Lona Cohen

Lona Cohen
Lona Cohen on Russian stamp
Allegiance	USSR
Active	1939–1961 (arrest)
Award(s)	Order of the Red Banner, Order of Friendship of Nations
Codename(s)	Helen Kroger
Birth name	Leontine Theresa Petka
Born	(1913-01-11)January 11, 1913 Adams, Massachusetts
Died	December 23, 1992(1992-12-23) (aged 79) Moscow
Nationality	American
Spouse	Morris Cohen

Lona Cohen (January 11, 1913 – December 23, 1992), born Leontine Theresa Petka, also known as Helen Kroger, was an American spy for the Soviet Union. She was the wife of spy Morris Cohen.

Lona Cohen was born Leontine Theresa Petka in Adams, Massachusetts, the daughter of Polish Catholic immigrants. An American citizen, she was a member of the Communist Party USA and had been recruited into Soviet espionage in 1939 by her husband, Morris. She worked for Soviet case officers, including Anatoli Yatskov, out of the New York rezidentura during World War II.

After her husband was drafted in 1942, Cohen ran a network that included engineers and technicians at munitions and aviation plants in the New York area. One of her sources smuggled a working model of a new machine gun out of a munition plant. She worked at two defense plants, the Public Metal Company in New York City in 1941 and the Aircraft Screw Products plant on Long Island in 1943.

She was a courier who picked up reports from Theodore Hall, and a source cover named "FOGEL" and "PERS" from the American secret atomic weapons project at Los Alamos, New Mexico and carried them to the Soviet consulate in New York, where a KGB sub-residency under a young engineer, Leonid R. Kvasnikov, coordinated operations and dispatched intelligence to Moscow.