As the Soviet espionage rings began to unravel in the wake of investigations into the theft of Atomic secrets, the Soviets began a concerted effort to switch gears and attack the U.S. and British ciphers.
In their book, The Crown Jewels1, Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev using the Soviet Archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union, confirm much of the story already known by U.S. and British Intelligence about this effort even as the Cambridge Five fled or were under investigation - an investigation which failed to stop another extremely successful Soviet espionage effort.
STANLEY and HICKS each independently reported that the
use of a one time pad twice by a Soviet agent had allowed U.S. and British
code breakers to partially decode a message that implicated Klaus Fuchs
as well. This disaster prompted an Information Ministry offical in
the Soviet Union to request an all out effort from all the rezidenturas
to get hands on codebooks and cipher clerks.
| Agent Code Name | Organization/Contribution | ||
| 1940 to 1951 | |||
| STANLEY (Kim Philby) | British SIS officer, one of the notorious Cambridge spies recruited while attending college using the ideaology card. | ||
| HICKS (Guy Burgess | British MI5 officer, one of the notorious Cambridge spies recruited while attending college using the ideaology card. Defected to Soviet Union in May of 1951 | ||
| ROSS (Nicholai Korovin) aka Nicholai Rodin | Filled in on occasion to work the Cambridge spies and during a period where the Cambridge group was under scrutiny by the Soviets, verified their tradecraft and loyalty to the Soviet cause. The rezident in London | ||
| Vasili Dozhdalev | KGB Handler for SHAH and AYSA | ||
| Aleksandr Feklisov | Controller for SHAH | ||
| Yuri Modin | London rezident who, as the Polish network began to falter, recommended that SHAH be "handed over" to the Soviets, thereby ending the fiction that BRON and NICK were Polish Intelligence. | ||
| MIRON (Harry Houghton) aka SHAH | Provided reams of secret documents including assessments of Polish miltary to the rezident in Poland, Foreign Office intelligence summaries and Naval intelligence papers and the Naval Intelligence Codebooks. During May 1952 alone he passed on 735 documents. He was employed for sometime at the Underwater Weapons Research Establishment. Eventually captured in a grab of five conspirators, Houghton was sentenced to 15 years. | ||
| AYSA (Ethel Gee) | Mistress to SHAH and later recruited by SHAH. She was routinely asked in her job to destroy classified documents, instead she smuggled them home and gave them to SHAH -- for instance the plans for the British Super ASDIC 184.anti-submarine weapon. Eventually captured in a grab of five conspirators, Gee was sentenced to 15 years. | ||
| BRON(Aleksandr Baranov) | Legal rezident in the London Office posing as a Polish Intelligence officer, later reveled he was Soviet agent to SHAH.. His cover in the Embassy was as a military attache | ||
| NICK (Nikita Deryabkin) | Legal rezident in the London Office posing as a Polish Intelligence officer, later reveled he was Soviet agent to SHAH | ||
| BEN (Kolon Molody) aka Gordon Lonsdale | SHAH and AYSA transferred to this illegal rezident in order to reduce the risk on the legal side of the mission. Eventually captured in a grab of five conspirators, Molody was sentenced to 15 years. | ||
| LOUIS (Morris Cohen) | London, veteran agents, part of the team working with Rosenbergs when they used to operate in the U.S. Controlled by BEN | ||
| LESLIE (Lona Cohen) | London, veteran agents, part of the team working with Rosenbergs when they used to operate in the U.S. Controlled by BEN | ||
| EDITH (Edith Tudor Hart) | Thought to have recurited Philby, Mclean and Blunt and Burgess also initiated the recuritment of the original members of the Oxford group. | ||
| SCOTT | Unidentified Oxford trained scientist who himself recruited some 25 more from Oxford. | ||
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