Great Britain: Guilty of Spying

In London’s venerable Old Bailey last week a Russian, two Americans and two Britons drew the harshest penalties ever imposed for peacetime espionage in Britain. For five years the five had been passing on to the Soviet Union secrets filched from Britain’s Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland—everything from nuclear-sub blueprints to the plans and specifications of Royal Navy surface warships. After eight days of testimony and less than an hour and a half’s deliberation, the all-male jury found all five guilty as charged.

Fleeting Smile. Summoning the defendants to stand shoulder to shoulder in the glass-walled dock, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, in quiet, emotionless tones condemned them to a total of 95 years in prison. Lord Parker dealt first with the ”directing mind” of the ring, jowly Gordon Lonsdale, 38—who smiled fleetingly when the judge described him as “clearly a professional spy.” Lonsdale’s true identity is still unknown, but he is certainly a Russian and a Soviet intelligence agent. His claim to be a Canadian taken to Finland by his mother at the age of eight, was conclusively demolished when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police uncovered the fact that the real Lonsdale* was circumcised; the London “Lonsdale” is not. His sentence: 25 years.

The next two defendants had lived in the humdrum London suburb of Ruislip as Peter and Helen Kroger. Their modest home was littered with the latest espionage devices, ranging from microdot readers to long-range radio-transmission equipment. The Krogers claimed to be New Zealanders; actually they were U.S. Citizens Morris and Lona Cohen, with a long history of Communist ties. They had dealt with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the executed atom spies, as well as with Soviet Colonel Rudolf Abel, now in Atlanta federal penitentiary serving a 30-year term for espionage. The Cohens were each sentenced to 20 years.

Silly Fool. The Cohens and their Russian boss took their punishment with a certain professional pride. Master Spy Lonsdale even made an effort to shoulder all the guilt himself, insisting that the espionage equipment in the Ruislip house was his and had been put there without the Cohens’ knowledge. The Cohens, though protesting their innocence, refused to submit to crossexamination.

The two British defendants, ex-Navy Chief Petty Officer Henry Houghton, 56, and his fiancee, Ethel Elizabeth Gee, 46, a clerk at the Portland base, showed far less bravado. In an attempt to cut his own sentence, Houghton tried to turn Queen’s evidence at the expense of the others, including his fiancee. Ethel Gee sounded brusque and matronly as she protested she was just a silly little fool who had been under Houghton’s thumb. The Lord Chief Justice scornfully told her: “I think you acted, not out of blind infatuation, but for greed.” Each was sentenced to 15 years.

Vanished Vision. Prime Minister Macmillan assured Parliament that full inquiry would be made into the “security weaknesses” revealed by the trial. But Britain, wincing under a succession of clamorous spy cases beginning with the sale of atomic secrets by Klaus Fuchs in 1947 drew little, satisfaction from this promise. Horrified to discover that British intelligence had got onto the Lonsdale ring only by a series of accidents, the London Daily Express wondered “in the months and years before, how much vital information reached the Russians through the flagrant folly and incompetence of naval intelligence?” Mourned the Daily Mail: “The vision of an alert, unsleeping corps of first-class brains keeping watch and ward has taken another blow.”

*Whose fate, after reaching Finland, Western intelligence agencies have been unable to discover.