Spy story

The Unbelievable Story of How the CIA Helped Foil a Russian Spy Ring in London
This story is revealed in remarkable tranche of records declassified on Tuesday by the British Security Service, better known as MI5, about a major Russian spy network that operated in Britain in the post-war years, known as the Portland Spy Ring. Its discovery in the early 1960s set off alarm bells in capitals across the Western world. Unlike all previous post-war Soviet espionage cases investigated by MI5 in Britain, the Portland spy ring did not involve Soviet KGB and GRU (military) intelligence officers using official (“legal”) diplomatic cover. Instead, more alarmingly for British and Western intelligence agencies, it involved a deep-cover Soviet “illegal,” with no diplomatic cover, living out in the cold, under a false name and nationality— and almost impossible to detect. As British and U.S. intelligence were to discover, the spy network they uncovered was linked to some of the most important Soviet illegals operating in the United States, including Rudolf Abel, who was recently depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.