Dead Doubles
The Extraordinary Worldwide Hunt for One of the Cold War's Most Notorious Spy Rings
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
THE PORTLAND SPY RING was one of the most infamous espionage cases from the Cold War. People the world over were shocked when its exposure revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB 'illegals' - spies operating under false identities stolen from the dead.
The CIA's revelation to MI5 in 1960 that a KGB agent was stealing crucial secrets from the world-leading submarine research base at Portland in Dorset looked initially like a dangerous but contained lapse of security by a British man and his mistress. But the couple were tailed by MI5 'watchers' to a covert meeting with a Canadian businessman, Gordon Lonsdale. The unsuspecting Lonsdale in turn led MI5's spycatchers to an innocent-looking couple in suburban Ruislip called the Krogers.
But within weeks the CIA rang the alarm - their critical source of intelligence was to defect within hours - and MI5 was forced to act immediately. The Krogers were exposed as two of the most important Russian 'illegals' ever, whom the Americans had been hunting for years. And Lonsdale was no Canadian, but a senior KGB controller.
This astonishing but true story of MI5's spyhunt is straight from the world of John le Carré and is told here for the first time using hitherto secret MI5 and FBI files, private family archives and original interviews. Its tentacles stretch around the world - from America, to the USSR, Canada, New Zealand, Europe and the UK. DEAD DOUBLES is a gripping episode of Cold War history, and a case that fully justified the West's paranoia about infiltration and treachery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exhaustive history, journalist and crime novelist Barnes (Taped) documents the discovery, prosecution, and legacy of the Portland Spy Ring in early 1960s England. Drawing on KGB archives and declassified files from the U.K., Barnes details the investigation from its initial stages in February 1960, when an employee at a "highly sensitive naval facility" on the Isle of Portland accused a colleague, Henry Houghton, of removing secret files from the base five years earlier. Surveilling the hard-drinking and free-spending Houghton and his mistress, Ethel Gee, MI5 investigators connected them to a Canadian jukebox salesman named Edward Lonsdale and to Peter and Helen Kroger, married antiquarian booksellers who also claimed to be from Canada. MI5 eventually unmasked Lonsdale as Soviet spy Konon Molody and the Krogers as American Communists Morris and Lona Cohen, and caught the spy ring with information on secret naval research projects and coded messages from Moscow. Barnes dives deep into the investigation and trial, and exposes the espionage careers of Houghton, Molody, and the Cohens before the Portland episode. The extraordinary level of detail slows the pace, but allows for intriguing tangents (notably, the impact of sexism on Cold War espionage). This meticulously researched account informs and entertains.
Customer Reviews
Interesting but long winded
It is an interesting story, but the electronic version could have been 1000 pages less than it is. After ~1200 pages it really began to be struggle to get through. The authors language is very 'public school' and the vocabulary used is something that the average reader has to keep a dictionary close by to understand.