compel Whyte to miss the covert search of Lonsdale’s possessions in the MI5 laboratory six months later was linked to his love life. He had met an office secretary, Bridget Moore, just before Christmas and in the early months of 1960 their romance was starting to blossom. Bridget was fourteen years younger than Whyte, who had been attracted by her hearty laugh and independent character. They preferred to keep the relationship secret from colleagues at the office: the habit of concealment was now woven into the texture of their lives and if they married strict MI5 rules would compel one of them to leave the service.

Details about Harry Houghton trickled back from Naval Intelligence over the following weeks. Born on 1 March 1905 in Lincoln, he had joined the navy when seventeen, and served continuously until he was demobbed with a pension in December 1945. His character ‘was very good throughout’. Houghton was currently employed as a clerk in Portland’s Port Auxiliary Unit, where he had some limited access to classified information. More intriguingly for the Security Service, the Admiralty had already exchanged correspondence with MI5’s Protective Security Branch about Houghton in the summer of 1956. When that thin file emerged from the bowels of the Security Service Registry, it told an ambiguous story that was to unsettle the most senior management of MI5 in the year ahead. In June 1956, just under five years earlier, the head of the UDE had sent a report about Houghton to the Admiralty. The background to the report was ‘domestic strife’ between Houghton and his wife, which had caused her to leave him and seek a divorce. During ‘recent welfare enquiries’, he wrote, Mrs Houghton ‘alleged that her husband was divulging secret information to people who ought not to get it. No further action other than discreet surveillance is being taken at this time.’ He introduced this information about Houghton by remarking – based on nothing more than the widespread misogynistic views of the time – that ‘the whole of these allegations may be nothing more than outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife’.

The Admiralty had forwarded this report to MI5 with a covering note, which disclosed that Houghton had been sent home from Poland because he had become very drunk on one occasion and ‘it was thought he might break out again and involve himself in trouble with the Poles’. As for Mrs Houghton’s allegations about him divulging secret material, the Admiralty commented that ‘it seems not unlikely’ that they were ‘made on the spur of the moment and out of pure spite’. They hesitated to trouble MI5 except for the fact that the department had no record of a basic check being made when Houghton was offered the job at UDE, and that no security information was held on him. This Admiralty letter had landed on the desk of a young MI5 officer. He had checked with the Registry and confirmed that MI5 had no file on Houghton, so he responded to the Admiralty in July 1956: the Security Service ‘have no adverse trace of Houghton and agreed that prima facie the allegations seemed to be mainly spiteful. We should be interested to know if you hear of anything to confirm them.’ That young officer later had good cause to regret his lazy and biased thinking, which merely echoed the deep-seated prejudices of the Admiralty.

Having reviewed all the correspondence, MI5’s ‘communism – home’ branch considered that ‘someone must make a start [on the case] and it might as well be us’, setting up a file on Houghton and asking the Dorset police to make further enquiries at Portland.

The next day, a totally unexpected event intervened. At the time, and for years afterwards, it was guarded with the utmost secrecy. It jolted MI5’s meandering investigation from an amble to a sprint.

II

The roots of that unforeseen event in April 1960 tangled back to spring 1958, when the US ambassador in Bern received a mysterious letter. It contained two envelopes, one addressed to him, the other to the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Written in German and signed ‘Heckenschütze’, meaning ‘sniper’ in German, the letters offered secret information to the Americans and set out instructions on how to contact the potential spy. Over the coming months the new source started to send the CIA very valuable information, which was handled with the utmost sensitivity. The CIA baptised its new asset with the code-names ‘Vision’ or ‘Bevision’, and the FBI (with less originality) ‘Sniper’.⁵

No one knew the identity of the CIA spy. The inference from the available clues (in particular the high quality of the information about Poland) was that he was an officer in the Polish intelligence service, known widely as the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, or UB. ‘Sniper’ sent several letters to the CIA in the months that followed. Their contents were a closely guarded secret. There were doubts about the reliability of ‘Sniper’, especially in Washington, fostered by the CIA’s suspicious and calculating head of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who feared the new asset might be controlled by the KGB. This shadow continued to hang over the source.

In April 1959 the CIA revealed to the British intelligence services that according to ‘Sniper’ – in what CIA officers described unsmilingly as ‘a horrendous take’ – two Soviet agents were operating in Britain: one worked somewhere in the navy, the other in MI6. Two years later the second spy was finally revealed to be George Blake, the highly successful and dangerous KGB agent. The clues to the first were very sketchy, little more than that the agent had worked in Warsaw in the early 1950s. The Security Service had begun an investigation, but it was inconclusive. This 1959 inquiry was one of several into Soviet recruitment of British diplomatic staff in Poland in the 1950s.⁶

In April 1960 the CIA received another letter from ‘Sniper’ containing crucial new, top-secret material about the identity of the spy in the navy: a summary was hand-delivered to MI5 headquarters in Curzon Street, Mayfair, on the 27th. It was this information that spurred MI5’s Portland investigation to a gallop. ‘Sniper’ reported:

In about 1951 an employee of the British naval attaché’s office in Warsaw was recruited. The employee had access to the secret activities and documents of the attaché . . . The name of the employee was given provisionally by [‘Sniper’] as ‘Huppkener’ or ‘Happkener’ or ‘Huppenkort’ or some such. The employee was transferred back to England about the beginning of 1953 and assigned to the Admiralty. Because of his importance, he was taken over by the KGB and continued to work successfully for the KGB in London.

