LONDON'S SHADOWY CALLING
Must-see exhibit highlights British capital's long history as a hotbed of espionage
Skulking in the shadows may seem an unseemly way to spend precious vacation time in London, where world-leading culture, art, architecture and legendary pubs tempt the most jaded of travellers.
But the British capital is awash these days in another sort of attraction, one that's both under the radar and central to it: the dark arts of espionage and intelligence-gathering.
Thanks to a free exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IMW) in south London, holidaymakers can turn up their collars and lurk menacingly in laneways — all in the name of research.
Curators of the Spies, Lies & Deception exhibition have masterfully gathered more than 150 objects linked to covert intelligence gathering, from the First World War to the present day.
From decoding machines to reverse overshoes used to throw off pursuers, it's a “must-see exhibition for anyone who is interested in finding out the truth about the use of deception and espionage.”
Among the more James Bondian touches: a fountain pen that can fire tear gas, a lipstick with a hidden camera and dummy parachutists used to fool the Germans on D-Day.
Elsewhere, a fascinating collection of private papers sheds light on Operation Mincemeat in which a corpse was floated ashore with fake documents to mislead the Axis powers during the Second World War.
A Canadian visitor's eyes, however, are drawn to a remarkably bland artifact: an Ontario birth certificate. Bearing the name “Gordon Lonsdale” and the birthplace Cobalt, Ont., it is — despite its incongruous appearance — a key piece of evidence in one of Britain's most remarkable espionage tales, the Portland Spy Ring.
Lonsdale was in fact Konon Molody, an “illegal” Soviet KGB agent who used the document to create a false identity as an unassuming small-time Canadian businessman.
Canada has an unenviable reputation among the world's spies, gangsters, assassins and fugitives as a convenient source for ersatz travel documents. It got so bad, cartoonists would draw vending machines featuring baddies buying fake passports alongside chocolate bars and soft drinks.
Sadly, Lonsdale wasn't the only concocted Canuck in this 1960 scandal. Helen and Peter Kroger were ostensibly antiquarian book dealers from Canada living a quiet life in suburbia; they were in fact U.S.-born illegals helping Lonsdale ship U.K. naval secrets to Moscow.
The IMW show is a wonderful introduction to London's shadowy past, but there's plenty besides to satisfy cloak-and-dagger enthusiasts.
Start with the “house of secrets” in the sleepy northern suburb of Ruislip. It's here, at a bungalow on 45 Cranley Dr., that Lonsdale met with the Krogers, who would use microdots hidden in books to export top-secret intelligence to their KGB handlers. The house is still occupied — and so lengthy gawking is not encouraged.
But there's nothing wrong with a little furtive recce; it's what MI-5 agents did from an adjacent property as they gathered evidence to smash the ring. Lonsdale and two others were later arrested outside the Old Vic Theatre near Waterloo Station.
Northwest of Waterloo is Thames House. Located on Millbank at the end of Lambeth Bridge, it is the headquarters of MI-5, Britain's domestic spy agency. It's a listed heritage building and was originally built on the site of slums swept away by a flood in 1928.
South of the river, at 85 Vauxhall Cross, are the “Legoland” offices of MI5's international counterpart, MI-6, or the Secret Intelligence Service. Opened in 1984, its glowering presence does not invite lingering.
But then this is no ordinary building. It cost $255 million to build, with another $30 million splashed out on making it bomb resistant — which proved to be money well spent in 2000 when an anti-tank rocket fired at an eighth-floor window caused only superficial damage.
In the Olympia neighbourhood, meanwhile, is Blythe House, a Victorian-era red-brick structure hulking behind iron turnstiles that stood in for the MI-6 `Circus' in the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carré's spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Gary Oldman.
Returning west, spycatchers will reach the modernistic Waterloo Bridge where Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was assassinated with a ricin-tipped pellet from an umbrella gun as he waited for a bus on Sept. 7, 1978. He died four days later.
Hundreds of Russian spies were believed to have been active in London at the height of the Cold War — and the Brompton Oratory, a magnificent Italian baroque Catholic Church in Knightsbridge, proved an ideal place for “deadletter” drops of microfilms and documents.
Situated close to the Russian Embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens, it was easy for agents to slink away from the church among the narrow lanes branching off Brompton Road, or amid the many exits and staircases of the nearby Harrods department store.
Not far away, in South Kensington, is the Cafe Daquise, London's first Polish restaurant and another favourite spot for dead-letter drops. It was also a haunt for Christine Keeler, the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal of the early 1960s.
Fewer spies peer around pillars in today's London — they're more likely to be hacking at a keyboard — but as recently as 2006, the darker side of espionage was laid bare with the Alexander Litvinenko affair.
A former KGB officer who found asylum in Britain, Litvinenko met two Russian agents at the Millennium (now Biltmore) Hotel in Grosvenor Square, where he unwittingly sipped on green tea tainted with polonium-210, a deadly poison. He died less than a month later.
Grosvenor Square in Mayfair is significant in itself: General Dwight D. Eisenhower established his Second World War base at No. 20 “Eisenhower Platz,” as the square was nicknamed, and until recently it was home to the U.S. Embassy, now being converted into a five-star hotel.
Much of London's espionage activity took place quite literally underground, in a series of 30-metre-deep tunnels first used to house up to 8,000 people sheltering from Nazi air raids.
The warren of passageways near Chancery Lane was later used by MI-6 as a telecommunications “hotline” between the Soviets and the Americans and was key in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. You can visit the decommissioned entrance on Furnival Street, off High Holborn, now part of a $350-million regeneration scheme that would see the site opened to the public for the first time in 70 years.
It's tempting to imagine trench-coated spies consigned to history or Hollywood, but with sabres being rattled from Taiwan to Yemen, the threat of war is ever-present. And as the IWM's exhibit reminds us, so is double-dealing, chicanery, subterfuge and surveillance.
As Winston Churchill put it, in a quotation at the museum entrance: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Spies, Lies & Deception runs until April 14 (visit iwm.org.uk)