Friendly couple who owned bookshop ran Russian spy ring from leafy UK street

27 January 2024 , 10:02

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Peter and Helen Kroger (Image: Mirrorpix)

A friendly couple who owned a bookshop and enjoyed holding parties for neighbours were found to be running a Russian spy ring.

From the outside, 45 Cranley Drive in Ruislip was just a regular bungalow placed on a quiet residential street in London But in reality Peter and Helen Kroger, whose real names were Morris and Lona Cohen, were running a sophisticated operation to send sensitive British government information to Moscow.

The couple moved into the bungalow in the middle of the 1950s and used it as a base for their clandestine operation. And it was in November, 2017, that the spy ring was revealed to the public when records became declassified by MI5.

The major Russian spy network, known as the Portland Spy Ring, operated in Britain in the post-war years with members including intelligence agent Gordon Lonsdale, former British Naval Attaché Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee and the Kroger couple.

The Krogers got involved in the spy ring after Morris Cohen or Peter Kroger was left injured following a stint in the US army which led him into the role as a Soviet foreign intelligence agent.

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The couple's house in west London (Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Houghton was recruited by Polish intelligence in the 1950s and later handed to the Russians to find out top-secret information on the British government. Between January and November 1952, Houghton became "prolific" at feeding intelligence to his Soviet handlers, according to the MI5 history.

The Krogers were running a spy ring (Mirrorpix)

In this time alone, he shared 99 secret documents with them, including a manual of naval intelligence. In 1953, the spy returned to the UK and started work at what was then the navy's Underwater Detection Establishment base in Portland, Dorset alongside Lonsdale and Gee.

Their real names were Morris and Lona Cohen (Getty Images)

He continued leaking information to the Russians and stepped it up a gear when he began an affair behind his wife's back with colleague Gee, who had access to more sensitive documents. Houghton's then-wife contacted the admiralty with her suspicions about her husband in 1955. However, he continued to leak information until 1960 when the ring was exposed by a Polish defector.

Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee (Getty Images)

Ethel Gee was jailed for being part of the ring (Mirrorpix)

It was then revealed that Houghton and Gee would travel to London together at weekends, pretending to be a married couple in order to keep themselves anonymous. On their visits to the city, they would meet intelligence agent Lonsdale, whose real name was Konon Molody.

Molody was a KGB 'illegal', an undeclared spy with a false identity, who was running Houghton and Gee and the Cohen/Kroger couple for the Russians. On January 7, 1960 Special Branch officers arrested Houghton, Gee and Lonsdale near the Old Vic theatre in London where they were found to be in possession of secret navy documents.

The fridge in the kitchen of Peter and Helen Krogers' bungalow (Getty Images)

Spy equipment found in the bungalow (Getty Images)

Meanwhile, the Kroger couple were arrested in Ruislip and when the bungalow was searched by police, they found spy equipment and a secret trap door under the fridge. The Krogers were only unmasked due a tip off, leading intelligence agents to perform thorough surveillance checks on the Ruislip property at a nearby neighbour's house.

In court, Lonsdale refused to reveal his real name, even as he was sent down for 25 years. Houghton and Gee were given 15 years, while the Cohen/Kroger's were told they’d spend the next two decades behind bars.

However, Houghton and Gee were released within 10 years, with the Kroger couple and Lonsdale released early as part of spy swaps with the Soviet Union. Following the swap, which saw an exchange between the couple for British lecturer Gerald Brooke, the couple lived out the rest of their lives in Moscow before they passed away in the 90s.

Tim Hanlon