Countless personalities still lurk in the shadows of Cold War history – participants in the 20th century’s superpower spy games. While some seem cut from the pages of spy novels, one important spy couple was a dowdy husband and wife, whose years of commitment to the cause of International Communism went unnoticed until it was far too late.
Morris and Lona Cohen were among the most important spies in Soviet history. Their value to the Soviets, and the damage they inflicted on the western powers, had nothing to do with who they were or what they knew – they were “merely” couriers and conduits. But they were also idealists, spurred by a passion for the communist cause. It was this passion, and their attachment to one another, which helped them endure a life of constant danger.
What we know of the Cohens is limited by the nature of their work. And finding out more is increasingly challenging as memories of the Soviet Union fade away, making it difficult to understand the passions and motives that inspired them and many others.
The couple’s career began in the Depression. Both were Americans; both were from marginal groups. Morris was a New York Jew, middle-class and sophisticated. Raised as a communist, after graduating from Columbia he joined the Canadian volunteer Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. There, apparently, he was recruited by Soviet agents.
Lona was a Polish-American girl from Adams, a textile mill town in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. The town’s economy was built on immigrant labor, with a small ruling class that several times played host to business-friendly President William McKinley.
When Lona met Morris, she was a runaway, working as a governess in New York. Their relationship was a scandal to Morris’ parents, who were not amused by the sassy working class girl they feared was taking advantage of him. Lona and Morris were married in 1941.
Eugene Michaelenko, an Adams resident and historian who has researched Lona’s early years in the town, said that together they made a great team. “He was the intellectual of the two,” Michaelenko said. “He intellectualized the movement, and she went along with her man. And she was damn good at it, which made her want to do it more.”
According to the files of KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin, published in 1999, Morris was codenamed “Luis,” while Lona became “Leslie.” Together, they were the “Dachniki,” or “vacationers.”
During the war, Morris was drafted and Lona took up much of Morris’ work as a courier between the couple’s Soviet handlers in New York, and their military, government and industry contacts. At first, much of the Cohens’ work centered on obtaining industrial designs, like designs for weapons systems. But then, in 1945, Lona’s work brought her to New Mexico.
The Soviets had convinced Theodore Hall, a 19-year old physicist working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to turn over information about the top secret atomic bomb development program, The Manhattan Project. Lona’s job was to courier to New York whatever Hall could sneak out of Los Alamos. She spent weeks in Albuquerque, and was assigned to meet Hall at a designated spot on a Sunday afternoon. For three consecutive weeks, Hall missed his deadline. Then, just one day after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945, Hall showed up and gave to Lona detailed results of the atomic bomb tests made earlier in the year.
Lona went to the station to catch a train back to New York, only to find that a military detachment was searching all passengers and their luggage. With remarkable poise, Lona carefully wrapped the secret documents in a newspaper and, when the soldiers approached her, she fumbled around for a moment before asking a guard to hold her newspaper for a moment. After they’d had a look, they handed her back the newspaper and went on their way.
Another version of this story, reported by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel in their 1997 book, Bombshell, had Lona hiding the papers in a tissue box, which she handed to the guards while she searched for her ticket, then walking away as the guards called after her for her forgotten tissue box.
Mitrokhin reported that the Soviets were so stunned by the quality of what fell into their hands through Lona and Hall’s efforts that they feared it was a trap. But it was not: some feel that the first Soviet atomic bomb detonated in 1949 was a direct copy of the Los Alamos bomb.
For the next few years, the Cohens remained spies in and around New York, with a brief sojourn in France. Then, soon after David Greenglass (brother of Ethel Rosenberg) was arrested on charges of espionage, on June 16, 1950 (Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July; Ethel was picked up in August), the couple held a going away party. They left the city abruptly in late August or early September, 1950, telling friends it was “to do some kind of research for a movie company.”
The Rosenbergs’ guilt has been the subject of debate for half a century. The record suggests that Julius was tangentially associated with a circle that included the Cohens, but probably did little of consequence. His wife was apparently completely innocent. Even FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover was reportedly stunned that the couple’s trial led to their execution by electrocution in 1953.
For the Cohens, the Rosenbergs’ arrest was a signal that there was no going back. They were whisked to Mexico and eventually found their way to Moscow for the first time, for more training.
In 1954, the Cohens popped up in England as “Peter and Helen Kroger,” a pair of antiquarian booksellers from New Zealand. In reality, they were radio operators in their London suburb of Ruislip. Their attic contained a 74-foot antenna and transmitter cable that could send signals direct to Moscow. Years later, some long-time Ruislip residents thought back on the time and remembered that television and radio reception was bad on certain nights; local legend attributes it to the Krogers’ nocturnal broadcasting.
