So the personal stories were of the barristers who were to prosecute or defend. The Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, headed the prosecution, and four leading counsel were to appear for the defence, one each for Houghton, Gee, the Krogers and Lonsdale.
Sir Reginald was already quite well known to the public. Bespectacled, fifty-five, testy in public but kindly and witty in private, he had a reputation for crushing his opponents like a legalistic steamroller. Living in the market town of Towcester, he was inevitably pictured as a man of the rolling acres despite the fact that his house and gardens barely made up to six acres. Word pictures were painted in the Sunday press before the trial of Sir Reginald pruning his floribunda roses to soothe his nerves before rising in court next day for what seemed to be Britain’s most important spy-trial.
Baron Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice, was to preside at the trial. A gentle, moderate and modest man. Against the death penalty, but for corporal punishment. A man who had had to give up his rare hobby on appointment as Lord Chief Justice. The study of genetics applied to the breeding of high butter-fat dairy cattle.
The barrister defending Lonsdale was the grandson of an admiral and the son of a naval officer killed in the war. Born in Guernsey in the Channel Islands Mr. W.M.F. Hudson was well aware of the significance of the charges against his client.
Two barristers from the same chambers were to defend Houghton and Gee. Mr. Henry Palmer was to defend Houghton, and his equally young colleague Mr. James Dunlop was to defend Gee.
The heavyweight of the defence team was Mr. Victor Durand QC, a tough, able barrister who was to defend Peter and Helen Kroger.
When the trial started the defence objected to twelve of the jurors. Nine men and three women. It was finally an all-male jury.
Lonsdale sat in the dock, smartly dressed in a light grey suit. Ethel Gee wore a dark blue dress and Helen Kroger wore a heather mixture costume.
The Attorney-General opened the case, describing the circumstances of the arrests and of the accused and the details of what had been discovered in the parcel handed by Ethel Gee to Lonsdale. And then he went meticulously through the espionage material found at Lonsdale’s flat, the farm cottage, Houghton’s home and the Krogers’ bungalow.
It became obvious that the Krogers’ bungalow was the hub of the network. The searchers had found a microscope that could be used for reading micro-dots, a list of radio call-signs using the names of Russian rivers, a high-powered radio transmitter hidden under a trapdoor in the kitchen, one-time code pads and several letters in Russian. There were two New Zealand passports in the Krogers’ names, a Ronson table lighter with a concealed cavity in its base which contained film; the camera that had been in Lonsdale’s briefcase deposited in the Midland Bank was in the study.
The Attorney-General showed the jury a tin of well-known talcum powder which had a special compartment with a standard KGB micro-dot reader. There were black-painted boards in the loft to cover the bathroom windows so that the bathroom could be used for enlarging or reducing photographed material. Also in the loft was 74 feet of aerial which led to a radiogram in the sitting room. Under the loft insulation were several thousand US dollars, and American and British travellers’ cheques.
At Houghton’s semi-detached cottage was a list of the Admiralty Test pamphlets that had been passed to Lonsdale. Further Test pamphlets were found hidden in Houghton’s radiogram. There were Admiralty charts with pencil markings of secret submarine exercise areas, others had pencil marks pinpointing the site of suitable pieces of equipment for sabotage. £500 in Premium Bonds and a camera were found in a drawer with what looked like a box of normal Swan matches. Under the base of the match-box was a paper which registered dates for meetings and codes if a meeting had to be called off. In an empty tin of Snowcem paint in a garden shed was £650 in pound and ten shilling notes.
In Lonsdale’s flat there was another Ronson lighter with a concealed cavity holding radio signal plans similar to those found at the Krogers’ place. There was a similar tin of talcum powder with its hidden micro-dot reader, and a large amount of money in US dollars and sterling.
Nowak listened with envy as the prosecution established the evidence and its significance in carrying out espionage. The Attorney-General established the connections between them that constituted a conspiracy. Compared with the legal circus that they had had to go through in New York it all looked so simple.
Witnesses gave evidence of how the various espionage items were used and others gave details of dates, times and locations of meetings.
Houghton had offered to turn Queen’s Evidence against the other four if the charges against him could be dropped but the prosecution had refused the offer. They were confident that they didn’t need his testimony.
A Special Branch officer explained how the false passport had been obtained but there was no way that the prosecution could prove that Lonsdale was a Russian. They read out letters translated from Russian that were from a woman named Galyusha who wrote as if she were his wife. But the jury, the court, and the general public got the message, and the prosecution would have gained little even if they had been able to prove that he was Russian.
On the second day of the trial the Attorney-General established in considerable detail the evidence that had only been touched on in the first day, and defence counsel queried as best they could the significance and accuracy of the evidence given by witnesses whose names were not given for security reasons.
Some embarrassment to the
