Cold War secrets hidden in toilet in Alresford, Hampshire

Today, a discreet plaque affixed to its wall is the only sign of its clandestine past. It reads: “Secret information hidden in this toilet was collected periodically by Harry Houghton. In 1961 he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for his part in the Portland Spy Ring.” 

This simple inscription belies a sensational story of betrayal that erupted during the iciest depths of the Cold War. 

The scandal, in terms of the sheer volume and critical nature of the intelligence disclosed, inflicted a wound on Britain's security that was arguably far deeper and more strategically significant than the more infamous Profumo affair that would follow a few years later.

The web of intrigue began its slow unraveling in 1959. 

Across the Atlantic, American intelligence agencies detected a haemorrhage of classified information flowing to Moscow. 

The leak was traced with alarming precision to a nexus of British naval power - the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment and HMS Osprey in Portland, Dorset. 

This was the nerve centre of Britain's anti-submarine warfare research, a place guarding the nation’s most advanced maritime and nuclear secrets, including the plans for the UK's first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought. 

The breach was a catastrophic failure of security, and the British Security Service, MI5, was tasked with plugging the leak, and fast.

Their investigation soon narrowed its focus onto a single, seemingly unremarkable figure - Harry Houghton. 

A former Royal Navy Master-at-Arms, Houghton was now a civilian clerk at the Portland base. 

His naval career had ended under a cloud, embittered after being passed over for promotion, he harboured a deep-seated resentment against the establishment he felt had wronged him.

This festering grievance made him fertile ground for recruitment by Soviet intelligence during a posting to the British Embassy in Warsaw. Back in Britain, his handlers found him a willing, if initially clumsy, agent.

What truly drew MI5’s gaze was not Houghton’s past, but his present. His lifestyle was flagrantly, almost comically, incongruous with his modest £15-a-week salary. 

He flaunted his unexplained wealth, purchasing his fourth car, a brand-new Zodiac, and a comfortable bungalow. At the local pubs, he was notoriously free-spending, known for buying extravagant rounds of drinks and boasting of his financial windfalls. 

For the discreet, grey men of MI5, Houghton’s profligacy was a blazing red flag.

With suspicion solidifying into near certainty, Houghton was placed under intense surveillance. 

The net was cast wider to include his mistress, Ethel Gee. Known as ‘Bunty’, Gee was a 45-year-old spinster who had spent much of her life as a dutiful daughter caring for elderly relatives. She was, by all accounts, a quiet and unassuming filing clerk. 

However, her position gave her routine access to the very secrets that were proving so valuable to the Soviets, including top-secret documents that were far beyond Houghton’s own security clearance. 

Houghton, exploiting their romantic connection, had groomed her into an active accomplice.

The surveillance team watched as the couple developed a routine. 

They would embark on regular weekend trips to London, ostensibly for shopping and socialising. 

It was during these excursions that they would rendezvous with a third, far more polished, character: a charismatic Canadian businessman named Gordon Lonsdale. 

Posing as the director of a company dealing in jukeboxes and bubble gum machines, Lonsdale was the suave and confident controller of the spy ring. 

MI5 operatives, shadowing the trio, observed the discreet exchange of packages—Gee’s shopping bag, laden with Houghton’s camera film and her own pilfered documents, for envelopes thick with cash from Lonsdale.

Henry Frederick Houghton and Ethel Elizabeth Gee who spied together for the Russians.

Lonsdale himself was a ghost. His entire persona was a fiction crafted by the KGB. His real name was Konon Molody, a decorated colonel in Soviet intelligence. 

A true deep-cover agent, he had been expertly trained to blend into Western society. He too was placed under the microscope, and his movements led MI5 to the final, crucial link in the chain - a quiet, suburban bungalow at 45 Cranley Drive in Ruislip.

This was the home of Peter and Helen Kroger, who presented themselves as antiquarian booksellers. They were the ring's technical support, its communications hub. 

The house, on the surface a picture of middle-class banality, was in reality a sophisticated spy den. 

The Krogers were not who they claimed to be either; they were Morris and Lona Cohen, veteran American communists and seasoned spies who had likely worked on atomic espionage in the US before fleeing to the UK.

As MI5’s ‘watchers’ gathered irrefutable proof, the end-game began on Saturday, January 7, 1961. 

As Houghton, Gee, and Lonsdale met near the Old Vic theatre in London, the police and MI5 swooped in. 

Gee’s shopping bag was found to contain a vast quantity of undeveloped film and photographs of classified material, including details of the Dreadnought submarine. 

Lonsdale was found with a copy of a spy novel, used for code, and a map of London.

Simultaneously, Detective Superintendent George Smith, the lead investigator, knocked on the door of 45 Cranley Drive. 

Lona and Morris Cohen after being released from jail in 1969.

Helen Kroger, in a moment of panic, asked to stoke the boiler before the police began their search—a desperate attempt to destroy a microdot reader hidden in a talcum powder tin.

Smith, astute to the possibility of deception, denied her request. 

The subsequent search of the Kroger’s home was a revelation. It yielded a treasure trove of espionage equipment: large sums of money, specialised photographic gear for creating microdots (documents photographically shrunk to the size of a pinhead), one-time code pads for crafting secret messages, an arsenal of fake passports, and, concealed beneath the kitchen floor, a powerful long-range radio transmitter for communicating directly with Moscow.

The trial of the Portland Five sent shockwaves through the nation. 

The sheer audacity and success of the ring, operating undetected for years from such mundane settings as a suburban bungalow and a village toilet, was a profound embarrassment for the British government.

Houghton and Gee, the resentful clerk and his lovelorn accomplice, were each sentenced to 15 years in prison. They were released in 1970 and subsequently married. 

Lonsdale, the KGB mastermind, received a 25-year sentence but was exchanged in 1964 for Greville Wynne, a British spy held by the Soviets. 

The Krogers, the quiet technicians of treason, were handed 20-year sentences and were swapped in 1969 for a British citizen, Gerald Brooke, arrested in the USSR.

The public toilet in Alresford, once a secret conduit for betrayal, now stands as a symbol to that hidden war, and a reminder of the time when the front lines of the Cold War were not just in distant, heavily fortified territories, but also in the quiet corners of everyday British life.