Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

sky was the OGPU rezidentin Paris, recruiting and running sources

in Paris and Belgium. He was one of the first OGPU officers to re-

ceive the combat Order of the Red Banner. In 1937, disgusted by

Joseph Stalin’s purge of the Communist Partyand the NKVDfor-

eign intelligence component, Poretsky publicly resigned from the

service. A letter published in the European press read in part: “he who

remains silent at this hour makes himself an accomplice of Stalin,

and a traitor to the cause of the working class and of socialism.”

Poretsky publicly returned his Soviet medals and noted his decision

to remain in the West. He was assassinated in Switzerland in Sep-

tember 1937 by gunmen dispatched by Stalin only weeks after the

letter was received in Moscow. A participant in the assassination was

Vladimir Pravdin, an NKVD case officer later posted to New York.

PORTLAND SPY CASE.One of the KGB’s major victories in Lon-

don was the running of spies within the British Navy antisubmarine

research facility in Portland. Harry Houghton, a British civil servant

working in the naval attaché’s office, volunteered in 1951 to Polish

intelligence. Over the next year, he gave the Poles and their Soviet al-

lies hundreds of pages of classified material and British code books.

On his return from Warsaw, Houghton, now working at Portland, was

run by the KGB’s London rezidenturaand later by an illegal, Konon

Molody(Gordon Lonsdale). Houghton, whose KGB code names

were “Shah” and “Shahmakht” (Chess and Checkmate), copied thou-

sands of documents on British and NATO policy and technology for

the Soviet service. The operation ran until 1961, when Houghton and

his lover and associate Ethel Gee were arrested with Molody, along

with Morrisand Lona Cohen, two illegals sent by Moscow to Lon-

don to support the operation. Houghton and Gee married after serv-

ing their prison sentences.

PRAGUE, 1948–1954. TheMGB played an important role in the coup

that brought the Czech Communist Party to power in 1947–1948, and

an even more important role in the party’s consolidation of power.

MGB officers acted as clandestine advisors to Czech communists in

planning the coup, and almost certainly were involved in the “sui-

cide” of Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. Masaryk, the only non-

communist member of the government, was found dead underneath

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