Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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”). 64The 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. 65A 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. 67Molody’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. 70In 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. 72In 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.” 75During 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. 77Perhaps 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). 78Houghton, 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