Marks and Co, an antiquarian book seller in London, played a starring role in Helene Hanff's 1970 best seller 84 Charing Cross Road. In her follow-up book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Hanff recounts her adventures in England on her book tour. By that time Marks and Co had gone out of business, but she did get to meet Leo Marks, the son of one of the founders.
Marks was an entertaining host and the two shared a background in the theater and the movie business. What Marks did not discuss with her was his career in WWII's Special Operation Executive as a codemaker and self-appointed counterintelligence operative. Those stories were still covered by the Official Secrets Act and the government was still intent on preserving that secrecy.
Marks eventually did get to tell his story in 2001.
That was not Marks and Co's only brush with the world of spies and counter-spies. Frank Doel, the man who ran the day-to-day operations at the firm, was friendly neighbors with another antiquarian book seller-- Peter Kroger.
In 1961 Kroger and his wife Helen were arrested when the Brits rolled up a spy ring operating at the Portland naval base. The Krogers were not book dealers; they were not even named Kroger. They were actually two Americans named Morris and Lona Cohen and they were highly experienced operatives for Soviet intelligence. They had recruited spies in the US military and in defense plants. During WWII Lona/Helen served as a courier in the Soviet operation that penetrated the Manhattan Project.
When Elizabeth Bentley defected (1945) the Soviets put the Cohens on ice. But only for a short time. In 1947 they were reactivated and began putting their spy ring back in action.
One of those reactivated agents was William Weisband who promptly informed the Soviets that their most secret codes and ciphers had been broken by the VENONA project. The Soviets quickly took steps to protect their secrets.
The Cohens first re-established links with some of their ‘Volunteer’ agents, who provided new information about radar, sonar and radio guidance for missiles, and, according to some Russian sources, included the same agent who had worked during the war in the Office of Strategic Services, and had since been recruited into the fledgling CIA.
Trevor Barnes , Dead Doubles: The Extraordinary Worldwide Hunt for One of the Cold War's Most Notorious Spy Rings
When the Rosenbergs were arrested, the KGB ordered the Cohens to leave the country. The FBI completely lost track of them and even suggested that they had been liquidated somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Thanks to a Soviet agent in the New Zealand foreign service, they were provided with new identities: they were now the Krogers. By 1954 they were in London in support of the KGB officer Konon Molody who was handling the Portland spies.
Robert Lamphere, the FBI agent who followed the VENONA breadcrumbs to unmask many Soviet spies, made an important observation about the Cohen's history and operations:
It is a telling point. Usually, the discovery of one spy leads to the capture of more as counterintelligence authorities roll-up the entire network. The FBI missed the Cohen's twice-- even as the FBI was supposedly putting an end to the Stalinist infiltration of America.
A Philby-network man issued passports for the Cohens, who were involved with Colonel Abel, Gordon Lonsdale, and possibly with the Rosenbergs.
The ossified narrative of "McCarthyism" depends 100% on the premise that the Truman administration was diligently working to find and neutralize spies and traitors in 1950 and that they were effective in their efforts. The Cohen/Krogers are just one more example that suggests that this premise is not true.
The decision to reactivate the Cohens in 1947 and then again in London in 1955 shows that Soviet intelligence was less than impressed with Western security efforts.
The method used to turn the Cohens in the Krogers is also illuminating:
The Soviets understood that an agent need not have access to top secret material to be a valuable asset. This is worth remembering when McCarthy is accused of persecuting nobodies who were merely clerks or "pink dentists".
It is now clear that both Paddy and Bella Costello were KGB agents. Bella Costello knew about and was closely involved with helping the KGB obtain ‘dead double’ passports and other support work for illegals. Deprived by 1954 of any access to sensitive or classified information because of (well-founded, as it now proves) concerns about him being a security risk, Paddy Costello issued Morris and Lona Cohen in Paris with their new identities as Peter and Helen Kroger. Without his help, the KGB would not have been able to set up the Portland spy ring as they did.
