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220, [4] pages. Illustrations. DJ is worn, torn, soiled and chipped. Ink note on t-p. Minor edge soiling. In 1965, a year after Molody's return to the Soviet Union, a book called Spy: Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale was published with the approval of the Soviet authorities. It has to be read with caution. For instance, he claims Peter and Helen Kroger, convicted as members of the Portland Ring, were innocent. In fact they were veteran spies as the Soviets confirmed when they were exchanged in 1969. For Molody, life back in the Soviet Union was not a happy one. According to George Blake he was particularly critical of the way trade and industry were handled. He was given a post of minor importance and took to drinking. Konon Molody died, under what was thought by some to be mysterious circumstances, during a mushroom-picking expedition in October 1970; he was 48. Retired KGB officer Leonid Kolosov, Konon's youth friend, who co-authored The Dead Season: End of the Legend, maintained that upon Konon's return from the UK, he was healthy, but shortly afterwards he began complaining that KGB doctors were giving him injections for supposed high blood pressure, whereafter Konon was having headaches he never had before the injections but the doctors said he should expect to "feel worse before he felt better". He was buried in the Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow next to another illegal resident spy, Vilyam Genrikovich Fisher (alias Rudolf Abel). Konon Trofimovich Molody (17 January 1922 - 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, better known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. He was an illegal resident spy during the Cold War and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring. Konon Molody was born in Moscow in 1922, the son of a scientist. According to Konon's son Trofim Molody who authored the book about his father ("The Dead Season. End of the Legend", 1998), the Soviet intelligence had their eyes on the young boy, when the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda helped Konon's mother get a passport for him to go to the US in 1934 to live with an aunt in California (according to his official SVR biography, he left the USSR in 1932). Molody returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. In October 1940 he was conscripted and served in the Red Army during World War II. After the war, in 1946, he became a student at the Law Department of the Institute of Foreign Trade, where he studied Chinese. In 1951 he was recruited to the Soviet foreign intelligence service of the KGB and trained as an "illegal" spy. In 1953, Molody set off for Canada on a Soviet merchant ship, using the passport of a dead man whose late mother was a Finn married to Canadian citizen Arnold Lonsdale (this had been made possible thanks to the use of Finland's public records captured by the Soviets after the war). From Canada "Gordon Lonsdale" went on to the US, where he helped the atomic spy Rudolph Abel with his communications; there, he also met Peter and Helen Kroger, two Americans, who worked for the KGB because of their communist beliefs. In 1954, Konon Molody went to London, where he took courses at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. He was an outgoing character and had numerous female friends in London and Europe. Molody went into business, selling and renting jukeboxes, bubble-gum and gambling machines to pubs, clubs and cafes. This took him to continental Europe, where he may have recruited other agents and set up dead letter boxes. His family and friends in the USSR were led to believe that Konon was posted in China; once a year he would go to Prague or Warsaw to spend some time with his wife Galina. It was in 1959 that Molody began receiving British military secrets from Harry Houghton, who was working at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment on the Isle of Portland. His continental trips also led him to meet Morris Cohen (then using the pseudonym Peter Kroger), whom he often visited in London. He ran other spies, including Melita Norwood. In Lo.
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