In 1996, CSIS caught a pair of Russian spies who were living in Toronto as a married couple, Ian and Laurie Lambert. Lona Cohen had been a KGB courier, sent to Canada to collect documents and, on one occasion, a uranium sample, from the atomic research centre at Chalk River.Įven after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia continued sending “illegals” to Canada to assume false identities, often chosen by “tombstoning” - trolling graveyards looking for deceased children whose lives they could exploit. The other two members of the spy ring posing as Canadians, Lona and Morris Cohen, had long been sought by the FBI. When he was returned to the Soviet Union in a spy swap in exchange for an MI-6 agent, Greville Wynne, Molody was awarded the Honorary Security Officer medal for his “great services to the Motherland.” The Soviets even put him on a stamp. Lonsdale later claimed Houghton had leaked hundreds of documents on anti-submarine equipment and nuclear submarines to Moscow, which MI-5 believed had “helped in the manufacture of a new and more silent generation of Soviet submarines.” The RCMP subsequently began to investigate Lonsdale, but could find little about him, except that he was born in Cobalt, Ont., in 1924 and had obtained a driver’s licence in Vancouver in 1954. Notably, hidden in a cigarette lighter, MI-5 operatives found cipher pads of the type used by the Soviets to decode incoming radio messages and encode outgoing ones.
To discern whether Lonsdale might be also a spy, MI-5 had a discreet look in his safe deposit box and discovered “a treasure trove of KGB spy paraphernalia,” Barnes said. While under surveillance, Houghton met in London with a man MI-5 identified as a Canadian jukebox salesman, Gordon Lonsdale. MI-5 soon focused on Harry Houghton, a former British naval attaché in Warsaw who fit the profile supplied by Sniper. The investigation began after the CIA learned from an informant, code-named Sniper, that secrets from a highly-sensitive Royal Navy research facility in Portland, England, were making their way to the Soviets. Soviet ‘illegal’ Konon Trofimovich Molody in his London apartment with the radio he used to send messages to Moscow. In Dead Doubles, Barnes mines newly declassified MI-5 case files to unravel the story of what the British call one of their “most significant post-war counter-espionage cases.” The RCMP played a “crucial role,” says Trevor Barnes, the author of a new book on what became known as the Portland Spy Ring, in an interview with Global News.
Stealing the identities of Canadians is a common Russian spy stunt, but choosing Molody to double as Lonsdale was a fatal oversight by the KGB, and one the RCMP helped expose. It was the turning point of a key Cold War counter- espionage operation that outed Konon Trofimovich Molody as a Russian “illegal” - a deep-cover Soviet agent who had taken over Lonsdale’s identity. 30, 1961, acting on information uncovered by the RCMP, Britain’s MI-5 security service examined the penis of a man who purported to be a Canadian named Gordon Lonsdale and confirmed he was a KGB spy.
0 kommentar(er)
