Morris Cohen

MA, Columbia University

It was the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-recruits-girl-to-be-Soviet-spy, boy-marries-girl, boy-and-girl-flee-to-Soviet-Union, boy-and-girl-go-undercover-to-England-as-antiquarian-book-dealers-are-arrested-serve-time-in-jail-and-eventually-live-happily-ever-after-in-Moscow story.

Unlike most first-generation Americans whose parents escaped the nightmare of Eastern Europe in the early days of the twentieth century, Morris Cohen did not grow up to become a rah-rah all-American boy. Cohen, born in the Bronx in 1910, became what he might well have become had his parents stayed put in Ukraine (his father) and/or Lithuania^* (his mother): a communist. And not just a theoretical, after-school-commie-club kind of communist. After graduating from Mississippi State College^* with a bachelor’s degree in English, he joined the American Communist Party. Soon thereafter he shipped out to fight with the lefty Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, where he took a bullet for the cause. During his recuperation, Soviet intelligence recruited him to spy on the USA.

In 1939 he returned the favor by recruiting another first-generation American and CPUSA member, Lona Petka (born of Polish Catholic parents), into the exciting world of espionage. With so much in common, the two married in 1941. Morris was soon drafted into the US Army and served in the Quartermaster Corps in Europe for three years; Lona honed her tradecraft stateside. As soon as Morris returned, the two of them got back together, living and loving and spying. Their finest hour came when they slipped Moscow blueprints of the first atomic bomb twelve days before it was tested in New Mexico. Stalin put his people to work on a knockoff posthaste.

For some reason—perhaps to have something to “fall back on” if the spying business didn’t pan out, or perhaps as a cover—Morris Cohen entered Columbia University Teachers College in 1946. He got his MA in 1947, worked as a student teacher for a year at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, and received his license to teach the following year. It’s not clear that he ever had time to use that license, since in 1950 the Cohens, learning that they were about to be arrested, fled to Moscow by way of Mexico. Fun times!

Fast-forward to 1954, when Morris and Lona, now carrying New Zealand passports in the names of Peter and Helen Kroger, set up shop as antiquarian book dealers in a cute house in suburban Ruislip, West London.* (By “cute” we mean “bristling with state-of-the-art spy equipment.”) This adventure, dubbed the Portland Spy Ring, specialized in procuring info about the Royal Navy’s submarine program. The operation lasted until early 1961, when the happy couple was busted by Special Branch detectives. In the house the coppers found photographic materials, message-coding pads, phony passports, large sums of money, and a powerful radio transceiver (which took nine days of intense searching to unearth). More radio equipment turned up years later when the house was renovated.

Lona was sentenced to twenty years, Morris to twenty-five. They were out in eight, exchanged for an Englishman who was in prison in the Soviet Union for spreading anticommunist propaganda—which doesn’t seem nearly as exciting as being a spy with all that cool equipment, passports, and cash, plus “ferrets,” “baby-sitters,” “lamplighters,” “angels,” “leash-dogs,” and “pavement artists.”*

The lovebirds lived out their days in a pleasant KGB-supplied dacha outside Moscow, refusing contact with their families and with decadent Western media (which is to say all Western media). Despite Morris’s apparent thirst for education, he is said to have refused to learn Russian; perhaps it was too “old country” for him. He is also said to have eventually grown weary of the dullness of the totalitarian lifestyle—to the extent that a totalitarian society has a lifestyle. We’d like to think he occasionally wondered how things might have turned out if, after the war, he had allowed himself to outgrow his fatuous ideological purity, left behind the espionage racket, and gone back to teaching school in Harlem.