How a naval clerk, his girlfriend, a fake Canadian, and a pair of antique booksellers passed Britain’s most sensitive nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union—through a public restroom in rural Hampshire
There’s an unspoken code of conduct in public restrooms—particularly in busy places like airports. You hear nothing, you acknowledge nothing, and in return, others extend you the same courtesy. It’s a polite fiction, and we all silently agree to it.
But if you’d wandered into the small Hampshire village of Alresford — about ninety minutes outside London — sometime in the 1950s, you might have wanted to make an exception. You could keep your nose closed, certainly. But your ears? Keep them open. Because that modest public toilet, tucked across the street from the local police station, was quietly serving as a dead drop for Soviet intelligence. And it sat at the heart of one of the most extraordinary espionage cases in British Cold War history.
A suspicious wife and a desk job that paid too well
As explained here, it was Peggy Houghton who first sensed something was wrong. Her husband Harry worked a routine clerical job at the Royal Navy base on the Isle of Portland — an unremarkable posting, except for what was happening there. Portland was where Britain was developing its most sensitive undersea weapons programs, including its nascent nuclear submarine fleet. Harry had no access to anything classified, or so it seemed. Yet he kept coming home with unexplained money.
He’d started making frequent trips to London, always returning flush with cash. He bought a French car well beyond his salary. On one occasion, he came through the door and threw a fistful of banknotes into the air—Peggy counted it up and found around £150, equivalent to roughly $4,500 today. Strange parcels began appearing around the house. When Peggy opened one, she found a bundle of documents stamped Top Secret.
Harry had never been a kind husband. He drank heavily—badly enough, in fact, that he’d been sent home early from his previous naval posting in Warsaw. But now his behavior had darkened further. Drunk and paranoid, he would corner Peggy and tell her she knew too much. He threatened to kill her. On one visit to the coastal cliffs, he tried to push her over the edge.
Peggy went to Harry’s superiors three times between 1955 and 1956, laying out everything she’d observed—the cash, the London trips, the secret documents. Three times, they dismissed her. One officer recorded in an official report that her concerns were merely the outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife. As it turned out, Harry was also having an affair, which perhaps lent her warnings a convenient veneer of personal grievance. But the affair was the least of it.
Bunty, Gordon, and the Krogers
By 1956, Harry and Peggy had separated. Harry was living in a caravan on the coast and had taken up with a colleague: Ethel Gee, a clerk at the naval office. She went by Bunty—a nickname so thoroughly English it almost defies parody. The two became a couple, and their regular trips to London—dinner, a show, a pint at a pub called the Bunch of Grapes—became cover for something far more serious.
On these visits, Harry and Bunty met with a man known to British authorities as Gordon Lonsdale. He presented himself as a Canadian businessman dealing in jukeboxes. He was charming and convincing, and he moved in interesting circles. Among his closest friends were Peter and Helen Kroger, a seemingly ordinary couple who ran a small antique book business from a bungalow in the London suburbs.
Together, this unlikely group—the jukebox salesman, the booksellers, the naval clerk and his girlfriend—formed what would become known as the Portland Spy Ring.
How it worked
The operation was elegant in its simplicity. Harry and Bunty would collect or photograph classified documents from the naval base using a miniature camera. They’d then travel to Alresford and stop at the public toilet, where packages were left behind a cubicle door—small enough, Harry later wrote in his memoir, to fit inside a two-ounce tobacco tin. He claimed he never knew what was inside them, and given the circumstances, that may even have been true.
Why Alresford? The Krogers’ antique book trade gave them a plausible reason to visit a town with its own antique bookshop. And once the materials reached the Krogers, their particular tradecraft came into play. They would reduce photographs of the stolen documents down to microdots—images so small they could be mistaken for an ordinary punctuation mark on a printed page. These were then concealed within the text of antique books, camouflaged among the full stops. A reader in Moscow, equipped with a disguised magnifying device—sometimes hidden inside an ordinary-looking coin—could reconstruct the full document.
Gordon Lonsdale coordinated the whole network. He was not, of course, a Canadian jukebox salesman. He was Konon Molody, a seasoned KGB officer working deep undercover in Britain.
The tip-off and the arrests
In April 1960, British intelligence received a crucial lead from the CIA. A Polish agent codenamed Sniper had identified a mole inside the British naval establishment — someone who had been recruited by the KGB during a posting in Warsaw. The description fit Harry almost perfectly.
MI5 placed him under surveillance. They followed him to London, watched him call in at Alresford, and traced his movements to the Krogers’ bungalow. Investigators soon established that the Krogers were not who they claimed to be either: they were American citizens—real names Morris and Lona Cohen—who had previously passed atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to Soviet intelligence. Lonsdale was identified and monitored as the net closed tighter.
In January 1961, the arrests came. MI5 officers caught Harry, Bunty, and Lonsdale together outside the Old Vic Theatre in London. Bunty’s handbag contained a cache of classified naval documents. All five defendants stood trial in one of the most high-profile espionage cases postwar Britain had ever seen.
Harry claimed he had acted under duress, fearing for his life. Bunty said simply that she had done it for love. The judge found neither argument compelling. All five were convicted. The Krogers received twenty years; Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-five. Harry and Bunty each received fifteen.
None of them served their full terms. By the late 1960s, the Krogers had been exchanged in a prisoner swap and resettled in Moscow, where they spent their remaining years training new intelligence officers. The Soviet state honored them with a postage stamp. Lonsdale—Molody—was also exchanged, though his later life remains murky. Depending on the source, he died either on a mushroom-foraging trip or during a family picnic. Spy work, it seems, remains hazardous even in retirement.
Harry and Bunty, and what became of them
Harry and Ethel Gee were released after nine years. Shortly afterward, they married. Harry wrote a memoir—the one quoted earlier—and the two remained together until their deaths in the mid-1980s, within a year of each other. Whether Harry had genuinely changed, whether there was real tenderness underneath the deceit and violence, is impossible to say. But something in that story lingers.
The damage, meanwhile, was considerable. The British Navy’s own assessment concluded that the intelligence passed to Moscow helped the Soviet Union develop a significantly quieter class of submarines, and that critical details about Britain’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, had been compromised.
In 2019, MI5 documents relating to the case were declassified for the first time. Among other things, they confirmed what had long been rumoured: Peggy Houghton had indeed tried to warn Harry’s superiors, multiple times, as early as 1955. The files also revealed something rather poignant — the prison letters Harry and Bunty exchanged during their sentences. They are available to read online, if you want to trace the love story buried inside the espionage.
As for the toilet in Alresford: it’s still there. It even has a plaque now, which reads—with exactly the right amount of British understatement—”Secret information hidden in this toilet was collected periodically by Harry Houghton.”
Periodically. Someone in the local council has a sense of humor.