Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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. 80At 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. 81In 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. 83The 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. 86He 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. 87Shortly 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, 90Koslov 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), 92Mikhail Timofeyevich Chizhov (1964-6), Mikhail Ivanovich Lopatin (acting resident, 1966-7) 93and 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