In England, the Krogers were a critical part of the “Portland Spy Ring,” led by the charismatic Konon Molody, better known as “Gordon Lonsdale.” Molody’s exploits were later the subject of the 1968 Russian spy thriller, The Dead Season (“Myortvy sezon”), the 1963 British film, Ring of Spies, and Hugh Whitemore’s 1983 play and subsequent TV miniseries, Pack of Lies.
But the Cohens were tiring of the espionage lifestyle and eager to take up “normal” life in Moscow as Soviet citizens. In 1960, they officially requested permission to come in from the cold. The KGB passed on a recommendation that the request be granted, with an 800 ruble per month pension.
The question was passed all the way up to the Central Committee, which called their request “premature.” But then, in January 1961, while the matter was still being considered, British intelligence cracked the Portland Spy Ring.
The police came on a day when Morris was not at home. According to the BBC, when the police searched the house, Lona showed her familiar grace under pressure and asked if she could stoke the boiler before being taken to the police station. An alert officer asked to see her handbag, however, and found there a coded map of meeting locations.
Both Lona and Morris were found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 20 years in prison. They served just eight. In 1969, the Soviet Union agreed to a prisoner exchange, and the Cohens were traded for Gerald Brooke, a British lecturer who had served four years in a Soviet prison for “subversive anti-Soviet activity on the territory of the Soviet Union.” He had apparently attempted to smuggle some anti-Soviet literature into the country.
Back in Moscow, the Cohens were greeted as heroes by the intelligence services. Mitrokhin describes a welcome reception held in November 1969 at a KGB dacha near the city, at which KGB head (and later CPSU General Secretary) Yuri Andropov personally awarded the Cohens the Order of the Red Star. Mitrokhin reports that the KGB spent 5,000 rubles furnishing the Cohens’ apartment on the capital’s prestigious Malaya Bronnaya street, and that many top security officials were on hand for a 1970 housewarming party.
According to later newspaper reports, Lona began teaching at the KGB’s top-secret espionage school in the woods near Yasenevo. Some sources say there is a plaque there today in her honor. But the Morrises were required to keep a very low profile. To maintain the charade of secrecy, the Soviets never officially acknowledged their link to the Cohens. Instead, they upheld the official cover story that the Cohens were actually Polish spies, and had found their refuge in the fraternal Soviet state.
Though it would seem the Cohens could now live out a contented retirement in the Workers’ Paradise they had dedicated their lives to, instead they found themselves increasingly isolated and alone. They were not even allowed to remain in touch with other former spies living in Moscow at the time.
In June 1971, Mitrokhin reported, Morris was doing some shopping in Moscow when he ran into George Blake, an English spy he knew from his time in prison in the UK. Delighted by the chance meeting, they exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to meet again soon. But it was not to be: the KGB told each separately to break off contact. Cohen telephoned Blake to say that they were about to go on holiday and could not meet anytime soon; Blake replied that he too was going out of town, and a meeting was out of the question.
But, in the era of glasnost, the security services suddenly had an incentive to carefully publicize some of their more impressive feats. Pieces of the Cohens’ story began to be doled out. In April 1991, KGB Colonel Vladimir Chikov gave the first glimpse of the depth of the Cohens’ work in the United States. In a series of articles in the newspaper Novoye Vremya, he focused on Lona’s work at Los Alamos, and dangled the names of several other, as yet unknown operatives.
Lona did not live long enough to enjoy any of the fruits of her new recognition; she died of cancer in 1992. Her passing crushed Morris. In 2001, journalist Nikolai Dolgopolov wrote in the newspaper Trud of a visit he paid to Morris shortly before the spy’s death in 1995.
The meeting took place in the Malaya Bronnaya apartment, with a translator and a member of the FSB – successor to the KGB – present. Throughout the interview, Morris referred to Lona as “Helen,” and Dolgopolov noted that her presence was very palpable in the apartment.
“It seemed that Helen had just stepped out and was about to come back from a little shop on Bronnaya,” Dolgopolov wrote. “Even her things remained scattered around the room and remained in their places for their owner to return.”
In the conversation, Morris spoke about their lives on the run, and their devotion to one another. He noted that the reason he and Lona never had children was not because they were so committed to the cause, but because a college football injury had made him sterile.
Morris would not speak about the couple’s espionage work, other than to note that, “there are two or three people in the intelligence services who know as much as I do, but it will pass with us.”
Cohen was buried with his wife in Kuntsevskoye Cemetery, in western Moscow. Their black marble tombstone includes etched portraits, and in July 2005, the gravesite was clean and well-tended with a few plastic flowers. The stone includes the image of a ribbon, marking them as Heroes of the Russian Federation – an honor given to them, interestingly, by President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
The epitaph reads simply, in English: “To love and to be loved.” RL
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