So, there is a kind of unspoken code of public conduct, of honor, when you are in a public restroom. I’m thinking of the restroom in an airport, busy, and you just try and pretend that you cannot hear the noises that are coming out of the stalls next to you. And thankfully, people pretend they don’t hear the noises coming out of your stall. This is just the polite fiction we all opt into.
However, if I had ever found myself in the small English village of Alresford, about an hour and a half drive from London, I’d want to keep my ears actually pretty highly attuned. I still would keep my nose closed, but my ears would be listening. And that’s because, had you been there to use the facilities in the 1950s, you might have heard a very odd sound, a sound that was potentially even incriminating: The sound of a man shuffling in, going into a stall, lifting the lid off the toilet tank, and then dropping something in, maybe taking something out.
That’s because this unassuming public toilet in Alresford, England, was used for quite some time as a dead drop for Soviet spies. And not only that, this very humble location played a key role in flushing out an infamous Cold War espionage reign.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we are going to Alresford to hear about one of Britain’s most notorious espionage cases, the Portland Spy Ring. It’s Tinker Tailor Toilet Spy.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
In the early 1950s, Peggy Houghton was getting a little suspicious of her husband, Harry. Harry and Peggy lived by the sea because Harry worked for the naval base on the Isle of Portland. This was a very important naval base in England because it was where they were developing all sorts of undersea weapons and capabilities, things like nuclear submarines. Harry just had a desk job at the base, and it was a cushy job, but it was not quite cushy enough to explain why Harry had started coming up with mysterious bundles of cash.
Harry had started making regular trips into London, and he always came back flush. He bought a nice French car, nicer than he could afford on his salary, and once he came home and threw a big pile of cash in the air. Peggy counted it up, and it was at least 150 pounds. Adjusted for inflation, that was about 4,500 U.S. dollars. Peggy also started coming across strange parcels in the house. Once she had taken a peek at one of them and found a stack of documents with some of them labeled Top Secret. So yeah, Peggy was suspicious.
The thing was, Harry had never been a very good husband. He was mean. He drank a lot. In fact, he’d been shipped home from his last Navy post in Warsaw because of his drinking problem. But now Harry’s behavior was becoming quite paranoid. Sometimes when he’d drink, he’d corner Peggy and say she knew too much. He started threatening to kill her. Once they visited the cliffs on England’s coast, and he tried to push her off. So Peggy had to do something.
She was at her wits’ end, so 1955, she went to Harry’s bosses and she told them what she had observed. They had all this mysterious money lying around, but he was taking these frequent trips to London. She thought Harry might be mixed up in something pretty bad. She went to Harry’s bosses three times with her concerns, and Harry’s bosses waved her away. They said Harry was probably just having an affair. One of them even wrote a note in a report that Peggy’s worries were just the outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife.
As it turns out, Harry was having an affair. It’s true. But that was not the half of it. By 1956, Harry and Peggy had separated. Harry was living in a caravan, basically an RV, and he had a girlfriend, a co-worker actually, a woman named Ethel Gee, a clerk at the Navy office, nickname Bunty, which is just so unbelievably British. Anyway, Harry and Bunty would make these regular trips together to London. They’d go to the theater, they’d stop at the pub. That spot was called the Bunch of Grapes.
But on these trips, they also had a little bit of an extracurricular mission. They’d meet up with this character, a guy who had many names and aliases, but to the British authorities, he was known as Gordon Lonsdale. Gordon was Canadian. He sold jukeboxes, or at least that’s what he said he did. And Gordon, the Canadian jukebox salesman, he had some interesting friends. He was friends with these two antique booksellers who ran their business out of a little bungalow in the suburbs of London. They were the Krogers, Peter and Helen Kroger. And this little crew, Gordon, the Canadian jukebox seller, the bookselling Krogers, and Harry, and Bunty, were about to become England’s most notorious spy ring.
Here is how this spy ring operated. Harry and Ethel, or Bunty, would collect documents from the naval office where they worked. Or they’d take photos of secret documents using a tiny spy camera. Then they’d head to the dead drop, the hiding place to leave these documents and photos behind. This, of course, is the public toilet.
