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Did the KGB 'sacrifice' their agent, Gordon Lonsdale?

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Wednesday, 5th August 2009

  Re-reading "Spycatcher" (1987); what an excellent book this is.
  
  The author, Peter Wright (ex MI 5), asserts that in order to protect the identity of a 'mole' at the top of British counter-espionage, it became necessary for the Soviets to send 'Gordon Lonsdale' (their spy, real name: Konan Trofimovich Molodi) back to London, in the knowledge that he would almost certainly be arrested by British counter-intelligence.
  
  To have warned Lonsdale of his imminent arrest would have un-masked their more highly-placed MI 5 insider.
  
  Was Lonsdale sacrificed by the Russians or did the British just get lucky in arresting Lonsdale and the Krogers in 1960?

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Thursday, 6th August 2009

  Hell knows, sometimes it is difficult to be sure who was working for whom.
  But it was the Houghton's wife who claimed that Houghton was meeting with foreigners and went regularly to London to meet a foreigners whom she couldn't identify...and had large ammounts of money stored in a tin in the garden shed.
  Her husband left her for his girlfriend, Ethel Gee.
  

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• Message 3

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by U3280211 (U3280211) on Friday, 7th August 2009

  You've obviously read the book OUNUPA, so can I sound you out on your opinion about Wright's conclusion that Roger Hollis, then the boss of MI5, was a Russian 'mole'?
  
  His case seems to hinge on Hollis always trying to stop 'mole-hunts' in MI5 and Hollis's access to material which was used to tip-off agents before arrest.
  But reading the book, is there not another candidate who was just as well placed in the establishment, just as implicitly trusted and also an old MI5 hand?
  
  I'm thinking of Victor Rothschild. (Lest the Rothschild lawyer is reading this, I'm not claiming that VR was a Russian agent but that the case against Hollis is no stronger than a possible case against Victor Rothschild)
  
  Let's consider the following:-
  
  1) Victor Rothschild owned the lease on 5, Bentinck Street.
  2) Blunt and Burgess both lived there during the war.
  3)VR was an MI5 agent.
  4) As was his wife Tess, who also lodged at 5, Bentinck Street.
  5)Victor was a suspect in 1951 when the Burgess and Maclean saga became public. But he was cleared (as was Blunt, who later confessed that he was indeed a Russian agent, later, in 1962)
  6)When Philby (MI6) was suspected of being an agent (early 50's), it was the supportive testimony from Tess Rothschild which helped to save him from being uncovered as a spy, which he obviously was.
  7) Victor lent Blunt money to buy some of Blunt's most valuable paintings.
  8) VR was a good social friend of Dick White, Head of MI6. He moved among the poshest people in the highest places.
  
  It is said that Tess and Victor could not have been 'moles' because "they were so brave in the war". So were many of the Cambridge circle,in UK intelligence, who we now know were Soviet agents.
  
  The Russians played a brilliant game, over many years. By having an agent at the very heart of our counter-espionage apparatus, an agent whom the establishment was reluctant to confront, all who worked for MI5 and MI6 found themselves doubting their colleagues' integrity the higher they worked their way up the system.
  
  In this paranoid atmosphere, even good fortune (the Penkovsky defection), was regarded as a cunningly-planted KGB deception.
  
  Whether Hollis (or others) were guilty or not, the Russians managed to create a corrosive distrust which made the CIA, FBI and the two UK security services doubt each other's integrity for the best part of 30 years.
  
  Whether Hollis (and /or others) were or were not agents hardly matters. In an organisation in which the deputy head believes his boss is a traitor, the damage is done and all offensive action against the real external enemy is necessarily paralysed until a new head and deputy can be found.

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