MI5’s multi-volume declassified files on the Portland Spy Ring are the first records from the archives of British intelligence to reveal how it was detected. intelligence were to discover, the spy network they uncovered was linked to some of the most important Soviet illegals operating in the United States, including Rudolf Abel, who was recently depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies. Instead, more alarmingly for British and Western intelligence agencies, it involved a deep-cover Soviet “illegal,” with no diplomatic cover, living out in the cold, under a false name and nationality- and almost impossible to detect. Unlike all previous post-war Soviet espionage cases investigated by MI5 in Britain, the Portland spy ring did not involve Soviet KGB and GRU (military) intelligence officers using official (“legal”) diplomatic cover. Its discovery in the early 1960s set off alarm bells in capitals across the Western world.
This story is revealed in remarkable tranche of records declassified on Tuesday by the British Security Service, better known as MI5, about a major Russian spy network that operated in Britain in the post-war years, known as the Portland Spy Ring. This is fact, not fiction- and the facts are important to understand Russia’s intelligence operations today.
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This is not a new bombshell revelation from the on-going Trump-Russia saga, nor a scene from the TV series The Americans, nor is it taken from a John Le Carré novel- though Russian spies posing as London antiquarian booksellers is like something from the pages of Le Carré. Their spy network is even linked to deep-cover Kremlin agents in the United States stealing atomic secrets. But their home is not ordinary, it is a house of secrets: Under cover of bland suburbia, they are using it to run a sophisticated deep-cover Russian spy ring, which has penetrated to the heart of a highly sensitive British government research establishment, which shares military secrets with the United States.
They are antiquarian booksellers in London, owning a shop on the Strand. Neighbors say the occupants of 45 Cranley Drive, in Ruislip, are friendly and host good parties. Follow him on twitter quiet residential street, like any other, in northwest London.
Calder Walton is an Ernest May Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
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