On the trail of the illegals

1. New York, Brooklyn: the Abel case

   Brooklyn, New York (USA)

   In 1953 a Brooklyn newspaper boy dropped a nickel that split open to reveal a tiny photograph of numbers. The case was solved only after the Soviet spy Reino Häyhänen defected to the United States: the FBI established that his superior was Colonel Rudolf Abel, a Soviet intelligence illegal. Abel was arrested on 21 June 1957 and convicted of espionage.¹

2. London: the Portland spy ring

   London and Ruislip (United Kingdom)

   Behind the figure of a small-scale Canadian businessman, ‘Gordon Lonsdale’, was Konon Molody, a KGB illegal. The ring reached into the Navy’s Underwater Detection Establishment in Portland, where Harry Houghton worked, and to his colleague Ethel Gee, who had access to material of a higher classification; the antiquarian booksellers Helen and Peter Kroger sent the material to Moscow from their bungalow in Ruislip. Lonsdale, Houghton and Gee were arrested near the Old Vic theatre in London, the Krogers in Ruislip. MI5 counts the arrest, trial and conviction in 1961 of five Soviet spies, three of them illegals, among its most significant post-war counter-espionage successes. In 1964 Molody was returned to Moscow in exchange for Greville Wynne.²

3. Berlin: Glienicke Bridge, 1962

   Glienicker Brücke, between Berlin and Potsdam

   On 10 February 1962 Abel was exchanged here for the American pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR in 1960 (see spy exchange). The trade was negotiated by Abel’s lawyer James B. Donovan and the CIA lawyer Milan Miskovsky.³

4. USA, 2010: the SVR illegals

   Montclair, Yonkers, Manhattan, Arlington and Boston (USA)

   On 27 June 2010 the FBI arrested ten people in these places who, according to the criminal complaint, were working as illegals for the Russian intelligence service, the SVR. The FBI describes them as agents leading seemingly ordinary lives, some under stolen identities. On 8 July 2010 all ten pleaded guilty in a New York court to conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government; the United States agreed to transfer them to Russia, and Russia agreed to release four people it was holding.^4,5,6,7

The history of these places is told in the operation card Operation Ghost Stories.