Black Friday’s effect continued to be felt through the early years of the NSA, with the agency not picking up on Stalin’s death or the subsequent uprising in East Berlin in spring 1953. By 1955, the lack of ability to crack the highest-grade Russian codes was causing serious concern. However, when the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis sprang up simultaneously, the NSA was able to provide sufficient information for President Eisenhower to take action to help defuse the situations and not overreact — they knew about Soviet tank movements on the Hungarian borders, and the Israeli/British/French plans regarding Egypt.
The NSA cooperated with the CIA over the U-2 missions, monitoring Soviet air-defence transmissions, and even intercepting communications from their radar operators who were tracking the planes — giving the CIA real-time information on the missions’ progress. They could also deduce the size of the Soviet air force from the nature of the force sent up to intercept the spy plane. The relationship grew a little cooler following the downing of Captain Powers’ plane: the NSA insisted that Powers was much lower than he claimed, although the official report would back Powers’ story, much to the annoyance of the NSA.
Unsurprisingly, the NSA became a prime target for the KGB. Although all the Soviet operations would take advantage of ‘walk-ins’ (Western volunteers prepared to betray their country, rather than agents infiltrated into position), the NSA became the target of a major plan by KGB chief Alexsandr Shelyepin, who set up better coordination between the relevant directorates with the Security service and established a Special Section whose primary objective was to collect intelligence on cypher systems of particular interest to the Soviet cryptanalysts.
By 1960, three NSA agents were also working for Moscow but then two cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, who had been based at the NSA for four years, defected during their annual leave in June. Arriving in Moscow that September, they gave a press conference that revealed great swathes about the NSA’s activities, including the embarrassing revelation that the agency wasn’t just focusing their attentions on their enemies. Italy, Turkey, France, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic, Indonesia and Uruguay were all specifically mentioned by Martin. It became commonly accepted that the two men were in a homosexual relationship, which had left them open to blackmail. This led to a witch-hunt within the NSA and the enforced resignations of over two-dozen officers who were believed to be ‘sexual deviates’. Oddly, the NSA’s own internal investigations, while noting that ‘Beyond any doubt, no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency’s security program,’ believed that their defections were impulsive, and not caused by blackmail over their sexuality.
The KGB still had another agent in place: Staff Sergeant Jack Dunlap, the chauffeur to the chief of staff at Fort Meade, who offered his services to the Soviet embassy in Washington in 1960. He became a source of instruction books, manuals, and conceptual and engineering designs for the cypher machines, but he found it hard to deal with his double life, and committed suicide in July 1963. His treachery was only discovered a month after his death.
By then, though, the KGB had other problems to deal with, as the early years of the sixties brought some of their longest-serving agents’ careers to an end.
6
DEFECTIVE INFORMATION
There are many ways in which spies’ careers come to a sudden halt: sometimes they’re caught red-handed, carrying out the missions set by their bosses; other times tradecraft errors, either their own or mistakes made by other people, lead to their capture. But probably the worst way to be taken out of action is through betrayal, particularly if it’s by one of your own.
The KGB suffered a number of such setbacks at the end of the fifties and early sixties following assorted defections to the West. Once the FBI, MI5 or the other Western counterintelligence agencies got hold of the information, they would pursue every lead until as many possible Soviet agents were identified. Sometimes this would take time. Unless defectors were particularly well placed, they were unlikely to possess exact details of particular agents, but usually they provided sufficient clues to enable the authorities to put a group under surveillance and then eliminate them from the investigation.
Polish Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Goleniewski juggled being a triple agent between 1959 and his defection in January 1961, working as head of the Technical and Scientific Department of the Polish Secret Service, reporting to Moscow, and also providing information jointly to MI6 and the CIA, which the CIA described as ‘Grade 1 from the inside’. The Americans called him ‘Sniper’; the British knew him as ‘Lavinia’. Even before his defection, he informed his controllers that ‘The Russians have got two very important spies in Britain: one in British Intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy.’ Working from the documents Goleniewski had seen, there were ten potential suspects within MI6 (including ‘rising star’ George Blake), but when investigated all appeared to be in the clear — the most likely source of the papers, so the British believed, was a burglary at the MI6 station in Brussels, and that’s what they told the Americans.
When Goleniewski passed along some more information about the naval spy in March 1960, it was the clue that blew open a complete Soviet spy network, known as the Portland Ring, after the naval base from which the secrets were being extracted. ‘Sniper’ said that the spy’s name was something like ‘Huiton’: this correlated with one Harry Houghton, who was at the time working in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, Dorset, and fitted the other information provided. What followed was a classic example of counterintelligence at work.
Houghton was followed by MI5 operatives (known as Watchers) on his monthly visit to London with his girlfriend, Ethel Gee. There they watched him hand over a carrier bag in exchange for an envelope. MI5 followed the man Houghton had met, whom they believed was a Polish intelligence officer, but hit a snag when they learned that the car he drove was registered to a Canadian importer of jukeboxes named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. At Lonsdale and Houghton’s next meeting, the Watchers overheard Lonsdale say he was heading to America on business; before he left, he deposited a parcel at the Midland Bank. MI5 opened the parcel, and discovered a treasure trove: ‘The complete toolkit of the professional spy,’ according to case officer Peter Wright. The materials identified Lonsdale as a KGB agent.
Lonsdale was followed on his return to the UK in October, and MI5 discovered he was staying with a New Zealand couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, in the London suburb of Ruislip. The Krogers and Lonsdale were monitored until their arrest in January, shortly before Goleniewski was going to defect.
Far from being innocent booksellers, the Krogers were in fact long-term Russian agents, who, then going by the names of Lona and Morris Cohen, had been part of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project. They had fled to Mexico when the Rosenbergs were arrested and then established a new cover in the UK a few years later. When MI5 raided their home, they found everything from multiple passports to a high-speed radio transmitter and short-wave receiver.
Lonsdale, alias Konon Trofimovich Molody, had joined the NKVD during the Second World War, and had adopted the identity of the deceased Gordon Lonsdale in 1954 when he entered Canada. As well as sending copious material to Moscow from his agents, Lonsdale’s natural business acumen meant that he was actually making a profit for the KGB!
In addition to Houghton, Lonsdale was running a spy inside the Germ Warfare Research Centre at Porton Down (87 miles south-west of London), as well as Melita Norwood, a seemingly innocent secretary who worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. Norwood had provided atomic secrets to the Russians during the Second World War, and would continue to work for the KGB until her retirement in 1972. Nicknamed ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op’, she was acclaimed as one of the KGB’s most important female assets, and remained undetected until Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the West in 1992.