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Harry Houghton
Harry Frederick Houghton (7 June 1905 – 23 May 1985) was a British Naval SNCO and a spy for the Polish People's Republic and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He was a member of the Portland Spy Ring. Early life Houghton was born in Lincoln, England. He left school at 14 to become an errand boy and later joined the Royal Navy. By the end of the Second World War he was a chief petty officer. After the war, he joined the civil service and in 1951 was attached to the staff of the naval attaché of the British embassy in Warsaw, Poland. Houghton dabbled in the black market, starting with coffee and moving on to medical drugs (in his memoirs, Houghton admits to the former but denies the latter). That made him money and acquaintances but also led him to heavy drinking and the attention of the Polish Secret Police. Houghton's wife complained of domestic abuse, and there were concerns that he was mixing with the wrong people. In 1952, he was ordered home. Houghton and his wife ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brackets
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an "opening bracket" or "closing bracket", respectively, depending on the Writing system#Directionality, directionality of the context. Specific forms of the mark include parentheses (also called "rounded brackets"), square brackets, curly brackets (also called 'braces'), and angle brackets (also called 'chevrons'), as well as various less common pairs of symbols. As well as signifying the overall class of punctuation, the word "bracket" is commonly used to refer to a specific form of bracket, which varies from region to region. In most English-speaking countries, an unqualified word "bracket" refers to the parenthesis (round bracket); in the United States, the square bracket. Glossary of mathematical sym ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union. Warsaw is the nation's capital and largest metropolis. Other major cities include Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin. Poland has a temperate transitional climate and its territory traverses the Central European Plain, extending from Baltic Sea in the north to Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the south. The longest Polish river is the Vistula, and Poland's highest point is Mount Rysy, situated in the Tatra mountain range of the Carpathians. The country is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. It also shares maritime boundaries with Denmark and Sweden. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Old Vic
The Old Vic is a 1,000-seat, nonprofit organization, not-for-profit producing house, producing theatre in Waterloo, London, Waterloo, London, England. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, and renamed in 1833 the Royal Victoria Theatre. In 1871 it was rebuilt and reopened as the Royal Victoria Palace. It was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 and formally named the Royal Victoria Hall, although by that time it was already known as the "Old Vic". In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian Baylis, assumed management and began a series of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare productions in 1914. The building was damaged in 1940 during The Blitz, air raids and it became a Grade II* listed building in 1951 after it reopened. The Old Vic is the crucible of many of the performing arts companies and theatres in London today. It was the name of a repertory company that was based at the theatre and formed (along with the Chichester Festival Theatre) the core of the National Theatre of Great ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metropolitan Police Special Branch
Special Branch was a unit in the Metropolitan Police in London, formed as a counter-terrorism unit in 1883 and merged with another unit to form Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) in 2006. It maintained contact with the Security Service and had responsibility for, among other things, personal protection of (non-royal) VIPs and performing the role of examining officer at designated ports and airports, as prescribed by the Terrorism Act 2000. History In response to the escalating terror campaign in Britain carried out by the militant Irish Fenians in the 1880s, the Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt established the first counter-terrorism unit ever in 1883, named Special Irish Branch, to combat Irish republican terrorism through infiltration and subversion. It initially formed a section of the Criminal Investigation Department within the London Metropolitan Police. Harcourt envisioned a permanent unit dedicated to the prevention of politically motivated violence through the use o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Goleniewski
Michał Franciszek Goleniewski a.k.a. 'SNIPER', 'LAVINIA', (16 August 1922 – 12 July 1993), was a Polish officer in the People's Republic of Poland's Ministry of Public Security, the deputy head of military counterintelligence GZI WP, later head of the technical and scientific section of the Polish intelligence, and a spy for the Soviet government during the 1950s. In 1959, he became a triple-agent, giving Polish and Soviet secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency, which directly caused the exposure of George Blake and Harry Houghton. Goleniewski defected to the United States in 1961. He later made unsubstantiated claims to be Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia. Early life and espionage career Goleniewski was born in 1922 in Nieśwież, then in Poland, now Belarus. He enlisted in the Polish Army in 1945 and was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Polish Army in 1955. He studied law at the University of Poznan and received a master's degree in political science from t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Wright (MI5 Officer)
Peter Maurice Wright CBE (9 August 191626 April 1995) was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. His book ''Spycatcher'', written with Paul Greengrass, became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. ''Spycatcher'' was part memoir, part exposé of what Wright claimed were serious institutional failures in MI5 and his subsequent investigations into those. He is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975. Early life Wright was born at 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright CBE, the Marconi Company's director of research, who was one of the founders of signals intelligence during the First World War.Peter MartlandWright, Peter Maurice (1916–1995) ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (OUP, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/57934 He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spycatcher
''Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer'' (1987) is a memoir written by Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director, and co-author Paul Greengrass. He drew on his own experiences and research into the history of the British intelligence community. Published first in Australia, the book was banned in England (but not Scotland) due to its allegations about government policy and incidents. These efforts ensured the book's notoriety, and it earned considerable profit for Wright. In 2021, the Cabinet Office was still blocking freedom of information requests for files on the ''Spycatcher'' affair despite the rule that documents should be released after 30 years. Content In ''Spycatcher'', Wright says that one of his assignments was to unmask a Soviet mole in MI5, who he says was Roger Hollis, a former MI5 Director General. His book also discusses other candidates who may have or may not have been the mole. He explores the history o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spying
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangible benefit. A person who commits espionage is called an ''espionage agent'' or ''spy''. Any individual or spy ring (a cooperating group of spies), in the service of a government, company, criminal organization, or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law. Espionage is often part of an institutional effort by a government or commercial concern. However, the term tends to be associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies for military purposes. Spying involving corporations is known as industrial espionage. One of the most effective ways to ga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Resident Spy
A resident spy in the world of espionage is an agent operating within a foreign country for extended periods of time. A base of operations within a foreign country with which a resident spy may liaise is known as a "station" in English and a (, 'residency') in Russian. What the U.S. would call a "station chief", the head spy, is known as a () in Russian. Types of resident spies In the former Soviet Union and Russian nomenclature, there were two types of resident spies: ' (, legal resident spy) and ' (, illegal resident spy). In U.S. parlance, the same distinction is between "official cover" and "non-official cover". A legal resident spy operates in a foreign country under official cover (such as from his country's embassy). He is an official member of the consular staff, such as a commercial, cultural, or military attaché. He has diplomatic immunity from prosecution and cannot be arrested by the host country if suspected of espionage. The host country can expel such a person, r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Konon Molody
Konon Trofimovich Molody (russian: Ко́нон Трофи́мович Моло́дый; 17 January 1922 – 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Posing as a Canadian businessman during the Cold War he was a non-official (illegal) KGB intelligence agent and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring, which operated in Britain from the late 1950s until 1961. Gordon Lonsdale identity A person by the name of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale was born on 27 August 1924 in Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. His father Emmanuel Jack Lonsdale was a miner. His mother Olga Elina Bousa had emigrated from Finland. The Lonsdales separated in 1931. A year later, Olga took her 8-year-old son with her back to her native Finland. He is believed to have died c. 1943 and the Soviets obtained his papers for use by their agents.Tietjen, Arthur (1961) ''Soviet Spy Ring''. Pan Books. The actual Gordon Lonsdale was recorded as having been circumcised; the impostor w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cut-out (espionage)
In espionage parlance, a cutout is a mutually trusted intermediary, method or channel of communication that facilitates the exchange of information between agents. Cutouts usually know only the source and destination of the information to be transmitted, not the identities of any other persons involved in the espionage process (need to know basis). Thus, a captured cutout cannot be used to identify members of an espionage cell. The cutout also isolates the source from the destination, so neither necessarily knows the other. Outside espionage Some computer protocols, like Tor, use the equivalent of ''cutout nodes'' in their communications networks. The use of multiple layers of encryption usually stops nodes on such networks from knowing the ultimate sender or receiver of the data. In computer networking, darknets have some cutout functionality. Darknets are distinct from other distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, as sharing is anonymous, ''i.e.'', IP address An Int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment
The Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment was an Admiralty research department dedicated to underwater detection systems and weapons. It was formed at the Isle of Portland in 1959 and later became part of the Admiralty Research Agency (ARE) in 1984. History In 1959, Portland's Admiralty Gunnery Establishment was transferred to Portsdown Hill, allowing the research at Portland to focus on anti-submarine research and underwater weapons. The Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment was formed in 1959 by the transfer of a number of Admiralty research establishments to Portland, including: * the Underwater Launching Establishment at Bournemouth * the Torpedo Experimental Establishment at Greenock * the Underwater Countermeasures and Weapons Establishment at Havant The Underwater Detection Establishment at Portland was then itself amalgamated into the AUWE the following year. This amalgamation saw all research into underwater weapons and detection systems concentrated at Po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
