How a Harlem football star became a key architect of Soviet nuclear espionage
In short: Morris Cohen, a Bronx-born athlete turned communist activist, spent decades operating as a high-level Soviet spy. Under the alias Peter Kroger, he and his wife Lona facilitated the transfer of Manhattan Project secrets to Moscow, eventually becoming central figures in a Cold War prisoner exchange that sparked intense political controversy.
Born in 1910 to immigrant parents in Harlem, Morris Cohen’s path to espionage began through radical politics at the University of Illinois. After volunteering for the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence. By 1945, Cohen and his wife, Lona, were instrumental in delivering critical nuclear weapon blueprints to the Soviet Union. Their efforts, which included courier work for physicist Theodore Hall, were later identified as being significantly more damaging to American interests than the better-known Rosenberg network.
The couple’s espionage career spanned decades and continents, including missions in Japan, Australia, and across Europe. In 1954, they settled in Ruislip, England, posing as antiquarian book dealers under the names Peter and Helen Kroger. Their suburban home was equipped with hidden transmission gear, including an antenna concealed in the attic. They were eventually exposed as part of the Portland spy ring, which had successfully compromised the Royal Navy. A breakthrough in the investigation occurred when MI5 discovered espionage equipment stashed inside a Ronson cigarette lighter within a bank safety deposit box.
Following their 1961 arrest and conviction, the Cohens served eight years of a 20-year sentence before being released in a 1969 prisoner swap. The British government, led by Harold Wilson, faced significant backlash for trading the pair for Gerald Brooke and other British subjects, with critics arguing the move set a dangerous precedent for international blackmail. The Cohens spent their final years in Moscow, where Morris trained new generations of intelligence agents. They were decorated by the Soviet state and later honored by the Yeltsin government as Heroes of the Russian Federation, remaining in Moscow until their deaths in 1995 and 1992, respectively.
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