With ‘Sniper’s letter were two documents. One was a letter dated 25 May 1959 from the Polish Vice-Minister of the Interior to the head of the Polish Military Internal Security Corps marked ‘Top Secret of Special Importance’. This attached ‘An Index of Documents Acquired in the British Embassy by Means of an Agent Penetration in the Period from January 1952 to November 1952’, which consisted of ten typed pages listing a total of ninety-nine items. These varied from the Handbook of British Naval Intelligence, which contained ‘information on the methods of conducting naval intelligence and on the scope of operation of that intelligence’, to details held by the British about sonar on Soviet submarines and desertion from the Polish navy. The covering letter from the Polish vice-minister confirmed that the source of this treasure trove of intelligence had since been transferred from the naval attaché’s office in the British embassy in Warsaw and been taken over for ‘operational contact’ by ‘Soviet friends’.

Although there was CIA doubt over the reliability of the new information, in the days that followed David Whyte swung his small team into urgent action. He chose two officers to join him on the case. One was George Leggett, half Polish and a friend, with whom he had worked on Soviet counter-espionage cases in the 1950s.⁷ The case officer was James Craggs, a sociable bachelor in his late thirties.⁸

Within a few days, attention focused on the man working at UDE whom the Admiralty had asked MI5 about in 1956: Harry Houghton. On 5 May 1960, Craggs spent the day examining files at the Admiralty. These revealed the dates when Houghton was in Warsaw (30 July 1951 to October 1952) and the identity of the naval attaché while Houghton was there, Captain Nigel Austen. A picture of Houghton’s life began to emerge. In December 1951 Austen had cautioned the navy clerk for heavy drinking, and the following May Austen wrote again to say Houghton was still drinking excessively. Houghton was sent home later that year, and on his return to the UK he was posted to the UDE at Portland.

Whyte cranked up the speed of the Portland investigation, working long hours with Leggett and Craggs. Dorset Special Branch confirmed that Houghton was living at 8 Meadow View Road, Broadwey, near Weymouth. They provided the registration number of Houghton’s car and, separately, details of a stash of money discovered in mysterious circumstances in 1954 (£500, found in a male public lavatory near Weymouth pier, worth about £12,500 in today’s money). The incongruous place where the money was discovered – the cistern – only heightened MI5’s suspicions. The Security Service knew this was a favourite place for the Russian secret service to locate a dead drop.⁹

Whyte wished to start intercepting Houghton’s phone calls at home. He knew, however, from his contacts inside the Service that there was already a long waiting list. Unless his request was given special priority, it would not be accepted.

At one end of the mahogany-lined corridor on the sixth floor of MI5’s headquarters was the canteen. At the other was an unmarked door. Next to the door was a bell and a metal grille. Only certain officers were allowed to pass into the sanctum beyond, where the recording and transcription of intercepted telephone calls took place. In a large square room, Post Office employees made the recordings and passed the fruits of their labours to Security Service transcribers in an adjacent section. Most of the transcribers were women and their work was overseen by Evelyn Grist. Now elderly, she had worked in the Security Service since before the Second World War and was renowned for her love of hats, necklaces and shawls as well as for her formidable personality. Her small empire was known affectionately as the ‘Gristery’.¹⁰ It was here where the problem – a lack of transcribers – lay. Whyte knew what to do. He dictated a memo to MI5’s Deputy Director General, requesting the necessary Home Office Warrant and asking for the case to be made an urgent priority. His briefing sheet for Mrs Grist asked the transcribers ‘to ascertain . . . whether Houghton is at present in touch with the R.I.S. [Russian intelligence service] or P.I.S. [its Polish equivalent] . . . anything which could be interpreted as a clandestine meeting would naturally be of particular interest’.

Meanwhile, Whyte pressed ahead with another urgent task.

III

Whyte knew from previous investigations how crucial it was not to make an enemy of the government department where an espionage suspect worked. Many – especially large and powerful ones like the Admiralty – regarded the Security Service with suspicion, crammed with interfering policemen. The first reaction to news of an MI5 inquiry was often incredulity tinged with hostility. By 1960 Britain’s Royal Navy was no longer the behemoth it had been in 1939, but it remained the third-largest in the world after the navies of the USA and the Soviet Union, with nine aircraft carriers, eight cruisers, a startling 114 destroyers, frigates and escorts, and forty-eight submarines.¹¹ A naval force of this heft had a government department to match, the Admiralty, anchored in grandiose headquarters in Admiralty Buildings in Whitehall, and still with its own separate Cabinet minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty (the post was finally abolished in 1964). Although at times the Royal Navy could be startlingly unconventional, in the early 1960s it was still preserved in the aspic of tradition: at the 1961 Royal Tournament, the navy’s displays were of cutlass fighting and hornpipe dancing from the era of Nelson, and of fieldguns from the time of the Boer War.¹²

On 12 May David Whyte, accompanied by Harold Shergold (an officer from MI6 specialising in Soviet and Polish affairs), visited the iconic red-brick Admiralty buildings. From his extensive experience of counter-espionage investigations involving Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Whyte knew it was essential to run down every potential clue to the background of a suspect, and he had cultivated contacts in MI6 to help him with this task. Shergold was especially valued because he was regarded as MI6’s best Soviet specialist. An alumnus of both Oxford and Cambridge, he had served with Military Intelligence during the Second World War before joining MI6, and was to prove the lynchpin of the investigation in 1961 which finally exposed George Blake as a KGB agent.¹³ Shergold was deeply involved in assessing the intelligence provided by ‘Sniper’.

Whyte and Shergold made their way to Naval Intelligence. Whyte got straight to the point: Houghton was ‘a prime suspect’, MI5 were investigating and wanted to send an officer down to Portland urgently...