Lona Cohen

Lona Theresa Cohen, Leontine, a.k.a. in London as Helen Kroger (11 January 1913 - 23 December 1992) was an American spy for the Soviet Union.

Espionage

Cohen was born in Adams, Massachusetts. She was an American citizen and member of the Communist Party USA, and was recruited into Soviet espionage in 1939 by her husband, Morris Cohen. She worked for Soviet case officers, including Anatoli Yatskov, out of the New York Rezidentura during World War II.

After her husband was drafted in 1942, Cohen ran a network that included engineers and technicians at munitions and aviation plants in the New York area. One of her sources smuggled a working model of a new machine gun out of a munition plant. She worked at two defense plants, the Public Metal Company in New York City in 1941 and the Aircraft Screw Products plant on Long Island in 1943.

She was a courier who picked up reports from Theodore Hall, and a source cover named "FOGEL" and "PERS" from the American secret atomic weapons project at Los Alamos, New Mexico and carried them to the Soviet consulate in New York, where a KGB sub-residency under a young engineer named Leonid R. Kvasnikov coordinated operations and dispatched intelligence to Moscow.

After the defections of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, the Cohens ended contact with Soviet intelligence until 1949, at which time they began working with Col. Rudolph Abel, the U.S. illegal resident. After Fuchs was arrested in Great Britain in 1950, Cohen and her husband fled to Moscow where she received additional training as a radio operator and cipher clerk. In 1954, the pair resurfaced in London under the names Helen and Peter Kroger with New Zealand passports. They set up an antiquarian book business which was cover for their activities of running the London Illegal Rezidentura. Gordon Lonsdale worked with them as part of the Portland Spy Ring.

Imprisonment

In the basement of their house, situated not far from the military airfield of Northolt, they set up a high speed radio transmitter and began sending Moscow "information of special importance". In January 1961, they were arrested for espionage, and in March, she received a sentence of 20 years while her husband got 25 years, of which they served only eight.

In 1969, the two were exchanged with the Soviet Union for a British subject called Gerald Brooke. Back in Moscow, they continued training colleagues for illegal intelligence operations.

Later life

Lona was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and Order of Friendship of Nations. Her code name in Soviet intelligence and the Venona files is "Lesley". In fact, both Lona and Morris Cohen were awarded the Soviet Union's highest award, Hero for the Soviet Union (equivalent to the U.S.' Congressional Medal of Honor). The literature also contains two other intriguing items: Morris Cohen was the original recruiter of Julius Rosenberg, and the Rosenbergs were also awarded the Hero of the USSR medal.

Fictional portrayals

In 1983, the British playwright Hugh Whitemore dramatized the case as "Pack of Lies," which was performed in London's West End theatre district starring Judi Dench and Michael Williams. It played on Broadway for 3½ months in 1985, for which Rosemary Harris won the best actress Tony award for her portrayal of the British neighbor of the Cohens/"Krogers." It was made into a TV movie starring Ellen Burstyn, Alan Bates, and Teri Garr (as "Helen Schaefer," i.e., "Helen Kroger," i.e., Lona Cohen) which aired in the U.S. as a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation in 1987 on CBS (which was then still known as the Tiffany network for the high quality of its programming). The story centred on the neighbours (and seeming friends) whose house was used as a base from which the security services could spy on the Cohens, and the way paranoia, suspicion and betrayal gradually destroyed their lives.

External links

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/13/newsid_4059000/4059209.stm BBC report on the case] . Includes a video news report on the Krogers/Cohens' return to the Soviet Union and an interview with former Foreign Secretary George Brown over the issues.

References

*Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) [http://svr.gov.ru]
*Russian Federal Foreign Intelligence Service, Veterany vneshnei razvedki Rosii (Veterans of Russian foreign intelligence service), Moscow: Russian Federal Foreign Intelligence Service, (1995).
* [http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/cohen_morris_lona.htm FBI Morris and Lona Cohen file, 100–406659] .
*Rebecca West, "The New Meaning of Treason", New York: Viking (1964), pgs. 281–288.
*Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, "Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy", New York: Times Books (1997) pgs. 244–253.
*John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America", New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pgs. 316, 317–319, 320, 321, 334. ISBN 0-300-08462-5
* [http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/interv/k_int_svetlana_chervonnaya.htm Interview with Dr. Svetlana Chervonnaya]