Gordon Lonsdale

Konon Trofimovich Molody (Russian: Ко́нон Трофи́мович Моло́дый, 17 January 1922 - 9 September 1970) was a Soviet intelligence officer, better known in the West as Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. He was an illegal resident spy during the Cold War and the mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring.

A person by the name of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale was born on 27 August 1924 in Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. His father was a miner, Emmanuel Jack Lonsdale, and his mother was Olga Elina Bousa, an immigrant from Finland. The Lonsdales were separated in 1931 and a year later, Olga took her son with her back to her native Finland. It is presumed that he died c. 1943 and that his papers were obtained by the Soviets for use by their agents.

There is little doubt the Lonsdale born in Cobalt in 1924 was not the Lonsdale arrested in London in 1961: the former had been circumcised, the latter was not.

Konon Molody was born in Moscow in 1922, the son of a scientist. His father died when he was a child. According to Konon's son Trofim Molody who authored the book about his father Мертвый сезон. Конец легенды ("The Dead Season. End of the Legend", 1998), the Soviet intelligence had their eyes on the young boy, when the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda helped Konon's mother get a passport for him to go to the US in 1934 to live with an aunt in California (according to his official SVR biography, he left the USSR in 1932).

Molody returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. In October 1940 he was conscripted and served in the Red Army during World War II.

After the war, in 1946, he became a student at the Law Department of the Institute of Foreign Trade, where he studied Chinese. In 1951 he was recruited to the Soviet foreign intelligence service of the KGB and trained as an "illegal" spy. He married and had two children.

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