Arthur sat hunched over the table, chain-smoking. Hugh Winterborn was tense and excited, and said very little. Furnival Jones was there too, with his shoes off, reclining on the bed in his braces. Although he was the Director of D Branch, he felt a strong loyalty to the troops, and was determined to see it through with us. He even went to the pub in Shepherd's Market and brought us back sandwiches. We drank Scotch through the small hours, as the ashtrays filled up.
We listened as Lonsdale returned late from a carefree evening on the town. He was with a girl. I discreetly muted the volume as the sound of their passionate lovemaking filtered through to us. When it was all quiet in the flat, I asked Arthur how long he thought Lonsdale would serve in prison.
"Fifteen at least," he replied.
Hugh Winterborn looked troubled. He was a religious man, and found no joy in the thought of a man's life ruined. I poured myself another drink.
"I can't help thinking of his wife and kids..." I said lamely. They knew what I meant. They had seen the intercepts of Lonsdale's messages, as I had: the talk of home, and family hardships, and birthdays, and children who missed their father. Lonsdale, for all his professionalism, was a very human spy. Like many men away on business, he was homesick, and sought solace in the company of other women.
"It's not as if he's a traitor... not like Houghton. He's just doing his job like us."
"That's enough!" Furnival Jones flashed angrily from the bed. "He went into this with his eyes wide open. He could have come as a diplomat. He knew what the risks were. He deserves everything he gets!"
I stayed silent. But the thought was there inside us all. We had seen almost too much of Lonsdale over the past two months.
Toward morning Lonsdale woke the girl up, and persuaded her to leave. He said he had urgent business to attend to, which in a way was true. When she left we heard him pull out his radio set, and prepare his pads to receive the message from Moscow. The radio crackled for a few minutes, and Lonsdale's pencil scratched out the decrypt. We could tell there was no warning from the way he sauntered into the bathroom, singing jauntily to himself in Russian. A few minutes later the green telephone rang, and Bill Collins gave us the text of the message over a scrambled line. It was a routine report, more talk of the family, more news from home. There was no warning or alarm.
Special Branch were told to prepare to make the arrest as Lonsdale received his package from Houghton that afternoon. At five the Special Branch line rang.
"Last Act is finished" said a voice. Last Act was Lonsdale's code name. His prison performance was about to begin.
Hugh Winterborn went straight over to the White House to search Lonsdale's flat, while Arthur and I waited for news of the Krogers' arrest. At seven, tired but elated, we drove out to Ruislip in my car. By the time we reached Cranleigh Gardens, the place was in chaos. Police were everywhere, searching the house almost at random. I tried to take control, but it was useless. Arthur vainly protested as a detective took out a plastic bag containing chemicals.
"Sorry, sir, I am afraid it's evidence," said the policeman. "It's a criminal matter now, and if you boys want to see it, you'll have to go through the channels."
The police operation was led by Detective Superintendent George Smith of the Special Branch, a man renowned inside MI5 for his powers of self-promotion Before the arrests, we stressed to Smith that we needed a forty-eight-hour blackout on any news about the arrests, so that we could monitor the next radio broadcast coming in from Moscow. But within hours word spread around Fleet Street that a major espionage ring had been smashed, and Smith began briefing selected reporters on the role he claimed to have played in the operation. The Moscow broadcast carried no traffic.
Despite the hamfisted search instituted by the police, it was obvious the house was packed full of espionage equipment. Two sets of different cipher pads were hidden in a cigarette lighter similar to the one used by Lonsdale. There were signal plans for three separate types of transmissions from Moscow, secret writing material, and facilities to make microdots using chromic acid and Sellotape. Mrs Kroger had even tried to destroy the contents of her handbag, containing details of meetings with spies, by flushing them down the toilet, but a vigilant woman PC stopped her. The most interesting find of all was a signal plan for special high-speed transmissions from Moscow. Hidden in a cookery jar we found a bottle of magnetic iron oxide used to print out the Morse from the high-speed message onto a tape, so that it could be read without being transferred onto a sophisticated tape recorder and slowed down. It was a new technique, and explained why we had failed to detect any transmissions to the Kroger house in the months before the arrests.
Toward the end of the evening the police began to vacate, leaving us to search among the debris, under the watchful eyes of a couple of young constables. We searched the house for nine days. On the last day we located the transmitter. It was hidden in a cavity under the kitchen floor, along with cameras and other radio equipment. Everything was carefully concealed in moisture-resistant sealed packages, and the whole system had obviously been designed to be stored for a considerable length of time.
On the following Wednesday, Hollis called everyone together in his office, and congratulated them on the triumph. The new D Branch team under Martin Furnival Jones and Arthur Martin had faced its stiffest test, and completely outplayed the Russians for the first time since Maxwell Knight smashed the Woolwich Arsenal Ring in 1938. The key to the Lonsdale success, as with the ENGULF and STOCKADE achievements, lay in the new techniques which I had worked to develop with GCHQ and AWRE. RAFTER and the X-raying and copying of the code pads enabled MI5 to run the case from a position of strength. I was intensely proud of the capture of the ring; for the first time I had played a major role in a counterespionage case, and shown the MI5 management what was possible. As a result, it was acknowledged that the workload passing through the Radiations Operations Committee was simply too great, and it was separated into two distinct units. Clan handled all clandestine operations against cipher targets here and abroad, while Counterclan controlled all the counterespionage side of ROC, such as RAFTER.
Hollis asked me to produce a detailed report, showing the role played in the Lonsdale case by the new techniques, with a view to encouraging similar approaches to counterespionage in the future. I began by paying a visit to the Old Bailey, where Lonsdale, the Krogers, Houghton, and Gee were on trial. The latter pair looked pasty-faced, flicking glances around the wood-paneled courtroom from the dock.
Lonsdale and the Krogers appeared completely unmoved by the proceedings. The Krogers occasionally whispered to each other, or passed notes; Lonsdale said nothing until the end, when he gave a short speech claiming the Krogers knew nothing of his activities. The Krogers were soon identified by the Americans as Morris and Lona Cohen, wanted by the FBI in connection with the Rosenberg nuclear espionage case. This was more than a little embarrassing for me; months before the arrests I saw Al Belmont of the FBI in Washington and briefed him on the progress of the case. He wondered then if the Krogers might turn out to be the Cohens. But I had not taken his offhand suggestion seriously, and failed to make a check. Lonsdale's identity proved much more of a mystery, and it was a year before we positively identified him as Konan Trofimovich Molodi, the son of a well-known Soviet scientist, and an experienced KGB officer who assumed the identity of Gordon Lonsdale, a long-deceased Finnish Canadian, in 1955.