[Globalnews.ca] On Jan. 30, 1961, acting on information uncovered by the RCMP, Britain’s MI-5 security service examined the penis of a man who purported to be a Canadian named Gordon Lonsdale and confirmed he was a KGB spy.
It was the turning point of a key Cold War counter-espionage operation that outed Konon Trofimovich Molody as a Russian "illegal" — a deep-cover Soviet agent who had taken over Lonsdale’s identity.
Stealing the identities of Canadians is a common Russian spy stunt, but choosing Molody to double as Lonsdale was a fatal oversight by the KGB, and one the RCMP helped expose.
The RCMP played a "crucial role," says Trevor Barnes, the author of a new book on what became known as the Portland Spy Ring, in an interview with Global News.
In Dead Doubles, Barnes mines newly declassified MI-5 case files to unravel the story of what the British call one of their "most significant post-war counter-espionage cases."
The investigation began after the CIA learned from an informant, code-named Sniper, that secrets from a highly-sensitive Royal Navy research facility in Portland, England, were making their way to the Soviets.
MI-5 soon focused on Harry Houghton, a former British naval attaché in Warsaw who fit the profile supplied by Sniper. While under surveillance, Houghton met in London with a man MI-5 identified as a Canadian jukebox salesman, Gordon Lonsdale.
To discern whether Lonsdale might be also a spy, MI-5 had a discreet look in his safe deposit box and discovered "a treasure trove of KGB spy paraphernalia," Barnes said.
Notably, hidden in a cigarette lighter, MI-5 operatives found cipher pads of the type used by the Soviets to decode incoming radio messages and encode outgoing ones.
The RCMP subsequently began to investigate Lonsdale, but could find little about him, except that he was born in Cobalt, Ont., in 1924 and had obtained a driver’s licence in Vancouver in 1954. In 1955, he had applied for a passport.
Beyond that, the RCMP security service struggled to find any trace of the man. There were scant records or witnesses who recalled him. His life in Canada was "shrouded in darkness," wrote the MI-5 officer in charge of the investigation.
"This total absence of documentation is perhaps the most revealing piece of evidence that Lonsdale is an illegal intelligence agent."
As it turned out, it wasn’t actually the most revealing piece of evidence.
The CIA informant Sniper defected in January 1961, forcing MI-5 to round up its spy ring suspects, including Lonsdale and two others posing as Canadians. But MI-5 needed "irrefutable evidence" that the man who said he was Lonsdale was an imposter, Barnes said.
So the RCMP kept at it, and on Jan. 16, 1961, they reported to MI-5 they had found something: Lonsdale’s father in northern Ontario had given a statement, and he was adamant his son had been circumcised....
....Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia continued sending "illegals" to Canada to assume false identities, often chosen by "tombstoning" — trolling graveyards looking for deceased children whose lives they could exploit....