As Harry would later write in his autobiography, “I was to enter on my left, take out a package, which I would find behind the door, put it in my pocket, and proceed to London. This package, never much larger than a two-ounce tobacco tin, was always sealed with cellotape, and I was never able to satisfy my curiosity about it.” I don’t know what that accent is. Anyway, Harry went on to say, “Whoever selected this pickup point did so with a total disregard for my nerves. The laboratory was slap-bang opposite the New Alresford police station.”
Exactly why they chose this toilet as the dead drop, we may never know. But why they chose the sleepy town of Alresford was a little clearer. There was an antique bookstore in town. So the Krogers, the antique booksellers, had a good excuse to visit. And here’s how the Krogers came into the picture. They would take the photos of the documents from Harry and Bunty and shrink them down to size, like, really down to size, the size of a period at the end of a sentence. And then they would take these micro-dots, these teeny, tiny photographs, and glue them inside antique books, where periods are found. And the spy picking up the book would then use a special device to magnify the micro-dot so that it was readable. And these readers were often disguised as other simple objects, like a coin.
The very last piece of the puzzle was their handler, Gordon Lonsdale. Not the Canadian jukebox salesman he claimed to be, Lonsdale was actually a KGB agent deep undercover in the U.K. So this is how the ring went on for years, passing along intel about secret U.K. weapon systems and their brand-new nuclear submarine fleet.
But then in April of 1960, British intelligence services got a tip-off from the CIA. A Polish spy, codenamed Sniper, had identified a mole in the British operation. And this mole was in the Navy and had been recruited by the KGB while he was posted in Warsaw. Uh-oh. Harry was pretty quickly identified, and MI6 set up a sting operation to track him. They watched him take the train to London and probably stop off in Alresford to use the toilet. Then they tracked him to the book-selling Krogers’ bungalow. Maybe at this point they realized the Krogers were using assumed identities as well. They were actually Americans and had funneled Manhattan Project secrets to the Russians during the war. Soon, MI6 closed in on Gordon Lonsdale, too.
In January 1961, MI6 moved in for the arrest. They caught Bunty, Harry, and Lonsdale right outside the Old Vic Theater. Bunty’s bag was filled with top-secret documents. Harry, Bunty, Gordon, and the Krogers went to trial in one of the biggest espionage cases in British history. Harry claimed he got involved because he feared for his life. Bunty said she was just doing it because she loved Harry. The judge was not convinced. They all got time.
The antique booksellers, the Krogers, they got 20 years. But by the end of the ’60s, they had been traded to Moscow as part of a prisoner exchange. They spent the rest of their lives basically working as spy instructors and ended up being featured on a Russian postage stamp. I mean, that was pretty good.
Gordon Lonsdale, real name Conan Malody, was sentenced to 25 years, but also traded to the USSR in a prisoner swap. He died mysteriously or mundanely, depending on which source you trust. Some say he died on a mushroom expedition. Others say he had a stroke while on a family picnic. You know, being a spy is dangerous business.
Harry and Bunty got the lightest sentences. They were sentenced to 15 years. They served nine. And shortly after they were released, they got married. Harry wrote that memoir we quoted from earlier. And they stayed together. They died within about a year of each other in the mid-1980s. So who knows? Maybe Harry cleaned up his act, figured out how to be a good husband. Maybe there was actually a real love story buried somewhere in this spy thriller.
The Portland spy ring is now pretty infamous in British intelligence history. According to the British Navy’s own assessment, the intel passed along to the Soviets helped them develop a new, much quieter fleet of submarines. The spy ring also passed along invaluable information about the U.K.’s first nuclear sub, the Dreadnought.
And here is some more recent information about the case. In 2019, MI6 documents relating to the ring were declassified. And for the first time, the public learned that Peggy, Harry’s ex-wife, had indeed tried to warn intelligence about her husband all the way back in 1955 at least three times. Yeah. If only they had listened.
Good news: The public toilet is still there. So next time you’re in the village of Alresford, you can stop by Harry Houghton’s favorite public restroom and secret spy dead drop. Maybe you’re in town shopping for antique books. Maybe you should be taking a very close look at the periods in those books. The toilets do now have a plaque that reads, “Secret information hidden in this toilet was collected periodically by Harry Houghton.”
By the way, the other documents declassified in 2019 include love letters that Harry and Bunty wrote to each other while in prison. So, if you’d like to follow the love story buried within this spy thriller, those are online too.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.