Dead Doubles

August 1, 2020
An eye-opening look at the mechanics of espionage, Soviet-style. In 1960, an age of abundant cocktails and government offices whose "air was often fuggy from cigarettes," British and American intelligence cracked a ring of spies operating in the U.K. The chief operative was a British citizen named Harry Houghton, who had been sent home from a post in Poland because of his pattern of heavy drinking. He was assigned to an office that oversaw British submarine activities, handling sensitive information that he handed on to a Soviet handler for the oldest of reasons: After having served time in prison, he "confessed that he had spied 'for money, ' but refused to disclose how much he had been paid." Divorced from a wife who tipped off intelligence agents to the fact that Houghton "was divulging secret information to people who ought not to get it," Houghton recruited a paramour and worked with another couple who, it turns out, were American Communists who had fled the U.S. a step ahead of the FBI, though they had long managed to evade capture. As Barnes writes in this entertaining thriller, the members of the so-called Portland Spy Ring "were arrested at a pivotal moment in the Cold War," a time marked by the quickening space race and, soon, the Cuban missile crisis and other moments when hot war nearly broke out. The American agents and their Soviet handler were exchanged, though, for British spies the Russians had captured. On his death, that handler was declared a hero--and not by the Soviets but instead by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of supposedly democratic Russia. The author does a good job of showing how Soviet intelligence used death records, stolen passports, and other instruments to plant spies throughout the West, and fans of Furst, Ludlum, and their kind will find this real-world exploration of old-school espionage suitably intriguing. The fraught spy game ably viewed as historical artifact and--thanks to Russia, China, and others--ongoing concern.

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August 1, 2020
The arrest of five individuals in 1961, caught spying on Great Britain's top secret Royal Navy research base at Portland on the southern coast of England and funneling intelligence about nuclear submarines back to the Soviet Union, shocked the West. Journalist and crime writer Barnes performs an incredible deep dive into this story of international espionage and counterintelligence, mining both existing sources and newly declassified information to fuel a narrative as compelling as a spy novel. The titular dead doubles are spies known as illegals by security services such as MI5 in Great Britain, operatives working in a country under an assumed identity. Barnes recounts an impressive array of training, methods, tools, and tradecraft used by both sides that are only slightly less glamorous than James Bond's fictional ones. Even without a strong connection to current events, this historical case study stands out as a first-rate history portraying the front line soldiers of the Cold War.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 17, 2020
In this exhaustive history, journalist and crime novelist Barnes (Taped) documents the discovery, prosecution, and legacy of the Portland Spy Ring in early 1960s England. Drawing on KGB archives and declassified files from the U.K., Barnes details the investigation from its initial stages in February 1960, when an employee at a “highly sensitive naval facility” on the Isle of Portland accused a colleague, Henry Houghton, of removing secret files from the base five years earlier. Surveilling the hard-drinking and free-spending Houghton and his mistress, Ethel Gee, MI5 investigators connected them to a Canadian jukebox salesman named Edward Lonsdale and to Peter and Helen Kroger, married antiquarian booksellers who also claimed to be from Canada. MI5 eventually unmasked Lonsdale as Soviet spy Konon Molody and the Krogers as American Communists Morris and Lona Cohen, and caught the spy ring with information on secret naval research projects and coded messages from Moscow. Barnes dives deep into the investigation and trial, and exposes the espionage careers of Houghton, Molody, and the Cohens before the Portland episode. The extraordinary level of detail slows the pace, but allows for intriguing tangents (notably, the impact of sexism on Cold War espionage). This meticulously researched account informs and entertains.

September 1, 2020

In this latest work, novelist Barnes (Trial at Torun) writes a detailed account of the Portland spy ring, based on research in British and American archives, along with interviews conducted with sources in the UK and Russia. In January 1961, British security services unraveled a spy group that was delivering naval secrets to a Soviet source. Primarily, the information related to the development of sonar for the Royal Navy's first nuclear submarine. The spy circle included a married couple who were former members of the American Communist Party, a cantankerous Brit, and a KGB infiltrator. Barnes effectively details the British investigation, the spies' biographical background, the information stolen, and the ramifications. His thrilling account also sheds insight into the actions of those who were monitoring the activity as it unfolded: the KGB, CIA, MI5, and the Metropolitan Police. Transporting readers from British courtrooms to Soviet spy rooms to Washington offices, Barnes leaves out no step in this thorough reporting. VERDICT This fast-paced narrative will engage those interested in Cold War international espionage and true crime.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

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