Konon Molody

Konon Trofimovich Molody (Russian: Ко́нон Трофи́мович Моло́дый; 17 January 1922 – 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, better known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Posing as a Canadian businessman, he was an illegal resident spy during the Cold War and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring, which operated in England from the late 1950s until 1961.

Soviet intelligence officer Konon Molody as depicted on a 1990 USSR commemorative stamp

The true Gordon Lonsdale

A person by the name of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale was born on 27 August 1924 in Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. His father Emmanuel Jack Lonsdale was a miner. His mother Olga Elina Bousa had immigrated from Finland. The Lonsdales separated in 1931. A year later, Olga took her 8-year-old son with her back to her native Finland. He is believed to have died c. 1943 and the Soviets obtained his papers for use by their agents.[1] The actual Gordon Lonsdale was recorded as having been circumcised; the imposter was not.[1]

Molody's early life

Konon Molody was born in Moscow in 1922, the son of a scientist and his wife. His father died when he was a child. According to Konon's son, Trofim Molody, who wrote a book about his father, Soviet intelligence already had their eyes on the young boy.[2][3] The NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda helped Konon's mother get a passport for him to go to the US in 1934 to live with an aunt in California.[4] (According to his official SVR biography, he left the USSR in 1932).[5]

Molody returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, having learned English and something of United States culture.[5] In October 1940, he was conscripted and served in the Red Army during World War II.

After the war, in 1946, Molody became a student at the Law Department of the Institute of Foreign Trade, where he studied Chinese. In 1951 he was recruited to the Soviet foreign intelligence service of the KGB and trained as an "illegal" spy. He married and had two children.

In 1953,[3] Molody went to Canada on a Soviet merchant ship, using a passport issued in the name of "Gordon Lonsdale". (The true Lonsdale had died in the early 1940s in Finland, as discussed above. (The Soviets had used Finland's public records to establish identities for some of their spies. They took possession of the records after the war).[3] From Canada, "Gordon Lonsdale" went to the US. There he helped the atomic spy, Rudolph Abel, with his communications.[3][6] He also met Peter and Helen Kroger, an American couple who worked for the KGB because of their communist beliefs.[6]

In 1954, Konon Molody went to London, where he took courses at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. He was an outgoing character and had numerous female friends in London and Europe. Molody went into business, selling and renting jukeboxes, bubble-gum and gambling machines to pubs, clubs and cafes. He also traveled to Europe on business, where he may have recruited other agents and set up dead letter boxes.

His family and friends in the USSR were led to believe that Konon was posted in China. Once a year he would go to Prague or Warsaw to spend some time with his wife Galina.[3]

In 1959 Molody began receiving British military secrets from Harry Houghton, who was working at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment on the Isle of Portland. During his continental trips, Molody met Morris Cohen (then using the pseudonym Peter Kroger), whom he also often visited in London. He ran other spies, including Melita Norwood.[7]

Conviction of espionage in the UK and exchange

In London, on 7 January 1961,[8] Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers, led by Detective Superintendent George Gordon Smith, arrested five people, all of whom were part of the Portland Spy Ring. One of the five was Gordon Lonsdale, who was caught by officers taking secrets from a British spy Harry Houghton on Waterloo Bridge.

Taken to Scotland Yard, Lonsdale told Smith he would not disclose any information, including his name or address. Western intelligence services, including MI5, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), had to resort to extensive enquiries to learn anything about him. All they could determine was that he was Russian, had a naval background, and was not the man his papers made him out to be. By the time he and his associates came to trial at the Old Bailey on 13 March 1961, no one knew his true identity.

The "Lonsdale" who was put on trial in London in 1961 was charged with spying, along with associates Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee and Morris and Lona Cohen (who were using the aliases Peter and Helen Kroger). Still refusing to reveal his real identity, "Gordon Lonsdale" was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 1961. He was taken to Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, to start his sentence. Although he was in a single cell, he fraternised with some of the Great Train Robbers.[3]

On 22 April 1964,[9] he was exchanged for Greville Wynne, a British businessman apprehended and convicted in Moscow for his contacts with Oleg Penkovsky. As part of the process, the Soviets admitted he was a spy and gave the British his real name, Konon Molody. The prisoners were swapped at the Heerstraße Checkpoint in Berlin.[10]

Memoir and later life

In 1965, a year after Molody's return to the Soviet Union, a book called Spy: Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale was published with the approval of the Soviet authorities. He also claimed Peter and Helen Kroger, convicted as members of the Portland Ring, were innocent.

Konon Molody died during a mushroom-picking expedition in October 1970;[11] he was 48. Retired KGB officer Leonid Kolosov, Konon's youth friend, who co-authored The Dead Season: End of the Legend, maintained that upon Konon's return from the UK, he was healthy, but shortly afterwards he began complaining that KGB doctors were giving him injections for supposed high blood pressure, whereafter Konon had headaches he never had before the injections but the doctors said he should expect to "feel worse before he felt better".[3][12]

He was buried in the Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow next to another spy, Vilyam Genrikovich Fisher (alias Rudolf Abel).

gollark: Neat, one of each seems to have grown now.
gollark: Huh, they're "aqulio". I don't think anyone got that.
gollark: I wonder why it was down, anyway.
gollark: My egg still exists, so it probably wasn't a maintenance downtime for the eggs to be removed.
gollark: So does anyone know what's actually going on? Weird bug? They're just very rare now?

References
  1. Soviet Spy Ring, by Arthur Tietjen, Pan Books, 1961
  2. Мертвый сезон. Конец легенды ("The Dead Season. End of the Legend", 1998)
  3. Womack, Helen (15 August 1998). "At last, the truth emerges about Gordon Lonsdale's shadowy life". The Independent. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
  4. Lonsdale, Gordon (1965). Spy: 20 Years Of Secret Service. London: N. Spearman. pp. 44–49. ASIN B0000CMR28. LCCN 66001151.
  5. Молодый Конон Трофимович Archived 2012-03-09 at the Wayback Machine Molody's biography on the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) web site.
  6. Helen Womack. "Playboy, Prisoner, Salesman, Spy.", The Moscow Times, 8 August 1998, p. 7.
  7. Obituary, Charles Elwell, The Telegraph, 23 January 2008
  8. "April, 22 in history – Russiapedia". russiapedia.rt.com.
  9. Кого и как обменивал Советский Союз // История вопроса Kommersant, 8 July 2010.
  10. Gordon Corera, The Art of Betrayal, London, Phoenix, 2012 pp. 230
  11. "Viewpoint: Life after spying - BBC News". BBC News. Retrieved 2016-01-13.
  12. Helen Womack. Playboy, Prisoner, Salesman, Spy. - The Moscow Times, 8 August 1998, p. 8.

Further reading
  • Soviet Spy Ring, by Arthur Tietjen, published by Pan Books, (1961)
  • SPY: twenty years of secret service: memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale, Hawthorn Books NY, N. Spearman, London, (1965).
  • Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, published by Greenhill Books, ISBN 1-85367-278-5 (1997)
  • The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, published by Penguin Press History, ISBN 0-14-028487-7 (1999)
  • "The Portland Spy Case" by Ludovic Kennedy, in Great Cases of Scotland Yard by Reader's Digest, pages 306-414.
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